Many Black cemeteries in United States' Houston have been washed away by a nearby bayou (marshy outlet) during major storms in past decades.

Under the blazing Texas sun, dozens of volunteers mowed grass and cleaned tombstones recently to help save what is left of Olivewood Cemetery's 4,000 graves.

Some parts of the cemetery at first appear forgotten, with broken or dirty headstones.

But the graveyard is receiving newfound care – part of a modern push to preserve Black heritage, as interest in saving neglected or even erased African-American historical sites spikes.

The "George Floyd murder, I think it just was a crystallizing moment," said Antoinette Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, explaining the new interest in such places.

African-American cemeteries "have been continually erased and information about them silenced," she said.

Margott Williams, president of the Descendants of Olivewood nonprofit, laments those whose graves have washed away at the Houston cemetery: "There were babies back there. I don't see my babies back there anymore. There were veterans back there. I don't see my veterans back there."

To help record the existence of such sites, Jackson created the Black Cemetery Network, which allows people to share the location of African-American graveyards, many of which have been lost to time and neglect.

The reasons for the cemeteries' disappearance from public knowledge are many.

The oldest plots hold enslaved individuals, who were generally buried on white people's land. Those white people did not systematically record the graves' existence, and subsequent landowners, if they knew about them, often ignored them.

Other Black cemeteries have been claimed by local government land grabs in which the community's rights to their burial grounds weren't respected, Jackson said.

Such was the case in Tampa, Florida, where Mayor Jane Castor earlier this year apologized for the city's confiscation of two cemeteries from the Black community to resell in the 1930s to white developers.

In the suburbs of Washington, an attempt to sell to an investor land that was once a slave cemetery is attracting attention, with various groups mobilizing against the move.

And finally, many cemeteries were forgotten after African-Americans were driven from nearby areas due to the construction of infrastructures such as highways or outright gentrification.

At Olivewood Cemetery, a single African-American family still lives nearby in a modest house that is now surrounded by high-end buildings.

The graveyard was only recently classified among the country's most endangered historic places by the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The move comes decades after Charles Cook first rediscovered the cemetery in 1993 after it was more or less abandoned for 40 years.

"It was a jungle," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Machete in hand, he cleared it himself and continuing its upkeep at his own expense, visiting the graveyard every day. In researching its occupants, he discovered two of his ancestors were buried there.

A study will soon propose solutions to protect it from the dangers of eroding rainwater and the bayou. How the work will be financed remains to be seen, however.

Nationally, in February, an African-American Burial Grounds Preservation Act was introduced in the U.S. House and Senate "to research, identify, document, preserve, and interpret historic African-American burial grounds," which Jackson thinks will be adopted in the fall.

In the meantime, on Saturday, anthropology student Jasmine Lee was supervising the Olivewood volunteers.

She says she is fascinated by the tombs which testify to "cultural, spiritual ideals that were not only founded in practice during enslavement but carried over into freedom."

Some of the tombstones' script is written upside-down or in reverse to trick evil spirits or otherwise allow the dead to read their names from below.

Elsewhere, shells were used as decorations to evoke a sea voyage, which in some parts of Africa symbolizes departure to the other side.

Further down the way, iron pipes in the ground no doubt helped the spirits get out and amble about.

In Sugar Land, a suburb southwest of Houston, a memorial is in the works to honor 95 African-Americans whose graves were found in 2018 during construction work on school district grounds.

The skeletons, as it would turn out, belonged to prisoners who died between 1878 and 1911 and who had been loaned out by judicial authorities to work the local sugarcane farms.

The work was grueling and the convicts' poor health was evident from the state of their bones.

The "convict leasing system," as it was called, was abolished in Texas in 1912 and at the federal level in 1941.

Shifa Rahman, campaign director for the Convict Leasing and Labor Project, is advocating for the forthcoming memorial to "properly and equitably" educate about what the prisoners "had to endure under the convict leasing system."

The nonprofit is also calling for DNA tests to identify the remains.

For now, everyone has an identical tombstone, on which "unknown" is written, followed by a number./AFP

More than two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China and at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.

That stance marks a sharp reversal of the United Nations health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.

WHO concluded last year that it was "extremely unlikely” COVID-19 might have spilled into humans in the city of Wuhan from a lab. Many scientists suspect the coronavirus jumped into people from bats, possibly via another animal.

Yet in a report released Thursday, WHO’s expert group said "key pieces of data” to explain how the pandemic began were still missing. The scientists said the group would "remain open to any and all scientific evidence that becomes available in the future to allow for comprehensive testing of all reasonable hypotheses.”

Identifying a disease's source in animals typically takes years. It took more than a decade for scientists to pinpoint the species of bats that were the natural reservoir for SARS, a relative of COVID-19.

WHO's expert group also noted that since lab accidents in the past have triggered some outbreaks, the highly politicized theory could not be discounted.

Jean-Claude Manuguerra, a co-chair of the 27-member international advisory group, acknowledged that some scientists might be "allergic” to the idea of investigating the lab leak theory, but said they needed to be "open-minded” enough to examine it.

The report could revive accusations that WHO initially was too accepting of Chinese government explanations early in the outbreak, which ultimately killed millions of people, sickened millions more, forced dozens of countries into lockdown and upended the world economy.

Investigations by The Associated Press found that some top WHO insiders were frustrated by China during the initial outbreak even as WHO heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping. They were also upset over how China sought to clamp down on research into the origins of COVID-19.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speculated repeatedly – without evidence – that COVID-19 was started in a Chinese lab. He also accused WHO of "colluding” with China to cover up the initial outbreak, citing the U.N. health agency's continued public praise of the country despite China's refusal to share crucial data.

WHO's expert group said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sent two letters to senior Chinese government officials in February requesting information, including details about the earliest human cases of COVID-19 in the city of Wuhan. It's unclear whether the Chinese responded.

The experts said no studies were provided to WHO that assessed the possibility of COVID-19 resulting from a laboratory leak.

Jamie Metzl, who sits on an unrelated WHO advisory group, has suggested that the Group of Seven industrialized nations set up their own COVID-19 origins probe, saying WHO lacks the political authority, expertise and independence to conduct such a critical evaluation.

Metzl welcomed WHO's call for a further investigation into the lab leak possibility but said it was insufficient.

"Tragically, the Chinese government is still refusing to share essential raw data and will not allow the necessary, full audit of the Wuhan labs,” he said. "Gaining access to this information is critical to both understanding how this pandemic began and preventing future pandemics.”

In Washington, a Republican-led subcommittee in the House of Representatives on the COVID-19 pandemic tweeted: "Americans were smeared as ‘conspiracy theorists’ for asking whether #COVID19 came from a lab leak. Now, the WHO is asking the same questions.”

"We need answers,” added the committee, which is headed by Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

WHO's expert scientists said numerous avenues of research were needed, including studies evaluating the role of wild animals, and environmental studies in places where the virus might have first spread, like the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.

In March 2021, WHO released a report about COVID-19's origins following a highly choreographed visit by international scientists to China. The report concluded that the disease most likely jumped into humans from bats and that there was no evidence to suggest there was a connection to a laboratory.

Yet after considerable criticism, including from some scientists on WHO's team, the agency's director acknowledged that it was " premature ” to rule out a lab leak.

In its new report, WHO said the experts were given access to data that included unpublished blood samples from more than 40,000 people in Wuhan in 2019. The samples were tested for COVID-19 antibodies. None were found, suggesting the virus was not spreading widely before it was first identified in late December that year.

WHO's experts called for numerous studies to be done, including testing wild animals to find which species might host COVID-19. They also said the "cold chain” supply theory should be probed. China has previously advanced the idea that traces of COVID-19 on frozen packaging was causing outbreaks rather than any domestic source, a theory widely panned by outside scientists.

To investigate whether COVID-19 might have been the result of a lab accident, WHO's experts said interviews should be conducted "with the staff in the laboratories tasked with managing and implementing biosafety and biosecurity.”

China has called the suggestion that COVID-19 began in a laboratory "baseless” and countered that the virus originated in American facilities, which were also known to be researching coronaviruses in animals. The Chinese government has said it supports the search for the pandemic's origins, but that other countries should be the focus.

In a footnote to the report, WHO's group noted that three of its own experts – scientists from China, Brazil and Russia – disagreed with the call to investigate the possibility of COVID-19 being sparked by a lab accident.

Scientists connected to WHO lamented in August 2021 that the search for the pandemic's origins had stalled and that the window of opportunity was "closing fast.” They warned that collecting data that was now at least two years old was increasingly difficult./AP

It all started in 1947.

On June 24, Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, sighted nine "flying saucers" near Mount Rainier on his way to an air show in Oregon. At first, he thought that it was a reflection of the sun coming from another aircraft. Later, he aimed to define the "unidentified flying objects (UFO)" that may be real and could pose a national security threat.

After Kenneth's “saucer skipped over water," his definition of their flight motion, the world started to believe that aliens travel all around the world in flying saucers. Reportedly, by the end of 1947, nearly 1,000 domestic UFO sightings had been reported. Soon, the number of sightings became too many for the U.S. Air Force to ignore.

In 1954, during a golfing vacation to Palm Springs, U.S. then-President Dwight Eisenhower visited a dentist at night in Edwards Air Force Base. When the press found out that the president had a midnight visit to the "dentist," many agencies claimed that the incident was suspicious and he had lied that night.

The rumors claimed that Eisenhower had met with aliens instead. In this alleged meeting, aliens referred to as "Nordics," who were disguised in "human form," and Eisenhower made a deal, enabling them to abduct humans for their extraterrestrial experiments on the condition they were returned unharmed. A few months after this "encounter," a mystic appeared and claimed that he was at the base that night and witnessed Eisenhower interacting with aliens and flying saucers.

Eisenhower quickly became the first U.S. president believed to have interacted with extraterrestrials.

Likewise, many alien encounters are listed in the U.S. government program "Project Blue Book" tasked to inspect UFOs from 1948 to 1969. Yet, the project was concluded as no aliens were uncovered and they were determined to not pose a threat to U.S. national security.

Area 51, which the CIA officially acknowledged as a secret military base near Las Vegas, has been another conspiracy theory cradle for decades. Many people thought the U.S. government stored alien bodies in the location. Yet, the U.S. government announced that the need for secrecy was to hide information from the Soviets rather than to cover up extraterrestrial bodies.

In 1997, Arizona residents reported another alien encounter in the sky after they saw flying objects near Phoenix. Years later, Arizona's governor, also a former Air Force officer, confirmed the report, citing his experience as well.

The year 2007 marks the official government efforts to establish UFO studies with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

In 2010, seven former Air Force officers detailed their experiences with aliens as they were flying over nuclear weapon facilities.

The Obama administration received two petitions asking that the U.S. government formally acknowledge extraterrestrials' existence and their numerous visits to Earth. The White House, however, replied by saying there was no concrete evidence to prove their existence and that no life existed outside the planet.

Last month, the Pentagon promised to take encounters with UFOs seriously in the first public congressional hearing on the matter in five decades. On Thursday, NASA announced that they will be recruiting a new team to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. Somehow, this matter has finally gained high-level attention from United States Congress after 50 years.

The alien investigation, which used to be laughed at, seems to be getting more serious now./DS

US stocks tumbled at the closing bell Friday as worries about inflation mount amid the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Annual inflation in the US hit 8.6% in May, the highest since December 1981, official data showed.

The figure was above market forecasts of 8.3%.

"Although it is good to see that the critical core inflation has moderated, it does not show a sharp and rapid decline as we should see," US President Biden said, citing that the latest inflation report shows why the fight against inflation is his top economic priority.

The S&P 500 fell 2.9%, giving the index its second-worst week of 2022.

The Nasdaq was off 3.6% and the Dow plummeted 2.7%

The MSCI World index fell 2.8%.

The yield on 10-year Treasuries gained 11 basis points to 3.15%.

Global oil benchmark Brent crude was trading at $121.61, down 1.1%, while West Texas Intermediate crude fell 0.7% to $120.61 a barrel

Gold futures rose 1.3% to $1,876.50. Silver was up 0.2% to $21.9 per ounce./aa

Russia risks facing increased inflation pressure if its oil exports drop significantly due to the European embargo over the Ukraine war, the country's Central bank chief warned on Friday.

The Russian Central Bank cut its key interest rate by 150 basis points on Friday to 9.5% in June, bringing borrowing costs back to pre-war levels.

Following the rate decision, Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina delivered remarks on the Russian economy at the meeting she held in Moscow.

Pointing out that it was too early for optimism on inflation in Russia, she said the "very low price growth rates we have been observing in recent weeks cannot be considered to be steadily low inflation."

Pro-inflationary risks are still strong, she added, underlining that external conditions involved a whole range of them.

"If Russian oil exports plummet, this will provoke pro-inflationary pressure due to a contraction of the balance of trade and a weaker ruble," she said.

"A lot will depend on how much oil the country will be able to redirect to other markets, as well as the extent to which the slump in oil exports will be offset by the price."

This, in turn, will depend on the elimination of infrastructure and logistics problems and oil demand in new target markets, explained the official.

Nabiullina also warned of mounting global recession risks. "If they materialize, the global demand for Russian exports will decrease, which will accelerate inflation through a weaker ruble."

"A contraction of Russian exports might also involve disinflationary risks if companies are forced to redirect their products to the domestic market because of the impossibility to establish export chains."

The annual inflation rate in Russia fell to 17.1% in May 2022, below market expectations of 17.3%.

US Dollar traded against the Russian Ruble at 57.8350, up 2.5850 or 4.68%, since the previous trading session./aa

The YPG, Syrian branch of the PKK terror group recruited about a dozen of Kurdish and Arab underage children, according to video footage released on Friday.

A total of 11 children were seen carrying the posters of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK ringleader imprisoned in Türkiye, and pieces of rag symbolizing the terror group.

The use of children as armed combatants, by terror groups or otherwise, is expressly forbidden under international humanitarian law and is defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

The YPG/PKK's use of child soldiers was also highlighted by the US State Department’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report.

The use of children as armed combatants, by terrorist groups or otherwise, is expressly forbidden under international humanitarian law and is defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

The YPG/PKK's use of child soldiers was highlighted by the US State Department’s 2020 Trafficking in Persons Report. The report underlined that the YPG/PKK continued to forcibly recruit boys and girls as young as 12 from refugee camps located in northwestern Syria.

This week, locals in Aleppo, Syria -- near northern areas controlled by YPG/PKK terrorists -- said two brothers, just 9 and 10 years old, had been kidnapped by the terror group.

Also, a January 2020 UN human rights office report said that according to its findings, the YPG/PKK is using children as fighters in Syria.

In July 2019, Virginia Gamba, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, signed an action plan with the SDF – the label the YPG/PKK terror group uses in Syria – to end and prevent the recruitment and use of minors under 18, but the terror group has violated the plan.

In its more than 35-year terror campaign against Türkiye, the PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the US, and the EU – has been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants./aa