LEWISTON: Richard Rodrigue stood in the back of a banquet hall, watching his blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter mingle among her high school classmates. These teenagers speak dozens of languages, and hail from a dozen African nations.
They fled brutal civil war, famine, oppressive regimes to find themselves here, at an ordinary high school pre-prom fete in this once-dying New England mill town, revived by an influx of some 7,500 immigrants over the last 16 years. Rodrigue smiled and waved at his daughter, proud she is a part of it: “It will help her in life,” he said. “The world is not all white.”
Rodrigue believes the refugees resuscitated his town — plugging the population drain that had threatened to cripple it, opening shops and restaurants in boarded-up storefronts. But he also agrees with Donald Trump that there should be no more of them, at least not now. America is struggling, he says, and needs to take care of its own before it takes care of anyone else.
His working-class community, built along the banks of the Androscoggin River in the whitest state in America, is a place that some point to as proof that refugee integration can work. And yet for the first time in 30 years, voters in Androscoggin County chose a Republican for president, endorsing Trump’s nativist zeal against the very sort of immigrants who share their streets and their schools.
Rodrigue knows he was born on the winning end of the American dream. His grandfather fled poverty in Quebec and moved to Maine to toil his whole life in the textile mills. He never learned English, faced hate and discrimination. Two generations later, Rodrigue owns a successful security company, lives in a tidy house in a quiet neighborhood and makes plans to send his daughter to college.
Immigration worked for him. But it feels different today, as the county tries to find its footing. The sprawling brick mills that line the river sit mostly shuttered. A quarter of children grow up poor. Taxpayers pick up the welfare tab. So Trump’s supporters here tie their embrace of his immigration clampdown to their economic anxieties, and their belief that the newcomers are taking more than they have earned.
“There’s got to be a point in time when you have to say, ‘Whoa, let’s get the working people back up. Let’s bring the money in. But they keep coming, keep coming,” Rodrigue said.
His community has been an experiment in immigration and all that comes with it — friendships, fear, triumphs, setbacks — and he knows that Trump’s presidency marks another chapter in that struggle for the American soul.
“I guess it just boils down to: What’s enough? Is that wrong? Am I wrong? Am I bad? That’s how I feel.”
No one invited the Somali refugees to Lewiston.
They fled bullets and warlords to eventually be chosen for resettlement in big American cities, where they were unnerved by the crime and drugs and noise.
In early 2001, a few refugee families struggling to afford housing in Portland ventured 30 miles north and found a city in retreat. Empty downtown stores were ringed by sagging apartment buildings no longer needed to house workers because so few workers remained.
The refugees saw possibility in Lewiston’s decay. Word spread quickly, and friends and families followed. The town morphed in a matter of months into a laboratory for what happens when culture suddenly shifts. Maine’s population is 95 percent white, and its citizens were abruptly confronted with hundreds of black Muslims, traumatized by war and barely able to speak English.
Ardo Mohamed came to Lewiston in 2001. She fled Mogadishu in the 1990s, when militiamen burst into the home she shared with her parents and nine siblings, and started shooting. She watched her father die, as the rest of the family escaped into the woods. They wound up in overcrowded refugee camps, separated for years, then finally Atlanta, then Lewiston. Now she fries sambusas with her sister at a shop she owns downtown.
“We wanted to be safe,” said the mother of five, “just like you do.”
When the refugees began arriving, Tabitha Beauchesne was a student at Lewiston High School. Her new classmates were poor, but Beauchesne was poor, too. She grew up in a struggling family in housing projects downtown. It felt to her then, and it still feels to her now, that the refugees got more help than her family.
“They just seemed to take over,” she said. She doesn’t consider herself racist, though acknowledges that race and religion likely play a role in her sense that the refugees overwhelmed her community. The African Muslims, many of whom wear hijabs, stand out far more than her French-Canadian ancestors did when they arrived generations ago, she said.
That perception — one of being inundated by a culture so different from her own — ingrained in her a sense of injustice so deep it persists to this day. She’s now a stay-at-home mother of two, and she left Lewiston to move to another school district in the county because she believes the refugee students monopolize teachers’ attention.
Once a Barack Obama supporter, Beauchesne turned to Trump — and she cheers his efforts to curb the flow of refugees into the United States. She wants Trump to design a tax system that funnels less of her money to aiding those from other countries.
“I just don’t like giving money away that’s not benefiting me and, not to sound selfish, but then seeing it benefit other people,” she said. “As a business owner, my husband wouldn’t donate $500 to the Salvation Army if we couldn’t afford it. Our country needs to do the same thing.”
Taxpayers do help refugee families. Maine offers a welfare program called General Assistance, a combination of state and city funds, which provides impoverished people with vouchers for rent, utilities and food.
In 2002, at the beginning of the immigrant influx, the city handed out about $343,000 in General Assistance funds, split almost evenly between native-born Mainers and refugees, according to city records. But rumors, largely unfounded, spread that the refugees were given free cars and apartments. Locals began calling City Hall to demand answers.
Then-Mayor Laurier T. Raymond Jr. penned an open letter to the Somali community, asking that they divert friends and family away from a city he described as “maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally.”
The letter plunged Lewiston overnight into the global political cauldron. A white-supremacist group from out of state planned a rally against the Somali “invasion.” Just a few people showed up. But across town 4,000 gathered in a gymnasium to support the Somalis and try to combat the reputation of Lewiston as a racist, xenophobic city that was rocketing around the world.
And in that moment, the tide seemed to turn, deputy city administrator Phil Nadeau said. Even more immigrants came. Somali refugees gave way to those seeking asylum, from Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, a dozen nations in all. The immigrant population exploded from a handful of families to more than 7,000 people today, according to a tally by the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine. But the anxieties of old rarely seemed to resurface.
Two years ago, immigrant children led the high school soccer team to win the state championship — a moment heralded as a triumph of cultural cooperation. Outside news crews still come from time to time, Nadeau said, and “they’re always amazed that there’s nothing bad to print.”
But around the edges of the city, in the suburbs and small towns that fill out the rest of Androscoggin County, many quietly stewed. It’s there that Trump’s “America First” message took root.
Thirty miles up the highway, Joyce Badeau greets customers by name at the hardware store where she works. She lives just outside Livermore Falls, population 3,187 — 3,064 of whom are white. She has little occasion to interact with immigrants, but her political views have been shaped by the idea of them.
Badeau voted for Obama but backs Trump now, and points to his promise to rein in immigration as one reason why.
“We’re becoming a poor country because we’re overloaded,” she said. “We can’t fix the system so long as we keep adding more broken pieces.”
She has watched the paper mills close and her neighbors lose good-paying jobs. But Badeau isn’t naive; she doesn’t believe Trump can make the mills roar back to life. That was a bygone era, replaced by e-mail and iPhones. And his arrogance grates on her. But she hopes one day to turn on the news and not hear about crime and homelessness and terrorism — and she worries that someone who wants to hurt Americans might slip through porous borders. Trump promised to fix it all. If he can’t, she’s not sure what more America can offer immigrants.
“Because they’re leaving one country of problems and coming into another country of problems,” she said.
David Lovewell used to work at a paper mill just outside of Livermore Falls that has shed hundreds of jobs. Now he runs a logging company with his sons, but he sees a dim future for them. A few months ago, business got so bad he laid off eight employees and fell behind on his $5,500 monthly payments on the machines he uses to cut down trees.
He looked down at his sneakers, bought for $25 at Walmart. There used to be two shoe factories nearby. He wants Trump to stop his town’s slow slip toward irrelevancy.
Lovewell doesn’t like to talk about immigration. He sighs and rubs his head, afraid to seem indifferent to pain and poverty around the world. He went on a cruise to Belize with his wife several years ago, when he still worked at the mill and could afford a vacation. He stopped to buy a carving from an old man whose hands were so worn from years of whittling they looked like leather. He remembers those hands still, and the man’s dirt-floor shack with no doors and his skinny, starving dog and the kids riding around on broken bicycles.
“I struggled with it, when he did the travel ban,” Lovewell said of Trump. “At the same time, I’m seeing ... people losing their jobs. Why are we so worried about immigrants coming into our country when we can’t really take care of our own people?“
So he’s looking to Trump to strike a better balance — to build an economy where his sons don’t have to battle to barely get by, and only after that design an immigration system that keeps America’s promise of open arms.
“I guess it could sound like bigotry,” he said. “But we’re hurting. Americans are hurting.”
Politicians have seized on the discontent.
Last August, candidate Trump stood on a stage in Portland and singled out the Somali community as causing a crime wave. The Lewiston police chief quickly refuted the charge — crime has decreased dramatically since the refugees arrived — but it stuck in the minds of many.
Maine’s Republican governor, Paul LePage, has called immigrants “the biggest problem in our state,” and suggested they bring danger and disease.
And in Androscoggin County, Republican leaders hammer the issue of refugee resettlement on their Facebook page, with post after post about the injustice they see in taxpayers helping them with assistance. They’ve dubbed it “the refugee racket,” and complain that the school system is forced to accommodate 34 languages.
Lewiston School Superintendent Bill Webster acknowledges that does cost money. But he has a statistic he likes to share with the critics.
Historically, Lewiston has had some of the lowest high school graduation rates in the state. Now, immigrant children are doing better than native-born kids. Some were illiterate in their native language when they set out to learn English. Yet an average of 78.3 percent of immigrant students graduate high school within five years, compared to an average of 73.3 percent of native students.
Fifteen years ago, the school district had an enrollment of 4,500 students and falling — a sign of a city on its knees, Webster said. Today, there are 5,400 students, more than one-quarter of them immigrants, and the number is going up. And now the immigrant children who grew up here are going off to college to get degrees, as teachers, doctors, engineers.
Several years ago, Webster and his wife sold their home in the suburbs and rented an apartment in downtown Lewiston, across the street from a mosque. They can stroll to dinner, past a yoga studio and a shop that sells artisan olive oil. There are also dozens of immigrant-owned businesses, like the Mogadishu Business Center — with two flags hanging in the window, one American and one Somali. Remaining vacant storefronts have signs in the windows, promising prospective buyers an opportunity to “be part of Lewiston’s great rebirth.”
“We never have the opportunity to redo time under a different set of assumptions,” Webster said. “But if the immigrant population hadn’t happened, Lewiston would be a community that was contracting, and potentially in a downward death spiral.”
Organizations that work with immigrants nevertheless must fight on to combat deep-seated distrust. Catholic Charities publishes a fact sheet called “The Top Ten Myths about Somalis and Why They Are Wrong.” It lists untruths like, “Somalis are draining the welfare coffers,” “Somalis get free apartments,” even “Somalis keep live chickens in their kitchen cupboards.”
Maine’s immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa made $136.6 million in income in 2014, and paid $40 million in taxes, according to one report from a bipartisan think-tank. But they largely work in invisible jobs, said Catherine Besteman, a professor of anthropology at Maine’s Colby College. They take out trash at hotels, do the laundry at the hospital. People don’t see them working, she said, so when they see them driving a car, or shopping for groceries, it becomes easy to assume they got it for free.
That leaves some here still feeling that the immigrants take more than they deserve.
Tabitha Beauchesne pulled a bag of bargain-brand cereal out of her kitchen cabinet to demonstrate that point. At the grocery store, she said, she sees immigrant mothers with carts piled high with name-brand food.
“I guess I’m jealous of that. I would love to buy my kids the real Fruit Roll-Ups,” she said. “But, no, sorry kids, you get the fruit packets from Walmart.”
So Mohamad Ibrahim now knocks on doors.
“Hello,” he says to strangers across Androscoggin County. “I am a Muslim. I was welcomed by America. I was helped by General Assistance, and that was coming from your pockets and I am grateful. I became a taxpayer. I’m not taking anything. Now I am giving.”
He wants his neighbors to know him, to know that he is normal. Trump’s election here taught him he has a lot more work to do.
“We thought, ‘Yay, it’s perfect.’ But everything was slipping.”
Ibrahim came in 2012 from Djibouti, where he risked imprisonment for opposing his government. He is one of the thousands who have flooded into Lewiston in recent years because they are seeking asylum from oppression.
With them came a spike in the amount of taxpayer assistance going to immigrants. Asylum-seekers, unlike resettled refugees, are barred from getting work permits for at least six months and many, like Ibrahim, must rely on government assistance to get by when they first arrive. The amount paid to immigrants jumped recently to nearly a half-million dollars.
And there seems to be more tension in town since Trump took office. One woman reported she was nearly run down by a screaming driver; another said someone jerked her hijab and told her to go back where she came from.
Ardo Mohamed, the Somali who cooks sambusas with her sister, is an American citizen now. Her children were born in the United States. But they worry the government will come to send her away.
“We are scared,” she said. “They say every night, ‘Mom, if they take you, where we do live?’“
Ibrahim does not blame his neighbors for supporting Trump, because he’s seen the pull of populism before. When his friends complain about the policies on immigration, he reminds them of the day, more than a decade ago, that the interior minister of their country ordered all illegal immigrants to leave or face mass arrest. He asks them how they felt, and they respond: patriotic — like their government was looking out for them.
Ibrahim has his own hopes for the president. He hopes Trump will build an immigration system that gives people confidence that those coming are good and hardworking — so that, one day, people like him will be called Americans, not refugees. But he worries it will come at a cost.
In 50 years, he thinks, the descendants of his fellow African immigrants will be suspicious of whoever comes next.
“That’s how it’s been through history. The Irish were discriminated against, and then they discriminated against the French. The French were discriminated against, now they discriminate against us, at the bottom of the ladder,” he said, laughing uncomfortably.
“I don’t hope for that, it is not my wish. We can change. But still, we are stuck being human beings.”
How a community changed by refugees came to embrace Trump
How a community changed by refugees came to embrace Trump
North Korea rules out any meetings with Japan
- North Korea has said it had no interest in a summit with Japan and would reject any talks
- KCNA: Pyongyang has no intention to help with the issue of Japanese abductees
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has said he wants to hold talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “without any preconditions” and is personally overseeing efforts to realize the first such leaders’ summit in 20 years in an attempt to defuse decades of tensions.
But North Korea has said it had no interest in a summit with Japan and would reject any talks, signalling no thaw in relations between the two countries.
Choe also said Pyongyang has no intention to help with the issue of Japanese abductees, according to KCNA, adding North Korea will “respond sharply” to Japan’s interference with its sovereignty.
“I cannot understand why he persistently adheres to the issue that cannot be settled,” Choe was quoted as saying by KCNA, referring to Kishida.
North Korea admitted in 2002 to kidnapping 13 Japanese citizens decades earlier. Five abductees and their families later returned to Japan, saying the others had died.
However, Tokyo believes 17 Japanese were abducted, and continues to investigate the fate of those who did not return, according to Japanese media.
North Korea’s ambassador to China, Ri Ryong Nam, also said there would be no meeting at any level with Japan, a separate KCNA report said.
Ri made the remark in a statement, adding that an official at the Japanese embassy in Beijing proposed a contact via email to a councillor of the North Korean embassy.
“I make the stance clear once again that no meeting at any level will take place between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Japan’s side,” Ri was quoted as saying in the KCNA report.
Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim, has said she would welcome talks only if Japan was ready to make a new start without “being obsessed by the past.”
Relations have been strained over disputes including the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea in the early 2000s, Japan’s occupation of the Korean peninsula in 1910-1945 and its use of forced labor and sexual slavery.
Japan and North Korea also have clashed over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs, with the North conducting a number of test launches in recent months, prompting fresh sanctions from Seoul and Washington.
New US Census will have category ‘MENA’ for some citizens of Middle East, North Africa heritage
- Most Arab Americans still have to write in nationality
- Activists want ‘Arab’ category but this is ‘step forward’
CHICAGO: The US Census announced Thursday that upcoming forms will include the category “MENA,” meaning Middle Eastern or North African, but most Arab Americans will still be required to write in their nationalities.
Arab-American activists have been fighting for the inclusion of an “Arab” category on census forms for more than 50 years, and accepted a compromise to be included in the broader term “MENA.”
The MENA category identifies only four Arab nationalities — Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian.
This announcement comes in the wake of Arab-American voters protesting what they believe has been President Joe Biden’s betrayal in ignoring their concerns over Israel’s war on Gaza.
In addition to the four Arab nationalities being identified with specific “Check Boxes,” the MENA category will also include check boxes for “Israeli” and “Iranian.”
All other Arab Americans, including citizens from Palestine and Jordan, who are among the largest of the Arab-American communities, will still be required to write in their nationalities on a blank line underneath.
Many Arab Americans believe the exclusion of the word “Arab” is a slight, and meant to satisfy the pro-Israel community.
‘I am very disappointed that they are not including all of the Arab countries. There are many Arab nationalities that are growing significantly including the Yemeni community which is among the fastest growing,” said Anna Mustafa, who began formally lobbying in 1980 for the inclusion of the Arab category in the US Census. Mustafa worked officially with the census as a partnership specialist in the 1990s and the 2000s.
“We were working on it in the political boundaries through the 1990s and 2000s but it got blocked and some group put a hold on everything. If Israel is being included, the Palestinian and Jordanian community should be included in that census form too,” she told Arab News.
Mustafa conceded that it is a “step forward.” But added: “It’s not what we wanted. But it is better than what we have.”
Mustafa said the community should not stop their advocacy for “full inclusion” of all 22 Arab nationalities.
Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry, who has been advocating for the inclusion of the MENA category, praised the change as a “major accomplishment” and credited the Biden administration.
“For the first time, Arab Americans will be made visible — not just on the decennial census, but in all federal data that collects race and ethnicity and that is historic,” Berry said.“However, it is unfortunate that instead of celebrating what should have been this momentous victory for improved data collection and our community, we are concerned about the erasure of a key segment of our community and the very real possibility of continued undercounts.”
Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said: “This is a long-awaited day. We have a lot of work ahead of us, particularly as the federal government begins to apply this revision. From programming designed to uplift our businesses to addressing health disparities and beyond. This is a good first step, however we are aware that more work needs to be done to ensure there is full and accurate representation of the Arab-American community.”
Inclusion in the census has a major impact on ethnic and national communities and helps them qualify for federal funding to support their needs. In addition, it gives them special status to prevent politicians from dividing their vote, especially in congressional districts.
In 2021 the Biden administration worked with Democrats to redraw several congressional districts. They targeted the former 3rd Congressional District in Illinois which was identified as having the largest concentration of Palestinian-American voters of any congressional district. The district was divided into five different congressional districts, diluting the ability of Palestinian-American voters to elect one of their own to Congress.
In the 1980s, Hispanics were included in the census and the state was forced to create a congressional district that would increase the chances of the election of one of its members. In the 1990s that district elected Luis Gutierrez, and has had a Hispanic member of Congress ever since. The district is now represented by US Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
The census is taken every 10 years. Previously, Arab Americans were included in the “White” category and were only given the opportunity to write in their national identity. As a result, the Arab community did not qualify for federal grants or for political voting continuity in the redrawing of congressional districts, Mustafa noted.
Census officials acknowledge that the MENA category is “a minimum reporting category, separate and distinct from the White category.”
The census is managed by the Office of Management and Budget, which is a part of the US government. The full report on the revision is available for viewing here.
Marathon singing, vigils and pre-dawn processions as Filipinos celebrate Holy Week
- Bulk of religious traditions begin on Holy Thursday, commemorating the Last Supper of Jesus
- Many traditions are a blend of folk customs and Spanish colonial influences
MANILA: As Christians around the world celebrate Holy Week, Filipinos are observing their unique traditions, which will culminate on Sunday with Easter — the joyous commemoration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
In the largest Christian-majority nation in Asia, where over 85 million people identify as Catholic, folk traditions have blended with more than 300 years of Spanish colonial influences, leading to unique expressions and observances of faith.
One of the most enduring yet extreme examples is senakulo, a street drama that depicts Jesus’ passion and death, where men flagellate and, in some cases, nail themselves to the cross as an act of penance.
But not all Filipino Catholics adhere to these practices, instead engaging in other traditions.
They began the observance of Holy Week with Palm Sunday last week, when churchgoers brought palm branches to be blessed by priests.
The palm branch symbolizes victory, peace and eternal life and once they receive blessing, Filipinos put them up at home either as decor or by windows or doorways to ward off bad spirits.
They represent the branches that according to the Gospel crowds laid down as Jesus entered Jerusalem a few days before his crucifixion.
“The Holy Week allows me to impart the importance of this occasion to my children, now that they’re a little bit older,” said Edgie Ruiz for whom the annual holiday is an opportunity to reconnect with loved ones.
“This is also the time when our relatives who live far away come to spend time with us, which is something I always look forward to.”
The bulk of religious traditions begin on Holy Thursday, the day during Holy Week that commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus. It is observed with a custom during which the priest washes the feet of 12 people — imitating the humility of Jesus, who washed the feet of his apostles on the night before his crucifixion.
Ruiz was one of those chosen to take part in the ritual at his local parish in Hermosa, Bataan province.
“My grandfather used to participate in this tradition as one of the chosen ‘apostles,’” he said. “The priest chooses common, everyday people to take part.”
Another tradition on Holy Thursday is the Visita Iglesia — visiting at least seven different churches to pray.
Gerald Gloton, who resides in Pampanga province 83 km north of Manila, has been practicing the Visita Iglesia tradition since childhood.
“The Visita Iglesia is very important for me because it unites our family. We visit various churches that depict the importance of faith, heritage, and culture,” he said.
Pampanga is known for its strong Catholic traditions, including several historical churches dating back to the Spanish colonial period — another aspect that Gloton looks forward to in this annual ritual.
“Aside from the spiritual reflection and family bonding, I also look forward to the intricate details and architecture of our churches which are regarded as structural treasures,” he said.
Another centuries-old tradition that continues to be practiced is the pabasa — a marathon reading of the passion of Christ, sung by volunteers, usually women, in their parishes. In urban places like Manila, the pabasa can run for more than a day, but in rural areas and places with intact traditions like Pampanga, it can go on for nearly a week.
While some Filipino communities have adopted Western practices such as hunting Easter eggs on Sunday morning, one of the most anticipated rituals is the salubong, or welcoming, a pre-dawn Easter ritual in which a solemn procession of the images of the mourning Virgin Mary and a risen Christ meet from opposite ends in front of a church.
A chorus of children, sometimes singing from hanging platforms to give the illusion of flying in mid-air, sing to herald the occasion. A child is assigned to lift the black veil off Virgin Mary, signifying the end of her mourning.
For Crystal Arcega from Batangas, south of Manila, the ritual’s atmosphere is the most joyous of all.
“It’s when the baby angels throw confetti and wave their wands, and the choir sings. That’s when the Easter Mass starts, and the church lights are turned on,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful moment and worth waking up early for.”
After Easter Mass, Filipino families will gather over celebratory meals and delicacies.
The rice cakes sold in front of churches, such as the suman and tamales — delicacies wrapped in banana leaves — are a must-have after the mass.
At home, they are followed by fried chicken, braised meat dishes in a tangy-sweet sauce, and kare-kare — a rich oxtail peanut stew.
The most sacred period in the liturgical year in Christianity, which is filled with mourning, prayers and fasting to culminate in togetherness and feast, is for many a time that strengthens their faith.
For Arcega, it is a “way to remind us how much sacrifice Jesus has made, and how despite being in the form of man, is able to show us God’s unconditional love,” she said.
“It really becomes the time for me to reflect and be thankful.”
Ukraine says Russian drone, missile attacks damage power facilities
- Regional officials said Russian forces had attacked infrastructure in the Kamianske district near the city of Dnipro
KYIV0: Russian missile and drone attacks hit thermal and hydro power plants in central and western Ukraine, power grid operator Ukrenergo said on Friday, the latest assault on the already damaged power infrastructure.
“During the night, the Russians struck again at energy facilities in a massive and combined attack,” Ukrenergo said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Thermal and hydroelectric power plants in the central and western regions were damaged,” it said.
Regional officials said Russian forces had attacked infrastructure in the Kamianske district near the city of Dnipro. At least one person was wounded, they added.
Ukrainian energy minister German Galushchenko also said power facilities in Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava and Cherkasy regions were attacked this morning.
“Electricity generation facilities were targeted by drones and missiles,” Gelushchenko said on Facebook.
Ukrainian television reported that explosions were heard in Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytskyi regions and the city of Dnipro as Russian cruise missiles were spotted in Ukrainian air space.
The largest private power firm DTEK said its three thermal power plants were attacked.
“The equipment was severely damaged. After the attack ended, the power engineers promptly started to repair the damage,” the company said on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukrainian power distributor Yasno said this week DTEK lost about 50 percent of its capacity after being hit by Russian missile and drone attacks.
‘A unique place’: Foreigners visit post-war Afghanistan
- Decades of conflict made tourism extremely rare in Afghanistan, but most violence has now abated
- Yet visitors are confronted with extreme poverty, dilapidated cultural sites and scant infrastructure
MAZAR-I-SHARIF: His soldier son toured Afghanistan with insurgents in his crosshairs, but American traveler Oscar Wells has a different objective — sight-seeing promoted by the Taliban’s fledgling tourism sector.
“It is a unique place, it touches my heart,” the 65-year-old Indiana farmer told AFP, praising “its magnificent mountains” with “people living in the old way.”
Marvelling at the 15th century Blue Mosque in northern Mazar-i-Sharif, Wells is among a small but rising number of travelers coming to Afghanistan since the war’s end.
Decades of conflict made tourism extremely rare, and while most violence has now abated, visitors are confronted with extreme poverty, dilapidated cultural sites and scant hospitality infrastructure.
They holiday under the austere control of Taliban authorities, without consular support after most embassies were evacuated following the fall of the Western-backed government in 2021.
They must register with officials on arrival in each province, comply with a strict dress code and submit to searches at checkpoints by men armed with Kalashnikovs.
Islamic State attacks also still pose a potential threat in the country.
“The first thing your loved ones say is: ‘You’re crazy to go there!’” said French tourist Didier Goudant, a 57-year-old lawyer, of a country that Western governments warn against visiting.
Security concerns worried Nayuree Chainton, the 45-year-old Thai owner of a travel agency in Bangkok, who made a trip for six days recently with a group to test the waters.
“I feel safe despite the checkpoints in the cities,” she said, during a visit to a shrine in the capital Kabul.
The number of foreign tourists visiting Afghanistan rose 120 percent year-on-year in 2023, reaching nearly 5,200, according to official figures.
The Taliban government has yet to be officially recognized by any country — in part because of its heavy restrictions on women — but it has welcomed foreign tourism.
“Afghanistan’s enemies don’t present the country in a good light,” said information and culture minister Khairullah Khairkhwa.
“But if these people come and see what it’s really like... they will definitely share a good image of it,” he said.
But Wells and Goudant — on a trip with firm Untamed Borders, which also offers tours of Syria and Somalia — describe their visit as a way to connect with Afghanistan’s people.
Tourists “like us are curious and want to be in contact with the population, to try to help them a little” said Goudant, on his second trip, which included skiing in central Bamiyan province.
He said part of his visits is making donations to local groups, something he describes as “small-scale humanitarian work” in a country that has seen foreign aid drastically shrink since the Taliban takeover.
For Wells, there is a “sense of guilt for the departure” of US troops.
“I really felt we had a horrible exit, it created such a vacuum and disaster,” he said. “It’s good to help these people and keep relations.”
Untamed Borders brought around 100 tourists to Afghanistan last year, with a nine-day package starting in neighboring Pakistan costing $2,850.
The end of the fighting means tourists “can do more things,” said founder James Willcox.
“But on the other hand it is disruptive,” he added, noting a woman tour guide with the company fled to Italy after the Taliban return.
While the Taliban government has shut girls and women out of education, and much of public life, foreign women are granted greater freedoms.
For solo traveler Stefanie Meier, a 53-year-old American, who spent a month traveling from Kabul to Kandahar via Bamiyan and Herat in the west, it was a “bittersweet experience.”
“I have been able to meet people I never thought I would meet, who told me about their life,” she said, adding that she didn’t face any issues as a woman on her own.
She experienced “disbelief that people have to live like this,” she added. “The poverty, there are no jobs, women not being able to go to school, no future for them.”
With little by way of official information, tourists band together on social media and messaging apps to trade tips.
While two airlines serve Afghanistan’s major cities, backpackers prefer the bus, and don’t shy away from the 20-hour journey from Kabul to Herat.
An active WhatsApp group named Afghanistan Travel Experience brings together over 600 people from places as far flung as Mexico, India and Italy who are already in the country or on their way out.
They pepper the group with questions, such as one from user Alberto asking if it is “haram” (not allowed) to travel with a dog, or if it’s a problem to have visible tattoos.
Another, Soo, asked: “Is there a co-working space in Mazar?”