Novelty
People like to hear stories about "acts of god". This story shows something out of the norm which makes it interesting.
NEW DELHI — Using ice picks and chain saws, Indian Army rescue teams had tunneled their way 35 feet down through the ice around Siachen Glacier, to the spot where they expected to find the bodies of 10 soldiers.
Their post was located at an elevation of 19,500 feet, opposite Pakistani positions on what has been called “the world’s highest battlefield.” Five days earlier, in the predawn hours on Feb. 3, a wall of ice more than a half-mile in length thundered down onto the encampment, in a place where nighttime temperatures can drop to 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; officially and unofficially, the soldiers had been given up for dead.
What the rescue teams discovered late on Monday came as a shock: an infantryman named Naik Hanamanthappa Koppad, described by doctors as drowsy, “severely dehydrated, hypothermic, hypoxic, hypoglycemic and in shock.”
But — alive.
Word of the “Siachen miracle” sent a patriotic thrill through India on Tuesday, though the nine other soldiers were dead and a government health bulletin suggested that Mr. Koppad was barely clinging to life. Airlifted to an army hospital in New Delhi, he received a 10-minute visit from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who remarked, on exiting, that “no words are enough to describe the endurance and indomitable spirit of Lance Naik Hanamanthappa.”
Wire services sent out a photograph of Mr. Koppad’s wife at home in southern India, looking shaken, walking down a dirt road to a temple to pray. “We are all overwhelmed, we cannot stop crying,” his father told CNN-IBN, a cable news station.
There has been no fighting on Siachen Glacier since 2003, but the thousands of troops stationed on either side of the border are in constant danger of frostbite and asphyxiation. There are also yawning crevasses that appear beneath their feet in the spring, among other hazards. Eight hundred and sixty-nine Indian soldiers have died from the extreme weather since 1984, according to an army spokesman.
In the past, disasters have prompted soul-searching about whether clinging to this remote spot is worth the loss of life; after 140 Pakistanis died in an avalanche in 2012, a commentator in the News International, a Pakistani newspaper, blamed “the chauvinistic pride of national leaders who could have solved the problem with common sense and the stroke of a pen if they had the moral courage to do so.”
But there was little sign of this sentiment in India on Tuesday, as video of Mr. Koppad’s rescue played repeatedly on Indian news programs.
“The Indian establishment has got one simple formulation, and that is, ‘We are in the position of advantage, the Pakistani army cannot be trusted, so why should we give up our position of advantage, even if it causes the deaths of 20 people every year?’” said Brig. Gurmeet Kanwal, the former director of the Center for Land Warfare Studies, a government-funded research group.
It is unclear how Mr. Koppad survived for five days, or how he escaped without broken bones or frostbite. An army spokesman said the post was buried under “massive ice boulders, some the size of a small room,” and that rescuers had to chip their way “inch by inch” through 30 feet of hard blue ice. Helicopters made hundreds of sorties to deliver rescue equipment, “flying at extremes both for men and machines,” one pilot told NDTV, a cable news station.
Nitin A. Gokhale, the author of a book about warfare on the Siachen Glacier, said sufficient oxygen must have reached Mr. Koppad in spaces between the boulders and slabs of ice that had trapped him. During research for his book, “Beyond NJ 9842: The Siachen Saga,” Mr. Gokhale said, he had never heard of anyone surviving in the elements for more than a day.
“He was conscious, after so many days, after five days — he has extreme will power,” Mr. Gokhale said. “He was pinned down, he had nothing to do except think about being alive.”
India has controlled the heights overlooking the glacier since its commandos seized them in 1984. Infantry battalions are rotated through three-month tours of duty in the area around the glacier, and describe the assignment as arduous. The altitude affects digestion, and soldiers go months without bathing and report losing their hair. The sense of isolation can be severe. Surviving these hardships is considered a badge of honor, Mr. Gokhale said.
“It’s a box that is a must-tick for any Indian soldier,” he said. “They all want to serve at Siachen. It’s a test of your endurance, your mental ability, your logistics, your supply chain. If a unit comes down without a single casualty, it’s almost like winning a battle.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timeliness
This article is brand new and it's about current events that will heavily affect the nation in a short period of time.
HOOKSETT, N.H. — After her unexpected victory in the New Hampshire primary in 2008, Hillary Clinton said she “found my own voice.” She left New Hampshire on Tuesday night, after a double-digit defeat, still searching for it.
Bernie Sanders’s nearly 22-point victory came after Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had worked hard to lower expectations, but privately, many people close to Mrs. Clinton, including her husband, believed the state would once again serve as a lifeline.
They had hoped that women and working-class voters, who had resuscitated Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign and rescued Bill Clinton’s in 1992, would at least narrow the gap with Mr. Sanders. Instead, Mr. Sanders won among nearly every demographic, including women, young voters and those who make less than $50,000 a year. In the end, the only demographic Mrs. Clinton held onto from 2008 was voters over the age of 65.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Win in New Hampshire PrimaryFEB. 9, 2016
Backers Stayed With Donald Trump as He Regained His BearingsFEB. 9, 2016
News Analysis: As Donald Trump Wins, Mainstream G.O.P. Is Left to Muddle OnFEB. 9, 2016
The rout rocked the Clinton campaign. As the results rolled in on Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers took a somber assessment of the exit polls, recognizing early missteps that had allowed an insurgent challenger to gain the momentum, and their failure to capture the imaginations of young voters and young women, in particular.
A rethinking of the campaign’s strategy and message was already underway Tuesday evening, with aides and outside advisers grappling with how to best position a former first lady, senator and secretary of state for an electorate disillusioned by the Washington status quo.
For the Sanders campaign, the resounding victory on Tuesday is expected to generate a windfall of Internet donations that would help it build a broader national structure, expanding in Nevada and South Carolina and the 11 states that hold contests on Super Tuesday on March 1. One of the more remarkable developments of the Sanders challenge has been the insurgent’s ability to compete financially with the Clinton money-raising machine, which has dominated Democratic politics for decades.
The Sanders campaign has already spent nearly $3.6 million on TV ads in Nevada, including $1 million for the coming week, roughly twice what the Clinton campaign has spent, according to Ralston Reports, a local news website that tracks political spending. “I’m not going to New York City to hold a fund-raiser on Wall Street,” Mr. Sanders said at his victory rally in Concord, N.H. “Instead, I’m going to hold a fund-raiser right here, right now, all across America.”
In the days leading up to Tuesday’s primary, as the polls showed Mr. Sanders maintaining a sizable lead, Mrs. Clinton had grown increasingly frustrated that her opponent’s broad message of political revolution had somehow eclipsed her careful attention to policy details to improve people’s lives.
She turned to old friends and advisers from the White House years and previous campaigns to help her better frame her candidacy to address voters’ discontent. And she received additional media training after criticism that she “shouts,” as The Washington Post editor Bob Woodward put it on MSNBC last week, said several people briefed on the campaign’s approach who could discuss internal planning only without attribution.
By the weekend, the changes began to take shape. “I know that it’s maybe not the most appealing or charismatic message to say, ‘Hey, guys, be angry, and then let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said at a forum with students from New England College on Saturday. “Anger is a powerful emotion,” she added, “but it’s not a plan.”
That town-hall-style meeting became the framework for Mrs. Clinton’s concession speech on Tuesday, held in the same field house at Southern New Hampshire University where she delivered her victory speech — and found her voice — eight years ago.
Supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders at the candidate’s primary-night rally in Concord, N.H., on Tuesday. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
“People have a right to be angry,” she said to a rowdy crowd that tried to lift Mrs. Clinton after the steeper-than-expected loss. “But they’re also hungry, they’re hungry for solutions,” she said.
“Who is the best change maker?” Mrs. Clinton asked the crowd. “You are!” a woman yelled.
In the weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had clashed over how hard she should hit Mr. Sanders. But by New Hampshire, the strategy had become clear — they would aggressively question his record and his campaign’s tactics.
At the beginning of last week, Mrs. Clinton was referring to Mr. Sanders as “my esteemed opponent.” By Sunday, her husband was calling him “hermetically sealed” and accusing him of condoning his supporters’ sexist speech.
“I feel like only in the last four or five days, we are finally moving into territory when we talk about things that are part of the public record,” Mr. Clinton said after an event in Rochester, N.H., on Monday.
Even as Mrs. Clinton assured the crowd on Tuesday, “I still love New Hampshire,” she used the speech to look ahead to the coming contests with more ethnically and ideologically diverse electorates.
Before she took the stage Tuesday night, Mrs. Clinton sent an email blast to donors that said, “Keep in mind, most of the country casts their primary ballots by the middle of March.”
In a memo titled “March Matters,” Robby Mook, the campaign manager, wrote, “We believe that Hillary’s unique level of strength among African-Americans, Hispanics” would “put her on a clear path to the nomination.”
Mrs. Clinton tried on Tuesday to broaden the discussion of inequality beyond Mr. Sanders’s trademark assault on Wall Street, calling for an end to discrimination against women, minorities, gays, and bisexual and transgender people.
On Sunday, Mrs. Clinton traveled to Flint, Mich., to meet with local leaders and speak at a black church, calling the city’s contaminated water supply and the delayed response to it “not merely unacceptable or wrong” but also “immoral.”
“It isn’t right that kids I met in Flint on Sunday were poisoned because their governor wanted to save money,” Mrs. Clinton said on Tuesday.
But the Sanders campaign is not ceding minority support. His aides predicted the Vermont senator’s appeal to young voters can transcend ethnic and racial boundaries. Mr. Sanders’s campaign is also planning a visit to Flint before the candidates meet in a debate there on March 6.
“We are really looking forward for the opportunity to compete for votes from Latinos and African-Americans; Bernie Sanders has an incredibly powerful story to tell,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign.
Nevada, with its sizable Latino population, will serve as a test of whether the Vermont senator’s message can connect beyond the largely white, liberal states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Polls in the state have tightened, and the Sanders operation has caught up with the Clinton campaign in dispersing organizers to the state. “There is tremendous movement with Latino voters in Nevada,” Mr. Devine said.
The Clinton campaign has worked since April to court Hispanic voters in Nevada, including holding a round-table discussion in the Las Vegas suburbs at which Mrs. Clinton appeared alongside the children of undocumented immigrants, and has promised to go further than Mr. Obama to overhaul the immigration system.
But on Tuesday, the Clinton campaign sought to play down expectations there, too. “There’s an important Hispanic element to the Democratic caucus in Nevada,” a spokesman, Brian Fallon, told MSNBC. “But it’s still a state that is 80 percent white voters. You have a caucus-style format, and he’ll have the momentum coming out of New Hampshire.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Proximity
This story is not close to me personally, but to citizens in Louisiana, it can be interesting to hear about things that they don't know about that are so close to them.
CHOUPIC, La. — Mardi Gras morning broke bright and cold and back in the swamp, quiet. Then, a flash of color amid the bush palmettos and a shout: Porkchop had found his quarry.
Porkchop, as the 19-year-old welder in a secondhand Mardi Gras costume called himself, had nabbed a 12-year-old boy. He marched the boy out of the woods to the field where there waited a group of men, all costumed and masked, wheezing out the morning’s beer and cigarettes. The boy, taunting all the while, dropped to his knees. “Say your prayers,” one of the masked men said, and then — thwack, thwack, thwack — down came a fishing rod on his thigh.
Young men calling themselves the Mardi Gras chased children through a swamp in Choupic. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
“It’s all about the religion, kiddo,” said Alex Percle, a 22-year-old college senior with a bright red and green mask. “Repent for your sins.”
Here is where the man holding the fishing rod and the boy at the rod’s business end agreed: Mardi Gras, which fell on this Tuesday, is the best day of the year in Choupic.
Everyone has a general idea of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, even if the reality is nothing like the citywide drunken anatomy exam of popular imagination. There are the enormous floats spitting out plastic beads, the masks, the balls, the kings and drunks, the hierarchy and the anarchy. Though less well known, Cajun Mardi Gras in the southwest Louisiana prairie has long been a prime stop for travel writers. There, men in otherworldly costumes move from house to house begging for ingredients and chasing chickens in the mud for the makings of a communal gumbo.
Families in Promised Land, La., and a few other isolated areas take part in the unusual Mardi Gras custom. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
But there is another Mardi Gras rite that has remained mostly obscure, hanging on in just a few isolated pockets, including here in Choupic (pronounced shoe-pick); in a tiny Cajun community called Gheens (pronounced Gains) about 35 miles away; and, a hundred miles to the west, in a black Creole community called Promised Land.
Each of these small Catholic communities lies off the main arteries; each consists of a cluster of houses strung along a road passing roughly from a church to a sugar cane field.
Men in masks and costumes parade through the town. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
And though there is almost no communication among the communities, the Mardi Gras practices in them are the same in their essentials. Young men dressed in costumes and masks — calling themselves the Mardi Gras — roll down the main drag brandishing switches of peach or willow (the whip of choice in Gheens), bamboo (Promised Land), or broken fishing poles and golf club shafts (Choupic). Their targets are the children and young teenagers, who taunt and backtalk from the roadside but know that when the Mardi Gras jump out and the chase is on, no adult is a friend and any parent will sell out a son or daughter hiding in a back seat or under a bed.
Once they are captured, children must kneel and say their prayers. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
They also know that if caught, their only recourse is to kneel and say the Our Father or to beg “Pardon! Pardon!” — the whole ritual timed to the penitential season of Lent — and then hope that the masked men go easy.
They almost always go easy, particularly on the younger children and the ones they do not recognize. A few light taps is all. This is the day and age we live in: A video could show up on YouTube, the elders warn the young maskers, or some parent could raise a stink and the whole tradition, dating back long past living memory, could be shut down.
“People have come here now that is not used to it and that don’t want their kids getting whipped,” said Mark Breaux, 57, of Gheens, echoing a common lament. “Our parents, they never minded it because they know what it’s about.”
This is the motive behind the initiation ceremony that takes place just after dawn in Choupic, just before the procession of trucks and trailers blasts AC/DC on loudspeakers and takes to the road. The newest Mardi Gras, still reeling from the all-night parties, line up on their knees for a lesson from the veterans on what a whip can really feel like. They grimace, curse and shout, but in a couple of hours they will have some nice eggplant-colored calves to show off to the girls.
New initiates are trained to be gentle with their switches. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
The initiation teaches them to keep a gentle touch, mostly. Though if there is a little brother, or one whose taunts are a little too feisty, or who puts up a fight — well, everybody knew what they were getting into. And on Ash Wednesday, when the children are back to a quiet holiday and the Mardi Gras are back at the chemical plants, tugboat docks and refineries, no one is looking back in anger.
“That was our biggest event was the whip,” said Emily Johnson, 68, of Promised Land. “We’d all be up the next night putting on the rubbing alcohol and laughing about it.”
Not everyone. “My cousin, I think he’s 75, he’s still scared of them,” said Joyce Plummer, 72. To this day, he stays indoors on Mardi Gras.
That this takes place in white Cajun and black Creole communities a hundred miles apart is part of the puzzle for anyone trying to figure out the origins. Similar practices can be found in the ancient pagan springtime festivals, in medieval European rites and in African-Creole rituals, said Barry Ancelet, a professor at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette and an expert in Cajun folklore and tradition.
“I don’t think any of what’s left is clean,” he said. “I think a lot of different things got fused together.”
Professor Ancelet said that oral histories suggested that chases like this took place all around southeast Louisiana at one time. Even now, no one in Gheens or Choupic seemed to have heard about the chase in Promised Land, and no one in Promised Land, where it took place in midafternoon, seemed to know about the chases in Gheens or Choupic. They all just knew that where they lived, the roots went deep, back to parents of grandparents.
The whippings seem to get tougher and the chases get better as the memories go back farther. Way back when, the older men and women say, the Mardi Gras rode in on horses and carried bullwhips. The children really had to know their prayers back then and were not allowed to get away with saying their ABCs as they do now. In Promised Land you knew never to mess around with a certain Mardi Gras named Pokey, as he was capable of anything. That was when they would really hurt you.
Jax Chaisson, 5, could not escape capture. Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
“Times have changed,” said Francheska Charles, 23, who remembers crawling over roofs and running out in the sugar cane fields on Mardi Gras day. It used to be scary, she said, but it also used to be that she, as a woman, would have only the option of running away. In Promised Land, unlike in the other places, women can now chase, too.
“I’m on the good side now,” said Ms. Charles, smiling, before pulling on her rubber clown mask, ready to make some boys and girls say their prayers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Human Interest
