World

Cubans voted to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption as well as surrogate pregnancies in a referendum over the weekend, the communist country’s electoral officials said Monday.

Preliminary results indicate an “irreversible trend,” with almost 67 percent of votes counted so far in favor of the government-backed change, electoral council president Alina Balseiro said on state television. 

“The Family Code has been ratified by the people,” she said.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel tweeted: “Yes has won. Justice has been done.”

The updated code represents a major shift in a country where machismo is strong and where the authorities sent LGBTQ people to militarized labor camps in the 1960s and 1970s.

Official attitudes have since evolved, and the government conducted an intense media campaign in favor of the overhaul, which will replace the country’s 1975 Family Code.

The new code permits surrogate pregnancies as long as no money changes hands, and legally recognizes same-sex adoptions, as well as several fathers or mothers in addition to the biological parents.

It defines marriage as the union between two people, rather than that of a man and a woman, while also boosting the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled.

“In the end we won!” wrote LGBTQ rights activist Maykel Gonzalez on Twitter.

“It settles a debt with several generations of Cuban men and women whose family projects have been waiting for this law. From now on we will be a better nation,” said Diaz-Canel.

– ‘Punishment vote’ –

According to the National Electoral Council, 74 percent of Cuba’s 8.4 million eligible voters cast a ballot with 3.9 million valid votes counted so far in favor and only 2.0 million against.

Turnout, however, was well below the last referendum when a new constitution was adopted in 2019 with 90 percent of people casting a ballot.

It is also the lowest percentage the communist government has received in a vote since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Diaz-Canel acknowledged Sunday that “for such complex issues, where are is a diversity” of motives, people might cast “a punishment vote.”

Experts had predicted before the vote that many Cubans would use the referendum as a means to express their disapproval of the government.

Dissidents had called on citizens to reject the code or to abstain.

Cuban political scientist Rafael Hernandez said adopting the new family code was “an effective step in the direction of social justice” and that this was the “most important” legal protection for human rights since the revolution.

The law required 50 percent voter approval to be adopted.

The referendum came amid the country’s worst economic crisis in 30 years that was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

It was the first time an issue other than a constitutional change had been put to a public vote in Cuba.

The main opposition to the law’s adoption came from Protestant and Catholic churches, the latter of which blasted the changes as “gender ideology.”

Russia found rare support for its war in Ukraine at the UN General Assembly on Monday from Syria, whose leadership has relied on Moscow’s support in its civil war.

“Syria reiterates its position on Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine and Russia’s right to defend and secure its own territory,” Foreign Minister Faisal al-Meqdad told the world body.

“We are convinced that the Russian Federation is defending not only itself but justice and humanity’s right to reject unipolar hegemony.”

Syria has for months rallied behind Russia, recognizing Russian-backed breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine and offering to send Syrian troops to fight alongside Russia.

Russia has provided wide-ranging military support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2015, helping government forces win back most of the country from the opposition and jihadists after a decade of brutal conflict  that has killed half a million people.

The top Syrian diplomat’s robust support of the Ukraine invasion came in contrast to speeches from other nominal Russian partners during the annual General Assembly, which closes Monday.

China, which before the war pledged wide cooperation with Russia, and India, a historic defense partner of Moscow despite warming ties with Washington, both called for dialogue to end the conflict in Ukraine.

But the junta-appointed interim prime minister of Mali, Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga, saluted “exemplary and fruitful cooperation” with Russia, whose Wagner Group security firm has deployed in the West African country in defiance of Western warnings on the unit’s human rights record.

From taking a big Kremlin catering contract to personally recruiting convicts in a prison yard to fight in Ukraine, secretive businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin appears to have a unique role in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The 61-year-old Saint Petersburg native on Monday broke cover to issue a rare personal statement confirming what many had already assumed — that he is behind the hugely controversial Wagner PMC (private military company) mercenary group.

But this is by no means the only controversy surrounding Prigozhin, who is sanctioned by the EU and Washington, accused of election interference in the United States and has issued threats against jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Prigozhin had for years irritably shaken off claims tying him to Wagner, whose fighters have waged battles in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Africa, Syria and now during Russia’s 2022 intervention in Ukraine.

On Monday he confirmed he had founded Wagner in 2014, saying a “group of patriots was born” who worked in Africa, Syria and even Latin America to become “pillars of our motherland”.

– ‘Friendly team’ –

Earlier this month, a video surfaced of a bald man bearing a strong resemblance to Prigozhin in a jail courtyard, offering contracts to prisoners to fight in Ukraine with a chilling set of conditions.

“If you serve six months, you go home and you are free. If you want to stay (with Wagner) you can. No one goes back to prison. 

“If you arrive in Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we will regard it as desertion and will shoot you. Any questions, guys?” said the man.

“The first sin is desertion. No one gives themselves up,” he said, adding recruits should have grenades on them in case of capture. “If you die, your body will be repatriated to the place you wrote down on the form.”

It is not possible to verify if the man in the video is Prigozhin but a statement in his name from his holding company Concord did not deny it was him.

It cited him as saying: “Of course, if I were a prisoner, I would dream of joining this friendly team in order to be able not only to redeem my debt to the Motherland, but also to repay it with interest.”

He added: “Those who do not want PMCs (private military companies) to fight… then send your children to the front.”

– ‘Putin’s chef’ –

Prigozhin rose from a modest background to become part of the inner circle around Putin, who also hails from the former imperial capital on the Baltic Sea.

He spent nine years in prison in the final period of the USSR after being convicted of fraud and theft, emerging in 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

In the chaos of the 1990s, he began a moderately successful business selling hot dogs.

From there he fell into the restaurant business and opened a luxury location in Saint Petersburg whose customers included Putin, then making the transition from working in the Soviet KGB to local politics.

The Concord catering group he founded at one point worked for the Kremlin, earning Prigozhin the soubriquet of “Putin’s chef”.

But the sheer range of his acknowledged and alleged interests have made this name something of a misnomer.

– ‘Troll factory’ –

Prigozhin shuns the limelight and there are scant images of the man who rarely makes public appearances. When he is captured on camera, it is with a shaven head, a piercing stare and usually in a dark suit.

One of the best-known images shows him at the Kremlin in 2011, bending down over a seated Putin as he offers him a dish while the Russian leader looks back with an approving glance.

Reports in Russian media have described him as a billionaire with a vast fortune built on state contracts, although the true extent of his wealth is unknown.

He was sanctioned by Washington which accused him of playing a role in meddling in the 2016 presidential election, in particular through his internet “troll factory”.

Prigozhin denied any involvement and in March asked for $50 billion in compensation from the United States.

– Feud with Navalny –

He had until now always denied links to Wagner, which is accused of abuses and meddling not just in Ukraine but also Syria, Libya and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

In July 2018, three journalists researching Wagner’s operations in the Central African Republic for an investigative media outlet were killed in an ambush.

Western countries have accused Wagner of coming to the aid of the military junta in Mali, in a move that contributed to France’s decision to end an almost decade-long military operation there.

Prigozhin has been unusually vocal in the wake of the poisoning of Navalny, who fell ill on a flight in Siberia and was then transferred for treatment in Germany in 2020.

The two have never made any secret of their enmity, with Navalny’s anti-corruption group accusing a firm that worked with Concord of serving food in schools that was dangerous for the health of children.

Prigozhin sued Navalny for libel and a court ordered that the campaigner’s group pay more than $1 million in damages.

Not mincing his words, Prigozhin said: “I intend to strip this group of unscrupulous people of their clothes and shoes.”

NASA’s DART mission to test deflecting an asteroid using “kinetic impact” with a spaceship is just one way to defend planet Earth from an approaching object  — and for now, the only method possible with current technology.

The operation is like playing billiards in space, using Newton’s laws of motion to guide us. 

If an asteroid threat to Earth were real, a mission might need to be launched a year or two in advance to take on a small asteroid, or decades ahead of projected impact for larger objects hundreds of kilometers in diameter that could prove catastrophic to the planet. 

Or, a larger object might require hits with multiple spacecraft.

“This demonstration will start to add tools to our toolbox of methods that could be used in the future,” said Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense office, in a recent briefing.

Other proposed ideas have included a futuristic-sounding “gravity tractor,” or a mission to blow up the hypothetical object with a nuclear weapon — the method preferred by Hollywood.

– Gravity tractor – 

Should an approaching object be detected early — years or decades before it would hit Earth — a spaceship could be sent to fly alongside it for long enough to divert its path via using the ship’s gravitational pull, creating a so-called gravity tractor.

This method “has the virtue that the method of moving the asteroid is totally well understood — it’s gravity and we know how gravity works,” Tom Statler, a DART program scientist at NASA said at a briefing last November when DART launched.

The mass of the spacecraft however would be a limiting factor — and gravity tractors would be less effective for asteroids more than 500 meters in diameter, which are the very ones that pose the greatest threat. 

In a 2017 paper, NASA engineers proposed a way to overcome this snag: by having the spacecraft scoop material from the asteroid to enhance its own mass, and thus, gravity.

But none of these concepts have been tried, and would need decades to build, launch and test.

– Nuclear detonation – 

Another option: launching nuclear explosives to redirect or destroy an asteroid. 

“This may be the only strategy that would be effective for the largest and most dangerous ‘planet-killer’ asteroids (more than one kilometer in diameter),” a NASA article on the subject says, adding such a strike might be useful as a “last resort” in case the other methods fail.

But these weapons are geopolitically controversial and technically banned from use in outer space.

Lori Glaze, NASA’s planetary science division director said in a 2021 briefing that the agency believed the best way to deploy the weapons would be at a distance from an asteroid, in order to impart force on the object without blowing it into smaller pieces that could then multiply the threat to Earth.

A 2018 paper published in the “Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics” by Russian scientists looked at the direct detonation scenario.

E. Yu. Aristova and colleagues built miniature asteroid models and blasted them with lasers. Their experiments showed that blowing up a 200-meter asteroid would require a bomb 200 times as powerful as the one that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. 

They also said it would be most effective to drill into the asteroid, bury the bomb, then blow it up — just like in the movie Armageddon.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres renewed his call Monday for the global abolition of nuclear weapons as concerns grow over Russia’s threat to use them in the Ukraine war.

“Decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we can hear once again the rattling of nuclear sabers,” Guterres told a special General Assembly session on nuclear disarmament.

“Let me be clear — the era of nuclear blackmail must end,” he said.

“The idea that any country could fight and win a nuclear war is deranged. Any use of a nuclear weapon would incite a humanitarian Armageddon,” he said.

“Without eliminating nuclear weapons, there can be no peace.” 

Russian President Vladimir Putin in a speech last week made a thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons following Ukrainian forces’ recapture of land seized Moscow in its seven-month invasion.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied that Washington has told Moscow, including through private channels, of “catastrophic” consequences over any use of nuclear weapons.

Guterres voiced disappointment that a review conference last month of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty failed to reach a consensus.

Russia blocked the outcome after the draft document backed Ukraine’s control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, whose occupation by Moscow has raised fears of a major accident.

The United States condemned Russia’s stance. But no nuclear power backed a UN treaty adopted in 2017 that called for a comprehensive prohibition of nuclear weapons, with mostly developing countries in support.

No country has used nuclear weapons on the battlefield except the United States in 1945, when it destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. Imperial Japan surrendered days later, ending World War II.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in his speech to the General Assembly last week, vowed to work for “a world without nuclear weapons.”

“Threatening the use of nuclear weapons, as Russia has done, let alone the actual use of nuclear weapons, is a serious threat to the peace and security of the international community, and is absolutely unacceptable,” Kishida said.