16-09-2021

THuRSdAY, SePTeMBeR 16, 2021
5
Francine Niyonsaba becomes first athlete
with DSD to break world record
SeAN INgLe
Track and field history was
made in Zagreb on Tuesday
night as Francine Niyonsaba
became the first athlete who
has identified herself as
having a difference of sex
development (DSD) to
officially break a world
record. The Burundian did it
in style, shattering the old
2,000m best by more than
two seconds as she crossed
the line in 5:21.26. While the
2,000m is not run frequently,
Niyonsaba's performance will
inevitably reignite the debate
over athletes with DSDs,
given they are barred from
competing internationally
between 400m and 1600m
unless they take medication
to reduce their high
testosterone.
Niyonsaba, who won the
silver medal over 800m at the
2016 Rio Olympics before
moving up in distance due to
the World Athletics rules, has
had an astonishing year -
winning the Diamond League
title at 5,000m and running
the fifth-fastest outdoor
3,000m time ever.
But in Croatia she produced
the cherry on the cake. Going
through halfway in 2:41.37
Francine Niyonsaba has set a new world record in the 2,000m in Zagreb.
Photo: Maja Hitij
OLIveR LAugHLANd
At a gas station in Mesa,
Arizona, more than 2,300
miles from where the twin
towers fell on 9/11, stands a
permanent reminder of long
reaching trauma. A memorial
constructed with speckled
white marble and black tile
marks the spot where Balbir
Singh Sodhi was shot and
killed, becoming the first
American victim of a fatal
hate crime in the aftermath of
9/11.
It was 15 September,
almost 20 years ago, that
Sodhi, a Sikh immigrant from
the Indian Punjab, was fatally
shot in an act of racist hate as
he planted flowers around
the parking lot of his new
business to commemorate
the victims of the terror
attacks in New York.
The gas station has
remained largely as it was
then. It is still owned by the
Sodhi family and Balbir's son,
Sukhwinder Singh Sodhi,
now 48, is here every day
managing the staff, handling
the checkout, balancing the
books and working 60 hours
a week. He tries to keep his
eyes away from the
memorial. "The pain is still
there," said Sukhwinder. "I
miss him every day."
On Wednesday, as has
happened for the past 19
years, members of the Sodhi
family, other organizers in
the Sikh and Muslim
communities, interfaith
groups and others will gather
to remember the man who
was shot and killed here.
Even after two decades the
memories are still raw. Not
only is the Sodhi family's
journey a story of grief,
trauma, struggle and
forgiveness, it is also one
achingly resonant with many
immigrant families in post
9/11 America.
Balbir Singh Sodhi moved
to the United States in the
late 1980s with a number of
his brothers, who left the
Punjab after a series of anti-
Sikh pogroms following the
assassination of Indira
Gandhi. They had all believed
in the basic premise of the
American dream: with hard
work and dedication they
could find stability and
economic prosperity.
The gas station, opened
only a year before his death,
became a symbol of the
family's toil. Balbir built the
business himself with money
he had saved since arriving in
the US. In the year he
operated it, he became
known for his generosity,
handing out free candy to
children who came in and
spoiling his own kids and
many nieces and nephews.
It was a senseless act of
violence that took Balbir. A
white gunman named Frank
Roque, 42 at the time, began
his rampage in the early
afternoon. First he shot
Balbir dead, mistaking his
turban for an indication of
Muslim faith. Then, 20
minutes later, he shot at
another gas station, aiming
for a Lebanese-American
clerk. He missed. The final
stop was to the place he used
to live, then the home of an
Afghan-American family. He
missed again.
Shortly after, he was
arrested and reportedly
shouted: ''I stand for America
all the way,'' as he was placed
in handcuffs. Former
colleagues testified at trial
that Roque had long made
racist remarks in public and,
on the day of 9/11, had told a
co-worker using racist slurs
that he planned so-called
reprisal attacks.
"We should round them all
up and kill them. We should
kill their children, too,
because they'll grow up to be
like their parents," Roque
said.
Rana Sodhi, Balbir's
younger brother, has always
remained steadfast that his
brother's death should unify
the community against
hatred. He continues to speak
in schools, colleges and other
venues around the country,
discussing the peaceful tenets
of Sikhism and telling the
story of his brother's life and
death.
"Even after 20 years, it
seems like yesterday," he
said, sitting at his home in
Mesa, next to a mantle that is
decorated with drawings of
his brother and photographs
of his many public
appearances - including with
former president Barack
Obama - made in the
aftermath. "I know it is still
sad for us. We lost our
brother. But his death
brought a lot of positivity, to
bring the community closer
to each other. Bringing
people closer together."
But just as the 9/11 attacks
became a turning point in the
scope and scale of
international terror, the
murder of Balbir Sodhi Singh
marked the beginning of a
pronounced wave of anti-
Islamic and anti-immigrant
hate in America.
US government data on
hate crimes is notably spotty,
put Niyonsaba on pace to
break the world record of
5:23.75, set indoors by
Ethiopia's Genzebe Dibaba in
2017. The 28-year-old then
powered to glory with a final
lap of 63 seconds to break the
record. While Niyonsaba is a
popular athlete, others in the
sport including the two-times
400m Olympic champion
Shaunae Miller-Uibo have
questioned why World
Athletics does not extend its
rules regarding DSDs to other
events.
In 2019, the court of
arbitration for sport (Cas)
ruled that 46 XY DSD athletes
"enjoy a significant sporting
advantage … over 46 XX
athletes without such DSD"
due to their biology.
Cas added: "Individuals
with 5-ARD have what is
commonly identified as the
male chromosomal sex (XY
and not XX), male gonads
(testes not ovaries) and levels
of circulating testosterone in
the male range (7.7-29.4
nmol/L), which are
significantly higher than the
female range (0.06-1.68
nmol/L)."
How a Sikh family resolved to carry
on their American dream
A memorial marks the place where Balbir Singh Sodhi was fatally shot on
15 September 2001 by Frank Silva Roque. Photo: Caitlin O'Hara
but in the year after 9/11,
targeted crimes against
Muslims increased by 1,700
percent nationally, according
to the FBI. So too did hateful
acts against Sikh Americans,
with advocacy groups
reporting 300 incidents
against the religious minority
in the month after September
11.
Sodhi's killing shocked
minority communities
throughout Arizona. Azza
Abuseif, the executive
director of Arizona's chapter
of the Council on American
Islamic Relations [Cair]
recalled hearing of the
murder for the first time as a
young, recently arrived
immigrant.
"It set off a lot of fears," she
said, pointing out that Sodhi
was targeted because of his
clothing. "Muslim men don't
usually dress in traditional
clothing in the workplace but
a lot of women have lived in
fear since 9/11."
Abuseif started her job as
executive director just a few
months ago. Cair's offices are
unmarked and she sits in a
room with the blinds closed.
On her first day in the new
office she recalled scanning
the room for escape routes in
case of an active shooter.
"I don't want to say I live in
fear," she said. "But I worry
for my family because of my
line of work." She will attend
the memorial service for
Balbir Singh Sodhi on
Wednesday, a marker of
collective interfaith
mourning.
Arizona has long been a
hotbed of post 9/11
Islamophobia and antiimmigrant
hatred that only
intensified over the four years
of the Trump presidency.
Armed protest outside the
city's main mosque in the
suburb of Tempe became a
regular fixture. In 2018 two
women were charged with
breaking into the Islamic
Community Center of
Tempe, where they recorded
themselves stealing a Quran
and making Islamophobic
slurs.
The state's gun laws, which
permit open carry without a
license, are viewed as causes
for increased concern among
minority communities here.
During a recent Friday prayer
at the mosque attended by
the Guardian, armed guards
provided security as
worshippers entered to pray.
They have been present at
every Friday prayer since
9/11, Islamic Center officials
said.
If the people of Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, Lagos, Bangkok and New York are not concerned,
they should be.
Photo: Mario Tama
Rain fell on Greenland's ice sheet
for the first time ever known
KIM HeACOx
Many people believed he
couldn't do it. Ski across the
Greenland ice sheet, a vast,
unmapped, high-elevation
plateau of ice and snow?
Madness.
But Fridtjof Nansen, a
young Norwegian, proved
them wrong. In 1888, he and
his small party went light and
fast, unlike two large
expeditions a few years
before. And unlike the others,
Nansen traveled from east to
west, giving himself no option
of retreat to a safe base. It
would be forward or die
trying. He did it in seven
weeks, man-hauling his
supplies and ascending to
8,900ft (2,700 meters)
elevation, where summertime
temperatures dropped to -49F
(-45C).
Last month, for the first
time in recorded history, rain
fell on the highest point of the
Greenland ice sheet. It hardly
made the news. But rain in a
place historically defined by
bitter cold portends a future
that will alter coastlines
around the world, and drown
entire cities.
The Greenland ice sheet
contains four times more ice
than all of Earth's other
glaciers and ice fields
combined, outside Antarctica.
The largest island in the
world, Greenland is more
than 36,000 times the size of
Manhattan, and ice covers
most of it, in many places
thousands of feet thick. As
carbon dioxide and methane
accumulate in our
atmosphere, causing our
Christopher Nolan to make drama
about the father of the atomic bomb
BeNjAMIN Lee
Christopher Nolan has
confirmed that his next film
will be a drama about the
development of the atomic
bomb. In a deviation from his
work with Warner Bros, the
director will head to Universal
Pictures for the drama which
is believed to have a budget of
around $100m. Nolan had
been in discussions with a
number of studios, also
including Sony, Paramount
and MGM, and ultimately
decided against Warners.
The film will focus on US
physicist J Robert
Oppenheimer who was
among those credited as the
"father of the atomic bomb"
for his involvement in what
was known as the Manhattan
Project, which produced the
first nuclear weapons during
the second world war.
According to Deadline,
frequent Nolan collaborator
Cillian Murphy is being eyed
for a role.
The as-yet-untitled project
follows Nolan's sci-fi thriller
Tenet which was met with
mixed-to-positive reviews in
planet to heat (the six
warmest years on record have
been the last six), the ice sheet
disintegrates. Greenland lost
more ice in the past decade
than it did in the previous
century.
Massive summertime
meltwater rivers now flow
over the ice sheet where, in
Nansen's time, no signs of
surface water could be found.
If the people of Miami,
Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai,
Lagos, Bangkok and New
York are not concerned, they
should be. The great
Greenland ice melt is a
climate crisis sword of
Damocles for all coastal, lowlying,
densely populated
areas. No other single factor
will probably contribute more
to sea level rise over the next
few decades.
A consortium of climate
scientists writing two years
ago in Nature, a prestigious
scientific journal, concluded
that if Greenland continues to
melt, in one bad-case scenario
after another, tens of millions
of people could be in danger of
yearly flooding and
displacement by 2030 - less
than nine years from now.
And by the end of this
century, when Antarctica,
which contains vastly more
ice than Greenland, also
enters a phase of catastrophic
melting, the number of
annual flood-prone people
could reach nearly half a
billion. It's more than
farewell, Miami. It's goodbye,
Florida.
The assumption that land
will always last is no longer
valid. "Land is about the only
Christopher Nolan at Cannes.
thing that cannot fly away,"
the English novelist Anthony
Trollope once observed. True.
But it can go bone dry - or
drown.
After Nansen's Greenland
expedition, he oversaw the
construction of a small
wooden ship named Fram
("Forward"), designed to
enter the Arctic pack ice in an
attempt to reach the north
pole. Later, he mentored the
explorers Roald Amundsen,
Robert Falcon Scott and
Ernest Shackleton. His final
act, however, was his most
inspiring. As high
commissioner for refugees for
the League of Nations, he
devised a passport to
repatriate thousands left
homeless after the Great War,
and was awarded the 1922
Nobel peace prize.
Nansen did what
humankind must now do. He
transcended himself. He
respected science, and cared
deeply for others. In the face
of great challenges today, we
can - and must - do the same.
A good example is Jason
Box, who Jeff Goodell, in his
2017 book The Water Will
Come, describes as "a
maverick scientist and
Greenland ice junkie who got
a lot of attention in 2012 when
he publicly predicted just
weeks before the summer
melt season that Greenland
would experience a recordbreaking
year for ice melt".
Raised and educated in
Colorado, Box suspected that
soot from wildfires in the
American west and Canada,
and from coal-fired power
plants in the industrial north,
2020. It was his ninth film
with Warner Bros, including
two that were co-distributed
by other studios. Nolan's
previous film about the
second world war, the
acclaimed drama Dunkirk,
won three Oscars and made
over $520m at the global box
office. Nolan was outspoken
about his frustration with the
studio's controversial dayand-date
deal with HBO Max
that meant that the entirety of
their 2021 slate would also
premiere on the streaming
platform. He referred to it as
"the worst streaming service"
in a statement to the
Hollywood Reporter.
"Warner Bros had an
incredible machine for getting
a film-maker's work out
everywhere, both in theaters
would enter the atmosphere
and travel far. When it settled
in Greenland, the soot would
darken the ice sheet and make
it absorb, not reflect, solar
energy. The result: the ice
sheet would melt like
gangbusters. Which is exactly
what has happened.
In 2014, Box was stunned to
find the ice sheet so dark. He
has since said that humanity's
burning of fossil fuels has
probably set in motion nearly
70ft of sea level rise. A bold
prediction, and not out of
character for Box, who has
spent more than a year on the
ice.
"I like ice because it's
nature's thermometer," he
told Goodell. "It's not political.
As the world heats up, ice
melts, it's simple. It's the kind
of science that everyone can
understand." While science,
endeavoring to avoid
alarmism, can be overly
cautious, science isn't the
problem. Disinformation and
a lack of political will are the
problems.
To save the Greenland ice
sheet - and Florida - will
require a Nansen-esque
transformation on steroids,
something inspired by, but
much larger than, President
Franklin D Roosevelt's New
Deal.
To begin, we need to elect
representatives who respect
science, and accept the
magnitude of what we're up
against. If they do not, they
must be defeated.
It's time to put our planet
first. A little more than a
thousand years ago, back
when the world seemed large
and wondrous and unknown,
the Vikings settled Greenland.
For every one person alive on
earth back then, there are 25
today, most of us trapped in a
fossil fuel economy that has
given us great prosperity but
now must be replaced. By
what?
and in the home, and they are
dismantling it as we speak,"
he wrote. "They don't even
understand what they're
losing. Their decision makes
no economic sense, and even
the most casual Wall Street
investor can see the difference
between disruption and
dysfunction." Filming is
expected to begin at the start
of 2022.
Photo: daniele venturelli