Prince Harry, Meghan Markle open up on 'unbelievably tough’ split from royal life, on Oprah Winfrey special

Prince Harry says the process of separating from royal life has been very difficult for him and his wife, Meghan.

In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harry invoked the memory of his late mother, Princess Diana, who had to find her way alone after she and Prince Charles divorced.

“I’m just really relieved and happy to be sitting here talking to you with my wife by my side because I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for her going through this process by herself all those years ago,” Harry said, adding, “because it’s been unbelievably tough for the two of us.”

“But at least we have each other,” Harry said, in a clip from the interview special, which is scheduled to air 7 March on CBS and the following day in Britain. Diana was shown in a photo holding toddler Harry as he made the comments. His mother died in 1997 of injuries suffered in a car crash.

Harry and Meghan sat opposite Winfrey and side-by-side, holding hands during the interview that was conducted in a lush garden setting. The couple lives in Montecito, California, where they are neighbours of Winfrey. Meghan, who recently announced she is pregnant with the couple’s second child, wore an empire-style black dress with embroidery. Harry wore a light gray suit and white dress shirt, minus a tie.

As for Meghan Markle, the actor starred in the TV legal drama Suits. She married Queen Elizabeth II’s grandson at Windsor Castle in May 2018, and their son, Archie, was born a year later.

The brief promotional clip was one of two that aired Sunday during CBS’ news magazine 60 Minutes. Winfrey’s questions and comment were predominant in the other clip, including her statement that “You said some pretty shocking things here,” without an indication of what she was referring to. Meghan was not heard from in the clips.

See the promo clip below

CBS Presents Oprah with Meghan and Harry: A Primetime Special in one week. #OprahMeghanHarry pic.twitter.com/WCyoHDMCaP

— CBS (@CBS) March 1, 2021

Harry and Meghan stepped away from full-time royal life in March 2020, unhappy at media scrutiny and the strictures of their roles. They cited what they described as the intrusions and racist attitudes of the British media toward the duchess, who is African American.

It was agreed the situation would be reviewed after a year. On Friday, Buckingham Palace confirmed that the couple will not be returning to royal duties and Harry will give up his honorary military titles — a decision that makes formal, and final, the couple’s split from the royal family.

The pair, also known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, verified “they will not be returning as working members of the Royal Family. “

A spokesperson for the couple hit back at suggestions that Meghan and Harry were not devoted to duty.

“As evidenced by their work over the past year, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex remain committed to their duty and service to the U.K. and around the world, and have offered their continued support to the organizations they have represented regardless of official role,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Watch the promo clip here

(With inputs from The Associated Press)

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Airbus estimates its 863 planes delivered in 2019 will emit 740 million tonnes of CO2 in approximately next 22 years

Airbus unveiled Friday the carbon footprint of its aircraft, a move that will help measure progress made by the aviation industry towards its goal of reducing emissions. It is the first time an aircraft manufacturer has released lifetime carbon emissions of its aircraft, and Airbus Executive VP Corporate Affairs Julie Kitcher said it was an opportunity to increase transparency in the sector. "We really want to demonstrate our commitment to driving decarbonisation of the sector," she said.

The industry currently represents 2 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, but a forecast rise in passenger air traffic means it could add more pollution to the skies unless measures are taken rapidly.

And between the "flygskam" movement, a Swedish neologism meaning "flight shame", to increasing social responsibility expectations among investors, the industry is under mounting pressure to meet its promise to cut its carbon emissions by half from 2005 levels by 2050.

Airbus calculated that the 863 planes that it delivered in 2019 will emit 740 million tonnes of CO2 during an estimated 22 years in service. As a point of comparison, France is estimated to have emitted 441 million tonnes of CO2 in 2019.

Airbus used the accounting measure for emissions used by most leading firms, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, including measuring the use of its products by consumers. Airbus pointed out, however, that the efficiency of its planes is improving.

It calculated that the planes delivered in 2019 will produce on average 66.6 grams of CO2 per passenger per kilometre. In 2020, that figure dropped to 63.5 grams per passenger kilometre.

The current commercial aircraft fleet, including older aircraft, is estimated to emit on average 90 grams per passenger kilometre, according to the NGO International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

It estimates that cars produce an average of 122 grams per kilometre, but that figures needs to be divided by the number of passengers in the vehicle to offer a real comparison.

'Snapshot'

While the information is useful, Airbus's Kitcher pointed out that it only offers a snapshot of the situation today.

That is because the industry is hoping for the development of sustainable aircraft fuels (SAF) made from renewable sources to reduce its emissions.

The predicted carbon dioxide emission levels would drop if the aircraft that Airbus delivered in 2019 are certified to accept up to 50 percent SAF, although the amount of the green fuel available today is extremely low. "If we had 50 percent of SAF going into our aircraft today we could reduce the emissions of our aircraft flying already by 40 percent," Kitcher said. An increase to 100 percent SAF, the use of hydrogen produced in a renewable manner, or battery powered aircraft could push down emissions even further.

But to reach the 2050 goals, as well as head towards zero emissions, requires a fleet of planes that is 90 percent more efficient than those in 2005 given the expected increase in air travel. Last year Airbus released three zero-emission concept planes powered by hydrogen that it said could enter service by 2035.

The aviation industry is also counting on better air traffic control and efficiency gains from engines to reduce CO2 emissions.

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South Africa moves into 'level 1' alert after dramatic drop in COVID-19 case numbers

South Africa will move into the lowest 'alert level-1' lockdown from Monday, further relaxing restrictions on movement, economic activities and gatherings, after a "dramatic" decline in COVID-19 cases over eight weeks. 'Alert level-1' is the lowest of five levels of lockdown, which was imposed almost a year ago following the outbreak of the coronavirus that has infected over 1.5 million people and claimed nearly 50,000 lives in the country.

In a national broadcast, President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the country has now clearly emerged from the second wave, with new infections, admissions to hospitals and deaths having fallen significantly and continuing to decline steadily.

In the week that has just passed, the country recorded just under 10,000 new infections, a month ago, in the last week of January, it recorded over 40,000 new cases, and a month before that, in the last week of December, close to 90,000 new cases were recorded, he said.

"This dramatic decline in cases over eight weeks is due to a combination of public health measures introduced, changes in behaviour and accumulating immunity in those who became infected in our communities," he said.

However, the president cautioned people against letting their guard down. The wearing of masks in public places is still mandatory, and failure to wear a mask when required remains a criminal offence, Ramaphosa said.

"We were able to emerge from the second wave because most people adhered to the tighter restrictions and observed basic health protocols, including wearing masks in public and social distancing," he said.

The new alert level, which went into effect from midnight on Sunday, includes the curfew hours being reduced to start at midnight and end at 4 am, gatherings being allowed for up to 100 people, including social, political and cultural gatherings, and the sale of alcohol being permitted according to normal license provisions, except during the curfew hours, Ramaphosa said during his address to the nation.

Night vigils or other gatherings before or after funerals are still not permitted and nightclubs will remain closed, he said.

"The return to 'alert level-1' means that most of the remaining restrictions on economic activity have been removed. We expect this to lead to higher consumption spending, bolstered by the steady recovery in employment. We expect businesses to implement the plans they may have put on hold," Ramaphosa said.

Cautioning people about a potential third wave, which scientists say is expected as the harsh winter months approach, the president said that "as we ease restrictions, we cannot let our guard down. The few remaining restrictions under 'alert level-1' are meant to maintain low levels of infections and, in particular, to prevent super-spreading events".

"For this reason, among others, the easing of restrictions should not be viewed as a reason to abandon precautions. The threat of a third wave is constantly present, as is the threat of yet more new variants," Ramaphosa said.

The president said that "as we witnessed last year, our actions as individuals and as a collective will determine whether and how soon we experience a resurgence of the virus".

Describing COVID-19 vaccines being used across the globe as "a clear path towards containing infections and, ultimately, overcoming the disease", Ramaphosa said, "Within less than a year the global scientific community has developed, tested and produced several vaccines that are safe and effective against the disease."

The president commended the role of the nation's scientists in the process.

"We have long held the view that a vaccine would be our most decisive measure to combat COVID-19, and to that extent set up processes at a continental and national level to prepare for the availability of an effective vaccine, he said, highlighting the rapid vaccine acquisition processes that are currently under way.

South Africa recently signed an agreement with Johnson & Johnson to secure 11 million doses. Of these doses, 2.8 million will be delivered in the second quarter and the rest spread throughout the year, Ramaphosa said.

"We have also secured 20 million doses from Pfizer, which will be delivered from the second quarter. Additionally, we have secured 12 million vaccine doses from the COVAX facility and are in the process of finalising our dose allocation from the African Union, he said.

Ramaphosa said the government would monitor the situation closely together with scientists and experts, to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic in a responsive and flexible manner.

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'Do you miss me yet?': Donald Trump returns to address Conservatives, pledges unity in GOP

Orlando: Former president Donald Trump used his first public appearance since leaving office and moving to Florida to lash out at President Joe Biden and insist that there are no divisions within the Republican Party — even as he plots revenge on GOP lawmakers who have broken with him.

In an address on the closing day of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday, Trump arrived at the venue an hour after he was scheduled to take the lectern.

“Do you miss me yet?” Trump asked the crowd. He talked about his “journey” with his supporters, adding, “It is far from being over.”

“We will do what we’ve done right from the beginning, which is to win,” Trump said. And despite having floated the idea with a few advisors, he went on to assert plainly: “I am not starting a new party.”

Condemning Biden’s performance and persisting in his false claims that voting fraud deprived him of victory in 2020, Trump declared, two months after his supporters violently breached the US Capitol, that Democrats “just lost the White House.” He added, “I may even decide to beat them for a third time.”

He veered off script repeatedly.

Trump’s biggest applause lines came over his grievances. He criticised Dr Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who worked with the former president and who stayed on with Biden, and called for ending the coronavirus restrictions that have kept schools closed around the country. The issue of schools is one that Republicans have pressed repeatedly heading into the 2022 midterm elections, believing it gives them an edge.

At one point, Trump did something he never did as president — expressly called on people to take the coronavirus vaccines that he had pressed for and hoped would help him in his reelection effort. But he mocked Biden for stumbling during a CNN town hall event and attacked him over comments the president made about the number of vaccines available when he took office.

Backstage, before he spoke, an aide brought Trump a full-length mirror to gaze at how he looked. The former president held a small bottle of hair spray a few inches away from his chin and aimed it at his forehead. He swigged a Diet Coke before taking the stage.

While much of the party’s rank-and-file remains devoted to the 74-year-old former president, he is viewed less favorably by some Republicans because of his refusal to accept defeat and his role in inciting the Capitol riot on 6 January.

A handful of GOP lawmakers have urged the party to move on from Trump, most prominently Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican.

In response, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, repeatedly attacked Cheney in his remarks at CPAC on Friday, and the former president was expected to take aim at her himself Sunday.

Many of his advisors, however, were urging him to use his time onstage in Orlando to deliver a forward-looking address.

To this end, they also released an excerpt in which Trump would take on his successor in a manner almost identical to what he said about Biden when he himself was president, when he repeatedly told his supporters that Biden would destroy the country.

Ignoring that schools remained closed during his own presidency, Trump also planned to call on Biden to open schools “right now. No more special interest delays!”

How closely Trump would choose to follow a teleprompter script, though, was always an open question. And perhaps more so now that he has decamped from the White House to his resort in Palm Beach, Florida, stripped of his social media accounts.

His address was crafted by two of the former president’s speechwriters in the White House, Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, with input from other advisors.

The former president’s aides had been looking for an opportunity for him to reemerge and debated whether to put on a rally-type event of their own or take advantage of the forum of CPAC, which relocated to Trump’s new home state from suburban Washington because Florida has more lenient coronavirus restrictions.

Trump and his aides worked with him on the speech for several days at his newly-built office above the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, his private club near the Atlantic Ocean. Without his Twitter feed, Trump has been using specific moments in the news cycle — the death of radio host Rush Limbaugh and Tiger Woods’ car crash — to inject himself into the news cycle.

Outside prepared statements, though, he has said far less since Jan. 20 about the future of the GOP and his own lingering ambitions.

Trump’s advisors said he was not planning to discuss a litany of his own accomplishments, and instead would try to recapture some of how he sounded as a candidate in 2016. Trump has made clear to allies and advisors that, for now at least, he wants to run for president again in 2024.

Yet even with a built-in supportive audience, not everyone in the party believes that Trumpism is the way forward.

“CPAC is not the entirety of the Republican Party,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump on the House impeachment charges, said Sunday.

Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Cassidy said that Republicans must pay heed to those voters who switched in the last four years. “If we speak to the voters who are less sure, who went from Trump to Biden, we win. If we don’t, we lose,” Cassidy said.

Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman c.2021 The New York Times Company

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UK'S COVID-19 vaccine rollout enters new phase, expands to inoculate those above 60 years

London: The UK's vaccination programme against COVID-19 enters a new phase on Sunday as the National Health Service (NHS) will begin contacting all over-60s to book their jabs at the nearest vaccination centre or with a general practitioner (GP) or pharmacy.

Almost 2 million people aged 60 to 63 will be invited after over 64s had been covered in the previous phase and letters will start arriving from Monday explaining how they can make an appointment for the jab.

They follow more than three in four people aged 65 to 70 taking up the offer of vaccination and nearly 17 million people across England, over a third of the adult population, having received the “life-saving jab”.

“Our incredible vaccination programme is accelerating and well over one in three people across the UK have now received their first jab,” said Nadhim Zahawi, UK Vaccine Deployment Minister.

“We are now inviting those aged 60 to 63 to receive their vaccines and I urge everybody to come forward as quickly as possible to protect yourself and others from this terrible virus. Thank you to everyone on the frontline, including NHS vaccinators, GPs, pharmacists and volunteers, whose unrivalled dedication to protecting the most vulnerable should be applauded,” he said.

The latest move comes after the NHS wrote to almost 450,000 people aged 64 along with 600,000 who have recently been asked to shield due to underlying health conditions last week.

“The NHS vaccination programme, the biggest in the health service’s history and fastest in Europe, goes from strength to strength. I would urge anyone who has been invited to take up the offer – it doesn’t matter when you were invited you can still come forward and protect yourself and others,” said Professor Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director.

The push to get as many of the most at-risk people protected means nine in 10 people in the top four priority groups have received a jab. The UK government aims to give a jab to all over-50s and those in specific at-risk groups by 15 April and all other adults are expected to be offered their first dose by July 31.

"Since around four-fifths of 65-69-year-olds have now been vaccinated, we're rapidly working our way down the generations, with people ages 60+ now able to come forward. As expected vaccine supply increases in March, we're planning for further acceleration as we head towards Easter," said Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England.

England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, added that “be reassured the queue is moving really fast and that you're going to get to the front of the queue because it's moving fast".

It follows the updated recommendation by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) earlier this week that the rollout will continue to follow an age-based approach. The government has faced some calls to prioritise vaccines based on occupation, such as for teachers who will have to start reopening schools post-lockdown from next month.

"Thankfully, teachers are no more likely to catch COVID than any other member of the population who goes to work, and so trying to come up with a scheme which prioritises one professional group over another would have been complicated to put in place and wouldn't have done what we asked the JCVI to do... which is to make sure that we minimise the people who die," said UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, during a Downing Street press conference on Friday.

Vaccinations are now being administered at more than 1,600 sites across England, including mosques, museums and rugby grounds, with the distribution of centres meaning 98 per cent of the country lives within 10 miles of at least one vaccination service.

Appointments are staggered to allow for social distancing and people are being asked not to turn up early to avoid creating queues. Everyone will receive a health status check and a pre-vaccination assessment before they have their jab.

NHS teams are also visiting those who are housebound and cannot travel to a vaccination service.

All four UK nations – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – will follow the approach recommended by the JCVI and begin expanding the age groups eligible for jabs over the course of the next few months.

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Myanmar coup: At least six protesters shot dead in bloodiest action so far as police intensify crackdown

Yangon: Myanmar security forces shot dead at least six protesters Sunday in the bloodiest action so far to smother opposition to the military coup four weeks ago.

The junta is battling to contain a massive street movement demanding it yields power and releases ousted civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was detained along with top political allies at the start of the month.

Sunday brought a significant escalation in force, with fatal shootings of protesters in at least three cities around the country, as police and soldiers attempted to bring the civil disobedience campaign to heel.

Three men were killed and at least 20 others injured when security forces moved on a rally in the southern coastal hub of Dawei.

Rescue worker Pyae Zaw Hein said the trio were "shot dead with live rounds", while the injured were hit by rubber bullets.

"More wounded people keep coming in," he told AFP.

Two teenagers were gunned down in Bago, a two-hour drive north of commercial capital Yangon.

Ambulance driver Than Lwin Oo told AFP he had sent the bodies of the 18-year-olds to the mortuary at Bago's main hospital.

Officers in Yangon began dispersing small crowds minutes before the slated beginning of the day's protest, with a 23-year-old man shot dead in the city's east.

"His wife is heartbroken," Win Ko, a social worker who visited the man's widow, told AFP. "She's three months pregnant."

Elsewhere protesters took up positions behind barricades and wielded homemade shields to defend themselves against the onslaught, with police using tear gas to clear some rallies.

Hundreds of people had been arrested by evening and transported to the city's notorious Insein Prison, where many of Myanmar's leading democracy campaigners have served long jail terms under previous dictatorships.

One man in Mandalay was taken to the hospital in critical condition after a projectile pierced his helmet and lodged in his brain.

A doctor in the city, Myanmar's second-largest, said it was not known whether the 41-year-old had been struck by a live round or a rubber bullet.

At least one journalist documenting Sunday's assaults by security forces was beaten and detained further north in Myitkyina, a city at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy river, according to local outlet The 74 Media.

Another reporter was shot with rubber bullets while covering a protest in the central city of Pyay, their employer said.

A spokesman for the ruling junta did not respond to phone calls seeking comment on Sunday's violence.

Before Sunday, at least five people had died in anti-coup unrest since the army takeover, including three who were all killed on February 20.

One police officer also died while attempting to quell a protest, the military has said.

Weeks of unrest

Since the 1 February military takeover, Myanmar has been roiled by giant demonstrations and a civil disobedience campaign encouraging civil servants to walk off the job.

Sunday's crackdown followed a similar wave of violent action against angry but largely peaceful anti-coup rallies around the country a day earlier.

Several journalists documenting Saturday's assaults by security forces were detained, including an Associated Press photographer in Yangon.

Human Rights Watch said medical volunteers helping to treat wounded protesters were also being targeted for arrest by security forces.

More than 850 people have been arrested, charged or sentenced since the coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners monitoring group.

But the weekend crackdown was expected to raise that number dramatically, with state newspapers reporting 479 arrests on Saturday alone.

International condemnation of the military regime has been fierce, with the United States, the European Union and other major powers denouncing violence against protesters.

'Anything can happen'

Suu Kyi has not been seen in public since she was taken into custody during pre-dawn raids in the capital Naypyidaw.

A court hearing will be held on Monday for the ousted leader, who faces obscure charges for possession of unregistered walkie-talkies and violating coronavirus restrictions on public gatherings.

But her lawyer Khin Maung Zaw told AFP he had still been unable to meet with Suu Kyi ahead of the hearing.

"As a lawyer, I put my trust in the court," he said. "But in this period of time, anything can happen."

State media announced Saturday that the junta had sacked the country's United Nations envoy, who gave an impassioned plea for help on behalf of Myanmar's ousted civilian government.

 

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Tehran and its allies could be behind Israeli ship blast, writes ultraconservative Iranian newspaper

Tehran:  The "resistance axis" of Tehran and its regional allies may have been behind an explosion that hit an Israeli-owned "spy" vessel four days ago, an ultraconservative Iranian newspaper said Sunday.

The MV Helios Ray, a vehicle carrier, was travelling from the Saudi port of Dammam to Singapore when the blast occurred on Thursday, according to the London-based Dryad Global maritime security group.

Citing unnamed "military experts," Kayhan, Iran's leading ultraconservative daily, wrote in a front-page report that "the targeted ship in the Gulf of Oman is a military ship belonging to the Israeli Army".

It was "gathering information about the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman" when it was targeted, the newspaper said.
"This spy ship, although it was sailing secretly, may have fallen into the ambush of one of the branches of the resistance axis," it added, without offering further details.

The term "resistance axis" usually refers to the Islamic republic and its allied forces in the region. Israel's defence minister Benny Gantz said on Saturday that the Jewish state's "initial assessment" is that Iran is responsible for the explosion aboard the vessel.

"This... takes into account the proximity (with Iran) and the context" in which the blast occurred, he added.
"This is what I believe." Rami Ungar, an Israeli businessman who owns the Helios Ray, told Israeli State television Kan on Friday that the explosion caused "two holes about a metre and a half (five feet) in diameter".

It was "not yet clear" if the damage was caused by missiles or mines attached to the ship, Ungar added.

He said that the explosion did not cause any casualties among the crew or damage to the engine. Israel has long accused arch-foe Iran of trying to acquire nuclear weapons, a charge always denied by Tehran.

Iran blamed the November 27 assassination outside Tehran of its top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on the Jewish State. "The Zionist regime's attacks and crimes in the region, which have been going on publicly for some time, seem to have finally made it a legitimate target," Kayhan said.

The US and Saudi Arabia in mid-2019 alleged Iran used limpet mines to blow holes in Gulf-area ships, and then US president Donald Trump came close to ordering an attack on Iran in retaliation.

Tehran strongly denied those allegations.

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Archeologists find unscathed ceremonial chariot that survived the Mt Vesuvius eruption near Italy's Pompeii

Officials at the Pompeii archaeological site in Italy announced Saturday the discovery of an intact ceremonial chariot, one of several important discoveries made in the same area outside the park near Naples following an investigation into an illegal dig.

The chariot, with its iron elements, bronze decorations and mineralised wooden remains, was found in the ruins of a settlement north of Pompeii, beyond the walls of the ancient city, parked in the portico of a stable where the remains of three horses previously were discovered.

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii called the chariot “an exceptional discovery” and said "it represents a unique find — which has no parallel in Italy thus far — in an excellent state of preservation.”

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD destroyed Pompeii. The chariot was spared when the walls and roof of the structure it was in collapsed, and also survived looting by modern-day antiquities thieves, who had dug tunnels through to the site, grazing but not damaging the four-wheeled cart, according to park officials.

The chariot was found on the grounds of what is one of the most significant ancient villas in the area around Vesuvius, with a panoramic view of the Mediterranean Sea on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city.

Archaeologists last year found in the same area on the outskirts of Pompeii, Civita Giulian, the skeletal remains of what are believed to have been a wealthy man and his male slave, attempting to escape death.

The chariot's first iron element emerged on 7 January from the blanket of volcanic material filling the two-story portico. Archaeologists believe the cart was used for festivities and parades, perhaps also to carry brides to their new homes.

While chariots for daily life or the transport of agricultural products have been previously found at Pompeii, officials said the new find is the first ceremonial chariot unearthed in its entirety.

The villa was discovered after police came across the illegal tunnels in 2017, officials said. Two people who live in the houses atop the site are currently on trial for allegedly digging more than 80 meters of tunnels at the site.

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Chinese moviegoers flock to theatres after COVID-19 containment, spur new box office records

The thrills and chills of the big screen are back big-time in the world’s largest film market.

With the coronavirus well under control in China and cinemas running at half capacity, moviegoers are smashing China's box office records, with domestic productions far outpacing their Hollywood competitors.

February marked China’s all-time biggest month for movie ticket sales, which have so far totalled 11.2 billion yuan ($1.7 billion). China overtook the US as the world’s biggest market for movie ticket sales last year as the American box office took a massive hit from the closure of cinemas because of the pandemic.

Chinese theatres were able to reopen by midyear and have seen steady audience growth since then. Local movies have also benefited from periodic unofficial “blackout" periods, when only domestic productions are allowed to be screened. A dearth of major Hollywood blockbusters over recent months appears to have also boosted the market for Chinese films.

“People were encouraged to stay in Beijing for the Lunar New Year, and so watching movies in the cinema became the top choice of entertainment,” said Chu Donglei, marketing manager at Poly Cinema’s Tiananmen branch in central Beijing.

Mask wearing is mandatory and moviegoers must register with a cellphone app so they can be traced in the event of an outbreak. Only every other seat is allowed to be occupied, making it even harder to obtain tickets for the most popular films.

According to the China Movie Data Information Network, 95 percent of ticket sales came from the seven top-grossing films timed for release around the Lunar New Year festival, which began this year on 12 February.

Hi, Mom, a time-travelling comedy written and directed by and starring Jia Ling, was the top earner with 4.36 billion yuan, followed by action comedy Detective Chinatown 3, with 4.13 billion yuan.

Wang Xiaoyu, 32, who works in the film industry, was only able to procure a ticket for Hi, Mom on Thursday and called the viewing experience “deeply moving."

“I know there are some movies that are released and streamed online. But I think the experience of watching movies online is not as good as that of watching in a cinema,” Wang said.

A lack of entertainment options helped pump up ticket sales during the pandemic, foretelling a bright future for the Chinese film industry, Wang said.

Recent box office figures show the “great resiliency and powerful foundation of China’s film industry," said Fu Yalong, deputy general manager of the Solution Center at ENDATA, an analysis firm focusing on the entertainment industry.

“During the Lunar New Year, there were films with a variety of genres and topics and the audiences were satisfied," Fu said. “Even with the impact of the pandemic and the increase in ticket prices, we were still able to score such achievements.”

College student Zhang Jiazhi, 21, said the movie theatre experience was a welcome break from staying at home watching videos. Successful online film promotion also helped attract many viewers to brick-and-mortar cinemas, Zhang said.

“I’m bored, and you can’t stay at home watching (streaming service) Douyin all the time, so I came to the cinema to watch a movie. There’s nothing to do,” said Zhang, who is on winter break and came to the cinema to see A Writer’s Odyssey, a Chinese fantasy film which he said he didn’t quite understand.

Last year, China sold an estimated $2.7 billion in tickets compared to $2.3 billion in the US, which saw an 80 percent drop in ticket sales. The Eight Hundred, an action drama glorifying China's resistance to Japanese invaders in 1930s Shanghai, was the world's biggest hit, making $461.3 million at the box office, most of it within China.

China's theatres also closed for a time during the height of COVID-19 in the country last spring, but gradually reopened over the summer. As of Friday, China has gone 11 days without reporting a single new case of local transmission of the virus.

Since the outbreak was first detected in the central city of Wuhan in late 2019, China has reported a total of 89,877 cases, including 4,636 deaths.

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New York governor's ex-aide accuses him of sexual harassment; second such allegation against official

A second former aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is accusing him of sexual harassment, saying that he asked her questions about her sex life, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and if she had ever had sex with older men.

The aide, Charlotte Bennett, who was an executive assistant and health policy adviser in the Cuomo administration until she left in November, told The New York Times that the governor had harassed her late last spring, during the height of the state’s fight against the coronavirus.

Bennett, 25, said the most unsettling episode occurred 5 June, when she was alone with Cuomo in his state Capitol office. In a series of interviews this week, she said the governor had asked her numerous questions about her personal life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships, and had said that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s — comments she interpreted as clear overtures to a sexual relationship.

Cuomo said in a statement to the Times on Saturday that he believed he had been acting as a mentor and had “never made advances toward Ms. Bennett, nor did I ever intend to act in any way that was inappropriate.” He said he had requested an independent review of the matter and asked that New Yorkers await the findings “before making any judgments.”

Bennett said that during the June encounter, the governor, 63, also complained to her about being lonely during the pandemic, mentioning that he “can’t even hug anyone” before turning the focus to Bennett. She said that Cuomo asked her, “Who did I last hug?”

Bennett said she had tried to dodge the question by responding that she missed hugging her parents. “And he was, like, ‘No, I mean like really hugged somebody?’” she said.

Cuomo never tried to touch her, Bennett said, but the message of the entire episode was unmistakable to her.

“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Bennett said. “And was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job.”

Bennett said she had disclosed the interaction with Cuomo to his chief of staff, Jill DesRosiers, less than a week later and was transferred to another job, as a health policy adviser, with an office on the opposite side of the Capitol, soon after that. Bennett said she had also given a lengthy statement to a special counsel to the governor, Judith Mogul, toward the end of June.

Bennett said she ultimately decided not to insist on an investigation because she was happy in her new job and “wanted to move on.” No action was taken against the governor.

In his statement, Cuomo called Bennett a “hardworking and valued member” of his staff with “every right to speak out.” He said that Bennett had opened up to him about being a sexual assault survivor, and he had tried to be supportive and helpful. “The last thing I would ever have wanted was to make her feel any of the things that are being reported,” the governor said.

The governor did not deny that he asked Bennett personal questions; he said in the statement that he would have no further comment until the review concluded.

Bennett’s account follows another detailed accusation, published Wednesday, by Lindsey Boylan, a former state economic development official who said that Cuomo had harassed her on several occasions from 2016 to 2018, at one point giving her an unsolicited kiss on the lips at his Manhattan office.

Cuomo’s office has called Boylan’s accusations untrue, but they have nonetheless prompted calls for investigations into her claims. In addition to the two women’s harassment allegations, the governor, a third-term Democrat, is confronting significant political fallout over his handling of the state’s nursing homes during the pandemic.

After seeing Boylan detail her accusations against Cuomo, Bennett shared Boylan’s account on Twitter, suggesting that people read it if they wanted a true picture of “what it’s like to work for the Cuomo” administration.

The Times contacted Bennett, and she agreed to relate her own account of harassment. She said she felt an obligation to other victims of sexual harassment and wanted to counter the way Cuomo “wields his power.”

Bennett said she had told her parents and friends about the exchange with the governor around the time that it happened, as well as about her growing discomfort with having to work closely with him, and had kept text messages from that period.

The Times reviewed the messages and confirmed their contents with those who received them. Bennett also retained text messages from DesRosiers and Mogul that alluded to their meetings in June but did not mention the subject matter.

“I have no problem with what they did,” Bennett said of DesRosiers and Mogul, describing both women as sympathetic to her concerns. “I have a problem with what the governor did.”

Bennett was hired by the administration in early 2019, working out of the governor’s Manhattan office as a briefer, an entry-level position. She had graduated from Hamilton College in 2017, where she was active in women’s issues and founded a sexual misconduct task force. She said her own experience in surviving a sexual attack had prompted her to “help sexual assault survivors be heard and enforce victims’ rights,” according to a bulletin on the college’s website.

By mid-2019, Bennett had been promoted to senior briefer and executive assistant after an interview with Cuomo. The two became friendly, she said, and they bonded over shared connections with Westchester County: At the time, he was living with Sandra Lee, a celebrity chef, in Mount Kisco; Bennett was living with her parents in a neighboring hamlet. She mentioned to Cuomo that she had played middle-school soccer against one of his daughters, who are also in their mid-20s.

“We got along really well,” she said of the governor. Cuomo, she said, would sometimes ask questions about her dating life that she said seemed inappropriate but not necessarily unmanageable.

“I saw him more as a father figure,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about it as anything sexual.”

In January 2020, Bennett sent her mother a text. “Had a really long convo with Gov today,” she wrote, outlining a two-hour conversation about numerous topics, including her career goals.

“He had a lot to say and was very emotional and serious but also asked a lot of questions,” she wrote, adding, “He got emotional. Not me.”

Bennett’s mother, Jessica, confirmed the text, and her feeling, at the time, that it was reassuring that the governor seemed to be taking on the role of a mentor.

Charlotte Bennett said she was asked in late March to begin working in Albany as part of the state’s COVID-19 response effort. Two months later, in mid-May, the governor’s perception of their relationship seemingly began to change, she said.

On May 15, she said she arrived at the Capitol around 7 a.m. to find Cuomo already at work. Bennett was there to drop off some briefing papers, but Cuomo was chatty, asking about her love life and, in a gossipy way, whether she was involved with other members of the governor’s staff. She memorialized the exchange in several texts to another Cuomo staff member that the Times reviewed.

Bennett said she had mentioned a speech she was scheduled to give to Hamilton students about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault. She said she had been taken aback by Cuomo’s seeming fixation on that element of her life experience.

“The way he was repeating, ‘You were raped and abused and attacked and assaulted and betrayed,’ over and over again while looking me directly in the eyes was something out of a horror movie,” she wrote in a second text to her friend. “It was like he was testing me.”

In retrospect, Bennett said, she viewed the 15 May meeting “as the turning point in our relationship.”

“Anything before it I now see differently,” she said. “I now understand that as grooming.”

Three weeks later, Bennett said, she was summoned to Cuomo’s second-floor office and was asked to take dictation with another aide.

After the second aide left, Cuomo and Bennett continued their work. When they finished, she said, he asked her to turn off her recorder, and he began a winding conversation that touched on the Black Lives Matter protests and his daily news conferences.

But, Bennett said, the governor also started to ask questions about her personal life, including whether she was romantically involved, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and whether she had ever had sex with older men.

A series of text exchanges with a female friend from that afternoon, 5 June, comported with Bennett’s recounting of the story this week. In the texts, she told her friend that she was shaken and upset by the episode and worried about even writing it down.

“Something just happened and I can’t even type it out or put it in a video,” Bennett wrote.

Bennett went on to say to her friend, who confirmed the texts’ content and validity but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, that she and the governor had just spoken “about age differences in relationships.”

When her friend asked whether Cuomo had done anything physical to Bennett, she responded, “No but it was like the most explicit it could be.”

The next day, the women continued to discuss the episode via text. Bennett wrote that the governor had asked her whether she was having sex with other people “while in my recent relationships.”

In the interview, Bennett said Cuomo told her he was lonely, particularly since the end of his relationship with Lee in 2019. He said Lee was “out of the picture,” according to Bennett, adding that he referred to “wanting a girlfriend, preferably in the Albany area.”

Bennett, who had just turned 25 at the time, said Cuomo had also asked about her feelings about age differences in relationships, saying “age doesn’t matter,” according to a text she sent to her friend.

“He asked me if I believed if age made a difference in relationships, and he also asked me in the same conversation if I had ever been with an older man,” Bennett reiterated in an interview with the Times.

At one juncture, Bennett said, the governor also noted that he felt “he’s fine with anyone above the age of 22,” a point that came up after they discussed her speech at Hamilton on what was her 25th birthday.

Asked if she felt Cuomo’s questions and comments were an entreaty to a sexual relationship, Bennett said, “That’s absolutely how it felt.”

Bennett said that she had felt deeply uncomfortable with Cuomo’s comments and had tried to shift the conversation into more neutral territory — something “not about my sex life,” she recalled — like intellectual theories about monogamy and power dynamics, and even a tattoo she was considering getting.

She said Cuomo had suggested that perhaps she should put the tattoo on her buttocks so people would not see it when she wore a dress.

A friend of Bennett’s, a former Cuomo administration official, said he had spoken to her shortly after the June 5 episode. He confirmed the contours of her account, saying that she had made it clear to him that she believed the governor wanted to have sex with her.

Bennett told her parents about the encounter within days, her mother recalled, saying her daughter had made a special visit home to do so. “She was obviously upset,” Bennett’s mother said.

Bennett said she spoke to Cuomo’s chief of staff, DesRosiers, on June 10, five days after the episode.

She said the meeting, in DesRosiers’ office, had lasted about 10 minutes. Bennett said she had recounted her interaction with Cuomo, and she recalled that DesRosiers had asked a few questions, been apologetic and asked to speak to her again in two days.

In a text message sent to a friend after the meeting, Bennett said DesRosiers had said, “How can we do this?” asking whether she wanted to stay in the executive branch or move to another part of the state government.

When Bennett’s friend asked what that meant, Bennett explained that an outside job would still be with the administration, but “just not interacting with him.”

She also told her friend, in the same series of texts, that she trusted DesRosiers but was worried about Cuomo’s reaction: “I just said I didn’t want him to find out and get mad.”

Two days later, on June 12, DesRosiers told Bennett she would be transferred to a new position as a health policy adviser, still working in the executive branch, but in a different part of the Capitol. Her new job was announced in a June 17 email to Department of Health officials. “Welcome Charlotte!” it concluded.

Later that month, Bennett met with Mogul, a special counsel to the governor, and repeated her claims. She said, however, that she soon decided to “let this go and move on.”

In a statement Saturday, Beth Garvey, another special counsel to the governor, said that “Ms. Bennett’s concerns were treated with sensitivity and respect and in accordance with applicable law and policy.” She characterized the transfer to a health policy position as fulfilling “a long-standing interest” of Bennett’s.

Of Bennett, Garvey said, “she was consulted regarding the resolution and expressed satisfaction and appreciation for the way in which it was handled.” Barbara Jones, a former federal judge in Manhattan, will lead the outside review into the matter, Garvey said.

Bennett left state government last fall, and she now lives and works in a neighboring state. She said that her anger about what had happened had continued to percolate and had led to her departure.

“His presence was suffocating,” she said. “I was thinking that I could recover and have distance, but that is so naive.”

She added that she had been committed to her job in the administration, even after her interactions with Cuomo, and had tried to “not have him ruin this for me.”

But, she said, “I learned that’s not how that works.”

Jesse McKinley c.2021 The New York Times Company

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The Frick, New York's plushest museum, undergoes an unexpectedly audacious transmutation

Yesterday’s robber barons lived like princes; today, they’d rather be monks.

When union-crushing coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick left Pittsburgh for New York in 1905, he built himself a beaux-arts town house the width of a city block, encased in marble and mahogany, trimmed with velvet and gold. The museum it now houses on Fifth Avenue is expanding: The house’s upstairs living quarters will open to the public, and there will be an addition designed by Annabelle Selldorf, the New York architect of understated rigour. But to prepare, the Frick Collection has to move out for two years — and in a sublet five blocks north, it’s discovering the more modern luxury of blank walls and empty rooms.

“After finding Nothingness, I have found Beauty,” Mallarmé wrote. And so it is at Frick Madison: an unexpectedly audacious transmutation of the city’s plushest museum within Marcel Breuer’s home for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recently occupied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brutalist building at 945 Madison Ave. reopens 18 March as an old masters gallery, with 104 of the Frick’s paintings, plus marbles and bronzes and vases and clocks.

The backdrop is gray, the lighting sober. No barriers. No protective glass. No descriptive texts. (And no selfies, either — as at the mother ship, at Frick Madison photography is banned too.) New York’s most majestic Bellini, most lavish Rembrandt, most sharply cut Ingres have been unencumbered, made strange. Frick Madison is European art history distilled, and it’s a swaggering wager on the collection’s sufficiency and an audience’s attention span. You can study up via print, app or video, but your primordial task here is to look, look, look.

“We’re doing the opposite of what the house does,” Xavier Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator, tells me during one of three visits I made this winter to the reinstallation. For the next two years, these artworks appear not as elements of a residence. Rather, they are reordered by geography and medium. Dutch and Flemish painting get the second floor, which culminates with all eight of the Frick’s Van Dycks and a snug room for its three Vermeers. The third floor is the province of Italy and Spain, but also Mughal carpets and Chinese porcelain.

Floor four is Britain and France, where Breuer’s massive trapezoidal window illuminates the four panels of Fragonard’s blithe “Progress of Love,” a Rococo fête of countryside hooking up. The gallery is a modernist showstopper, although not without historical grounding; Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, commissioned the panels for a pleasure palace whose window was placed in roughly the same location. “That window at Louveciennes looked out onto the Seine,” Salomon said. “Now you look out to the Apple Store across Madison Avenue …”

This new setting isn’t just unusual. It’s unprecedented, since the Frick, by long-standing tradition, has not lent pictures bequeathed by its founder to other institutions. Frick Madison is therefore the first, and probably only, time that many of these artworks will ever be on view outside the sumptuous confines of 1 E. 70th St.

I’d only ever seen Holbein’s flinty portraits of the two Thomases, More and Cromwell (the “Wolf Hall” rivals), on either side of Frick’s fireplace; here, they face off in their own gallery. In the mansion, the museum’s larger pictures by Van Dyck or Velázquez hang above wainscoting; Ingres’ razor-edged portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville is protected by a table of marble and gilt bronze. At the Breuer they’ve been brought down to eye level. You can almost walk into them. (Hence another negative rule: no children under 10.)

Frick Madison began, like so many good New York stories, with a lucky break on a rental. “I went around all the major museums, kind of cup in hand, looking for some space,” said Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s director since 2011. “Richard Armstrong offered me the Guggenheim, which would have been fascinating, but it was only for four months.”

He contacted his old colleagues at the Metropolitan, which had leased the Breuer building from the Whitney until 2023. “Everybody knew the Met was having financial troubles, and having troubles running all those exhibitions. So I thought, maybe, they’d give me a floor,” Wardropper said. “But, very quickly, we got into negotiations for the whole thing. And that changed the whole ballgame. Because suddenly, it was not just an opportunity to show a few works, but to really rethink the collection for a couple of years.”

When the deal came through, Salomon said, “I felt totally relieved that the collection could be on view. And totally terrified: What the hell am I going to do with this space?” (We were talking through our masks in the half-complete Italian galleries. The Frick staggered its crews in case of infection, and sometimes curators supervised the installation via FaceTime.) But the Frick already had a partner in Selldorf, who knew the collection intimately after years planning the museum’s fourth attempt at expansion and renovation.

Breuer’s gridded ceiling dictates much of the flow. “The concrete ceiling creates a kind of module that you want to respect,” Selldorf said. “It’s such a strong building. It’s not like you can argue it away.” Along with the Frick’s long-standing designer, Stephen Saitas, she contrived a sequence of walls (often left blank) noticeably thicker than those the Whitney or Met used, and paint jobs in a narrow band of slate to gunmetal. “White,” Salomon tells me, “is the kiss of death for old masters.”

The fusty Frick, gone minimal? It may surprise you, but this place has the youngest curatorial team of any major museum in New York, led by Salomon, 42, and Aimee Ng, 39. Last year, they achieved sudden digital fame for “Cocktails with a Curator,” an on-the-fly pandemic YouTube series that pairs paintings with libations, and which became appointment viewing at Friday martini hour. More than 1 million viewers have tuned in to watch Salomon unpack the history of Velázquez’s royal commissions (while drinking sherry), or to hear Ng analyse gender depictions in 18th-century English portraiture (while drinking Pimm’s).

The cocktail hour, Ng said, has “transformed what we do in writing, with footnotes, into something that’s much more accessible.” They now get stopped in the street by Renaissance art fans, although the alcoholic accompaniment may have loosened the tongues of their most devoted watchers.

“I mean, it’s overwhelmingly positive,” Salomon said. “But you always get the comment of ‘I don’t like the sweater you’re wearing today....’”

Ng: “Or, ‘You touch your hair too much. You should smile less.’”

Salomon: “I got, ‘You should smile more!’”

For the Breuer project they traveled to inspect two other museums of older art in similarly spartan digs: the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, a Brutalist structure in Lisbon, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, a pavilion of concrete designed by Louis Kahn. They were joined in Texas by their partners in the Breuer project, Charlotte Vignon and David Pullins, who’ve both since left the Frick for new positions. (Two new young hires from Europe, Giulio Dalvit and Marie-Laure Buku Pongo, have participated from afar.)

The vision properly started to crystallise somewhere along Interstate 20 in West Texas, en route from the Kimbell to Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in the tiny town of Marfa.

“We were stuck in a car together for eight hours,” Ng remembers. “And we went through every iteration, even if we were going to dismiss it out of hand. What if we did it by date of acquisition? How can we treat this collection in a really special way?”

“We even discussed putting damask everywhere and recreating some of the rooms, in a kind of Barnes way,” Salomon adds, referring to the Barnes Collection’s nuts-and-bolts duplication of its founder’s suburban Philadelphia house. “But that lasted about three seconds ...”

Another scenario — showing new art with old — also didn’t last long. “This is not a contemporary building,” Salomon said. “It’s a building from the ’60s. It’s a historical building, of a different language than the beaux-arts house we work in usually — but we didn’t feel any pressure that, because we’re here, we had to do contemporary.”

They contemplated Judd’s metal boxes in the Texas scrub grass — and, by the poolside of Marfa’s Thunderbird Hotel, they started sketching. And erasing. “We were going to have four pictures in here, and Aimee was like, ‘No, let’s make it two. Let’s make it one!’” Salomon said.

“The house is this overload of sensations: fabrics and wood and paintings and objects. We really wanted that Marfa feeling: if you go into a room and you have one piece by Judd, in the same way you can have a huge wall with just one Velázquez. And it holds it, because it’s just so powerful.

“One trustee kept asking me, ‘So, the fabrics are going to be exactly the same as the house, right? There are going to be nice colors on the walls?’ And I had to say, um, no ...”

Their minimalism certainly doesn’t sideline more pugnacious gazes on the past. In the new, intimate Vermeer gallery, Ng recalls the blowback she got for her cocktail chat about his “Officer and Laughing Girl.” (She was drinking Dutch jenever.) She had zeroed in on the beaver-pelt hat worn by the Dutchman in the picture’s foreground — a luxury imported from the young colonies of North America, and an undevised emblem of the violence and disease that came with European contact. “Indigenous communities got horribly slammed by that. A horrible, tragic time. I got so many notes from people: ‘I’ve never seen this painting like this before.’ And the amount of crap I got: You’re politicising Vermeer!”

“People think about old masters as escapism, as looking at pretty old things,” Salomon said.

And yet the past year, isolated from art, reaffirmed their conviction that analysis can be delivered in many formats. What’s scarcer, and dearer, is time and space to see. “If they want to read more, they can. We offer endless programming,” Ng said. “The gift we’re trying to give people is the ability to look.”

Jason Farago c.2021 The New York Times Company

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We have telescopes in space, rovers on other worlds – our search for alien life continues

For more than a century, our imagination has fuelled our search for aliens. We have envisioned them as giant robots, little green men, or slimy creatures. After the two World Wars, humanity’s technological progress sky-rocketed, quite literally, opening a new horizon for exploration: space. It was time to move beyond gazing upwards – our rockets could take orbiters, rovers and eventually, people, to worlds that could, or may be, harbouring life. The stage was set for our encounters with aliens to take place. Our machines have been landing on Mars, flying past all the planets in our solar system, and observing the stars and planets in deep space for over 45 years now. Even with all this progress, our guess as to whether aliens exist is as good as it was a century ago.

In the 1950s, over a casual lunch conversation, a scientist called Fermi brought up the high likelihood for Earth-like life to exist in the Universe with the innumerable number of stars and planets in the Universe, and the simultaneous lack of evidence to support it. Coined the Fermi paradox, this inconsistency something that motivated (and demotivated) communicators to think about Aliens for the years to come. In 2017, a travelling piece of space rubble was spotted from 85 times the Earth-Moon distance away. For its unusual characteristics, the object known as 'Oumuamua became a sensation. It’s size, wobble and acceleration were unusual for interstellar objects – hard to explain by conventional standards. A popular recent hypothesis regarding it being a product of an alien construct, led by Harvard professor Avi Loeb, was widely shared in the international media. It was generally shot down by the scientific community as "insufficient evidence to support such a premise", since science demands hard, incontrovertible proof, even if the process to get to it is cumbersome.

So why are aliens so hard to find?

Space is vast. It takes years to build missions, launch them, and travel to worlds that appear promising. Space is also risky, and getting a spacecraft to enter the right orbit around a planet or land safely on its surface is a complex business to which tens of missions have been lost over the decades. On arriving, the search for ancient relics or by-products of simple microbial life is priority. The information at these nascent stages of exploration is hard to decipher, and often leaves plenty of room for speculation and doubt. We are getting better at unravelling these clues with experience, but reaching the limits of what is possible with the instruments at hand. Fitted on low-powered, small, automatic rovers that are millions of kilometers away from us, the scope of exploration is fairly limited. For the moment, our best bet is returning samples from these worlds back to us, to study on Earth.

With the Perseverance (Percy) rover, which made a safe landing on 18 February, NASA is aiming to inch us forward by returning samples from our near neighbour Mars. The SUV-sized rover packs a drill on its back and a helicopter under its belly, designed to drive around its landing site in Jezero Crater. The crater was once home to a lake that had dramatic streams filling up its floor – an exciting place to look for traces or deposits of biological activity. Shortly after the landing, we gorged on never-before-seen footage of a rover landing on the surface of Mars, kicking up dust in the process. As it settled, the panoramic photos of the surrounding environment show the arena that could perhaps finally ascertain if Mars once had life.

Also read: Stunning 360-degree panorama captured by Perseverance of its Mars landing site

We are still unsure what to expect. Would life on Mars be like that on Earth? Or are we about to uncover a completely new form of life? If we did, would it be a simple or complex life form? We know that the complexity of life on Earth arose from the long periods of habitable conditions on Earth. Was it the same on Mars? Does life evolve differently on different planets? Zoologist & astrobiologist Arik Kershenbaum at Cambridge University studies vocal communication of wolves and dolphins. He offers an interesting view on understanding the process of life, explaining that there is much to learn from animals on Earth, to help determine the different characteristics of extraterrestrial life motion, communication, socialising, intelligence, etc. Most studies of extraterrestrial life is based on simple microbial life – their cell structures, their metabolism, preferences for certain environments, etc.

"Problems like finding food, avoiding becoming someone else’s food, and reproducing. These Earthly problems are also problems that need to be solved on alien worlds," Kershenbaum writes in a story for BBC's Science Focus magazine.

So the search is on, both at the micro level, looking at how simple life on Earth deals with harsh environments, as well as macro, looking at giant suns in deep space and their planets where statistically-likely alien life awaits. Just in the last 50 years, we have discovered the wealth of life teeming on Earth in the most unexpected dark, deep, dry, wet, cold and toxic of places. This has motivated us to look far and wide – from clouds in the thick Venusian atmosphere, to subsurface water columns on Mars; from liquid methane rivers on Titan, to underwater hydrothermal vents on Europa or Enceladus.

The scientific community is divided on their understanding of the origin of life on Earth. Some talk about black smokers, or hydrothermal vents at the bottom of frigid cold oceans, teeming with simple and complex life. Recent evidence from the ancient outback of Australia points towards a more terrestrial origin, on beaches and terrestrial hot springs. Natural environments offer analogue scenarios for scientists to test their experiment plans and for engineers to train their instruments before they are packed up and flown to space. In India, Ladakh offers a unique cold, high altitude environment with glacial pools, salt-water lakes, hot springs and frozen soils – an excellent Mars analogue, only recently being recognized, after international expeditions since August 2016 to the region.

Astrobiology as a field attracts people from all walks of life, professions, ages, and regions: for many this is the crux of their excitement about space and its exploration. It humbles us, inspires us and awakens us from our usually monotonous Earthly troubles, makes us strain our short-sightedness and self-centred tendencies. So do we know when will we meet aliens? No. Does this excite us or bore us? Will we ever be able to find an answer? With the increasing popularity of the subject, more minds will hopefully get to task and help us answer this question for once and for all.

From 2021, a five-month Earth and Space Exploration Program, led by Amity University Mumbai for students, teachers and travellers that want to explore the terrain in Ladakh in an expedition led by leading astrobiologists and earth scientists. The program is a great pathway for students to pursue an exciting career in Earth and Space Sciences, and for space enthusiasts to get a taste of the not-so-distant future, when space exploration is open to civilians as the scientists and engineers in the space race. 

The author is the Head of Amity University's Centre of Excellence in Astrobiology. He tweets at @siddharthpandey.

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US gets third COVID-19 vaccine as FDA approves Johnson & Johnson's one-dose shot

Washington: The US is getting a third vaccine to prevent COVID-19, as the Food and Drug Administration on Saturday cleared a Johnson & Johnson shot that works with just one dose instead of two.

Health experts are anxiously awaiting a one-and-done option to help speed vaccinations, as they race against a virus that already has killed more than 5,10,000 people in the US and is mutating in increasingly worrisome ways.

The FDA said J&J's vaccine offers strong protection against what matters most: serious illness, hospitalisations and death. One dose was 85 percent protective against the most severe COVID-19 illness, in a massive study that spanned three continents — protection that remained strong even in countries such as South Africa, where the variants of most concern are spreading.

"This is really good news," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "The most important thing we can do right now is to get as many shots in as many arms as we can."

J&J initially is providing a few million doses and shipments to states could begin as early as Monday. By the end of March, J&J has said it expects to deliver 20 million doses to the US, and 100 million by summer.

J&J also is seeking authorization for emergency use of its vaccine in Europe and from the World Health Organization. The company aims to produce about 1 billion doses globally by the end of the year. On Thursday, the island nation of Bahrain became the first to clear its use.

"This is exciting news for all Americans, and an encouraging development in our efforts to bring an end to the crisis," President Joe Biden said in a statement. "But I want to be clear: this fight is far from over," he added, encouraging people to stick with masks and other public health measures.

On Sunday, a US advisory committee will meet to recommend how to prioritize use of the single-dose vaccine. And one big challenge is what the public wants to know: Which kind is better?

"In this environment, whatever you can get — get," said Dr. Arnold Monto of the University of Michigan, who chaired an FDA advisory panel that unanimously voted Friday that the vaccine's benefits outweigh its risks.

Data is mixed on how well all the vaccines being used around the world work, prompting reports in some countries of people refusing one kind to wait for another.

In the US, the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna shots were 95 percent protective against symptomatic COVID-19. J&J's one-dose effectiveness of 85 percent against severe COVID-19 dropped to 66 percent when moderate cases were rolled in. But there's no apples-to-apples comparison because of differences in when and where each company conducted its studies, with the Pfizer and Moderna research finished before concerning variants began spreading.

NIH's Collins said the evidence shows no reason to favor one vaccine over another.

"What people I think are mostly interested in is, is it going to keep me from getting really sick?" Collins said. "Will it keep me from dying from this terrible disease? The good news is all of these say yes to that."

Also, J&J is testing two doses of its vaccine in a separate large study. Collins said if a second dose eventually is deemed better, people who got one earlier would be offered another.

The FDA cautioned that it's too early to tell if someone who gets a mild or asymptomatic infection despite vaccination still could spread the virus.

There are clear advantages aside from the convenience of one shot. Local health officials are looking to use the J&J option in mobile vaccination clinics, homeless shelters, even with sailors who are spending months on fishing vessels — communities where it's hard to be sure someone will come back in three to four weeks for a second vaccination.

The J&J vaccine also is easier to handle, lasting three months in the refrigerator compared to the Pfizer and Moderna options, which must be frozen.

"We're chomping at the bit to get more supply. That's the limiting factor for us right now," said Dr. Matt Anderson of UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, where staffers were readying electronic health records, staffing and vaccine storage in anticipation of offering J&J shots soon.

The FDA said studies detected no serious side effects. Like other COVID-19 vaccines, the main side effects of the J&J shot are pain at the injection site and flu-like fever, fatigue and headache.

An FDA fact sheet for vaccine recipients says there is "a remote chance" that people may experience a severe allergic reaction to the shot, a rare risk seen with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Such reactions are treatable, and vaccine recipients are supposed to be briefly monitored after the injection.

The vaccine has been authorized for emergency use in adults 18 and older for now. But like other manufacturers, J&J is about to study how it works in teens before moving to younger children later in the year, and also plans a study in pregnant women.

All COVID-19 vaccines train the body to recognize the new coronavirus, usually by spotting the spikey protein that coats it. But they're made in very different ways.

J&J's shot uses a cold virus like a Trojan horse to carry the spike gene into the body, where cells make harmless copies of the protein to prime the immune system in case the real virus comes along. It's the same technology the company used in making an Ebola vaccine, and similar to COVID-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca and China's CanSino Biologics.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are made with a different technology, a piece of genetic code called messenger RNA that spurs cells to make those harmless spike copies.

The AstraZeneca vaccine, already used in Britain and numerous other countries, is finishing a large US study needed for FDA clearance. Also in the pipeline, Novavax uses a still different technology, made with lab-grown copies of the spike protein, and has reported preliminary findings from a British study suggesting strong protection.

Still other countries are using "inactivated vaccines," made with killed coronavirus by Chinese companies Sinovac and Sinopharm.

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Myanmar's UN envoy fired for denouncing junta as crackdown on dissenters continue

Myanmar's junta fired its United Nations ambassador Saturday for breaking ranks to denounce the military's ouster of civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, as police stepped up a crackdown on protesters across the country.

The country has been shaken by a wave of demonstrations since a coup toppled civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi on 1 February.

Authorities have ramped up the use of force to suppress dissent, deploying tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse some protests. Live rounds have been used in isolated cases.

In justifying its seizure of power, the military has alleged widespread fraud in the November elections, which Suu Kyi's party won in a landslide, and promised fresh polls in a year.

But its ambassador to the United Nations on Friday broke ranks and made an emotional appeal to the international community for "the strongest possible action... to restore democracy".

Kyaw Moe Tun also pleaded with his "brothers and sisters" in Burmese to keep fighting.

"This revolution must win," he said, flashing the three-finger salute that has become a symbol of resistance against the junta.

By Saturday night, state-run TV announced that Kyaw Moe Tun was no longer Myanmar's UN ambassador.

"(He) didn't follow the order and direction by the state and betrayed the country," according to a MRTV broadcast.

"That is why he is revoked from his position starting from today."

'We want to fight until we win'

News of Kyaw Moe Tun's removal follows a day of crackdowns and mass arrests by Myanmar's security forces as the country enters its fourth week of daily protests against the generals' grip on power.

Chaos unfolded across commercial hub Yangon, with police closing in early on peaceful demonstrators and deploying rubber bullets to disperse them from Myaynigone junction.

Protesters scattered into residential streets and started building makeshift barricades out of stacked tables and trash cans to stop the police.

Many wore hard hats and gas masks, wielding homemade shields for protection.

"What are the police doing? They are protecting a crazy dictator," the protesters chanted angrily.

Local reporters broadcast the chaotic scenes live on Facebook, including the moments when the shots rang out, which AFP reporters on the ground also witnessed.

"We want to fight until we win," said protester Moe Moe, 23, who used a pseudonym.

At nearby Hledan junction several rounds of stun grenades were fired, according to AFP reporters.

At least three media workers were detained, including an Associated Press photographer, a video journalist from Myanmar Now, and a photographer from the Myanmar Pressphoto Agency.

Another protest near a shopping centre in nearby Tamwe Township was broken up by police.

Aye Myint Kyi, a distraught mother of one shopper, said she reached her daughter briefly on the phone, who said she was being taken.

"I don't know where she was taken," she told AFP, crying. "She was unjustly arrested."

Mass arrests

In the central city of Monywa, a rally had barely started before police and soldiers moved in on demonstrators, said a medic with a local emergency rescue team.

Htwe Aung Zin said his team had been "sent a man who was severely injured in his leg from the police crackdown", adding that they treated 10 others with minor injuries.

He declined to say what kind of bullets caused the man's injury.

Another medic — who did not give their name — told AFP that a woman with severe injuries had been sent to the intensive care unit.

Meanwhile, two local media outlets saw their journalists arrested as they attempted to broadcast live video of protests on Facebook.

Monywa Gazette's Kyaw Kyaw Win was beaten and arrested by plainclothes police, while Hakha Times' Pu Lalawmpuia was nabbed as he was filming authorities fanning out around him.

More than 770 people have been arrested, charged and sentenced since the putsch, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) monitoring group, with some 680 still behind bars.

But Saturday is expected to push the number up, said AAPP's Bo Gyi.

"More than 400 were arrested (today)," he said, adding that only a fraction will make it into the group's daily updated list as they were not able to confirm the names of everyone.

'Protection concerns'

Earlier in the day, MRTV also broadcast the arrival of more than 1,000 Myanmar nationals deported from Malaysia despite a court order halting the repatriation.

The migrants — whom activists say include vulnerable asylum seekers — received a hero's welcome at Yangon's navy port, attended by military families and officials.

Some of the returnees include ethnic minorities from Rakhine and Kachin state who may have "protection concerns", said John Quinley of Fortify Rights.

"The military has been on an all-out campaign to crack down on protesters, journalists, activists, and anyone calling for democracy," he said.

Since the coup, at least five people have been killed — four of them from injuries sustained at anti-coup demonstrations that saw security forces open fire on protesters.

The military has said one police officer has died while attempting to quell a protest.

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'Myanmar military must stop oppressing the innocent', UN envoy makes emotional speech

United Nations: Myanmar's UN ambassador strongly opposed the military coup in his country and appealed for the "strongest possible action from the international community" to immediately restore democracy, in a dramatic speech to the UN General Assembly Friday that drew loud applause from many diplomats in the 193-nation global body.

Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun began his statement saying he represented Aung San Suu Kyi's "civilian government elected by the people" in November, and supported their fight for the end of military rule.

He urged all countries to issue public statements strongly condemning the 1 February coup, and to refuse to recognise the military regime and ask its leaders to respect the free and fair elections in November won by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party. He also urged stronger international measures to stop violence by security forces against peaceful demonstrators.

"It is time for the military to immediately relinquish power and release those detained," Tun said, agreeing with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that military coup "is not acceptable in this modern world and the coup must cease."

"We will continue to fight for a government which is of the people, by the people, for the people," he vowed.

His voice cracking, he ended his statement by addressing people back home in Burmese and raised a three-finger salute that has been adopted by the anti-coup movement.

Tun's surprise statement not only drew applause but commendations from speaker after speaker at the assembly meeting including ambassadors representing the European Union, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the new USambassador, Linda Thomas Greenfield. She joined others in describing the speech as "courageous," "powerful" and "brave".

In her first appearance at the assembly since presenting her credentials to Guterres in Thursday, Thomas-Greenfield said the United States "stands in solidarity" with the people of Myanmar who are in the streets protesting the coup. And she reiterated President Joe Biden's warning that "we will show the military that their actions have consequences" and demand to the military "to immediately relinquish power".

In a tweet later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to Myanmar by its former name Burma and said "the United States commends the courageous and clear statement" of Ambassador Tun, "and by those in Burma who are making their voices heard. We must all heed their call to restore democracy in Burma."

The assembly meeting was called to hear a briefing from the UN special envoy for Myanmar, Christine Schraner Burgener, who said it is time to "sound the alarm" about the coup and the military pushing democratic processes aside, violating the constitution, reversing reforms instituted by Suu Kyi, and arresting peaceful protesters, civil society representatives and members of the media.

She pointed to restrictions on the internet and communication services and the detention of about 700 people according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Myanmar, and she called "the use of lethal force and rising deaths unacceptable."

The huge protests in the country are not about a fight between Suu Kyi's party and the military, she said, "it is a fight without arms."

Addressing diplomats in the General Assembly chamber by video link, Schraner Burgener urged "all of you to collectively send a clear signal in support of democracy in Myanmar."

The military takeover in Myanmar shocked the international community and reversed years of slow progress toward democracy. Suu Kyi’s party would have been installed for a second five-year term that day, but the army blocked Parliament from convening and detained her, President Win Myint and other top members of her government.

Myanmar's military says it took power because November's election was marked by widespread voting irregularities, an assertion that was refuted by the election commission, whose members have since been replaced by the ruling junta. The junta has said it will rule for a year under a state of emergency and then hold new polls.

Schraner Burgener told the General Assembly that democratically elected representatives were able to be sworn in according to the constitution on 4 February and have formed the Committee Representing Pyidaungu Hluttaw (National Assembly), known as CRPH, and are seeking "to uphold their obligations to serve the people who voted for them."

Tun began his remarks by reading a statement from CRPH stressing the legitimacy of the election results and declaring that the military overthrew the democratically elected government. He cited the massive opposition by the people, saying “now is not the time for the international community to tolerate the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Myanmar military.”

The CRPH, saying it represented some 80 parliamentarians, asked the UN, the Security Council and the international community "that aspires to build a peaceful and civilised global society to use any means necessary to take action against the Myanmar military and to provide safety and security for the people of Myanmar."

China's UN Ambassador Zhang Jun, whose neighboring country has invested billions of dollars in Myanmar and is its biggest trading partner, called on all parties to handle differences through dialogue "under the constitutional and legal framework," avoid violence, "and continue to promote the domestic democratic transformation process in an orderly manner."

Never mentioning the military or a coup and describing what happened in Myanmar as "in essence Myanmar's internal affairs", he said the international community should help the parties "bridge their differences and solve problems".

Zhang backed efforts by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which Myanmar belongs to, "in playing an active role in easing the current state of affairs."

ASEAN countries are discussing holding an informal foreign ministers meeting and "we look forward to its early convening on the basis of consensus, thus providing a useful platform and opportunity for promoting problem solving," he said.

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Jamal Khashoggi murder: US intel report indicts Saudi Crown Prince, but Biden takes cautious stand

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, according to an intelligence report that the Biden administration released Friday that offered the world a reminder of the brutal killing.

An elite team of operatives helped carry out the killing, the report said. The team reported directly to Crown Prince Mohammed, who cultivated a climate of fear that made it unlikely for aides to act without his consent, according to the report. It omitted the brutal details of Khashoggi’s death, including the dismemberment of his body with a bone saw after Saudi officials lured him to their consulate in Istanbul.

But the Biden administration took no direct action against Crown Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler of the kingdom, instead announcing travel and financial sanctions on other Saudis involved in the killing and on members of the elite unit of the Royal Guard, who protect the crown prince. The administration concluded it could not risk a full rupture of its relationship with the kingdom, relied on by the United States to help contain Iran, to counter terrorist groups and to broker peaceful relations with Israel. Cutting off Saudi Arabia could also push its leaders toward China.

Lawmakers of both parties praised the release of the report, but some Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff of California, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, spoke out in dismay that the administration stopped short of more severely punishing Crown Prince Mohammed for the killing of Khashoggi, a legal permanent resident of Virginia who was critical of the Saudi government in columns he wrote for The Post.

“There are ways to bring about more personal repercussions without completely rupturing the relationship,” Schiff said in an interview.

Still, he added: “This is an official U.S. government statement that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has blood on his hands, and that blood belongs to an American resident and journalist. And I think that’s very powerful.”

The 2018 assassination of Khashoggi and the brutality of his death, detailed in news reports at the time, shocked the world. And it disgusted U.S. officials, including the CIA director at the time, Gina Haspel, according to current and former intelligence officials. Haspel and the other U.S. officials listened to a recording obtained by Turkish intelligence that not only captured Khashoggi’s struggle against Saudi agents and his killing but also caught the sounds of the saw being used on his body.

The Saudi government issued a blistering response to the report’s release and the penalties, rejecting the document as a “negative, false and unacceptable assessment” about its leaders.

“It is truly unfortunate that this report, with its unjustified and inaccurate conclusions, is issued while the kingdom had clearly denounced this heinous crime,” the statement said. It noted that the kingdom had “taken steps” to prevent a repeat of the killing; it prosecuted eight people in connection with it.

Much of the evidence the CIA used to conclude that Crown Prince Mohammed was culpable in Khashoggi’s killing remains classified. But the report’s disclosure was the first time that the U.S. intelligence community had made its conclusions public, and the declassified document was a powerful rebuke of Crown Prince Mohammed, a close ally of the Trump administration, whose continued support of him prompted international outrage.

The release of the report signaled that President Joe Biden, unlike his predecessor, would not set aside the killing of Khashoggi and that his administration intended to try to isolate the crown prince.

“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” said the report, issued by Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.

The decision to rebuke the Saudis without punishing Crown Prince Mohammed directly was the result of a weeks-long debate among aides to Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value.” Two years earlier, Biden called out the Trump administration for its inaction after Khashoggi’s death, calling it “embarrassing” and “dangerous.”

Biden’s newly formed national security team advised him that he could not bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, nor weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with a key Arab ally, according to officials.

They said that a consensus emerged inside the White House that the cost of such a breach, in terms of Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.

For Biden, the decision was a telling indication that his more cautious instincts had kicked in.

In an interview with Univision on Friday, the president said that he “spoke yesterday with the king, not the prince.” Biden added that he had “made it clear to him that the rules are changing, and we’re going to be announcing significant changes today and on Monday” to hold the Saudis accountable. “It is outrageous what happened.”

Ultimately, the Biden administration announced penalties against Saudi officials, including a travel ban and freezing of assets of the kingdom’s former intelligence chief and sanctions against members of a paramilitary unit that took part in the assassination.

The State Department also announced visa restrictions against 76 Saudis accused of suppressing or harming journalists, activists and dissidents, and more will eventually be applied to others around the world as the administration expands enforcement of a new “Khashoggi ban,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

“The relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual,” Blinken said at a news conference at the department. “What we’ve done by the actions that we’ve taken is really not to rupture the relationship, but to recalibrate it to be more in line with our interests and our values.”

Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator and foreign policy aide in administrations of both parties, applauded Biden for “trying to thread the needle,” calling the matter “a classic example of where you have to balance your values and your interests.”

“We are now doing things that show a clear difference from Trump on democracy and human rights,” Ross added in an interview.

The four-page intelligence report contained few previously undisclosed major facts and reiterated the CIA’s conclusion from 2018 that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the killing of Khashoggi. It made its case based on smaller pieces of evidence and the CIA’s understanding of the prince’s control of the kingdom, which intelligence officials have long said led them to a high confidence conclusion of his culpability.

Crown Prince Mohammed viewed Khashoggi as a threat and “broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him,” the intelligence report concluded. U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Saudi officials had planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, but the report said the United States had not learned when Saudi officials decided to harm him.

Members of the hit team flew to Turkey on 2 October, 2018, after Saudi officials lured Khashoggi, who was seeking paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancée, into the consulate in Istanbul.

While the team arrived in Istanbul prepared to kill Khashoggi, U.S. intelligence agencies were not confident that was their only authorized option.

The spy agencies could not rule out that Crown Prince Mohammed might have preferred to capture Khashoggi, a U.S. intelligence official said, adding that the CIA and other agencies have high confidence in their judgment that Crown Prince Mohammed was responsible for an order to either capture or kill Khashoggi. His body was never found.

According to the report, Crown Prince Mohammed “fostered an environment” in which his aides feared that any failure to follow his orders could result in their arrest. “This suggests that the aides were unlikely to question Mohammed bin Salman’s orders or undertake sensitive actions without his consent,” the report said.

The report listed 21 others involved in the killing of Khashoggi, including members of the hit team.

The operatives worked for the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs, at the time led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of the prince. Al-Qahtani’s official job was the media czar for the Royal Court, and he was once in charge of a campaign to use social media to attack Saudi dissidents online. The report noted that al-Qahtani had said publicly that he did not make decisions without Crown Prince Mohammed’s approval.

The report said that seven members of Crown Prince Mohammed’s elite protective detail, called the Rapid Intervention Force, or RIF, were part of the 15-man team that killed Khashoggi. The unit has carried out a campaign of kidnapping, surveillance, detention and torture to crush opposition to the crown prince.

“Members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval,” the declassified report said.

From the moment Khashoggi’s death was discovered, Saudi officials sought to deflect blame from the crown prince. The Saudi government imprisoned eight people in connection with Khashoggi’s death, trying them largely secretively. Although five were originally sentenced to death, after one of Khashoggi’s sons said he and his siblings had forgiven the men who killed their father, a Saudi court reduced the sentences to prison terms.

Schiff said he met with White House officials Friday to press for “more personal repercussions” on the crown prince.

“I don’t think the president should be meeting with him. I don’t think the president should be talking with him,” Schiff said. “I think the administration should explore ways to go after assets that he controls.”

Before the report’s release, Biden spoke to King Salman of Saudi Arabia. And officials have said Biden will speak only to the king, his counterpart as head of state, although others in the administration might speak directly to the crown prince.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., who was the assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Obama administration, said that a “visa ban for MBS should be mandatory” under existing law “if the secretary of state has credible information that he committed a gross human rights abuse, which the secretary just told us he has.”

Blinken, Malinowski said, had the power to waive the visa ban but only with a report to Congress laying out a justification.

In the waning days of Trump’s presidency, the outgoing administration approved two major sales of precision-guided bombs to the Saudis totaling more than $750 million. Soon after Biden took office, his administration suspended those sales but did not cancel them, State Department officials said. The sales could still go through, and other military deals, including for maintenance of the Saudis fleet of F-15 attack jets and other support for the kingdom’s military, were unaffected by the suspension.

The intelligence report was written a year ago after Congress, which had been briefed on the underlying findings, passed a law mandating intelligence agencies’ conclusions be declassified and released.

Haines, in an interview with NPR, acknowledged that the conclusions would not be surprising but insisted the intelligence agencies had a responsibility “to provide what we see and make sure that it is as clear as possible.”

Julian E Barnes and David E Sanger c.2021 The New York Times Company

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