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How a nanny and a mini-van revived one of Australia's most remote schools

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During a quick break from loading goats on her remote outback property, grazier Suz Laidler drives her kids 30 kilometres down a dirt driveway to meet the school bus. "Hello to the start of my precious cargo," 66-year-old Deb Porter yells from the driver's seat.

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2023/3/23 - Aspiring teacher aims to plug workforce gaps in his hometown - The Guardian

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2023/3/23 - Aspiring teacher aims to plug workforce gaps in his hometown - The Guardian

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Indigenous knowledge may have helped solve the scientific mystery of how polka-dot "fairy circles" occur in Australian deserts.

The bare circular patches were first recorded by scientists in Africa in the 1970s, sparking a global debate about the phenomenon.

Ethnoecologist Fiona Walsh said scientists had concluded they came about from plants competing for water and nutrients.

But traditional owners have a different hypothesis for the circles that are between two and 12 metres in diameter.

Martu elder Gladys Bidu said the patches are called linyji and termites live in the ground under them.

"I learnt this from my old people and have seen it myself many times," she said.

"We gathered and ate the Warturnuma [flying termites] that flew from linyji."

Bidu said her ancestors also used the rock hard circles to break open and crush seeds for use in food, such as damper.

"Aboriginal people told us that these regular circular patterns of bare pavements are occupied by spinifex termites," Walsh said on Tuesday.

"We saw similarities between the patterns in Aboriginal art and aerial views of the pavements and found paintings that have deep and complex stories about the activities of termites and termite ancestors."

Researchers surveyed and excavated trenches on land containing multiple fairy circles in Nyiyaparli country, east of Newman in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

They also looked at patches at Newhaven, an Australian Wildlife Conservancy property in Warlpiri country in the Northern Territory.

"The pavement surface is concrete hard," Walsh said.

"After we dug and then dusted to clean the trenches, 100% of them had termite chambers seen horizontally and vertically in the matrix."

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Walsh said termites and their structures were much more common under the circles than in the nearby spinifex grasslands, "which provided alternative scientific evidence to the dominant international theory explaining the fairy circle phenomenon in Australia".

The cross-cultural research has led to other unexpected findings.

Martu interpreter Desmond Taylor shared his cultural knowledge about Mulyamiji or great desert skinks, which are a threatened species.

"After good rains in linyji country, Mulyamiji would be born in water lying on the linyji," he said.

"My mother, my two fathers, my uncle told me this long ago."

This breeding behaviour has not previously been reported for the species and Walsh said it was an outstanding example of how Aboriginal people's knowledge had not only informed but led science questions.

"The water-holding characteristics of termite pavements were unknown to desert scientists until we recognised clues in the stories of our Aboriginal colleagues and Aboriginal art," she said.

"Aboriginal people refined their encyclopedia and authoritative knowledge when living continuously on this continent for at least 65,000 years and their knowledge is critical to improving ecosystem management and in understanding and caring for Australia's desert."

The research was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution by researchers from the Western Desert region, the University of WA, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research.

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Mystery of Australian desert 'fairy circles' may be solved thanks to Indigenous knowledge

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Indigenous knowledge may have helped solve the scientific mystery of how polka-dot "fairy circles" occur in Australian deserts. The bare circular patches were first recorded by scientists in Africa in the 1970s, sparking a global debate about the phenomenon. Ethnoecologist Fiona Walsh said scientists had concluded they came about from plants competing for water and nutrients.

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Travelling workers at the Sydney Royal Easter Show are making sure their children's studies continue during the busy period.

The workers - known as "showies" - are often on the road year-round following the show circuit.

Their families join them town-to-town and have done so for generations.

"I love it, it's what I've done all my life. I've never done nothing else," travelling showman Aaron Pink told the ABC from the campground in Sydney's Concord.

"It's my way of life and it's a tremendous way of life. You're living with your family, you're going to work with your family."

However, a life on the road doesn't undermine the school term.

Classrooms across the country may have closed for the long weekend, but over the full duration of the Sydney Royal Easter Show, show family children will continue their lesson plans before heading up north to the Hawkesbury area.

A classroom on wheels

Kate Jones is a volunteer travelling teacher working on-site from the back of a van.

She initially came across the gig after fostering a show child studying for their Higher School Certificate, and has been helping out on-and-off for the last three years.

"So many of these children have great ambitions," she said of her latest students.

"One of the boys inside wants to be a fighter pilot."

But unlike a traditional classroom, Ms Jones doesn't know who will be regularly sitting in on her lessons.

"From one week to the next, we don't know who might be in town."

Her plan of attack is to follow the curriculum set out by the state Department of Education, which ensures she covers everything that a "regular school child" gets to learn.

Every student has their own laptop and she said the internet consistently runs fast and strong for activities.

While it isn't the full conventional experience, she's noted a shift over the decades towards broadening the options available to the show family children.

"Many of the families of my generation and the adults are illiterate, and they have such a strong ethical desire for their children and grandchildren to be able to move out into the world and have choices that they didn't have," Ms Jones said.

Nomadic pupils

Five-year-old Violet Blades has just started up at the travelling school where she has been practising the alphabet and counting up to the number 10.

Her parents sell churros and slushies at an Easter Show stand.

"(They have) one tent that makes a drink, one that makes food and one that's a game," she said.

Fellow pupil Charles Bell doesn't feel like he's missing out on the traditional brick-and-mortar experience.

In fact, the seven-year-old, who's parents run rides at shows, believes he's actually got a better deal than other students.

"They would be jealous that we move to different towns and meet different people," he said.

The Sydney Royal Easter Show runs until April 17.

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Inside the classroom on wheels where kids of travelling Sydney Easter Show workers go to learn

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Travelling workers at the Sydney Royal Easter Show are making sure their children's studies continue during the busy period. The workers - known as "showies" - are often on the road year-round following the show circuit. Their families join them town-to-town and have done so for generations.

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T2-T3 Australia (See "Your Turn" section for more class notes.)

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The Queen’s long reign saw the world change dramatically.

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HM the Queen's Christmas message to the peoples of the Commonwealth

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9/8 - Queen Elizabeth II has died. - NYT

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9/8 - Queen Elizabeth II has died. - NYT

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9/6 - Liz Truss has become The UK's new PM.

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9/6 - Liz Truss has become The UK's new PM.

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Liz Truss has set out her priorities for government as she promised to "deliver, deliver, deliver".

The new leader of the Conservative Party said lowering tax, dealing with the energy crisis and the NHS would be the focus for her government, which would be made up of "all the talents" of the party.

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Liz Truss: We will deliver for our country

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Liz Truss has set out her priorities for government as she promised to "deliver, deliver, deliver". The new leader of the Conservative Party said lowering tax, dealing with the energy crisis and the NHS would be the focus for her government, which would be made up of "all the talents" of the party.

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Highland Park Parade Shooting

July 4, 2022, 12:34 p.m. ET

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. - It sounded at first like fireworks to the parents who had brought excited children to a charming Fourth of July parade in their town. Or perhaps a military salute to the flag.

But within seconds, as marching band members and politicians strutted down the street, horrified spectators realized the noise from a nearby rooftop was a high-powered rifle spraying bullets into the crowd, killing six people and wounding dozens.

The attack in Highland Park, a usually safe lakefront suburb north of Chicago, set police on a sprawling manhunt that forced residents to shelter in place for much of the day, and prompted neighboring cities to cancel theirholiday events. About eight hours later, the police said they had taken into custody a 22-year-old man whom they described as a person of interest.

Even in a country battered from the constancy of mass violence - at grocery stores and elementary schools and on urban street corners - the carnage in Illinois proved shocking. According to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, the shooting on Monday was the 15th this year in which at least four people were fatally shot in the United States.

For reasons that remained unclear to the police Monday evening, officials said a young man had climbed onto a rooftop with a rifle and begun firing into a sea of families in lawn chairs who were celebrating Independence Day.

"My wife looks up and screams, 'Get up, run. Get up, run,'" said Shawn Cotreau, 47, a Massachusetts resident who was visiting family in Illinois, and who said he initially thought there were firecrackers nearby.

Mr. Cotreau estimated his family was sitting in chairs about 20 feet away from the gunman, who was on the roof of a store firing down.

"I can't even get the image of the guy out of my head," he said, describing a man with a large gun, wearing fatigues and a hat pulled down. "He was just opening up fire. And I saw the bullets hitting the tree that was like literally in front of us."

Police officers, who were already assigned to the parade route, arrived and rushed to help the wounded, the authorities said. Victims ranged in age from 8 to 85, doctors who received the injured at local hospitals said.

The gunfire stopped around the time officers arrived, police said, and the gunman was able to get away. By late afternoon, SWAT teams were still combing the area, and officials wereasking residents and businesses to turn over photos or videos that might provide clues.Authorities warned that he was believed to be armed, and told the public not to approach him.

"Could this happen again?" Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Sheriff's Office asked Monday afternoon, while the search for a gunman was on, and as other Chicago suburbs rushed to cancel parades and fireworks shows. "We don't know what his intentions are at this point."

Robert E. Crimo III was taken into custody in nearby Lake Forest after a brief chase, the police said.

Survivors described a joyous family event, with high school football players and a marching band that turned suddenly into a scramble to live. Dr. David Baum, an obstetrician who had come to the parade to watch his 2-year-old grandson push a bubble lawn mower alongside dozens of other children, said he rushed to help after what sounded like a sonic boom and people yelling, "'Bodies down, bodies down!'"

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Dr. David Baum, an obstetrician, rushed to help victims who were injured. Credit... Mary Mathis for The New York Times

Diego Rosas, who was working at a grocery store near the parade route, heard perhaps 30 shots, then saw people running toward the store. He let them inside.

Alexander Sandoval, who had arrived early with his family long before the parade started to stake out a prime viewing spot, said he did not immediately realize what was going on.

"When it started happening, I thought it was the Navy saluting the flag," said Mr. Sandoval, a construction contractor and a lifelong resident of Highland Park. "Then I grabbed my kid and we ran and tried to break a store window to get away from it."

Mr. Sandoval said he also tried to break a door down at a closed business, but then had to continue running."I was punching the door but couldn't punch through it," he said. "I think the shooter stopped and reloaded, and that's when I ran around the corner and put my son and little brother in a dumpster."

Mr. Sandoval said he saw a police officer carrying a wounded boy about the age of his own child. "It's just emotional," he said.

The shooting brought outpourings of sympathy from across the state and country, and renewed pleas among Democrats for stricter gun laws, barely a week after President Biden signed the most significant gun legislation to clear Congress in decades. President Biden said he was "shocked by the senseless gun violence." Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, vowed to "end this plague."

"There are no words for the kind of monster who lies in wait and fires into a crowd of families with children celebrating a holiday with their community," the governor said. "There are no words for the kind of evil that robs our neighbors of their hopes, their dreams, their futures."

Those victims included Nicolas Toledo, who had recently moved back to Highland Park from Mexico to spend more time with his family, according to his granddaughter, Xochil Toledo.

Ms. Toledo said her family had gone out at midnight to line up chairs so 15 of them could be together for the Fourth of July. Three in that group would be shot.

"We brought him over here so he could have a better life," Ms. Toledo said of her grandfather. "His sons wanted to take care of him and be more in his life, and then this tragedy happened."

After the shooting, 26 people were taken to Highland Park Hospital, 25 of them with gunshot wounds, said Dr. Brigham R. Temple, the medical director for emergency preparedness at NorthShore University HealthSystem. At least 10 other patients were taken to nearby hospitals, he said. Their injuries ranged from minor to severe.

With downtown still considered an active crime scene and residents encouraged to stay inside, many in Highland Park spoke of a mix of shock, grief and anger.

"On a day that we came together to celebrate community and freedom, we're instead mourning the loss, the tragic loss, of life and struggling with the terror that was brought upon us," Mayor Nancy Rotering said.

"I think every parent now in this community and every other community starts to look at risk completely differently," said Dr. Baum, before referring to the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school dead. "Uvalde is a couple thousand miles away, but Uvalde happened in Highland Park in a different way."

The attack on Monday came less than eight months after the driver of an S.U.V. stormed through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., about 80 miles northwest of Highland Park, killing six people and wounding dozens more.

In Illinois, Chief Covellisaid that officials had recovered a rifle, and that hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement officers had searched for the gunman.

The Lake County coroner said at least five of the six people who died were adults. Officials did not immediately release their names.

Highland Park Police Sargent Christopher Covelli at a press conference after the shooting. Credit... Max Herman/Reuters

News of the shooting rattled people across the Chicago area, as officials weighed whether to go forward with their own celebrations amid the grief and the manhunt.

Several cities and towns called off parades and fireworks displays, and even closed beaches. In Highland Park and neighboring Deerfield, residents were advised to stay indoors.

Michelle Bernstein, a resident of Deerfield, said the her two teenage daughters were at friends' houses at the time of the shooting. She told them to stay there until the gunman was apprehended. One of her daughters was scheduled to work as a lifeguard at a local pool, she said, but the pool closed for the day.

"I'm hoping they catch the person so my kids can come home," Ms. Bernstein said in the hours before a person of interest was taken into custody. "Right now I don't want to go outside."

And as the afternoon dragged on without an arrest, signs of sudden terror remained scattered along the parade route.

Abandoned strollers and empty lawn chairs, some with half-consumed drinks in the cupholders, were lined up along the sidewalk. A child's bicycle was discarded along the curb. And a cheerful-looking balloon, left alone in the grass, said "God bless America."

Maggie Astor, Adam Goldman, Michael Levenson, Noam Scheiber and Alan Yuhas contributed reporting.

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A joyful July Fourth event turns into a scramble to survive.

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Highland Park Parade Shooting July 4, 2022, 12:34 p.m. ET HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. - It sounded at first like fireworks to the parents who had brought excited children to a charming Fourth of July parade in their town. Or perhaps a military salute to the flag.

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7/4 - July 4: US Independence & Equality - NPR

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7/4 - July 4: US Independence & Equality - NPR

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On this July 4th, what does equality mean? Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians discuss the history of the Declaration of Independence and the founding principle, "All men are created equal."

On this July 4th, what does equality mean?

Download

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/1109667557/1109667558" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player">

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians discuss the history of the Declaration of Independence and the founding principle, "All men are created equal."

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On this July 4th, what does equality mean?

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Two Pulitzer Prize-winning historians discuss the history of the Declaration of Independence and the founding principle, "All men are created equal."

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History of Canada Day

Until 1982, Canada celebrated Dominion Day as their national holiday. The day was then renamed 'Canada Day.' The history of Canada isn't splattered with a ton of wars and bloodshed, unlike many other countries. Throughout the mid-1800s, the possibility of unification between the British North American colonies was discussed. On July 1, 1867, the British Parliament brought the British North America Act into effect, leading to the creation of independent Canada. The territories within the dominion consisted of Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Through this act, Canada was divided into Quebec and Ontario, allowing provisions for neighboring colonies to join in the future. This is how present-day Canada came into formation. The British North America Act served as the constitution for Canada until 1982.

Dominion Day was established in 1879 but wasn't celebrated by many Canadians, as they still identified themselves as British citizens. This changed on the 50th anniversary of the confederation in 1917, when Dominion Day started becoming more popular. A bill was forwarded in 1946 to rename Dominion Day, but the passing of the bill was stalled due to disagreement in the House of Commons over what the new name should be.

In 1967, on the 100th anniversary of the nation's creation, there was an increasing interest in Canadian patriotism, and celebrations really took off. Even before it became official, citizens would refer to the holiday as Canada Day, and the name was finally adopted in 1982.

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Until 1982, Canada celebrated Dominion Day as their national holiday. The day was then renamed 'Canada Day.' The history of Canada isn't splattered with a ton of wars and bloodshed, unlike many other countries. Throughout the mid-1800s, the possibility of unification between the British North American colonies was discussed.

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‘The Pro-Life Generation’: Young Women Fight Against Abortion Rights (Published 2022)

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Many American women mourned the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe, but for others it is a moment of triumph and a matter of human rights.

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5/30 - 53's Sweet Tooth - Recipe Book - 2nd Edition

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5/30 - 53's Sweet Tooth - Recipe Book - 2nd Edition

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53's Sweet Tooth - Recipe Book - 2nd Edition

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5/29 - 63 Desserts from Aorund the World

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5/29 - 63 Desserts from Aorund the World

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2022/5/27 - Sydney Festival of Lights - The Guardian

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2022/5/27 - Sydney Festival of Lights - The Guardian

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The annual Vivid light festival returns to Sydney after being cancelled two years in a row due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year's highlights include a choreographed light show by 600 drones over Circular Quay, a projection on Customs House by artist and icon Ken Done, a special Sydney Opera House lighting of the sails, and a bubble walk at Darling Harbour. Here's a sneak peek of some of the installations and light projections that will be displayed across the city. The festival runs from 27 May-18 June

► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

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Vivid Sydney 2022: festival of lights returns after two years of Covid lockdowns - video

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The annual Vivid light festival returns to Sydney after being cancelled two years in a row due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year's highlights include a choreographed light show by 600 drones over Circular Quay, a projection on Customs House by artist and icon Ken Done, a special Sydney Opera House lighting of the sails, and a bubble walk at Darling Harbour.

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Tucked away in the mulga trees of outback Queensland, a plane hanger that has existed since World War II roars to life as its doors roll open and a twin turbo-prop plan is dragged towards the runway.

The hangar is home to the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), which is often labelled the key to the outback's survival.

But it is the pilots who keep the doctors and nurses in the air.

Charleville senior base pilot Elliott Johnston, 26, said there was nothing he would rather be doing.

The Charleville base has two Beechcraft King Air planes.(ABC Western Qld: Melanie Groves)

"I started flying training for my 14th birthday and I didn't look back from there," he said.

He flies across the outback delivering doctors and nurses to remote clinics and responding to emergencies.

The RFDS travels to small towns and airports as well as to remote stations.

Pilots dodge kangaroos as they land on dirt runways and sometimes using flaming toilet rolls as markers along the strip at night.

Being a pilot for the service is not for the faint hearted — or the routine orientated.

"[On a recent shift] we're landing at a dirt strip that none of us have seen before, scoop this fellow out of the dirt, throw him on the plane and take him to Brisbane, then fly home that evening.

"That's probably as exciting as it gets."

Positions vacant

Many pilots found themselves out of work, furloughed or contemplating a career change after COVID-19 decimated the travel industry.

The RFDS was offering jobs, however, if hair-raising landings in the outback at night and long hours were not a deterrent.

But now the travel industry is starting to recover and recruit, organisations like the flying doctors are receiving less applications.

"So we are struggling to find people that can come out."

Mr Johnston flies wherever the RFDS is needed across south-west Queensland and to Brisbane.(ABC Western Qld: Melanie Groves)

The Charleville base has four pilots filling a preferred roster of seven, but Mr Johnston said there was no impact to services.

"At the moment we're just picking up the slack where we can," he said.

"We have a very strict set of fatigue rules, so we're not having to work any harder, but our structure to our rosters is suffering a little bit."

Keeping communities alive

Outback Queensland man Scott Shorten said the flying doctors were a vital and beloved institution.

Mr Shorten lives in the opal fields at Yowah, nearly 1,000 kilometres from Brisbane.

His mother first advocated for the flying doctor to visit the community in the 1970s.

He said every member of his family has needed the service at some point in their life — including a visiting grandchild who was bitten by a snake.

Mr Shorten said the flying doctors had taken him to hospital three times in the past 12 months for treatment of a recurring lung condition.

He said the importance of the service was increasing as communities aged.

"They'd have to leave where they grew up, their homes, to go somewhere strange," Mr Shorten said.

Yowah man Scott Shorten was named the RFDS Queensland Hero in 2018.(Supplied: Royal Flying Doctors Queensland)

He said the flying doctors had a clinic in his town once a week and they were only a phone call away.

Mr Shorten has shown his appreciation for the service by fundraising, keeping the airstrip in working condition and helping organise and coordinate clinics.

He was even handed the 2018 RFDS Queensland hero award for his support fundraising and volunteering for the organisation.

Mr Shorten, along with the town of Yowah, rallied in 2018 to arrange a community ambulance to help get patients to the airstrip more comfortably.

'Best job in the world'

Mr Johnston, who grew up in Brisbane and attended Aviation State High School, said his move to the outback was a lifelong goal achieved.

"In my opinion, it's the best job in the world," he said.

His workday could take him anywhere within a 600,000 square kilometre radius, from the western and southern border of Queensland, right up to Longreach and central Queensland.

Pilot Elliott Johnston started flight-training at the age of 14.(ABC Western Qld: Melanie Groves)

He said while emergencies could sound like a busy gig, pilots had it the easiest on remote clinic days.

"We get to lie around on the couch all day, read a book, watch Netflix while the doctors and nurse do all the hard work, then we fly them home in the afternoon," he said.

Posted 23 May 2022 Mon 23 May 2022 at 8:44pm, updated 23 May 2022 Mon 23 May 2022 at 9:52pm

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‘Best job in the world’: Outback pilots needed to keep doctors in the air

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Burning loo rolls and life-saving missions can be all in a night’s work for an essential service that is struggling to attract applicants as the travel industry and big airlines recruit more pilots.

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The 'Stolen Generations' Testimonies' project is an initiative to record on film the personal testimonies of Australia's Stolen Generations Survivors and share them online. The Stolen Generations' Testimonies Foundation hopes the online museum will become a national treasure and a unique and sacred keeping place for Stolen Generations' Survivors' Testimonies. By allowing Australians to listen to the Survivors' stories with open hearts and without judgement, the foundation hopes more people will be engaged in the healing process.
​

​ ​​

In 2009 more than thirty Stolen Generations' Survivors shared their stories, their memories and themselves in the first round of interviews for the 'Stolen Generations' Testimonies Foundation'. These are their testimonies. Thank you to those Survivors for their generosity of spirit in sharing their testimonies with us.
​ ​​

"There's nothing more powerful than the personal story. For people to understand, we have to open ourselves up. It's hard to tell our personal stories but we are doing this to educate people. For us to heal as a country these are the stories we need to share. They're sad stories but they're important stories. For me as a Stolen Generations' Survivor, I know you don't get over things. You sometimes don't fully recover. What you do is you adjust and you build your life around the scars and that's what you have to do in order to survive. And many of us have survived. Whatever this resilience is, whatever this stuff is that keeps us going, it is the strength of the Aboriginal spirit that keeps us alive. For those people who do feel challenged about the 'Stolen Generations', we ask you to listen to just one of these testimonies to see if you still feel the same. That's all we ask" - Debra Hocking

​Please click on the images to view the video testimonies.
​

The Stolen Generations Testimonies Project was initiated by filmmaker Melanie Hogan ( www.melaniehogan.com) soon after the release of her acclaimed documentary film Kanyini ( www.kanyini.com), featuring Stolen Generation Survivor Uncle Bob Randall.

One of the key aims and objectives when making Kanyini was to encourage more Australians to walk in the shoes of their Indigenous brothers and sisters. To go deeper. To begin to learn, to respect, to understand, and to start a friendship with Indigenous Australians; a friendship that has been missing for so long.

One key element in the film KANYINI was the importance of Aboriginal people to connect to family, in order to feel whole. The policies that created the Stolen Generations of Australia cut very deeply, the chord between many Aboriginal children and their parents. Uncle Bob Randall and Melanie Hogan therefore felt it was incredibly important to create a platform so that survivors of the Stolen Generations could share with Australians their loss and their resilience, so that we could all heal together. Thus the Stolen Generations Testimonies project was born.

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The 'Stolen Generations' Testimonies' project is an initiative to record on film the personal testimonies of Australia's Stolen Generations Survivors and share them online.

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Real questions, from real Australians like you, answered by the ABC's experts. Here's what other ABC readers want to know about the election.

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For the latest flood and weather warnings in Queensland, search on ABC Emergency Get ready for the 2022 federal election Unsure who you should vote for, or where to go on the day? Relax, we've done your homework. Check our list below to become an informed voter.

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By Zubaidah Abdul Jalil & Jay Savage
BBC News

Australians go to the polls on 21 May, for the country's first election since 2019.

It will decide who serves as Australia's next prime minister and which political group is in power.

Who is being elected?

Australians will vote for all the seats in the House of Representatives, and just over half the seats in the Senate.

The result in the House of Representatives - where the prime minister sits - will decide which party forms the next government.

One party needs to win at least 76 of the 151 seats there to form a majority government.

If it cannot do that, it must try to win support from independent MPs, or those from minor parties.

Voting is mandatory for over-18s. More than 17.2 million people - 96% of eligible voters - are enrolled for the 2022 election.

Australia does not have a set date for national elections, but the maximum term for the House of Representatives is three years.

Who is currently in power?

The Liberal-National Coalition holds 76 seats in the House of Representatives, which makes it the ruling political group.

Labor holds 68, and the seven other seats are held by minor parties and independents.

In the Senate, the upper house of Parliament, the Coalition has 35 seats and Labor has 26. Forty Senate seats are up for election.

Who is in the running to be prime minister?

Scott Morrison has been the prime minister since 2018, having taken over from Malcolm Turnbull.

He has been taking credit for adopting a tough closed-borders approach to Covid, which helped Australia achieve one of the lowest death rates globally.

But the prime minister is facing public perception problems, after criticisms of his character from senior members of his own party and others.

Government senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells accused him of being "an autocrat" and "a bully with no moral compass" during a row over internal party processes.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce wrote that Mr Morrison was a "hypocrite and a liar" in a text message before he took the post.

Mr Morrison is being challenged by Labor leader Anthony Albanese.

Mr Albanese is one of Australia's longest-serving politicians and was briefly deputy prime minister under Kevin Rudd in 2013.

Mr Albanese has recently edged from the political left to the centre, and is basing his campaign on "small targets" - modest policy proposals.

What are the key issues?

Australia's economy grew strongly throughout the pandemic, and is projected to grow a further 4.25% this year.

The unemployment rate has fallen to 4% - its lowest level since 2008.

However, many people are concerned about the rising costs of fuel, electricity and other goods.

Added to this, Australia has just raised interest rates for the first time in a decade - putting pressure on borrowers and those with mortgages.

Climate change is an increasing worry because Australia has recently seen some its its worst ever bushfires and floods.

Both major parties have committed to net zero emissions by 2050. However, both of them have also pledged support to Australia's coal mining industry.

This may push environmentally aware voters towards parties such as the Greens.

Last year, hundreds of thousands of Australians took part in protests over the treatment of women.

A recent review has suggested that one in three staff working in parliamentary offices have experienced sexual harassment.

Mr Morrison made a formal apology on behalf of the parliament, but his party has been criticised for its response to misconduct allegations.

Labor says it wants to reduce the "boys' club" culture of parliament, but the party has also faced accusations of bullying.

China recently signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, a nation 2,000km (1,400 miles) north-east of Australia.

Labor has accused Mr Morrison of letting China potentially expand its military presence in the region, saying this was "worst failure of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific" in 80 years.

The prime minister has defended Australia's ties with its "Pacific family".

Trust in leaders, healthcare and education are also big concerns.

When will we know the results?

Most likely late on election day, but it might take longer if the contest is close.

If a major party has to form a pact with minor parties or independent MPs, then the negotiations could take several days. In 2010, it took Julia Gillard two weeks to receive support to put Labor in power.

Opinion polls suggest Labor will win by a narrow majority this time around. However, the polls were wildly inaccurate in the last election.

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By Zubaidah Abdul Jalil & Jay Savage BBC News Australians go to the polls on 21 May, for the country's first election since 2019. It will decide who serves as Australia's next prime minister and which political group is in power. Who is being elected?

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5/15 - Covid and Australian Elections - BBC article

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5/15 - Covid and Australian Elections - BBC article

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The pandemic - and PM Scott Morrison's handling of it - was once expected to be a central element of his campaign to be re-elected.

But with the election just a week away, Covid seems to have taken a backseat in Australian politics.

Mr Morrison took credit for saving thousands of lives in his first campaign video - a reminder of 2020 when infections first gripped Europe and the US, but life in much of Australia largely went on as usual.

The country was sealed off from the world, but it began to cautiously open up to itself. "Finally made it all the way to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland," I remember telling my friend.

Australia was hailed as a Covid success story as days went by with zero cases. But as the pandemic has worn on, that theory has been put to test.

The initial success

When the first cases emerged in Australia, Mr Morrison's government reacted quickly with strict measures that controlled its spread.

Every state too adopted fast and firm lockdowns, test and trace protocols, social distancing and mask mandates to contain outbreaks.

The country shut its borders - Australians couldn't leave without official permission and those allowed in had to go through a two-week hotel quarantine.

When the vaccines arrived, the drive picked up after a slow start. Australia is now one of the most vaccinated countries in the world with 95% of its eligible population double-jabbed.

It has also recorded just over 7,000 Covid deaths to date - a small number compared to other developed nations. Last week, the World Health Organization found Australia had recorded fewer deaths in 2020 and 2021 - from Covid or otherwise - than it had in a normal year.

"If you measure success in terms of mortality, there's absolutely no doubt that Australia is one of the success stories among [other places like] New Zealand and Taiwan," says Professor Greg Dore an epidemiologist with the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney.

But Australia's harsh border policies and lockdowns came at a huge cost. Tens of thousands of people were locked in or out of the country, separated from their families.

The restrictions, however, couldn't stop the highly transmissible and vicious Delta variant from breaking through in the middle of 2021.

Mr Morrison, who had frequently boasted of Australia's success in controlling the virus' spread, asked people to "hang in there". And when he was criticised for the slow vaccine rollout, he made a now-infamous comment that it "isn't a race".

"It took us too long to [realise] that the zero Covid bubble had burst," Prof Dore said. "The [vaccine] rollout through 2021 was slower than it should've been. It took them [the government] several months to drop the zero Covid public health approach."

By the end of 2021, authorities had decided it was time to live with the virus - restrictions were relaxed and international borders were partially opened to citizens and permanent residents, with the promise of allowing in more international travellers.

From control to crisis

But the Omicron variant brought fresh panic and the government was caught off-guard again.

Australia's case count, which stood at nearly 400,000 cases by the end of 2021, jumped to 2.1 million over the next month.

While deaths have remained relatively low, Australia has already had more than twice as many Covid deaths this year compared to 2020 and 2021 combined.

Australians had swung from one extreme to another. After months of restrictions, they were left to navigate the new reality of living with the virus on their own - and this was while cases soared.

"Every government health agency was informed by modelling that cases and hospitalisations would surge when mitigation measures were relaxed. But there has been inadequate surge planning at all levels of government, leaving us sitting ducks with low third-dose vaccine coverage," Professor Raina MacIntyre, head of the biosecurity programme at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, wrote back in January in an article.

"There was no planning for expedited third-dose boosters, expanded testing capacity, rapid antigen tests, hospital in the home, opening of schools or even guidance for people to protect their household when one person becomes infected."

People queued for hours at overwhelmed PCR testing clinics, only to be turned away in the end. Rapid antigen tests were expensive and not available for a time. Rules about what constituted a "close contact" were confusing and officials flip-flopped on mask and other safety mandates.

As staffing and supply chains suffered, supermarkets emptied out and businesses struggled to survive.

But one of the starkest failures happened in the aged care sector. It was already struggling, but Covid proved devastating. Three quarters of the 910 Covid deaths in 2020 were aged care residents, according to a review by Lyn Gilbert, honorary professor at the Faculty of Health and Medical Science in the University of Sydney.

By mid-January 2022, as the country opened and cases soared, the problem in nursing homes became acute with staff shortages. There were more than 7,000 active cases among residents in over 1,000 aged care facilities.

Mr Morrison has at times used the campaign to talk up his economic handling of Covid. And his opponent, Anthony Albanese, used one question in a leader's debate to get the prime minister to concede that his comment - "it's not a race" - was miscalculated.

And yet, Covid has barely been mentioned otherwise.

"It's somewhat surprising given that Australian news coverage for the last few years was dominated by Covid stories and different appraisals of state and federal government's handling of the various aspects of Covid," said Andrea Carson, associate professor of journalism and political science at La Trobe University.

Professor Carson added that data from a sample survey of 100,000 people by the national broadcaster ABC showed that Covid was a long way down the list of issues on voter's minds.

"I think Australians are so tired of hearing about it that they're trying to get back on with their lives," she says.

But it's hard to ignore the full impact of the virus. Sera Dogramaci, a sports scientist and mother of two, has been trying to move forward - "Getting vaccinated and boosted and doing the right thing."

But she said the government had been complacent and unplanned in its response to the pandemic: "I'd give them a five out of 10," she said.

But there is concern of another Covid wave as Australia heads into winter.

"Our health system just couldn't cope. [I've been] talking to friends who are nurses working in hospitals about the number of staff that are burned out and leaving," Ms Dogramaci adds.

"We look to our leadership to lead and for us to know which steps to take. And if they're lazy, things start to spiral out of control."

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Is Australia still a Covid success - and does it matter to the election?

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The pandemic - and PM Scott Morrison's handling of it - was once expected to be a central element of his campaign to be re-elected. But with the election just a week away, Covid seems to have taken a backseat in Australian politics.

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For the latest flood and weather warnings in Queensland, search on ABC Emergency Get ready for the 2022 federal election Unsure who you should vote for, or where to go on the day? Relax, we've done your homework. Check our list below to become an informed voter.

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Queensland communities completely cut off by floods | 9 News Australia

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Queensland floods: Residents evacuate as Australia faces new emergency

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Queensland is enduring its second flood emergency in three months, with several regions on alert.

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Nigeria’s Chibok girls: Why was this former captive treated differently?

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Hassana Adamu speaks to the BBC about feeling neglected on the eighth anniversary of the kidnappings.

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Further Resources:

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/rhythm-and-blues

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Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage

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As we prepare for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Freedom Sounds festival, we look back into our archives of African American music from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Smithsonian Folkways. A version of this article originally appeared in the 2011 Folklife Festival program book. Author Mark Puryear curated the Rhythm and Blues program that year and is now curator for Freedom Sounds.

In 1964 The Dixie Cups, a female vocal trio from New Orleans, crooned out a cheerful version of "Chapel of Love" and knocked the Beatles from their number one spot on the pop charts. A year later, the trio released "lko lko," a song first released in 1954 by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford as "Jock-A-Mo," whose lyrics recount the meeting of two groups of Mardi Gras Indians. Since then, this song has been covered by artists from the Grateful Dead to Cyndi Lauper, and continues to move new generations with its infectious New Orleans rhythms. The career of The Dixie Cups, and their direct and indirect roles in carrying rhythm and blues (R&B) into mainstream consciousness, speaks to the enduring power of this music to transcend region and musical category and become a representative sound of the country.

The history of R&B and the breadth of what it encompasses-socially, commercially, and artistically-suggests that it is not monolithic. It tells a complex story of many strands and experiences. A distinctly African American music drawing from the deep tributaries of African American expressive culture, it is an amalgam of jump blues, big band swing, gospel, boogie, and blues that was initially developed during a thirty-year period that bridges the era of legally sanctioned racial segregation, international conflicts, and the struggle for civil rights. Its formal qualities, stylistic range, marketing and consumption trends, and worldwide currency today thus reflect not only the changing social and political landscapes of American race relations, but also urban life, culture, and popular entertainment in mainstream America.

The emergence of R&B as a music category reflects its simultaneous marginalization as a form of African American music and its centrality to the development of a wide repertoire of American popular music genres, most notably rock 'n' roll. Three historical processes provide the framework for understanding the social and cultural contexts of the development of R&B: the migrations of African Americans to urban centers surrounding World War I and World War II, and the civil rights movement.
Hear "The Roots of Rhythm & Blues," a Smithsonian Folkways playlist

The Great Migration

The development of R&B is closely intertwined with the growth of twentieth-century African American urban communities in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Memphis, and Detroit, which were geographical anchors for how these processes played out across the country. The expansion of these urban communities took place during two periods of migration from Southern regions of the United States. The first, known as the Great Migration, occurred from 1916 to 1930, in response to the collapse of cotton agriculture due to boll weevil infestation and the demand for industrial workers in Northern cities during World War I. In concert with these shifts in population from rural to urban, many forms of African American expressive culture, especially music, were able to make transitions into urban environments and the marketplace.

African American residents in these urban areas confronted a range of discriminatory housing and employment practices, including restrictive covenants and segregation. Confined to such areas as Chicago's South Side, Harlem in New York City, or near Central Avenue in Los Angeles, people in these residential neighborhoods represented all economic backgrounds and were served by a variety of business and commercial entertainment venues such as clubs, lounges, and theaters. A majority of the theaters were owned and operated as White businesses, requiring African American performers to secure bookings on the limited Theater Owners' Booking Association circuit.

It was during this period that large national organizations working to support the social and political concerns of African Americans-such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the National Urban League (1910), and later, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1925)-advocated for institutional change on a range of issues from voting rights to labor. As communities coalesced, cultural pride began to be increasingly expressed through music.

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Tell It Like It Is: A History of Rhythm and Blues

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As we prepare for the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Freedom Sounds festival, we look back into our archives of African American music from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and Smithsonian Folkways. A version of this article originally appeared in the 2011 Folklife Festival program book.

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Rock Music’s Origins: A 1940s Blending of Country and Blues

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People can argue about an exact definition of rock, but they can’t deny that it has constantly evolved from its origins to its still vibrant present.

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The Monkees are an American rock and pop band originally active between 1966 and 1971, with reunion albums and tours in the decades that followed. Their original line-up consisted of the American actor/musicians Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork with...

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How about that. Lynnipulse did a story on our show where they wrote all kinds of nice stuff about us. Check it out -> Student Turns Unwavering Passion For Music Into A Radio Broadcasting Dream Or you can download the whole newsletter here ->...

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Pop | The History of Rock and Roll Radio Show

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The Monkees are an American rock and pop band originally active between 1966 and 1971, with reunion albums and tours in the decades that followed. Their original line-up consisted of the American actor/musicians Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork with...

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Chicano Rock | The History of Rock and Roll Radio Show

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by | Sep 8, 2017 | Blues, Chicano Rock, Country, Folk, Folk Rock, Gospel, History, Pop, Psychedelic Rock, Rock and Roll, Rockabilly

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Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It combines elements of African-American gospel music, rhythm and blues and jazz. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening in the United States, where record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement. Soul also became popular around the world, directly influencing rock music and the music of Africa

According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of funky, secular testifying" Catchy rhythms, stressed by handclaps and extemporaneous body moves, are an important feature of soul music. Other characteristics are a call and response between the lead vocalist and the chorus and an especially tense vocal sound. The style also occasionally uses improvisational additions, twirls and auxiliary sounds. Soul music reflected the African-American identity and it stressed the importance of an African-American culture. The new-found African-American consciousness led to new styles of music, which boasted pride in being black.

Soul music dominated the U.S. R&B chart in the 1960s, and many recordings crossed over into the pop charts in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere. By 1968, the soul music genre had begun to splinter. Some soul artists developed funk music, while other singers and groups developed slicker, more sophisticated, and in some cases more politically conscious varieties. By the early 1970s, soul music had been influenced by psychedelic rock and other genres, leading to psychedelic soul. The United States saw the development of neo soul around 1994. There are also several other subgenres and offshoots of soul music.

The key subgenres of soul include the Detroit (Motown) style, a rhythmic music influenced by gospel; deep soul and southern soul, driving, energetic soul styles combining R&B with southern gospel music sounds; Memphis soul, a shimmering, sultry style; New Orleans soul, which came out of the rhythm and blues style; Chicago soul, a lighter gospel-influenced sound; Philadelphia soul, a lush orchestral sound with doo-wop-inspired vocals; psychedelic soul, a blend of psychedelic rock and soul music; as well as categories such as blue-eyed soul, which is soul music performed by white artists; British soul; and Northern soul, rare soul music played by DJs at nightclubs in Northern England.

Origins

Soul music has its roots in traditional African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues, and the hybridization of their respective religious and secular styles, in both lyrical content and instrumentation, that began to occur in the 1950s. The term soul had been used among African-American musicians to emphasize the feeling of being an African-American in the United States.

Important innovators whose recordings in the 1950s contributed to the emergence of soul music included Clyde McPhatter, Hank Ballard, and Etta James. Ray Charles is often cited as popularizing the soul genre with his string of hits starting with 1954's "I Got a Woman".

Little Richard (who inspired Otis Redding) and James Brown were equally influential. Brown was known as the "Godfather of Soul" and Richard proclaimed himself the "king of rockin' and rollin', rhythm and blues soulin'", because his music embodied elements of all three, and because he inspired artists in all three genres.

Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson are also often acknowledged as soul forefathers. Cooke became popular as the lead singer of gospel group The Soul Stirrers, before controversially moving into secular music. His recording of "You Send Me" in 1957 launched a successful pop career, and his 1962 recording of "Bring It On Home To Me" has been described as "perhaps the first record to define the soul experience". Jackie Wilson, a contemporary of both Cooke and James Brown, also achieved crossover success in 1957 with "Reet Petite", and was particularly influential for his dramatic delivery and performances.

1960s

Writer Peter Guralnick is among those to identify Solomon Burke as a key figure in the emergence of soul music, and Atlantic Records as the key record label. Burke's early 1960s songs, including "Cry to Me", "Just Out of Reach" and "Down in the Valley" are considered classics of the genre. Guralnick wrote:

"Soul started, in a sense, with the 1961 success of Solomon Burke's "Just Out Of Reach". Ray Charles, of course, had already enjoyed enormous success (also on Atlantic), as had James Brown and Sam Cooke - primarily in a pop vein. Each of these singers, though, could be looked upon as an isolated phenomenon; it was only with the coming together of Burke and Atlantic Records that you could begin to see anything even resembling a movement."

Ben E. King also achieved success in 1961 with "Stand By Me", a song directly based on a gospel hymn. By the mid-1960s, the initial successes of Burke, King and others had been surpassed by new soul singers, including Stax artists such as Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, who mainly recorded in Memphis, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. According to Jon Landau:

"Between 1962 and 1964 Redding recorded a series of soul ballads characterized by unabashedly sentimental lyrics usually begging forgiveness or asking a girlfriend to come home.... He soon became known as "Mr. Pitiful" and earned a reputation as the leading performer of soul ballads."

The most important female soul singer to emerge was Aretha Franklin, originally a gospel singer who began to make secular recordings in 1960 but whose career was later revitalised by her recordings for Atlantic. Her 1967 recordings, such as "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)", "Respect" (originally sung by Otis Redding), and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" (written by Chips Moman and Dan Penn), were significant and commercially successful productions.

Soul music dominated the U.S. African-American music charts in the 1960s, and many recordings crossed over into the pop charts in the U.S. Otis Redding was a huge success at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. The genre also became highly popular in the UK, where many leading acts toured in the late 1960s. "Soul" became an umbrella term, used to describe an increasingly wide variety of R&B-based music styles - from the dance and pop-oriented acts at Motown Records in Detroit, such as The Temptations, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, to "deep soul" performers such as Percy Sledge and James Carr. Different regions and cities within the U.S., including New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama (the home of FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studios) became noted for different subgenres of the music and recording styles.

By 1968, while at its peak of popularity, soul began to fragment into disparate subgenres. Artists such as James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone evolved into funk music, while other singers such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Al Green developed slicker, more sophisticated and in some cases more politically conscious varieties of the genre. However, soul music continued to evolve, informing most subsequent forms of R&B from the 1970s-onward, with pockets of musicians continuing to perform in traditional soul style.

1970s and later

Later examples of soul music include recordings by The Staple Singers (such as I'll Take You There), and Al Green's 1970s recordings, done at Willie Mitchell's' Royal Recording in Memphis. Mitchell's Hi Records continued in the Stax tradition of the previous decade, releasing a string of hits by Green, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright and Syl Johnson. Bobby Womack, who recorded with Chips Moman in the late 1960s, continued to produce soul recordings in the 1970s and 1980s.

In Detroit, producer Don Davis worked with Stax artists such as Johnnie Taylor and The Dramatics. Early 1970s recordings by The Detroit Emeralds, such as Do Me Right, are a link between soul and the later disco style. Motown Records artists such as Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson contributed to the evolution of soul music, although their recordings were considered more in a pop music vein than those of Redding, Franklin and Carr. Although stylistically different from classic soul music, recordings by Chicago-based artists are often considered part of the genre.

By the early 1970s, soul music had been influenced by psychedelic rock and other genres. The social and political ferment of the times inspired artists like Gaye and Curtis Mayfield to release album-length statements with hard-hitting social commentary. Artists like James Brown led soul towards funk music, which became typified by 1970s bands like Parliament-Funkadelic and The Meters. More versatile groups such as War, the Commodores, and Earth, Wind and Fire became popular around this time. During the 1970s, some slick and commercial blue-eyed soul acts like Philadelphia's Hall & Oates and Oakland's Tower of Power achieved mainstream success, as did a new generation of street-corner harmony or "city-soul" groups such as The Delfonics and the historically black Howard University's Unifics.

The syndicated music/dance variety television series Soul Train, hosted by Chicago native Don Cornelius, debuted in 1971. The show provided an outlet for soul music for several decades, also spawning a franchise that saw the creation of a record label (Soul Train Records) that distributed music by The Whispers, Carrie Lucas, and an up-and-coming group known as Shalamar. Numerous disputes led to Cornelius spinning off the record label to his talent booker, Dick Griffey, who transformed the label into Solar Records, itself a prominent soul music label throughout the 1980s. The TV series continued to air until 2006, although other predominantly African-American music genres such as hip-hop began overshadowing soul on the show beginning in the 1980s.

As disco and funk were dominating the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, soul went in the direction of quiet storm. With its relaxed tempos and soft melodies, quiet storm soul took influences from soft rock and adult contemporary. Many funk bands, such as Con Funk Shun, Cameo, and Lakeside would have a few quiet storm tracks on their albums. Among the most successful acts in this era include Smokey Robinson, Teddy Pendergrass, Peabo Bryson, Atlantic Starr, and Larry Graham.

After the decline of disco and funk in the early 1980s, soul music became influenced by electro music. It became less raw and more slickly produced, resulting in a style known as contemporary R&B, which sounded very different from the original rhythm and blues style. The United States saw the development of neo-soul around 1994. Mainstream record label marketing support for soul genres cooled in the 2000s due to the industry's re-focus on hip-hop.

Notable record labels and producers

Motown Records

Berry Gordy's successful Tamla/Motown group of labels was notable for being African-American owned, unlike most of the earlier independent R&B labels. Notable artists under this label were The Supremes, The Temptations, The Miracles, the Four Tops, The Marvelettes, Mary Wells, Jr. Walker & The All-Stars, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Tammi Terrell, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Jackson Five.

Hits were made using a quasi-industrial "production-line" approach. Some considered the sound to be mechanistic, but the producers and songwriters brought artistic sensitivity to the three-minute tunes. Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland were rarely out of the charts for their work as songwriters and record producers for The Supremes, the Four Tops and Martha and the Vandellas. They allowed important elements to shine through the dense musical texture. Rhythm was emphasized by handclaps or tambourine. Smokey Robinson was another writer and record producer who added lyrics to "The Tracks Of My Tears" by his group The Miracles, which was one of the most important songs of the decade.

Stax Records and Atlantic Records

Stax Records and Atlantic Records were independent labels that produced high-quality dance records featuring many well known singers of the day. They tended to have smaller ensembles marked by expressive gospel-tinged vocals. Brass and saxophones were also used extensively.

Stax Records, founded by siblings Estelle and James Stewart, was the second most successful record label behind Motown Records. They were responsible for releasing hits by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, The Staple Singers and many more.

Ahmet Ertegun, who had anticipated being a diplomat until 1944 when his father died, founded Atlantic Records in 1947 with his friend Herb Abramson. Ertegun wrote many songs for Ray Charles and The Clovers. He even sang backup vocals for his artist Big Joe Turner on the song, "Shake Rattle and Roll.

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Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It combines elements of African-American gospel music, rhythm and blues and jazz. Soul music became popular for dancing and listening in the United States, where record labels such as Motown, Atlantic and Stax were influential during the Civil Rights Movement.

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Further Resources:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/songs-of-america/articles-and-essays/musical-styles/ritual-and-worship/african-american-gospel

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/gospel-music-guide

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When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. You lose your job, you get the blues. Your mate falls out of love with you, you get the blues. Your dog dies, you get the blues.

While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity. The blues is also about overcoming hard luck, saying what you feel, ridding yourself of frustration, letting your hair down, and simply having fun. The best blues is visceral, cathartic, and starkly emotional. From unbridled joy to deep sadness, no form of music communicates more genuine emotion.

The blues has deep roots in American history, particularly African-American history. The blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. Its inventors were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves—African-American sharecroppers who sang as they toiled in the cotton and vegetable fields. It's generally accepted that the music evolved from African spirituals, African chants, work songs, field hollers, rural fife and drum music, revivalist hymns, and country dance music.

The blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Blues and jazz have always influenced each other, and they still interact in countless ways today.

Unlike jazz, the blues didn't spread out significantly from the South to the Midwest until the 1930s and '40s. Once the Delta blues made their way up the Mississippi to urban areas, the music evolved into electrified Chicago blues, other regional blues styles, and various jazz-blues hybrids. A decade or so later the blues gave birth to rhythm 'n blues and rock 'n roll.

No single person invented the blues, but many people claimed to have discovered the genre. For instance, minstrel show bandleader W.C. Handy insisted that the blues were revealed to him in 1903 by an itinerant street guitarist at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi.

During the middle to late 1800s, the Deep South was home to hundreds of seminal bluesmen who helped to shape the music. Unfortunately, much of this original music followed these sharecroppers to their graves. But the legacy of these earliest blues pioneers can still be heard in 1920s and '30s recordings from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and other Southern states. This music is not very far removed from the field hollers and work songs of the slaves and sharecroppers. Many of the earliest blues musicians incorporated the blues into a wider repertoire that included traditional folk songs, vaudeville music, and minstrel tunes.

Without getting too technical, most blues music is comprised of 12 bars (or measures). A specific series of notes is also utilized in the blues. The individual parts of this scale are known as the blue notes.

Well-known blues pioneers from the 1920s such as Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Charlie Patton and usually performed solo with just a guitar. Occasionally they teamed up with one or more fellow bluesmen to perform in the plantation camps, rural juke joints, and rambling shacks of the Deep South. Blues bands may have evolved from early jazz bands, gospel choirs and jug bands. Jug band music was popular in the South until the 1930s. Early jug bands variously featured jugs, guitars, mandolins, banjos, kazoos, stringed basses, harmonicas, fiddles, washboards and other everyday appliances converted into crude instruments.

When the country blues moved to the cities and other locales, it took on various regional characteristics. Hence the St. Louis blues, the Memphis blues, the Louisiana blues, etc. Chicago bluesmen such as and were the first to electrify the blues and add drums and piano in the late 1940s.

Today there are many different shades of the blues. Forms include:

Traditional county blues: A general term that describes the rural blues of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont and other rural locales;

Jump blues: A danceable amalgam of swing and blues and a precursor to R&B. Jump blues was pioneered by Louis Jordan;

Boogie-woogie: A piano-based blues popularized by Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and derived from barrelhouse and ragtime;

Chicago blues: Delta blues electrified;

Cool blues: A sophisticated piano-based form that owes much to jazz;

West Coast blues: Popularized mainly by Texas musicians who moved to California. West Coast blues is heavily influenced by the swing beat.

The Texas blues, Memphis blues, and St. Louis blues consist of a wide variety of subgenres. Louisiana blues is characterized by a swampy guitar or harmonica sound with lots of echo, while Kansas City blues is jazz oriented—think Count Basie. There is also the British blues, a rock-blues hybrid pioneered by John Mayall, Peter Green and Eric Clapton.

New Orleans blues is largely piano-based, with the exception of some talented guitarists such as Guitar Slim and Snooks Eaglin. And most people are familiar with blues rock.

At All About Jazz, we don't plan to delimit the blues too narrowly. Our reviews will touch on rootsy R&B and zydeco, as well as the more traditional blues styles.

For a more complete overview of the blues, check out the following books:

Blues For Dummies by Lonnie Brooks, Cub Koda and Wayne Baker Brooks

Deep Blues by Robert Palmer

All Music Guide to the Blues

White Boy Singin' the Blues: The Black Roots of White Rock by Michael Bane

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A Brief History of the Blues article @ All About Jazz

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When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. You lose your job, you get the blues. Your mate falls out of love with you, you get the blues. Your dog dies, you get the blues. While blues lyrics often deal with personal adversity, the music itself goes far beyond self-pity.

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Further Resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Gl__ZOp1g

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/country-music-timeline/

https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/music-country.htm

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Further Resources:

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/

https://americanhistory.si.edu/smithsonian-jazz/education/what-jazz

https://www.jazzwise.com/

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What is Jazz? [The History, The Music, The Musicians]

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Developed in early 20th Century America, Jazz is a style of music which features improvisation & rhythmic invention at its heart.

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In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers and the violin.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the spirited, sublime music of the Baroque period, which lasted about 1600 to 1750. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your choices in the comments.

This aria is set to a timeless and soothing melody, and its lyrics speak to us in these unsettling times. "Lascia la spina" recalls Horace's "carpe diem" and helps us not lose hope. It tells us to make the best of this situation of forced intimacy - to reconnect with our families, to slow down, to pay attention to our feelings. At the same time, it reminds us to challenge our creativity and develop new ideas.

Many great arias have to fight against the banality of their lyrics. In Handel's "Giulio Cesare," Cleopatra learns that Julius Caesar has not been killed in battle, as she was told. So she lets it rip with joy, comparing her heart to a ship - risking shipwreck, storm-battered - that finally arrives safe in port and finds comfort. I'm torn between two stunning performances: this one by Beverly Sills - from the 1960s, when Baroque operas were still rarely performed - and Joyce DiDonato, a few years ago. Both are sublime; I'm an addict.

Jean-Philippe Rameau is one of my favorite Baroque composers. The dance music in his opera-ballets has arresting sarabandes, soul-searching airs (such as his "Air tendre pour les Muses") and tambourins which will have you dancing in the streets. But it is his chaconnesthat are always profound in their harmonic beauty and which, propelled by the ground bass, delight the audience with variations both sublime and brilliant, often breaking out into a sung chorus.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music

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In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers and the violin.

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We asked some of our favorite artists to tell us about the sounds they cherish. Listen to their choices.

Credit... Angie Wang

I posed a deceptively simple question to our writers and editors, as well as some artists we admire: What are the five minutes or so - longer than a moment, shorter than a symphony - that you'd play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music?

A bit of agonizing later, here are our selections. It's an astonishing array: the very old and the very new; some favorites, as well as things I'd never heard before and am delighted to now have.

Enjoy the listening, and please leave your picks in the comments. We'll publish an assortment of them. - ZACHARY WOOLFE, Times classical music editor

This is one of the most perfect compositions I know. There are no superfluous notes. Every phrase has been crafted with the precision of a master jeweler. Ravel creates a paradox: A miniature musical form becomes a vast space. Every time this piece ends, I feel devastated, as I do not want to return to the physical world. I would be perfectly happy to stay in this garden forever.

The first notes of "Lavender Rain" form a simple scale, but one that moves as haltingly as someone warily placing one foot in front of the other in pitch darkness. There's a second voice here, trailing the first like a shadow. Then the sound grows, divided as if by a prism into many lines, and the music embarks on a reluctant, ineffably tender descent. Anna Clyne wrote "Lavender Rain" as she was grieving for her mother. In its somber beauty - somehow both weightless and heavy-hearted - it's part of a long tradition of classical music inspired by loss.

The five minutes or so I would choose to inspire a love affair with classical music are the closing moments of Strauss's opera "Der Rosenkavalier": the final trio. Here is a heartbreaking use of music's essential instrument, the voice, giving each of the three singers the simultaneous chance to express herself with transparency and beauty. Using elegant and sophisticated strategies from the traditions of classical music, Strauss draws each listener into music's capacity to inspire a personal recognition of the bittersweet transition from desire to fulfillment, and ultimately to loss.

"Consort of Musicke by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons" is Glenn Gould's greatest record. These early English harpsichord pieces had no history of piano performance until Gould's charismatic advocacy. Although not originally intended to be played as a set, Gibbons's Fantasy in C and Allemande (Italian Ground) were clearly paired by him as antecedent and consequent. The solemn counterpoint in the Fantasy is glorious, and Gould marches so hard in the Italian Ground that he's almost swinging.

In my early teens I was overwhelmed by Stravinsky's 1910 ballet score "The Firebird" - in the recording conducted by Stravinsky - even before I knew what was going on in the fairy-tale story, about a wondrous firebird that helps a prince rescue the princess he loves from the realm of an evil sorcerer. The last scene still gives me chills. The villain's death, depicted in jagged, fractured bursts, leads to a passage of shimmering, shifting chords. A consoling melody, first played by a horn, signals the lifting of the magical spell, then builds and builds to a blazing, brassy, rhythmically charged conclusion.

You can't listen to a recording of it, and the many YouTube renditions won't give you a sense of what it really is. Instead, like all great musical works, "4'33"," John Cage's three movements of silence, must be experienced live in concert, where the transient energy and the perception of time becomes a collective and individualized event. The accidental and unintentional sounds of everyday life, from coughs to faraway sirens to the hum of an air conditioner, become the piece itself. A strong reaction is guaranteed - perhaps, like it did for me, it will awaken a sense of the still untapped potential in classical music.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music (Published 2018)

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We asked some of our favorite artists to tell us about the sounds they cherish. Listen to their choices. I posed a deceptively simple question to our writers and editors, as well as some artists we admire: What are the five minutes or so - longer than a moment, shorter than a symphony - that you'd play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music?

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Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched.

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past, we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms and choral music.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love percussion - the resonant sound of instruments struck, shaken, pounded. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

It's an exciting era for percussion innovation and inspiration. Particularly new works with flexible instrumentation, because they really showcase an ensemble's choices and personality. Sandbox Percussion's multiple versions of Jason Treuting's "extremes" are an awesome example of how a great composition can renew itself with each interpretation. It's interesting to learn how the piece works and what inspired the material - rhythms drawn from the letters of six American cities - but most important, I just love listening to and watching it be performed, and I want to share that experience with you.

Though the piano is a percussion instrument, we agreed we'd look beyond its traditional repertoire for this feature. But John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano are works that truly create a percussion ensemble of exhilarating variety. In these 20 pieces, Cage continued his experiments with prepared pianos - regular pianos with screws, bolts, slabs of rubber, pieces of plastic and other items inserted, according to Cage's precise specifications, between its strings. By striking the keys, a player produces an array of thuds, chime-like tones, near-pitchless plunks, delicate harplike sounds and more. In the paired Sonatas XIV and XV, "Gemini," the music sounds like a vaguely Asian dance, with rippling riffs in the bass register, melodic bits in peeling high tones, alluring thumps and intricate rhythmic figures.

When it comes to Duke Ellington's music from the early 1940s, discussion tends to center on the contributions made by the bassist Jimmy Blanton and the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster - and the skill of the percussionist Sonny Greer is often overlooked. Yet Ellington himself described Greer, his longtime drummer, as the "world's best percussionist reactor." "When he heard a ping," Ellington added in his memoir, "he responded with the most apropos pong." You can hear that responsiveness throughout the classic "Cotton Tail," as Greer drives the ensemble sections, adds excitement to an already stirring Webster solo and pongs nimbly underneath Ellington's piano.

During my first visit to New York City on a crystalline autumn day in 1977, I walked the length of Manhattan to stand outside of the building where Edgard Varèse had lived in SoHo. Along the way, I heard the metal-on-metal cacophony of construction, wailing sirens and snippets of the city's joyous mix of world music. I realized then that "Ionisation," composed of those very sounds,was not barren modernism but Varèse's love letter to his adopted home. Listening 44 years later, the noises of "Ionisation" are still bracing, the rhythms still joyous, and I am buoyed again by this fierce anthem to the present.

In its rhythms and lyrical gestures, this piece seems to contain elements of Steve Reich and John Adams - maybe even Leonard Bernstein. Yet it predates them all: Colin McPhee wrote "Tabuh-Tabuhan" in 1936, influenced by his years spent studying gamelan music in Bali. He transplanted his research onto the Western classical orchestra, featuring Balinese gongs but also creating what he called a "nuclear gamelan" of two pianos and percussion instruments, and approximating the sounds of hand-beaten drums in the strings. The resulting works helped to pave a new path, later trod by Benjamin Britten and broadened by Lou Harrison, for Western percussion in the 20th century.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Percussion

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Listen to the varied, explosive, resonant sounds of instruments struck, shaken, pounded, scratched. In the past, we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms and choral music.

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In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart and 21st-century composers.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the sweet, songful violin. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your choices in the comments.

This solo violin piece by Reena Esmail really blew me away when I first heard it. Like much of her work, it inhabits an intensely lyrical space informed by both Indian and Western classical musics. In Vijay Gupta's gripping performance, I hear sounds, colors and expressions simultaneously familiar and fresh, intimate and epic, grounded and aloft.

With Eddie South's performance of this piece, all you need is three minutes to fall in love with the violin. Any violinists who listen to this recording will surely identify at least one reason they chose to play the instrument, though it doesn't take a seasoned listener to be completely delighted. The piece has a dazzling array of challenging techniques, Romantic lyricism and various fiddling styles, including jazz, Gypsy jazz and old time; the spontaneous nature of South's performance brings me so much joy.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Violin (Published 2020)

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In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart and 21st-century composers. Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the sweet, songful violin.

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Listen to Louis Armstrong's sweetness, Miles Davis's wild squall, Handel's Baroque majesty and other favorites.

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the trumpet. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

The musical term "intrada" suggests a fanfare, music to mark an entrance. This one, written in 1947 by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, captures the many personalities of the trumpet: noble and bombastic, mischievous and meditative. Hakan Hardenberger seamlessly glides between these moods, driving the energy through the rollicking finale.

Here is my impassioned clarion call to understand the trumpet! See that exclamation point? That's what a trumpet does. It punctuates emotions. My trumpet teacher Bill Fielder would always ask, "What is the trumpet?" I would ponder for a moment and offer an encyclopedic answer like "A metal instrument with ... blah, blah, blah." To that Mr. Fielder would say, "It is a mirror of your mind."

Ordinarily, I would invite you to listen to Miles Davis's "Porgy and Bess," a classic collaboration between Miles and Gil Evans. This album set the stage for people thinking differently about the orchestra and jazz. But as I write this, yesterday was the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. My song "Funeral Dirge," from the album "A Tale of God's Will," originally composed for the soundtrack of Spike Lee's first Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke," still haunts me today. Actually, I don't feel like I composed it. I feel like it was being screamed at me: my personal clarion call to hear and weep with my hometown, New Orleans.

Dead bodies floating. Dead bodies on top of cars. Dead bodies in the grass. Dead bodies in places I knew. Dead bodies in neighborhoods I grew up in. I saw these bodies in the raw footage of Spike's documentary. One dead body I didn't see in the video was that of an old neighborhood friend who died trying to help people stay on their roofs while floodwaters raged beneath. I never cried so much, shedding tears for the many bodies I saw, and the many, many more I didn't see. This dirge is my tribute to those brave, valiant, fallen heroes. God bless those souls from Katrina - and, today, those souls from Ida.

Conventional wisdom holds that Louis Armstrong's peak came with his pathbreaking recordings of the late 1920s and early '30s. Don't believe it! He remained a potent creative force well into the middle of the century, and his 1947 Town Hall performance of "Dear Old Southland" shows how he continued to deepen his understanding of a tune.

This duo rendition, with the pianist Dick Cary, starts out as a stiff-upper-lip confession; the opening trumpet lines suggest a speaker confiding some sadness in a suavely guarded manner. But eventually the attempt to keep up appearances dissolves, as Armstrong sends torrents of welled-up feeling bawling forth. The beaming assurance of his technique - bending notes, reaching for new climaxes - gives this unraveling unmistakable dignity. And the ending's brief hint of a striding, sunnier future provides one more look at the malleability of a soul.

Who would have imagined that light touching light is connected to comprehension, that inspiration and creativity are bound together in the heart and soul of a true artist? Hearing Miles Davis's "Calypso Frelimo" was for me an inspired moment of music as art.

The piece begins at a shockingly intense level. First the trumpet solo, beautifully inspired music with long-and short-changing sonics,bellowing glissando multiphonics interspersed with nuanced micro-sonics: pure melodic development with a creative range matched by emotion, and just the right amount of space and silence perfectly arched across a vast, still environment mysteriously, without effort.

Kenny Dorham (1924-72) did not command attention with Gabriel-like power and bravura technique. A favorite of jazz connoisseurs, he seduced listeners with the soulful warmth, colorful wit and understated wisdom of the hippest bon vivant on the scene. Everything about his approach to the trumpet and improvisation was expressive, relaxed and personal. The dappled smears of his crepuscular tone and the flirty bounce he brings to the standard "I Had the Craziest Dream" in 1959 make a beeline for your heart. His improvised phrases, delivered with nonchalant charm, enchant you with clever melodic and rhythmic rhymes and piquant note choices. He's telling a story, inviting you into his dream - where you not only fall in love with the trumpet, but also the man with the horn.

Every year "Messiah" comes around, and every year, almost at the end, comes the moment to hold your breath. Many performances of Handel's classic oratorio now take place on period instruments, and the Baroque trumpet is an unwieldy beast: long, straight and lacking the valves that allow players on modern trumpets to hit notes reliably. So while it hopefully doesn't sound like it, the soaring, angelic, regal solo part that crowns this bass aria is a merciless test of skill, as the player announces the Day of Judgment - and endures his or her own.

In 1958 my father, the conductor Felix Slatkin, commissioned the composer Leo Arnaud to create pieces that would demonstrate the then-new audio format of stereo. Utilizing various military fanfares as well as original tunes, "Bugler's Dream" included what would become known as "The Olympic Fanfare." The track was featured on a Capitol Records album called "Charge!" and has been reissued several times.

With trumpets of all sizes and the musicians separated into two different studios, there was simply no better way to show off not only the new technology but also the incredible skill of the 26 players. If you do not love the trumpet after listening to this, I suggest the track that contains the 12 bagpipers.

Leroy Anderson, the master of the light orchestral miniature, recalled that his 1949 piece "A Trumpeter's Lullaby" had its origins backstage during a Boston Pops concert. The great trumpeter Roger Voisin, then principal with the Pops, was complaining that trumpet works tended to be loud, martial, triumphant. Voisin suggested that Anderson try writing something different.

The result was this mellow lullaby. Of course, it was still a trumpet piece, so Anderson couldn't help letting jazzy bits slip in: The beguiling melody has a slightly jumpy repeated-note figure, even as the orchestra maintains a lulling mood in the background, and a middle section turns restless and syncopated in a moment of mischief.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Trumpet

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Listen to Louis Armstrong's sweetness, Miles Davis's wild squall, Handel's Baroque majesty and other favorites. In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky.

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We asked a few of our favorite artists to tell us about music that matters to them. Listen to their choices.

Image

Credit... Angie Wang

Last fall, we asked our writers and editors, and some of our favorite artists, to select the five minutes or so they'd play for friends to make them fall in love with classical music. ( See the picks.)

Choosing was hard, but we loved it so much that we're bringing it back - this month, with the goal of persuading those same curious friends to love the piano, the most powerful and protean of instruments. We know you'll make memorable discoveries, and we hope you enjoy.

Chopin makes the piano sing. He's a poet. When I play an encore by him, you hear people immediately relax. This nocturne is one of the most popular ones; it catches the ear. And Arthur Rubinstein is my idol. He has a way that is so simple that it touches your soul without needing to know anything about the music.

Rameau composed for the harpsichord in its 18th-century heyday, but Alexandre Tharaud made his recording on a modern piano, flooding rich colors into the nobility of this Sarabande. The combination of courtly dignity and expressive fullness will remind you of your favorite lush, elegant costume drama.

This music has a magical appeal to people who never listen to classical music. When I went to Beijing to learn the piano, we stayed in a suburb, because it was cheap. The kids had never heard piano music in their lives before. They were like: "You came all the way from Shenyang, potato farmer? And you are playing what?" That was how people in Beijing thought about regional people. Then I played this piece, and they were like, "Ooh, this potato farmer does nice stuff." I brought it back for my new album, "Piano Book."

In the last movement of Beethoven's final piano sonata, a sublimely simple theme is put through an astonishing set of variations - until the mystical final few minutes. Then the music splits apart: The theme is played delicately in the piano's high range, hovering over oscillating riffs below. And in the middle is a continuous, softly shimmering trill.

This next piece shows how simply - and how quickly - one piano can conjure a vivid scene. The opening is just a single note, played 16 times at a crescendo, like an image coming into focus. Then, with a cleverly chugging rhythm, Meredith Monk evokes a train passing, over an ostinato base as consistent as evenly spaced railroad ties.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Piano (Published 2019)

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We asked a few of our favorite artists to tell us about music that matters to them. Listen to their choices. Last fall, we asked our writers and editors, and some of our favorite artists, to select the five minutes or so they'd play for friends to make them fall in love with classical music.

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Listen to the biggest, loudest, most extravagant (yet incredibly subtle) instrument of them all.

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas and Bach.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the grandeur and colors of the organ - a full orchestra in a single instrument. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

If I had a time machine, I would go back to 1740 to hear Johann Sebastian Bach play the organ in Leipzig, Germany. Bach is the ultimate composer for this extraordinary, timeless instrument. Much of his organ music is intense, revealing its multilayered, life-affirming majesty slowly, through repeated listening. The opening to his 29th cantata, however, leaps and bounds with immediate joy. There is something visceral about hearing this music played live, on a great organ, in a vast cathedral space: The building shakes, the air shimmers and the music is as much felt as heard.

This piece stops me in my tracks every time I hear it, conjuring the phrases "tour de force" and "pièce de résistance." In an incredible display of badassery, Demessieux unleashes the full spectrum of the organ's capabilities, with all its sounds, timbres, colors and contrasts. Too often people associate this instrument with dirges or spooky music; this piece is energetic and exuberant.

The middle section is like a slow jazz waltz sound bath, filled with luscious chords and featuring an inverted texture that places the solo in the pedals and the bass line on the keyboards. As a performer, it's always a great adventure to tackle music written by a virtuoso composer to showcase her own instrument. Demessieux knows exactly what the organ can do, and she uses all of it.

The organ in church can be like a piece of beautiful architecture, or a wonderful sermon: It is sometimes taken for granted. And there is a subtle art to playing with a choir; the organist must wrestle with the acoustics of the space to make sure everything aligns, as the player is oftentimes quite far from the singers, and the pipes can be practically miles away.

One beautiful challenge is the "Jubilate" from Herbert Howells's morning service for the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the extraordinary and specific acoustics of the chapel there. Even when the organ is under the choir, Howells is masterly at doubling the voices and weaving in and out of them, foretelling little themes or echoing them after. The acoustics of the space turn the simple counterpoint into something intentionally blurry but somehow precise, like a house at night lit from within but seen from outside, with shapes flickering in and out of view.

The beginning of the piece starts with the organ in its simplest incarnation, just holding an E-flat minor chord. In the last phrase, on the text "world without end, amen," the choir sings in unison, and the organ, here the primary voice, unspools a long melody, crabwise but ultimately pointing downward toward a resolution in E-flat major.

When the Los Angeles Philharmonic wanted to commission organ music from Terry Riley, they let him hang out all night playing on Hurricane Mama, the potent pipe instrument inside Walt Disney Concert Hall. Some of the material Riley improvised there made its way into his 2013 concerto "At the Royal Majestic." One of his grandest late-career works, it's punchy, mystical and gorgeous. (It's also a reminder that his artistic development did not stop with the early Minimalist touchstone "In C.")

The close of the first movement - called "Negro Hall," after a drawing by the fin-de-siècle Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli - occasionally seesaws between sugar-sweet orchestral motifs and gloomier exhalations from the organ. Riley presents such contrasts not with postmodern irony, but with tangible, genuine delight. Even after a climactic turn toward frenzied rhythmic patterns, his joyous sensibility is always perceptible, and the final chords are exhilarating.

"Little" - but it is nevertheless great Bach! In a few minutes, the cantor of Leipzig tells us such a story. I love the fragility that shines throughout this work, a fragility that brings us back to our human condition in front of current events: the fire of Notre-Dame, the health situation, climate change. May this music make us aware of our determining role in humanity.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ

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Listen to the biggest, loudest, most extravagant (yet incredibly subtle) instrument of them all. In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas and Bach.

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It's an instrument based on the most fundamental sign of life: breath. Listen to the best music ever written for it.

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past, we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque music, sopranos and Beethoven.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the flute. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your choices in the comments.

The flute is one of humanity's oldest ways of producing a beautiful sound, and it is based on the most fundamental sign of life: breath. Made from bones, wood or reeds, the earliest specimens date from the Paleolithic era. The flute is often associated with things elegiac, poetic, angelic - with purity - but also with the world of magic; in mythology, Orpheus seduces the underworld playing the flute. In this excerpt from Gluck's Orpheus opera, the flute is extremely sensual, and, with its lyrical soaring, takes us from earthly pleasures to heavenly ones.

Hubert Laws is best known as a jazz flutist, but he was classically trained at the Juilliard School and has long included interpretations of classical music in his repertoire. This joyful Bach arrangement, from his 1971 album "The Rite of Spring," is great for people who like jazz but aren't much into classical - or if you're not into either, it could make you fall in love with both! Listen for the beautiful and original cadenza at the beginning, after which you will recognize Bach, sometimes in a jazz vein, sometimes straighter. (And if you have nine more minutes, check out his haunting then soaring take on Ravel's "Boléro," which starts with a rare bass flute passage and follows through with a blissful Chick Corea piano solo.)

No matter the style of the music or the cultural context it sings from, it's the flute's ability to pierce the heart that moves me most. "The Price of Everything," from "Suite for Frida Kahlo," is one of my favorites from the phenomenal James Newton. He is celebrated as a jazz flutist, but, like many creative musicians, also has an active career composing for orchestras and classical ensembles. In this piece, he sings with his huge sound through the upper register with effortlessness and grace. In our times of strife, his brilliant playing and the piece's title remind us what's really important: to seek humanity in one another.

These exhilarating four minutes hooked me to this little tube of metal when I was 13, and they keep me hooked to this day. By turns aching, luring, wailing like a siren and bursting into lyricism, this is music that grabs the listener and refuses to let go. There is no solo flute piece like it. "Density 21.5"unfurled genre-dissolving possibilities for the instrument and its repertoire, inspiring performances by titans of avant-garde jazz and classical music alike; Harvey Sollberger's 1975 rendition still shakes me with its honesty, brutality and grace.

You could put together a list of flute highlights drawing solely on Claire Chase's "Density 2036," her astonishing project to commission new solo programs each of the 23 years leading up to the centennial of Varèse's "Density 21.5." These premieres have already offered an encyclopedic vision of the instrument - sometimes even within a single piece, like Marcos Balter's "Pan." This is myth told through music, but it's also a tour of the flute family (panpipes included, of course) and the possibilities of full-body performance, leading to the final "Soliloquy": an ending at once chattering, claustrophobic and darkly sensuous.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Flute (Published 2021)

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It's an instrument based on the most fundamental sign of life: breath. Listen to the best music ever written for it. In the past, we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, the piano, opera, the cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, the violin, Baroque music, sopranos and Beethoven.

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We asked Yo-Yo Ma, John Williams, Andrew Lloyd Webber and others to pick the music that moves them. Listen to their choices.

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they'd play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano and opera.

This time, the goal couldn't be easier: Persuade those same curious friends to love the cello, that most soulful of instruments. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your choices in the comments.

Even when the cello moves into its high register, the sound seems to emanate from a deep, russet realm. That quality comes through sublimely in the fifth movement of Messiaen's mystical "Quartet for the End of Time."

The composer indicates that this "Praise to the Eternity of Jesus" should be played "infinitely slow, ecstatic." Aren't those words opposites? Not to Messiaen. The cello line is restrained, wistful, seemingly never-ending, but the cellist Fred Sherry brings just enough throbbing intensity to suggest spiritual ecstasy. The piano supports with a series of steady, spare, low chords, played by Peter Serkin with glowing richness and eerie calm.

Dvorak's Cello Concerto is perhaps the most beloved work for cello and orchestra. It is an astounding piece. But as a performer, I am always looking for the preconditions of a composer's creativity, the genealogy of a work. A very short story: In March 1894, Dvorak heard the New York Philharmonic perform his friend Victor Herbert's new E-minor cello concerto. Afterward, Dvorak is said to have rushed backstage, telling Herbert it was "splendid, absolutely splendid." Almost exactly a year later, Dvorak finished writing the concerto that we know so well.

While I was working with the cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras on the choreography for "Mitten wir im Leben sind/Bach6Cellosuiten,"he told me that, for him, the Sarabande of the Fifth Cello Suite is the quintessence of what Bach does in these suites: achieving transcendence through the dematerialization of music.

I decided not to dance to this sarabande and leave it like a delicate void, embraced by the physical and emotional intensity of the previous suites, and the glorious Sixth Suite that comes right after. This moment in the choreography might embody what T.S. Eliot describes so beautifully in the poem "Burnt Norton": "At the still point of the turning world ... There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

The opening eight bars of the Andante of Brahms's B-flat Piano Concerto shine with a luster that places them high among the many melodic masterpieces this composer has given us. With a range of slightly over an octave, the home key of B flat brings a glowing warmth after the rousing Appassionato in D minor.

I don't know why Brahms chose the cello to present this arioso. However, with its vocal characteristics and breathtaking control, always capable of producing the suggestion of portamento, it's hard to imagine any other instrument for this role. The cello and this tune seem destined to come together, and we are once again in great debt to Herr Brahms.

The great Abdul Wadud comes to mind, and specifically a track from his 1977 solo record "By Myself," called "Camille." I first learned about Wadud's work mostly from recordings with Julius Hemphill such as "Dogon A.D.," then work he did with James Newton and Anthony Davis. I was super excited to learn that he had a solo record, but I could never find it! A friend of mine had to make a copy for me.

Finally, I got a vinyl copy about six years ago and even got to meet Wadud and have him sign it. I love the freedom and creativity in his playing. He uses the whole range of the cello and moves between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work. He's definitely a cellist I wish not only more cellists knew about, but also more people in general.

From the very earliest days of my love of music, Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata has haunted me as one of the most profound and ethereal pieces ever written. As a cellist, simplicity, true beauty and a sense of tonal perfection are the greatest challenges, and this work demands all three. Add to that the unique relationship between Mstislav Rostropovich, possibly the greatest cellist who has ever lived, and Benjamin Britten, one of the great composers and pianists of the 20th century. In the opening minutes, they make the world stand still, and one almost has to stop breathing. Their partnership was an extraordinary one, such that, after Britten died, Rostropovich never played this piece again - he felt he could not do it with any other pianist.

The composer and trombonist George Lewis is well known for his improvisations, but "Not Alone," his 2015 piece for cello and electronics, is strictly notated. As performed by Seth Parker Woods, the acoustic part is often sinewy and percussive - qualities that help Mr. Woods's playing blend in with the transformations created by the software, which uses what Mr. Lewis calls "interactive digital delays, space and timbre transformation" in a work that he dedicated to Abdul Wadud.

I can think of nothing more beautiful than Fauré's famous "Élégie" for cello and piano. It is both instantly appealing and profoundly felt. The painful beauty of the main theme is balanced by the angelically comforting second theme; it can bring tears to one's eyes while also being uplifting. Like all great pieces of classical music, it can be appreciated on multiple levels, and will affect each listener in a deeply personal way.

In performance, the cellist and pianist must have the ability not only to tap into the more obvious passionate and sweet qualities of the music, but also to bring out the myriad subtle shades of nobility, reflection, sorrow. Steven Isserlis does justice to Fauré's treasure with the pianist Pascal Devoyon.

In Verdi's opera "Don Carlo," Philip II of Spain is a tyrant. But in a scene of Shakespearean empathy, Verdi shows us the aging king alone, vulnerable and heartbroken that he is unable to win the heart of the queen he forced into marriage.

A series of stern repeated chords stands for the self-built cage of rules and machinations that has trapped Philip. The sound of the cello cuts in like a pang of guilt, then tumbles down in wistful figures, becoming the voice of his conscience and delivering a recitative of grizzled remorse and tenderness. Fragments of questioning phrases finally build to a yearning melody as the instrument delivers an inner monologue so vivid and nuanced that, by the time the king begins to sing, the listener sees him in a newly sympathetic light.

How about the opening of Wagner's "Die Walküre"? It starts with one of the most striking cello lines in the repertory: a terrifying depiction of a storm that represents the emotional and metaphysical turmoil that will ultimately only be resolved with destruction and rebirth.

I love the visceral nature of this music, how it uses minimalist techniques and what you might call rock 'n' roll rhythmic pounding to draw the listener into the story. For me it is intoxicating and totally seductive; perhaps it can be for others, as well.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Cello (Published 2020)

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We asked Yo-Yo Ma, John Williams, Andrew Lloyd Webber and others to pick the music that moves them. Listen to their choices. In the past, we've asked some of our favorite artists to choose the five minutes or so they'd play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, the piano and opera.

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Listen to music that shows off the golden, mellow sunshine of "the cello of the brass section."

Credit... Angie Wang

In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos, music for dance, Wagner and Renaissance music.

Now we want to convince those curious friends to love the golden, mellow sunshine of the horn. We hope you find lots here to discover and enjoy; leave your favorites in the comments.

The French horn is so versatile. Heroic, romantic, scary, mysterious - you name it, the horn can play that part. And it's a sociable instrument: We love to play together. In the third movement of Richard Strauss's Horn Concerto No. 2, the horn is a virtuosic and passionate hero, which the horns in the orchestra join at the end of the movement for a final fanfare. These last moments always lift my heart and make me proud to be a horn player.

The horn has this beautiful, warm, singing sound, which resembles the middle register of the human voice; that is why it is so easy to connect to. The horn is sort of the cello of the brass section. The violins, trumpet and flute are in a high register, and not many people can sing that high, while the register in which the horn plays is accessible to anybody.

I chose the opening of the third movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, simply because people usually think of the horn as a hunting instrument. The horn here represents the crying out of the human soul, sort of lost in the ocean of an overwhelming world. In this section, the horn is an individual human voice surrounded by a crazy, dancing universe of other instruments. Mahler was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, so his music is always about the psyche - of an individual and of humanity.

The horn, with its mellow colors, doesn't always conjure pure relaxation; it can be regal even in passages of tranquillity. The composer William Bolcom uses this simultaneously lyrical and potent quality during stretches of his Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, created in response to Brahms's famous trio. But in the final movement - which he has described as a "resolute march of resistance," written in the wake of the 2016 election - Bolcom lets the instrument strut, with some raucous pressurized notes, drawing it closer to its more jazz-associated cousins in the brass section.

"Ecos oníricos de la Basílica de San Marcos" was written for me by the Argentine composer José Manuel Serrano. The piece, for a soloist and prerecorded horns, transforms the sound of the horn into ghostly echoes in a cathedral, requiring the player to access a wide range of textures and microtones.

For me, the horn has always been an extension of the voice. My childhood was filled with many a long car ride in which my mother would teach me to sing harmony, as well as choir rehearsals and weekend mornings at the piano working out hymns or whatever else of her songbooks I could get my hands on. When I first heard the horn, I wished that my voice could produce those sounds, and a love for the instrument was born. Its flexibility has freed me from the limitations of my own voice, and this piece is a wonderful space to explore that freedom.

Conductors and fellow musicians never seem to mind how loudly you can blow the horn, but they really, really care about how softly you can play; in fact, your career depends on it. As the natural harmonics of the instrument are very close together in the high register, playing pianissimo in that range requires laser focus and surgical precision. Next time you're at the symphony, imagine the hornists as darts players, having to throw bull's-eyes every 20 seconds for 45 minutes. Then imagine the conductor standing next to the dart board, silently urging the player to throw each dart as gently as possible, but still demanding that the bull's-eye be hit every time.

The flip side: It's incredibly liberating to play pieces in which you can just let it rip and go for it, as loudly as (tastefully) possible, like in this exciting recording of Haydn's "Hornsignal"Symphony, performed by the natural horn players - no valves! - of the Concentus Musicus Wien.

It's a profoundly moving interlude, and this is a profoundly moving account, a tribute from one horn player of distinction, Alan Civil, to a colleague who was arguably the greatest of them all: Dennis Brain, the principal horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra, who was killed in a car crash in 1957, two days before the sessions for this first recording of the work.

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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Horn

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Listen to music that shows off the golden, mellow sunshine of "the cello of the brass section." In the past we've chosen the five minutes or so we would play to make our friends fall in love with classical music, piano, opera, cello, Mozart, 21st-century composers, violin, Baroque music, sopranos, Beethoven, flute, string quartets, tenors, Brahms, choral music, percussion, symphonies, Stravinsky, trumpet, Maria Callas, Bach, the organ, mezzo-sopranos, music for dance, Wagner and Renaissance music.

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4/20 Couches on wheels race across Darwin to raise awareness of youth homelessness - ABC News

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4/20 Couches on wheels race across Darwin to raise awareness of youth homelessness - ABC News

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It didn't take long for Dakota Bigalla to remember that her mode of transport - a couch on wheels - didn't have any brakes.

The Northern Territory has the highest rate of homelessness in Australia

Anglicare says some young people are spending 70 per cent of their income on housing

The event is held to mark National Youth Homelessness Matters Day

"Everyone is pretty fast ... it was pretty scary," she said.

The teenager took part in Anglicare's annual couch surfing race to raise awareness of youth homelessness.

The event, which marks National Youth Homelessness Matters Day, was the 10th edition held in Darwin, with nearly 500 people attending.

The Northern Territory has the highest rate of homelessness in Australia, which is 12 times the national average, according to Anglicare.

Nearly 6,000 people aged between 15 and 24 experienced homelessness in 2020 and 2021 across the territory.

Anglicare CEO David Pugh said the event was a practical way to highlight the issue of youth homelessness and the challenges faced by young people who don't have access to housing.

"What we're finding is that it's harder for young people to leave transitional housing, because there's no affordable private housing in the market," he said.

"Young people are spending up to 70 per cent of their income just to get a roof over their head."

With a looming federal election on May 21, Mr Pugh said Anglicare was hoping the winning party will address two key issues.

"Firstly, a living wage for young people while they're looking for housing or for people who are unemployed, while they're looking for a job, so you can live with dignity," he said.

"The second is a national strategy to address homelessness for youth 25,000 youth are homeless in Australia."

Couch surfing to help build connections

Local businesses contributed to the event, with some offering free food and drink for crowds attending.

Twenty-four couch surfing teams battled it out for supremacy, including teams from Carers NT, Autism NT and Darwin High School.

Despite many hard-fought couch races on the day, teams were focused on "having fun" and "raising awareness" about youth homelessness.

"Some people don't know where help is and sometimes they are ashamed to talk about it (homelessness) and stuff...but everyone is here to spread awareness and help out," Dakota said.

Abby Smith also participated in the race with her team Seda College.

She described youth homelessness as one of the "challenges" facing youth in the NT.

"There's quite a lot of homelessness ... and that's hard for them up here," she said.

Ms Smith said young Territorians also faced drug and alcohol use and mental health challenges.

"This is a really good way to come out and support that kind of thing ... this is a good get together," she said.

A team of five boys who called themselves the "Sanderson Storms" said they were glad to be a part of the event and interact with the other teams.

Tytainui Stratton said the race was a good opportunity to meet people from other schools and educational institutes.

"[There are] a few good academies around here ... just gotta meet them, say hello and let yourself be known," Tytainui said.

Mr Pugh said in addition to raising awareness about homelessness, another aim of the event was interactions like that.

"Today is not just about addressing young people who are experiencing homelessness themselves .... it's also about letting their mates know - where you go for help - because that's who you need," he said.

"Most young people get their advice from their mates."

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Darwin teenagers couch surf - literally - all for a good cause

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It didn't take long for Dakota Bigalla to remember that her mode of transport - a couch on wheels - didn't have any brakes. The Northern Territory has the highest rate of homelessness in Australia Anglicare says some young people are spending 70 per cent of their income on housing The event is held to mark National Youth Homelessness Matters Day "Everyone is pretty fast ...

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4/18 The guitarist who saved hundreds of people on a sinking cruise liner - BBC Africa

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4/18 The guitarist who saved hundreds of people on a sinking cruise liner - BBC Africa

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When the luxury liner Oceanos started taking on water in rough seas during a voyage around the coast of South Africa in 1991, musician Moss Hills and his colleagues suddenly found themselves responsible for everyone on board.

It was during dinner that Moss Hills began to realise just how severe the storm was. The ship's waiters, normally completely adept at carrying drinks and food without spilling anything, were struggling. Moss, a guitarist from Zimbabwe working on board the cruise liner alongside his wife Tracy, a bass player, had never seen the waiters dropping trays before.

Earlier that day, gale-force winds and heavy rains had delayed sailing for the final leg of the cruise towards Durban several times. But with no sign of conditions improving, the captain eventually decided to lift anchor and the Oceanos, with 581 guests and crew on board, sailed off into 40-knot winds and 9m-high (30ft) waves.

Moss and Tracy, both in their 30s, would usually host parties up on the pool deck as the ship sailed away from port. But that day the party had been moved indoors, and Moss braced his body while he played his guitar, trying to keep his balance as the ship pitched and rolled.

"The storm just got worse and worse," Moss says.

At dinner, Tracy - who her husband describes as unflappable - decided to go to their cabin to organise an emergency bag, just in case.

"Off she went," Moss says, "and suddenly - boom - all the lights went out."

When none of the ship's officers appeared to issue instructions, Moss, who was not easily frightened, began to feel uneasy.

"You're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, in the dark of night, in a terrible storm," he says, "I felt this tightening in my stomach."

When small, dim emergency lights came on, Moss went up to the lounge to check on the musical instruments on stage. Microphone and cymbal stands were strewn about. Then he suddenly realised he couldn't hear the constant, throbbing, background noise of the engines. The ship had lost power and was slowing down.

Soon the 153m (502ft) Oceanos was drifting sideways onto the crashing waves.

The ship, says Moss, was getting hammered.

Anxious guests began pouring into the lounge. Pot plants, ashtrays, and chairs were sliding around, and people had to move from their seats to sit on the floor as the ship lurched wildly from one side to the other, port to starboard.

About an hour passed, and the mood in the lounge grew tense. Moss grabbed an acoustic guitar and began singing with some of the other entertainers to try to keep people calm. But as time stretched on, Moss noticed that the ship was heeling - no longer coming back to a level position when it was being thrown about in the storm.

"Something bad is happening," Moss said to Tracy, "I'm going to try and find out what's going on."

Hear Moss tell his story in a new series of Life Changing on 6 April 2022 at 0900 on BBC Radio 4 - or listen to the podcast.

Hanging on to the handrails, Moss and another entertainer, Julian, a magician from Yorkshire, made their way through the darkness below deck. They could hear excited voices speaking many different languages. Officers were running around, some were carrying bags, some had life jackets on, and some were wet.

"Everyone was pretty wild-eyed and panicked-looking," Moss says. "We were trying to ask, 'What's happening?' but it was like we didn't exist."

Julian and Moss continued down to the engine room - the lowest part of the ship.

"We were way below the waterline, in the dark, on our own, and there was no-one there," Moss says. "That would never, ever happen, even when you're docked."

The thick, metal doors which acted as a safety barrier by preventing water moving from one compartment of a ship to another in the event of flooding, were tightly closed.

"But it sounded like there was a large body of water sloshing about behind those watertight doors," Moss says.

Back up in the lounge, there had still not been any announcements about what was going on. Moss found the cruise director who said the captain had told her they were going to have to abandon the ship.

"Then we found out that one lifeboat had already gone with a lot of the crew and senior officers on it," he says.

Moss and the others had no idea how to evacuate a cruise ship, nor how to launch the lifeboats which hung high above the deck along each of the ship's sides, but there was nobody more qualified around to do it.

One by one, they began lowering the starboard side lifeboats down to the deck. They didn't know how to keep them steady as people got on, so Moss improvised by standing with one leg on the deck of the ship and the other on a lifeboat.

But each time the ship rolled to starboard, Moss would have to jump back onto the Oceanos before the lifeboat swung away, opening up a gap of a couple of metres, and then swung back, smashing with such force against the ship's hull that bits of it came splintering off.

Each heaving lifeboat, now with as many as 90 people in it, many screaming in fear, would then be lowered down to the sea on cables. But Moss had no idea how to start the engines or even where the keys were.

"We'd let them go, off into the night, and they would just drift away into the pounding waves," he says. "The people in the lifeboats had a torturous time - they were getting deluged in spray, it was cold and completely dark, but we just had to carry on until all of the starboard side lifeboats were launched."

By now the Oceanos was taking in more and more water and heeling markedly to its starboard side. Launching the remaining lifeboats on the port side safely was near impossible.

Instead of being lowered down to the water once loaded up with people, the lifeboats would cling to the side of the ship until the next big wave rolled in, tipping the ship enough to let them dangle freely.

"And then gravity would suddenly drop the lifeboat three or four metres (13 ft) in one go, almost tipping people out into the open water, it was horrific," Moss says.

Eventually, he realised it was too dangerous to continue.

"In the effort to try and rescue people we were possibly going to kill them," Moss says.

And time was running out.

Unable to launch any more lifeboats, but with hundreds of people still in need of rescue, Moss and others made their way up to the ship's bridge - where they assumed they would find the captain and the remaining senior officers - to ask what to do next.

"We looked inside, but there was no one there," Moss says. "That's when we realised - it's just us."

Orangey-red lights blinked in the darkness, but Moss had no idea what most of the equipment was for, never mind how it worked. They took turns trying to use the radio to send an SOS.

"I was calling, 'Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!' and just waiting for somebody to answer," Moss says.

A big, deep, rich voice eventually replied. "Yes, what is your Mayday?"

Relieved, Moss explained that he was on the cruise ship Oceanos and that it was sinking.

"OK. How long have you got left to float?"

"I don't know - we've got the starboard railings in the water, we're rolling around, we've taken on a huge amount of water," Moss said. "We still have at least 200 people on board."

"OK. What is your position?"

"We're probably about halfway between the port of East London and Durban."

"No, no, no, what are your coordinates?"

Moss had no idea what their coordinates were.

"Well, I'm not a rank - I'm a guitarist."

"What are you doing on the bridge?"

"Well, there's nobody else here."

"Who's on the bridge with you?"

"So I said, 'It's me, my wife - the bass player, we've got a magician here...'"

Moss was put in contact with two small ships that were close to the Oceanos. They told Moss to find the captain and get him onto the bridge. But Moss had no idea where he was.

"I knew he wouldn't be down below because we were sinking," he says. "I was making regular checks to see where the water level was, and one deck below us was flooded."

Eventually, Moss found the captain, right at the back of the ship, smoking in the darkness. Moss explained that they needed his help - urgently.

"He was just looking at me, wide-eyed and vacant, saying, 'It's not necessary, it's not necessary,'" Moss says.

"I think he was in deep, deep shock."

The two ships close to the Oceanos had only one lifeboat each, so there was little they could do to help. They shared the sinking vessel's coordinates with the South African authorities who began to organise an air rescue mission.

As the storm continued to batter the ship, Moss and Tracy sat together in the near darkness, praying that help would arrive before it was too late.

"I think the ship is going to go down and it's very likely we're going to go down with it," Moss said to his wife.

He and Tracy had a 15-year-old daughter, Amber, who'd been on board the Oceanos for the holidays and disembarked just days earlier. Amber was now back at boarding school in South Africa.

"She can't lose both parents," Moss remembers saying. "Whatever we do, we've got to make sure at least one of us gets off."

More than three hours passed before the first rescue helicopter arrived and hovered above the ship.

Two navy divers were winched down to the Oceanos' deck. They said they needed help to get everyone off before the ship sank, and Moss was given a five-minute crash course on how to run a helicopter airlift.

"Remember, the harness needs to be quite tight under people's underarms," the navy diver told him. "Make sure you get it right because otherwise they'll tip upside down and fall out - you'll kill them on the deck. Do two at a time or else we're going to run out of time. OK? Go."

One navy diver went to organise the helicopter rescue at the rear of the ship and Tracy and Moss were to organise a second at the front. But as the ship sank ever lower beneath the waves, people began jumping off the steeply pitching deck in panic and a rigid inflatable had to be launched into the churning sea to rescue them.

Dangling in mid-air from the helicopter cable, people who Moss was trying to save were being blown against parts of the ship by the strong winds as they were winched into the sky. There was no way of knowing how badly hurt they were and Moss momentarily lost his nerve. But with so many people still on board, he realised he had no choice but to keep going.

In total, five helicopters joined the rescue mission, shuttling back and forth, carrying 12 people at a time to safety as dawn broke and the darkness lifted.

Drained and exhausted, Moss and Tracy were among the last to be strapped into harnesses.

"As we were hovering above the ship it really hit me," Moss says, "I could see the Oceanos was in a critical situation. We could see waves breaking over the bow where we had been rescuing people."

When the helicopter carrying Moss touched down on the grass, cruise passengers ran towards him singing and cheering, and reaching out to hug him.

"I started to choke up and sob," Moss says, "and then I collapsed."

On 4 August 1991, about 45 minutes after the last person on board had been airlifted to safety, the Oceanos slipped away below the water. Everyone who had been put into lifeboats was rescued by passing ships and remarkably no lives were lost.

Moss and Tracy, who now live in Liverpool, continued working as cruise ship entertainers for many years. Even now, three decades later, Tracy prefers not to talk about the sinking or dwell on how close they all came to losing their lives.

But Moss, who's been asked about the Oceanos many, many times, finds it cathartic to talk about. He looks back on what happened with great relief.

"I'm not invincible," Moss says, "but if I can get through that, I can get through anything."

There was an inquiry in Greece which found the captain of the Oceanos and four other senior officers negligent in the ship's sinking.

All images courtesy of Moss Hills, unless otherwise stated.

Listen to Moss Hills on Life Changing - producer Thomas Harding Assinder

Do you have an extraordinary story to tell? Email lifechanging@bbc.co.uk

In early 2018, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors - which is why, on 20 January, Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people. Vasileios explains how he survived.

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The guitarist who saved hundreds of people on a sinking cruise liner

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When the luxury liner Oceanos started taking on water in rough seas during a voyage around the coast of South Africa in 1991, musician Moss Hills and his colleagues suddenly found themselves responsible for everyone on board. It was during dinner that Moss Hills began to realise just how severe the storm was.

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Nigerian environmental activists are trying to clean up Lagos "one community at a time".

Jennifer Uchendu leads a team of volunteers that pick up rubbish and remove waste from gutters in the city.

She told BBC Minute that the task is frustrating because people in Lagos don't care about the environment.
Video journalist: Dan Ikpoyi.

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Nigerian environmental activists are trying to clean up Lagos "one community at a time". Jennifer Uchendu leads a team of volunteers that pick up rubbish and remove waste from gutters in the city. She told BBC Minute that the task is frustrating because people in Lagos don't care about the environment.

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Nigeria’s Spider-Man fights for a cleaner society

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Jonathan Olakunle is fighting for a cleaner society in Osogbo, Nigeria.

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4/11 - The young couple restoring the lost treasures of Australia's desert - ABC News

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4/11 - The young couple restoring the lost treasures of Australia's desert - ABC News

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Meet the young couple living in one of the most-remote areas in Australia, all in the name of helping to bring our endangered animals back from the brink of extinction.

The Fort Grey homestead sits in one of the most-remote corners of New South Wales.

From the air, it is a tiny speck of human habitation in a vast, open landscape of rolling red sand dunes and rocky terrain.

Red earth runs for thousands of kilometres.

From the homestead, the Strzelecki desert stretches as far as the eye can see.

They call this Corner Country, tucked up where the state's borders with South Australia and Queensland meet.

It's six hours' drive north from Broken Hill and the nearest neighbours are 30km away.

Driving through Sturt National Park

Four-year-old Isla and nine-month-old Zac might be the most remote children in New South Wales.

To see other children once a month at playgroup means a 300km round trip. An excursion to the supermarket is a 12-hour journey there and back.

It's hard to imagine a tougher, more unforgiving place to work and live, but Isla and Zac's parents have grown to love it.

Dr Rebecca West and her husband, Dr Reece Pedler, are both ecologists on an urgent mission to push back against the extinction crisis.

To set up a home here, Rebecca and Reece have had to sacrifice proximity to their families back in Adelaide and the ordinary luxury of a coffee shop or a meal out.

But, for Reece, the "dead heart" of Australia is very much alive: "There is excitement. There's just so much incredible history." Their home, Fort Grey, was the explorer Charles Sturt's exploration depot in the 1840s.

When Rebecca first came to corner country, she remembers: "The bit that interested me the most was that you couldn't see a tree on the horizon. I found that fascinating."

As an extrovert, she wondered how she would cope with the isolation.

When she first walked into the homestead, it was full of dust.

"I remember thinking, hmm, am I going to be able to live here?"

But they came for a higher purpose: To put something back that had vanished and bring the desert country back to health by reintroducing locally extinct mammals that had not been seen here for more than a century.

"There are species that have gone extinct on our watch and we need to make sure that doesn't happen again," Rebecca says.

Australia is "extinction central", zoo manager Dr Chris West says. "More mammals have died out in Australia over the last 200 years than anywhere else in the world,."

For Richard Kingsford, professor of environment science at UNSW Sydney, "Our extinction crisis is basically 30 seconds to midnight. We've lost about 100 native species and 34 mammal species."

'We'll never get the landscape back without the animals'

Fort Grey, formerly a sheep and cattle property, is now part of Sturt National Park and is the research headquarters for the Wild Deserts project, lead by Professor Kingsford.

The 10-year project is a partnership between National Parks and Wildlife, Ecological Horizons and UNSW Sydney.

It has the backing of legendary conservationist and family friend Jane Goodall who says it, "aims to repopulate the remote and beautiful Sturt Desert with native animals that once roamed free, but are now rare and endangered".

This game-changing venture, she adds, "is a ray of hope" in a race against time.

Traditional owner Leroy Johnson explains that, before European settlement, the Sturt National Park would have been "exploding with life".

"My people would have been burning off some country, the hills would have been lush with vegetation and we would have had all types of animals," he tells Australian Story.

The Malyangapa and Wongkumara were just two local tribes who lived sustainably off the land.

"More mammals have died out in Australia over the last 200 years than anywhere else in the world."

Overgrazing by early settlers moving into the area with sheep and cattle caused the land to decline and was catastrophic for the native animals. Settlers introduced rabbits that decimated everything in their path and predators such as cats and foxes wiped out the smaller mammals.

"Cats and foxes eat things that are bite-size," Professor Kingsford explains, "and so many of our middle-sized marsupials were really lunch, breakfast [and] dinner for these animals.

"We need these native animals back, because they dig huge burrows for their food, so they're turning over all of that soil, restoring the desert.

"We'll never really get this landscape to function the way it's meant to be until we get these animals back."

Childhood of elephants, giraffes and snakes

Animals were always a big part of Rebecca West's childhood in the UK.

When she was 12, her father took on the job as director of Chester Zoo, near Liverpool. Chris West would bring his five children to work some days.

"They helped wash the elephants. They cleaned out giraffes. They saw animals being born. They fed the snakes," he recalls.

"Becky was in an attic bedroom and that became full of giant moths, scorpions, millipedes. And the crowning glory for her was a leaf-cutter ant colony."

Her childhood experiences made her want to work with animals and she completed a zoology degree in the UK.

The rest of her family moved to Australia for Chris to take on the chief executive role of the Adelaide Zoo.

On a visit out to see her parents, Rebecca was offered a PhD studying the reintroduction of rock wallabies into the fenced reserves of the APY lands below Alice Springs.

"I swapped green, grey and rainy England for red dust, dry, outback Australia. I felt like I was at home, even though I was very far from home," Rebecca says.

Reece Pedler grew up on his family's farm in the mid-north of South Australia and was also introduced to the ways of animals by his parents.

Both were strongly involved in conservation: His dad, Lynn Pedler, is one of the country's top ornithologists and his mother, Janet, has devoted her life to conservation and land management.

"My sister and I used to spend a lot of time out in the bush on scientific surveys with my parents."

When he graduated from university, he took a job in the South Australian outback at Roxbury Downs on various ecology projects, where he became fascinated with waterbirds.

Reece did his PhD on banded stilts, tracking them across the inland salt lakes that form after rainfall.

Rebecca and Reece first met at a mammal society conference in 2012.

When she arrived to take a job at Roxbury Downs in 2014, he offered her a spare room in his house while she looked for a place to live.

"I moved in," Rebecca recalls, "and then a month later, I just moved rooms and we never moved out."

They married in 2017. "She had fallen in love, not just with an Australian, but with the landscape, the nature, that spirit of the country and its ancient echoes," her dad says.

A dry, dusty few years in crippling drought

The couple heard the Wild Deserts project was on the cards and decided to sell themselves as a double act, Reece the project coordinator and Rebecca the project's ecologist.

They signed on in 2016, said goodbye to their families and moved to Fort Grey a year later.

The first part of the project involved building two, huge 20 square-kilometre paddocks they call "exclosures" - special, 2-metre-high fences with a floppy wire overhang to stop feral cats and foxes from climbing in.

Reece and his sheep dog, Peg, also tracked and removed every rabbit. That completed, they were "ready and raring" to reintroduce seven species of native mammals into the exclosures.

But, as Rebecca would discover, "the outback has a harsh side and a beautiful side".

The drought that descended towards the end of 2017 meant there was nothing for the animals to eat. It would become one of the worst droughts in Australia's history and make the couple wonder if they could keep going.

They couldn't bring the animals into a dust bowl where there was no food or water for them. The existing animals were dying.

Over the next three years, Rebecca says, "It just got progressively drier and drier until it looked like we were almost living on Mars".

"Watching everything just slowly die around you - the birds in the garden, the kangaroos, it got pretty hard for a while," she recalls.

"I thought I was going to have this baby in the middle of a sand dune!"

In addition to a phone line and satellite internet that frequently drops out, temperatures in summer can sit at 45 degrees Celsius, making it impossible to work outside beyond the early morning.

When things break, there is not much chance of getting an electrician or a plumber out there. The couple were always using YouTube and working things out on their own.

Four months after moving to "the middle of nowhere", Rebecca became pregnant.

"As a first-time pregnancy, there was quite a bit of concern about where we were and what might happen if something went wrong," she recalls.

Ultrasounds were a 900km round trip to Broken Hill. "Bec was quite nervous at times about some things," Reece says. "And I was trying to reassure her when I wasn't really very sure myself."

She had her first contractions during a rabbit eradication.

"I thought I was going to have this baby in the middle of a sand dune."

When they brought newborn Isla home, there was a heatwave, with weeks of temperatures in the 40s. They were struggling.

The drought stretched on through 2018 and 2019. Dust storms made it impossible to get things done.

"You have to retreat back to the house and watch everything just being obliterated," Reece remembers.

If it had gone on much longer they might have had to abandon the project.

Reece recalls the tap water was so hot, "we'd run the bath in the morning and leave it to sit for 8 or 9 hours so that the little temperature sensor that we put in there said it was cool enough for the baby to be in".

"We felt sort of trapped here," he says.

Rebecca was overwhelmed: "Oh my goodness, 'What are we doing with such a small child in such a remote place?'

"It really exacerbated that feeling of being remote and isolated and only having each other. I really wished my mum was closer."

But then came some relief. The drought finally broke in March 2020 with drenching rains.

They ran outside and jumped in the puddles.

Isla was two years old and it was the first time she had ever seen rain.

"She started crying because it was a big thunderstorm and there was heavy rain. I think it was a bit too much for her," Rebecca remembers.

The desert was transformed.

"You just get everything breeding, everything flowering, the smell of the plants flowering and the noise of the birds can be deafening," says Associate Professor Katherine Moseby, an ecologist and UNSW research scientist working on the project.

Professor Kingsford agrees: "The place is just bursting, everything is going off. The birds come from everywhere, the budgies sort of descend, clouds of them. And reptiles and small mammals just start taking off in these huge numbers."

Setting their 'babies' free into the desert

Now that food could grow, the time had finally come to restore the native animals to the desert. The first 10 bilbies arrived in their own charter flight from Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo.

Attaching transmitters to the animals so they could track them later, Rebecca felt like a worried mother.

"Had we set up everything ready for them? Were they going to survive? I had a sort of stress and nervous tummy."

National Parks manager and traditional owner Leroy Johnson did a smoking ceremony.

He was shaking with emotion when he released the first bilby.

"It was very magical," he says, "took my breath away and, for me, [it] means the land is healing itself."

For Rebecca and Reece, releasing the animals was a peak in their careers and time for a high five. This moment had seemed so far away for so long.

The first three of seven animals have now been released: the greater bilby, the crest-tailed mulgaras and the Shark Bay bandicoots.

All the animals were chosen, Rebecca says, not just because they were locally extinct, but also because they have really important roles to play in the desert ecosystem.

"We actually call them ecosystem engineers," she explains. "The bilbies and bandicoots dig and turn over the soil, creating burrows where rain can infiltrate and seeds can find a safe germinating spot."

There are now small mammal tracks in the sand dunes that might not have been seen for 150 years.

All the animals are healthy and putting on weight. The females have babies in their pouches.

"Suddenly we had the next generation of bilbies and the first wild desert bilbies, which was unimaginably exciting," says Tom Hunt, a field ecologist on the project.

After releasing the first ones, Leroy likes to think of them as his grandchildren.

Rebecca and Reece have also had a second baby of their own. Both Isla, and now baby Zac, accompany their parents on field work.

"The program is working. The population is growing. The project so far in the first five years has been an enormous success," Rebecca says.

Saving native animals beyond the fences

But the reality is the Wild Deserts team can't fence off the whole of Australia.

"Trying to get animals beyond fences is really like the holy grail of threatened species conservation in Australia," ecologist Professor Moseby says.

"This landscape won't function the way it's meant to until we get these animals back."

To this end, they have created The Wild Training Zone, a 100-square-kilometre area where they are training the animals to live alongside low densities of cats and foxes.

It's hoped the native species can be "trained up" to be wary of the predators and develop strategies to protect themselves.

"We need to equip them with the skills to live with cats and foxes in the landscape. Hopefully, we can find ways to get our animals beyond the fences and back across the whole Strzelecki Desert and beyond."

Rebecca often feels "mother guilt" about raising Isla and Zac in such a remote place.

"But then I think, 'Wow, what a childhood'. They are one of the few children [who] would know what a lot of these Australian native species are that are really important to our biodiversity."

Through all the adversity and the hardship of running a huge project, Rebecca says she and Reece have grown together and as parents.

"I reckon that both of us would be able to run something like the Olympics Opening Ceremony or run an airport," Rebecca laughs.

"But when conflict arises you can't just go and have a wine with your girlfriends and unload.

"It builds and strengthens a relationship because you can't have those moments where you walk away and come back a bit later. You have actually got to face it and deal with it."

"When you sit in the Wild Deserts paddock late at night and you let a bandicoot out of a bag, you think, 'I've put something back that wasn't here. This species is now going to be surviving in this area because that's what we've done as a team and as a project'."

The team have four more species to introduce: the golden bandicoot, the stick-nest rat, burrowing bettongs and a formidable carnivore, the Western quoll. They hope to have them all populating the desert by 2026.

As a custodian of the land, Leroy Johnson is overjoyed that the species that once thrived here are now back.

"It is very important that our land is healthy," he says.

"We're just custodians of the land and what's on the land. We won't be here for long. So it's important we leave them for our next generation."
Watch Australian Story's 'Into the Wild', 8:00pm, on ABCTV, iview and Youtube.
Credits

Producer: Vanessa Gorman

Feature writer: Susan Chenery

Digital producer: Megan Mackander

Editor: Matt Henry

Photos: Tom Hunt, Vanessa Gorman, Oli Aylen

Video: UNSW Sydney, Australian Story: Quentin Davis, supplied: Reece Pedler and Rebecca West

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'Not on our watch': The young family living in the middle of nowhere to bring our animals back from the brink

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Meet the young couple living in one of the most-remote areas in Australia, all in the name of helping to bring our endangered animals back from the brink of extinction. The Fort Grey homestead sits in one of the most-remote corners of New South Wales.

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Digital Stories of Immigration - Culture Victoria

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Extraordinary digital stories of migration, from Post-war Europe to emerging com...

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Throughout history stories have been used to illuminate, to educate, to recount, to challenge and to engage. Every individual's life experience is unique and dynamic, particularly for those of us who have journeyed far from our homes to establish new lives in foreign countries.
Australia's migrant history has enabled us to develop into the strong nation we are today. Personal stories and anecdotes are an important opportunity to enrich the public record and to embellish our history. Immigration Place Australia encourages the collection of immigrant stories. By giving a voice to our immigrants, we hope to record significant experiences with increased depth and nuance. We envision an opportunity to connect generations and to build community via a comprehensive record of the distinctive immigration footprint of Australia.

IPA's mission is to continue to collect stories until completion of the construction of Immigration Place in Canberra. At that time, subject to the agreement of the National Archives of Australia those stories will be transferred to their website - Destination Australia.
We encourage you to record your stories or those of your ancestors. Share your story now

From a small Mancunian child I always considered that the turnstiles of life swept my family through from a life of dirty polluted rivers, and unimaginable unemployment and the certainty of poverty. This had we not immigrated to Australia in the ...
Marie Constance Margaret Davidson and the Cunningham family., England, 1966!

REASONS FOR LEAVING OUR HOMELAND:

Robert's great, great, grandfather William was born in 1783 and became, like other generations of Scarletts way back to 1610, a tenant farmer in County Fermanagh Ireland on land no bigger than 1/8 of an acre.

Maisie's...
Robert and Maisie Scarlett, England, 1952

REASON FOR LEAVING HOMELAND.

I was 24 when I left England, with my then husband of a year, to move to Australia. He had a friend who had already immigrated to Sydney who loved it and we thought we would like the lifestyle - it would be great to get ...
Patricia June Morgan, England, 1967

Bohumil's Story

Reason For Leaving Homeland:
Bohumil was born at Sekule in 1930 within the then Communist Czechoslovakia. He was the youngest of 3 children and was only eight when Europe was engulfed by World War II. Sekule is a small town not...
Bohumil Kopunic, Czechoslovakia, 1952

Editor: With some stories I don't feel that editing is appropriate - this is one such story!
Berislav Babic ( known as Bery ) escaped from the former Yugoslavia with 2 friends (to avoid having to go into the army).

They stole a boat and with...
Bery Babic, Yugoslavia, 1949

Reason for leaving homeland

There was to many riots and Australia has more opportunities

About the Journey

We went and moved to Scotland then we moved to USA then Australia

Impressions on Arrival

I was relived that we know we are safe and at home...
Brodie Owen, England, 2008

Town/City: Kangaroo Valley, NSW

First Name: Otto

Surname : Abbott- Oerdoegh (...rdög)

Country of Origin: Hungary

Date of Birth : 1920

Year of Arrival in Australia: 1957

Story : Veterinarian, beef and dairy cattle diseases specialist and pioneer...
Otto Oerdoegh (...rdög), Hungary, 1957

James Phillips was born in Herefordshire 1823 to parents James and Ann.

His father was an agricultural labourer,

siblings included Mary Ann 1820,

*Richard 1826,

*John 1833,

*Enoch 1835,

Hannah 1840,

and Job 1844.

All or most of their baptisms took...
James & Mary Phillips, England, 1853

Edward Thomas Oldfield flew out to Australia during the RAF years he served, loved the climate & people & had many fond memories when he was based in QLD near the Gold Coast.

Afters some years of service & marrying Eileen Mary Miles ...
Edward Oldfield, Wales UK, 1958

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The Government sets up a roundtable to discuss rising fertiliser prices.

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Although Australia remains part of the Commonwealth, the future role of the monarchy has been a recurring issue in politics. An ageing population, pressure on infrastructure, and environmental concerns such as climate change are some of the long-term challenges facing the country.

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Provides an overview of Australia, including key dates and facts about this Pacific country.

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The government of Gough Whitlam is plagued by resignations and the blocking of its budget by the upper house of the parliament. In an unprecedented move, the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismisses the government. A caretaker administration under Malcolm Fraser is installed, and goes on to win the general election.

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A chronology of key events in the history of Australia

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Here are Dreamtime stories from Aboriginal Australia:

The Rainbow Serpent

At the beginning of the Dreamtime, the earth was flat and dry and empty. There were no trees, no rivers, no animals and no grass. Then the Rainbow Serpent started to move...
Read the Rainbow Serpent here.
Tiddalick the Frog

Tiddalick the Frog tells the story of a greedy frog who drank all the water in the billabong and how the other animals got their water back.
Read Tiddalick the Frog here.
Aboriginal Creation Story

All over Australia, Dreaming stories tell of the ancestor spirits who created the land and everything on it. This story, from the Ngiyaampaa of western New South Wales, tells how the Darling River was created, long ago.
Read the Aboriginal Creation Story here.
Eaglehawk and Crow

Long ago, many of the birds and animals were in human form. This story is about two warriors from the Ngiyaampaa people of western New South Wales. It is told for us here by Aunty Beryl Carmichael.

Emu and the Jabiru

From the Marrkula clan in Arnhem Land comes this story of greed between two brothers-in-law and the creation of the Emu and the Jabiru. It also offers an insight into the life of the Gapuwiayk people.

Emu and the Jabiru Story Explanation

Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory, is rich in Dreaming stories, art and dance. Here, Bangana Wunungmurra explains some of the background to Aboriginal, or Yolngu, life. He also discusses the importance of land within Yolngu culture and of the role that education plays in encouraging respect for other cultures.

Gulaga

One of the younger storytellers featured on the site, Warren Foster, tells the story behind the creation of two mountains and an island. Warren is from the Yuin-Monaro people, on the far south coast of New South Wales and the main mountain-Gulaga-holds deep significance for his people.

How the water got to the plains

When travelling through the arid regions of Australia, Aboriginal people would move from waterhole to waterhole. The Butchulla people of Fraser Island have a story that tells how the water first got to the plains, and it is told for us here by Olga Miller.

How the water got to the plains story explanation

Olga Miller and her sister first heard the Dreaming stories of her people - the Butchulla - on Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast. Here she gives the background to the tale of how fresh water first reached the arid plains of central Queensland, and recalls childhood holidays by the beaches and rainforest of Fraser Island.

Illawarra and the five islands

When Koala, Starfish and Whale were still people, they shared an island together. But a shortage of food led to a fight between them. Barry Moore tells the story to a group of children and adults participating in one of his Bush Tours.

Koockard (Goanna)

When two young boys go camping by the river with their Uncle, they learn more than they bargained for. With a twist in its tail, the story of Koockard, the river Goanna, comes from western New South Wales and is told for us here by Aunty Beryl Carmichael. This is a story of the Ngiyaampaa people.

Min-na-wee (Why the crocodile rolls)

Peace and harmony are essential in any community. Find out what happens when someone is determined to cause trouble. The story of Min-Na-Wee and why the crocodile rolls contains a powerful message for youngsters about the effects of their behaviour on others.

Min-na-wee Story Explanation

Frank Martin's grandfather, Jiller-rii, knew a great deal about 'traditional' Aboriginal life. He knew where to find kangaroos and turkeys and he also passed on his Dreaming stories. Here, Frank Martin gives us the background to the story of Min-Na-Wee and why the crocodile rolls. The story is from the GWINI people who come from the Broome area in Western Australia.

Red Waratah

Barry Moore conducts bushwalks, bush tucker tours and storytelling at Wreck Bay on the south coast of New South Wales. This dreatime story was filmed around the campfire, with a group of children and adults. The story tells of a time when all the Waratahs were white and how they became red, back in the Dreamtime.

The Two Wise Men And the Seven Sisters

A creation story from the WONG-GU-THA, people of the desert near Ooldea, South Australia. Discover how the hills and valleys, the rivers and oceans were made and how the earth was beautified. Find out why the desert people have such respect for the stars and the universe.

The Two Wise Men and the Seven Sisters story explanation

Many Dreaming stories are associated with specific objects and landmarks. For Josie Boyle, there is a real sadness that the landscape around the area where the Seven Sisters spent their time on Earth has been changed so drastically. A reminder of the importance of storytelling in keeping the culture alive.

Thukeri

In this story from the lower River Murray area of South Australia, two fishermen are delighted with their huge catch of fish. The trouble begins when they refuse to share it. A cautionary tale about greed, from the Ngarrindjeri people.

Thukeri story explanation

Veena Gollan is active in keeping alive the Dreaming stories of the Ngarrindjeri people of Lake Alexandrina, South Australia. Here she gives us the background to the Thukeri story and outlines the importance of teaching the stories in schools.

Toonkoo and Ngaardi

A creation dreamtime story from the Yuin-Monaro people of the far south coast of New South Wales. Warren Foster relates how the rivers and creeks were formed, where the boomerang originated and the origin of the red waratah. The Yuin-Monaro people operate a cultural centre near Narooma and this story was filmed nearby, on the shores of Wallaga Lake.

Umbarra

Back in the old days, when the people used to live around here, a lad named Merriman had his totem called Umbarra the black duck.

Why the stories are told

The YUIN-MONARO people have lived on the far south coast of New South Wales for thousands of years. Today, there is a Koori Village and Cultural centre based around Wallaga Lake. Warren Foster wants to keep his culture alive and here he explains the significance of Dreamtime storytelling. Warren represents the next generation of storytellers, passing on the stories of his people.

Why the stories are told
By Aunty Beryl Carmichael
Aunty Beryl Carmichael comes from Ngiyaampaa country in western New South Wales. She is a custodian of many Ngiyaampaa stories and incorporates these into her work at Broken Hill and Menindee, where she runs camps for Aboriginal youngsters. Here she talks about the importance of storytelling in educating Aboriginal children.
Read Why the stories are told by Aunty Beryl Carmichael here.

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Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories - Dreamtime

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Here are Dreamtime stories from Aboriginal Australia:

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3/1-3 Delivering a Baby amid Floods - ABC News

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3/1-3 Delivering a Baby amid Floods - ABC News

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Krystle Henry was due to give birth at the Mater Mothers' Hospital in Brisbane - but 24 hours before the scheduled caesarean, she woke to her Taringa home being surrounded by floodwaters.

A man called Rob, who lived three doors down from Krystle Henry, helped get her to the hospital to give birth

Obstetrician who delivered baby Angus said his birth had been a welcome news amid the south-east Queensland flood tragedy

Angus's father said he was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers

She and her partner Matt Bridges started planning for a home birth, when a good Samaritan from three doors down ferried Ms Henry to dry land on his motorised kayak.

At 7:15am yesterday, the new parents welcomed baby Angus into the world - safely in hospital, as expected.

"It got a little bit crazy," Mr Bridges said, only hours after his son's dramatic entry into the world.

"I didn't want to put Krystle in floodwater. It would have been up to her head. She would have had to swim.

"She was nearly at her full-term - 39 weeks and four days. We were preparing to have the baby at home if we had to.

"We had conversations about where we would set Krystle up to make sure she was comfortable."

Pregnant woman kayaked to safety in Brisbane floods, delivers baby boy

Obstetrician Paul Conaghan said Angus's birth had been welcome good news amid the horror of south-east Queensland's ongoing floods.

"The mum said to me she'd spent a fair bit of time on the couch in her flood-bound unit block in tears, wondering how it was all going to work out," Dr Conaghan said.

"But everything's great, everything's really good. The caesarean went really well. Bub's really well.

"They're all very excited. I think more than anything, they're just really relieved.

"It all worked out in the end."

'I'll have to buy him a thank you gift'

The couple, both in their late 30s, had initially phoned the State Emergency Service (SES) for assistance on Monday morning.

They were put on a rescue list, but because Ms Henry was not yet in labour - and her situation was not life-threatening - the pair were not considered an immediate priority.

After a man they only know as Rob paddled Ms Henry to safety, he went back and took Mr Bridges's mother Deb to the townhouse to look after the couple's two-year-old daughter Olive.

Ms Henry was met by her partner's father, who took her to the hospital, and Mr Bridges joined her shortly after with the bags.

Obstetrician Paul Conaghan says the "bub" is going "really well".(Supplied )

Mr Bridges said he had been touched by the number of people who had rallied around his family at their time of need.

"They were happy to drop everything," he said.

"They did whatever they needed to do to help us out.

"It's a really positive thing. It's awesome."

He hopes to get to know his neighbour better, once floodwaters recede and he can return to his home.

For now, the helpful stranger is listed in his phone as 'Rob Kayak'.

"I'll have to buy him a thank you gift for all his help," Mr Bridges said.

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Krystle was preparing to have a baby when the floodwaters arrived - a stranger on a kayak came to her rescue

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Krystle Henry was due to give birth at the Mater Mothers' Hospital in Brisbane - but 24 hours before the scheduled caesarean, she woke to her Taringa home being surrounded by floodwaters.

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3/4 Kindness in Flooded Queensland - ABC News

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3/4 Kindness in Flooded Queensland - ABC News

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Darling Downs farmers Jamie Rother and Caroline Azria are no strangers to what Mother Nature can dish out.

"Over the past few years we've had floods, hail, drought ... pretty much everything," Mr Rother said.

So when their truckload of produce destined for Brisbane markets couldn't make it due to floodwaters this week, they decided it was time for a random act of kindness - in fact, 2,000 random acts of kindness.

The sunflowers brightened up the hospital.(Facebook: St Vincents Hospital )

"We had 2,000 sunflower blooms destined for the markets and didn't want them to go to waste, so we went to local hospitals and aged care homes and handed them out," Mr Rother said.

He said it felt like the right thing to do during a disaster.

"Farmers go into farming with a purpose: to clothe people or feed people and, as flower farmers, our purpose is to spread joy to people," Mr Rother said.

"I remembered watching a film where a father visits his five-year-old daughter in the future and they talk about how there are times to buy, sell, or donate - this definitely felt like a time to donate."

It is the same sentiment that inspired Dee Davenport from Stanthorpe to load up her car with the things the Granite Belt is famous for when she drove to Brisbane to pick up family.

"I couldn't take an empty car knowing there were shortages of fruit and vegetables in Brisbane," she said.

Dee Davenport loaded her car with supplies before she drove to Brisbane.(Facebook: Dee Davenport )

"So I put a little post online asking what people needed and got some really good replies. I contacted some of our local stores and we were able to get a heap of donations of cleaning products, soaps, and rubber gloves, things like that."

And apples.

"Oh yes, it's the Apple and Grape Festival here this weekend, I visited Sam's [fruit and vegetable shop] on the way, and the car was very full of cleaning products, apples ... and beer!"

Ms Davenport operates the Granite Belt Brewery, and made sure to squeeze in some cold brews for the mud army.

"I was talking with people on the streets of Graceville, and they just wanted something fresh to eat while they're cleaning. They're working really hard. So here I was going around with apples, and they were all so thankful," she said.

"I've been getting a lot of messages about how amazing Stanthorpe apples are.

Sam Giacca in Stanthorpe says he was more than happy to help fill a load of fruit and vegetables headed for Brisbane.(ABC Rural: Lucy Cooper )

"They've got generators and small fridges, and they've all been gathering at knock-off time, and so I gave them some beers.

"So even though it's a disaster, it brings our communities much closer together, sharing food and drinks at the end of the day after a long day of cleaning."

Returning the favour

Ms Davenport said she was inspired by the help Brisbane offered her own community during the drought.

"We have accommodation at the brewery, and guests would come and visit and bring water and say 'we won't use your water while we're here'," she said.

"They'd give us bottled water, and say 'we brought extra for you'.

"It's just knowing that somebody is thinking of you, and they do a little thing to make you feel good. It just makes such a difference for your mental health."

Find more local news

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'Somebody is thinking of you': Queensland farming regions spread cheer during record floods

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Darling Downs farmers Jamie Rother and Caroline Azria are no strangers to what Mother Nature can dish out. "Over the past few years we've had floods, hail, drought ... pretty much everything," Mr Rother said.

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Musician Lyndsie Storer started out performing in pubs in the small outback city of Broken Hill, but is making a big name for herself in the Australian kids' music industry.

Lyndsie Storer's children's music career is taking off, with her second release in a row soaring to number one in the iTunes children's category

The singer-songwriter was inspired to write music for kids after her daughter was born

COVID-19 lockdowns also prompted her to begin writing books for young audiences

Her new song I Love You snagged the number one spot for children's music on the iTunes charts in late February, toppling Australian icons The Wiggles and their cover of Tame Impala's Elephant.

It's the second time a song of Ms Storer's has reached such heights, after I Found Happiness Today surpassed universal favourite Baby Shark last year.

She said her latest tune rose to the top within a few hours of its release.

"It's something that I definitely didn't expect to happen but it's such a good feeling, just to know that people are really enjoying my music," she said.

"I've had such a positive response and I've received videos of children singing my song.

"I'm doing something that I really love and to have other people love it as well has just been absolutely amazing."

Daughter an inspiration

The mother-of-one, who lives in Gol Gol, NSW, was inspired to delve into the world of children's music after the birth of her daughter Eden six years ago.

"I love sprinkling a bit of positivity and enjoyment in kids' lives, it's such a great experience," she said.

"I'm really into personal development and mindfulness."

The singer-songwriter admits it has been a long journey to finding her voice.

"I used to be ridiculously nervous," she said.

"If I wrote a song, the person listening to it would have to be in the next room so I could play it.

"Now I've turned that corner and music is my biggest passion, it feels like a real sense of achievement, like I've really conquered something," she said.

Mrs Storer says singing to her daughter Eden helped build her confidence as a musician.(Supplied: Lyndsie Storer )

Lockdown not all bad

Outside of music, Ms Storer is also an up-and-coming children's author.

She penned her first book, What Does It Mean To Be Grateful, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I think it was a good reminder because there was a lot going on in the world at that time, but I was feeling really grateful in myself for having everything I needed," she said.

"I wanted to remind children that sometimes things don't go to plan but there's always something to be grateful for."

Ms Storer's next book, about processing death, is due to be published in about a month's time.

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'It makes everything worthwhile': Outback mum tops iTunes children's song charts for the second time

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Musician Lyndsie Storer started out performing in pubs in the small outback city of Broken Hill, but is making a big name for herself in the Australian kids' music industry.

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When Dora Rögnvaldsdóttir's world darkened during the Black Summer bushfires on New Year's Eve, 2019, an idea came to her.

"Everybody was on tenterhooks. It was like we were celebrating New Year's Eve, but we weren't," says the sculptor from Nowra on the New South Wales south coast.

Tense and frustrated, she and her family listened to the radio for weather updates.

"We were just waiting for what was going to happen, you know, [with] ember attacks," says Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir, whose home would be spared from the flames.

Knowing that everyone on the south coast was going through the same thing, she decided to create something out of the experience.

"When the world went black, I felt empowered as a sculptor, a community artist and an educator that I could actually do something that really mattered for other people," Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir says.

"I wanted to do something really meaningful and powerful with no boundaries as to how many people I invited."

The result is Gateway.

The newly installed public sculpture in Ulladulla is the largest in the Shoalhaven region, both in size and participation, and has been a healing process, not just for Dora but for hundreds of people who took part in its creation.

Embedded in the artwork are more than 1,200 ceramics of native flora and fauna, created at public workshops she facilitated over 14 months.

"After the shock and destruction of the 2019/2020 bushfires I was moved to bring our community together to create a large-scale commemorative public sculpture," says Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir, who lives and works on Dharawal, Dhurga and Yuin country.

"So, how does one speak about the bushfires and then invite hundreds of people to be a part of it?"

A house of cards

Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir first sourced photographs from different communities in the Shoalhaven to incorporate their stories.

The images were then redrawn and cut into steel panels that were manufactured locally.

One of the 12 panels is dedicated to the ABC.

"This panel is about the person who decided to stay at home and defend their house, with a pet and a garden hose," Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir says.

"The plane [in the sculpture] has the fire retardant and he/she has the ABC transistor radio there, listening to whatever is happening."

Standing 3.7 metres high and each weighing about 350 kilograms, Gateway's three towers represent the wind.

"They go together like a house of cards, basically," says Marcus Groom, Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir's husband, who has been working by her side since the project's inception.

"After Dora made the first full-scale maquette of the sculptures in wire, we took measurements and put them into the AutoCAD model as well for the fabrication and laser cutting of the profiles," Mr Groom says.

"I did the images for the plasma-cut panels at the base of the sculptures by hand on the computer, but the images were originally taken from photograph."

Because of the height of the sculptures, it was easier to separate each into two pieces and then join them together on site.

"Transporting them at that height down the highway would have required much more attention to how we moved them," Mr Groom says.

Wombats, koalas, lizards and more

The sculpture is also a tribute to the animals and plants lost in the bushfires.

"I made over 100 moulds of native animals and invited the artistic community and anybody who wanted to have a go at making a three-dimensional animal, to join me in the studio," Ms Rögnvaldsdóttir says.

She held workshops at schools and other venues, and her studio was a hub, weekend after weekend.

The trickiest part was coming up with an idea that would include people of all ages and abilities, but she nailed it.

"What was fantastic about it was that there would be a five-year-old next to a 95-year-old, there were people of all capabilities, all different experiences and there were well over 400 people that contributed," she says.

"I fired about 1,200 pieces of ceramic and then [another local] Anne Stuart and I wove the wind in [symbolised by the blue] handmade tiles around all the animals.

"If you look at the animals, none of them actually look alike because people worked with the moulds and then individualised their own creation.

"Now that it's up, people will be searching for their animals so it's going to be very interactive."

Sharing stories on the streets

Installation of the Gateway went ahead in Ulladulla despite the recent wet weather.

The public artwork was partially funded by the NSW government, auspice of Shoalhaven City Council.

And the community is also chipping in.

The project became more expensive than anticipated, and local not-for-profit group Southland Creative Inc has set up a crowdsourcing page through the Australian Cultural Fund.

Bronwyn Coulston, the council's manager for arts and culture, says Dora has done an amazing job of bringing hundreds of people in the community together and getting the sculpture in the ground in just over 12 months.

"We are installing projects across the Shoalhaven of temporary and semi-permanent artwork to encourage people to get out and about, into our open spaces, to enjoy the outdoors and re-activate streets and green areas across the Shoalhaven," Ms Coulston says.

"It's a gateway to Ulladulla, it's a gateway to our community and it's a gateway to the recovery and resilience that occurred after the terrible bushfires that tore through this area over 2019/2020."

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When 'the world went black', Dora had an idea to help her disaster-hit community

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When Dora Rögnvaldsdóttir's world darkened during the Black Summer bushfires on New Year's Eve, 2019, an idea came to her. "Everybody was on tenterhooks. It was like we were celebrating New Year's Eve, but we weren't," says the sculptor from Nowra on the New South Wales south coast.

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4/2 War in Ukraine Compounds Hunger in East Africa - NYT

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4/2 War in Ukraine Compounds Hunger in East Africa - NYT

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to compound = to make worse

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War in Ukraine Compounds Hunger in East Africa

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The conflict has driven up the cost of food in a region that depends heavily on crops from Russia and Ukraine and is facing what could be its worst drought in four decades.

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Residents in the restive north-western Ethiopian region of Amhara have accused government forces of drone strikes and indiscriminate shelling as widespread fighting between the army and local militias continues.

An ongoing internet shutdown imposed by the authorities since August has made it difficult to independently confirm the allegations or get details of the violence.

Locals in East and West Gojjam, North Shoa and Central Gondar areas of the region have told the BBC's Amharic service that they have witnessed days-long "intense" fighting.

The clashes, according to the residents, include the use of heavy weapons and drones, creating concern for the safety of civilians.

In one district, witnesses have said five people attending a funeral were injured when an artillery shell hit a place nearby.

In another district, residents have said airstrikes hit a school. In the historic city of Lalibela, priests and a prominent opposition figure told Reuters news agency that "careless" firing of heavy weapons could endanger local churches, which are recognised by Unesco as world heritage sites.

Violence broke out in August after months of fermenting tension over a government directive to disband a regional paramilitary group.

Local militias, known as the Fano, overran major cities in the region and briefly controlled an airport at the onset of the clashes but have since been pushed back by government forces.

The militias, however, continued to operate in smaller towns and rural areas. The BBC's attempts to reach Amhara officials have not been successful and there haven't been official remarks about the reignited fighting.

Last week, western countries, including the US and Britain, said they were alarmed by the ongoing violence and called for dialogue.

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Get the latest African news from BBC News in Africa: breaking news, features, analysis and special reports plus audio and video from across the African continent.

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On Sunday, the Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor instructed the press not to publish the interview with Ukraine's leader, and said "an investigation has been started in order to identify the level of responsibility and what response will be taken" in relation to those who carried out the interview.

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Zelensky says Ukraine prepared to discuss neutrality in peace talks

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On Sunday, the Russian state media regulator Roskomnadzor instructed the press not to publish the interview with Ukraine's leader, and said "an investigation has been started in order to identify the level of responsibility and what response will be taken" in relation to those who carried out the interview.

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Ukraine has rejected a Russian ultimatum offering people in the besieged city of Mariupol safe passage out of the port if they surrender.

Under Russia's proposal, civilians would be allowed to leave if the city's defenders laid down arms.

But Ukraine has refused, saying there was no question of it surrendering the strategic port city.

Around 300,000 people are believed to be trapped there with supplies running out and aid blocked from entering.

Residents have endured weeks of Russian bombardment with no power or running water.

Details of the Russian proposal were laid out on Sunday by Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, who said Ukraine had until 05:00 Moscow time (02:00 GMT) on Monday morning to accept its terms.

Under the plans, Russian troops would have opened safe corridors out of Mariupol from 10:00 Moscow time (07:00 GMT), initially for Ukrainian troops and "foreign mercenaries" to disarm and leave the city.

After two hours, Russian forces say they would then have allowed humanitarian convoys with food, medicine and other supplies to enter the city safely, once the de-mining of the roads was complete.

Russian Gen Mizintsev admitted that a terrible humanitarian catastrophe was unfolding there - and said the offer would have allowed civilians to flee safely to either the east or west.

In response to the offer, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukraine would not stop defending Mariupol.

"There can be no question of any surrender, laying down of arms," she was quoted by Ukrainska Pravda as saying.

War in Ukraine: More coverage

Earlier on Sunday, Pyotr Andryushenko, who is an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, vowed the city's defenders would fight on.

"We will fight until the last of our soldiers," he said.

He told the BBC's Newshour that Moscow's humanitarian promises could not be trusted, and repeated unconfirmed claims made by Mariupol officials in recent days that Russian forces have been forcibly evacuating some of its residents to Russia.

"When they [Russian forces] say about humanitarian corridors, what do they really do? They really force evacuate our people to Russia," Andryushenko said.

The BBC has not been able to verify these accusations.

Mariupol is a key strategic target for Russia and has seen some of the invasion's fiercest fighting, with Russian forces so far failing to take the city from its defenders.

A catastrophe unfolds

By Hugo Bachega, BBC News, Lviv

"Hell on Earth". That's how Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a Ukrainian MP from Mariupol, described to me the situation in his native city. And it really is desperate.

Mariupol has been surrounded by Russian forces, which have prevented the creation of corridors to allow the distribution of humanitarian aid.

Around 300,000 residents are trapped inside, with no electricity, running water or heating. And as food and medical supplies run low, the crisis could get worse, with people going hungry and diseases spreading.

Residents spend most of their time in shelters and basements as Russia continues its unrelenting attack on the city, from land, air and sea, officials say.

Pictures show a city in ruins, with entire neighbourhoods devastated. The mayor, Vadym Boychenko, told me last week that over 80% of residential buildings had either been damaged or destroyed, a third of them beyond repair.

Bodies are being left in the streets as it's too dangerous to get them. When they're finally collected, some end up buried in mass graves, another symbol of the horror there.

Even a Russian general has acknowledged that a terrible humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in the city. Unsurprisingly, he didn't admit that his own forces were responsible for that.

Since the war began, authorities say at least 2,500 people have been killed in Mariupol although the true figure may be higher.

After last week's destruction of a theatre where more than 1,000 people were sheltering, on Sunday authorities in Mariupol said that an arts school with 400 people inside has also been attacked.

Previous efforts to evacuate Mariupol's civilians have been blocked by Russian fire, although local authorities say that thousands have been able to leave in private vehicles.

On Sunday, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister said 3,985 people had fled from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia, adding that on Monday the government plans on sending about 50 buses to pick up further evacuees from the city.

President Volodomyr Zelensky has said the Russian siege amounts to a "war crime".

"This is a totally deliberate tactic," he said. "They [Russian forces] have a clear order to do absolutely everything to make the humanitarian catastrophe in Ukrainian cities an 'argument' for Ukrainians to cooperate with the occupiers".

The location of the port city, on the Sea of Azov, makes it a strategic target for Russia, as it would help it create a land corridor between the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, controlled by Russian-backed separatists and Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Are you in Ukraine? Is you family? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.

Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:

If you are reading this page and can't see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission.

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Mariupol: Ukraine rejects Russian demand to surrender port city

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Ukraine has rejected a Russian ultimatum offering people in the besieged city of Mariupol safe passage out of the port if they surrender. Under Russia's proposal, civilians would be allowed to leave if the city's defenders laid down arms. But Ukraine has refused, saying there was no question of it surrendering the strategic port city.

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Mariupol: Russia accused of bombing theatre and swimming pool sheltering civilians

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Ukraine authorities say hundreds of people were hiding in theatre and that convoy of cars leaving besieged city was also shelled

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3/16 - War in Ukraine: What happened on Day 20? - BBC

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3/16 - War in Ukraine: What happened on Day 20? - BBC

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War in Ukraine: What happened on day 20 of Russia’s invasion

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Three PMs visit Kyiv, while staff at a hospital in Mariupol say they are being held like hostages.

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War in Ukraine: What happened on day 19 of Russia’s invasion

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Drone footage shows destruction of Mariupol, and protesters target an oligarch’s London mansion.

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3/14 - Protester interrupts TV news show - BBC

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3/14 - Protester interrupts TV news show - BBC

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Ukraine war: Editor interrupts Russian TV news show

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The woman held a sign reading "no war" behind a newsreader on Russian state-controlled TV.

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UNITED KINGDOM Map || What's the Difference Between the UK, England, and Great Britain?

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UK | United Kingdom | United Kingdom Song | A Geography Song About the UK and its Capitals

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Kids View: What to do in London (Insider tips from local kids)

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English - London sightseeing (A1-A2 - with subtitles)

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3/9 - BBC - Ukraine: What sanctions are being imposed on Russia?

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3/9 - BBC - Ukraine: What sanctions are being imposed on Russia?

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However, most Russian diamonds are sent to countries like India to be polished, says Hans Merket of the International Peace Information Service think tank. Once they are re-exported, it is hard to tell that they originated in Russia.

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What are the sanctions on Russia and are they hurting its economy?

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Western nations have imposed severe measures against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

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3/8 - BBC - The UK's response to Ukraine refugees - BBC News

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3/8 - BBC - The UK's response to Ukraine refugees - BBC News

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The UK's response to Ukraine refugees - BBC News

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3/9 - BBC - Maternity and children’s hospital in Ukraine ‘destroyed’ by Russian shelling

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3/9 - BBC - Maternity and children’s hospital in Ukraine ‘destroyed’ by Russian shelling

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Maternity and children’s hospital in Ukraine ‘destroyed’ by Russian shelling - BBC News

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2/24 - BBC - How Russia's invasion of Ukraine unfolded

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2/24 - BBC - How Russia's invasion of Ukraine unfolded

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WATCH: How Russia's invasion of Ukraine unfolded

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Russia launches a full-scale attack on Ukraine - after previously saying it wouldn't. Here's how it unfolded.

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2/12 - BBC - Ros Atkins on Nato's role in the Ukraine crisis

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2/12 - BBC - Ros Atkins on Nato's role in the Ukraine crisis

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Ros Atkins on... Nato's role in the Ukraine crisis

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The role of Nato is crucial in our understanding of Russia's troop build-up and the West's reaction to it.

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2/24 - BBC - Ros Atkins on the history behind the battle for Ukraine

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2/24 - BBC - Ros Atkins on the history behind the battle for Ukraine

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Russia has invaded Ukraine after weeks of escalating tensions between the two countries.

But how did we arrive at a situation where Russian tanks are rolling onto Ukrainian soil?

The BBC's Ros Atkins looks at the recent history of Ukraine's relationship with its neighbour.

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Ros Atkins on... the history behind the battle for Ukraine

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Russia has invaded Ukraine after weeks of escalating tensions between the two countries. But how did we arrive at a situation where Russian tanks are rolling onto Ukrainian soil? The BBC's Ros Atkins looks at the recent history of Ukraine's relationship with its neighbour.

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In London Shops, Greek Cheese, Sicilian Citrus and British Headaches

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For companies depending on fast, small deliveries, the costs of new Brexit trade rules are mounting.

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30/12 - What are Watch Night Services for? - A Testimony - NYT

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30/12 - What are Watch Night Services for? - A Testimony - NYT

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Terminale : To include in our reflection on diversity and inclusion

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The church, at its best, stood vigil, making a case for a better way to be human than a utilitarian ethic that used our shared trauma to justify exploiting other suffering Black people. It argued that the same God who opposes institutional racism travels all the way down to personal evil, resisting the ways that we harm one another. By arguing for both societal change and personal transformation, Watch Night suggests that justice and righteousness are not so easily separated.

Juneteenth, which recently became a federal holiday, remembers that news of the Emancipation Proclamation did not reach all of the enslaved right away. There were some who knew that freedom was on the horizon and those who had no idea of the momentous changes shaking American society. It was the work of those who knew about the newfound freedom to contend for those who could not fend for themselves. We are not free until everyone is.

Each New Year's Eve reminds us that the work is never finished. Douglass knew that. He said, "The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large." Because of his prophetic imagination and the painful lessons of history, he saw that something like Jim Crow was on the horizon. He knew that law and custom would endeavor to return us again and again to servitude.

What is the solution to that ever-present threat? Douglass said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Each generation of Black folks has taken up this watch keeping, guided by a moral compass that transcends the limited imagination of the powerful. We have done so out of respect to the generations whose vigils - filled with prayer, thanksgiving and sanctified dissatisfaction - won us the freedoms we now enjoy.

It's been years since I attended a Watch Night service. I miss them. A largely white university experience, my wife's military service in Japan and graduate studies in Britain took me far from the Black churches that kept watch. I spent too many years with those who do not remember the deadly slave ship, the dehumanizing auction block or the daring midnight escapes to the North with God as the only hope.

Now that I am back in a Black church in the United States, I'm looking forward to introducing my children to the practice of keeping watch, after the Covid pandemic allows our local church to resume its full schedule of services. Hopefully, Watch Night will connect them to a heritage too precious to lose.

On the edge of those New Year's Eves at church, time felt thin. We seemingly stepped inside history, if only for a moment, to join with the great cloud of witnesses that lauded Black freedom and mourned those slaves who died before freedom came. Too many New Year's Eve gatherings know only celebration. They do not know how to lament the lives lost or how to inspire the commitment that comes from honoring their legacies. Those parties are too free of our histories.

There are a number of New Year's resolutions on the horizon. I am sure we will fail at most of them. But I hope that we do not fail to take up the responsibilities handed to us by our ancestors. We must in 2022 take up the watch so that the coming generation might inherit a more free and just society.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Why Generations of Black Americans Have Celebrated the New Year at Church

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The church, at its best, stood vigil, making a case for a better way to be human than a utilitarian ethic that used our shared trauma to justify exploiting other suffering Black people. It argued that the same God who opposes institutional racism travels all the way down to personal evil, resisting the ways that we harm one another.

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12/28 - NYC Testing Program to Keep Children in School - NYT

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12/28 - NYC Testing Program to Keep Children in School - NYT

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Video: N.Y.C. Unveils New Testing Program To Keep Children in School

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Instead of quarantining entire classrooms exposed to Covid-19, New York City will allow asymptomatic students who test negative for the coronavirus to stay in school.

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Desmond Tutu, Whose Voice Helped Slay Apartheid, Dies at 90

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The archbishop, a powerful force for nonviolence in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.

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12/27 - Desmond Tutu's Death: The Sun has Gone Down - BBC

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12/27 - Desmond Tutu's Death: The Sun has Gone Down - BBC

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South Africans say "the Sun has gone down" following the death of Desmond Tutu at the age of 90.

Archbishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle to help abolish the apartheid system.

Watch as South Africans in the township of Soweto react to his death.

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'A dark day': South Africans remember Desmond Tutu

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South Africans say "the Sun has gone down" following the death of Desmond Tutu at the age of 90. Archbishop Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle to help abolish the apartheid system. Watch as South Africans in the township of Soweto react to his death.

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who helped to end apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90.

BBC South Africa correspondent Nomsa Maseko looks back at his life and legacy.

More on this story: Desmond Tutu - South Africa's rebellious priest

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The life and legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who helped to end apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90. BBC South Africa correspondent Nomsa Maseko looks back at his life and legacy. More on this story: Desmond Tutu - South Africa's rebellious priest

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12/6 - Intentionally Non-Inclusive? - NYT

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12/6 - Intentionally Non-Inclusive? - NYT

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Erin Aubry Kaplan in her home in Inglewood, Calif. Credit... Tergo for The New York Times

Ms. Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and author who grew up in the South Central section of Los Angeles and nearby Inglewood.

About a year ago, I decided to build a library on my front lawn. By library, I mean one of those little free-standing library boxes that dot lawns in bedroom communities around the country - charming, birdhouse-like structures filled with books that invite neighbors and passers-by to take a book, or donate a book, or both.

I'd spotted the phenomenon on walks through upscale, largely white neighborhoods around Los Angeles and immediately resolved to bring it home to Inglewood. Why not? A library is not so much a marker of wealth and whiteness as it is an affirmation of community and cozy, small-town camaraderie that Inglewood, a mostly Black and Latino city in southwestern Los Angeles County, has plenty of. We deserved no less.

Prepandemic, Inglewood was gentrifying, another reason I'd been inspired to do the library: I wanted to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement, and could carry them out in our own way. There are organizations that help people build these little libraries, but I did mine independently. I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic. The wooden post on which the library sat was a stake in the ground, literally.

The response to the library was slow at first - it was the first in the area, and some people mistook it for a birdhouse, or a mailbox. But I was pleased to soon see people stopping by to browse and take home books.

Then one morning, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions - astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!

The moment jolted me into realizing some things I'm not especially proud of. I had set out this library for all who lived here, and even for those who didn't, in theory. I would not want to restrict anyone from looking at it or taking books, based on race or anything else. But while I had seen white newcomers to the neighborhood here and there, the truth was, I hadn't set it out to appeal to white residents.

Now that they were in front of my house, curious about this new neighborhood attraction, I didn't know how to feel. By bringing this modern cultural artifact here from white neighborhoods, had I set myself up, set up the neighborhood? Was I contributing to gentrification and sending the wrong message about how I wanted the neighborhood to be?

What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of helplessness at not knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had created. I was seeing up close how fragile that space can be, how its meaning can be changed in my mind, even by people who have no conscious intention to change it. That library was on my lawn, but for that moment it became theirs. I built it and drove it into the ground because I love books and always have. But I suddenly felt that I could not own even this, something that was clearly and intimately mine.

As the couple wandered on, no books in hand, I thought about how fragile my feeling of being settled is. It didn't matter that I own my house, as many of my neighbors do. Generations of racism, Jim Crow, disinvestment and redlining have meant that we don't really control our own spaces. In that moment, I had been overwhelmed by a kind of fear, one that's connected to the historical reality of Black people being run off the land they lived on, expelled by force, high prices or some whim of white people.

One of the most famous examples of that displacement happened several miles south of Inglewood. Bruce's Beach, a Black-owned resort, once thrived along the coast of tony Manhattan Beach, until it was seized by eminent domain in 1924 by white city officials. They claimed they needed the land for a public park, but they didn't build one for more than three decades. It's clear they simply wanted the bustling holiday and leisure spot and the Black people it attracted gone. That parcel was recently returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, who owned it - an extraordinary example of reparation, but an isolated one that still leaves the problem of Black unsettledness intact.

When my uncle, Paul Aubry, bought a house in Los Angeles in the predominantly white, working-class South Central neighborhood of the late 1940s, he wasn't just buying a house, he was putting his stake in the ground, making his claim to the American ideal of belonging.

My uncle's claim was rejected. A cross was burned on his lawn. As more Black families moved to the neighborhood, white people moved out in droves. The ground shifted under Uncle Paul's feet. That white flight forged the chiefly Black and brown South Central of popular imagination and created similar demographics in other city neighborhoods across the country, including Inglewood.

It has to be said that there's nothing inherently wrong with the Black-, Latino- and immigrant-rich neighborhoods that resulted from those flights. Community has always been our greatest asset, and its greatest source of capital. But now, as younger generations of white people move back to the neighborhoods their parents shunned, in the phenomenon I call "white return," it all suddenly feels up for grabs - again.

Instead of the blatant racism of what happened at Bruce's Beach, we now have gentrification. It's perfectly legal, but ultimately it causes the same racial displacement, on a much larger scale. The stratospheric rise in home prices alone has meant that the Black population of Los Angeles has been declining for decades, and has dropped to around 9 percent.

The anti-gentrification strategy articulated by many of my longtime Black neighbors is this: Stay put. Don't sell. Stand your ground. While that is possible for some of us (I won't be selling because, really, where would I go?), it's not for everyone, and it's not a permanent solution. It also doesn't solve the bigger crisis of belonging.

Ultimately, the moment with the couple I saw through my window raised for me a serious moral question about how I should act. Screaming at them to get off my lawn would be adopting the values of the oppressor, as my racial-justice activist father used to say. Yet my resentment was not analogous to the white resentment of generations past (and of now, I'd argue). White resentment has always been legitimized, and reinforced, by legal and cultural dominance, a dynamic evident in everything from the rise of Trumpism to the current battle against the political boogeyman of critical race theory.

My little library, affirming as it is, is also an illusion; it can't save our neighborhood. Still, in 2021, it has become increasingly important to maintain and grow Black space, on its own terms. As I watched the white couple peruse my little library, the most complicated feeling of all was the brief, bittersweet satisfaction I took in watching them drawn to my lawn, and to my idea. It felt empowering and hopeful on the one hand, defeating on the other.

So what message do I hope they took from my library? The same message I wanted to send to the rest of my neighbors, my community: Black presence has value - in every sense of the word, and on its own terms.

That value should make the casual displacement of Black people untenable, even immoral. And that will take much more than a little library to rectify.

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Opinion | Is My Little Library Contributing to the Gentrification of My Black Neighborhood?

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Ms. Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and author who grew up in the South Central section of Los Angeles and nearby Inglewood. About a year ago, I decided to build a library on my front lawn.

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A 15-year-old student was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and terrorism. His parents face involuntary manslaughter charges.

Oxford High School students gathered for a candlelight vigil at LakePoint Community Church in Oxford, Mich., on Tuesday night. Credit... Nick Hagen for The New York Times

A gunman opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan on Tuesday afternoon, shooting 11 people. Four students were killed and several others were left critically and seriously injured.

Ethan Crumbley, a 15-year-old student, was later arrested in connection with the shooting, the authorities said. He was charged on Wednesday with one count of terrorism causing death and four counts of first-degree murder, which could lead to a life sentence if he is convicted.

On Friday, prosecutors took the rare step of filing involuntary manslaughter charges against his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, saying that they had bought the semiautomatic handgun that he used to carry out the deadly rampage as a Christmas gift.

The deadly gunfire in Oxford, in Oakland County - about 30 miles north of Detroit - added to a growing list of shootings on school grounds in the United States this year after a lull during the coronavirus pandemic, when many schools held classes remotely.

The shooting was the deadliest this year, according to Education Week, which tracks such shootings and reported that there had been 28 others so far in 2021.

Many details, including a motive, remained unclear. Here's what we know.

At 12:51 p.m. on Tuesday, the authorities received the first of more than a hundred 911 calls about the shooting.

The suspect emerged from a bathroom and started firing at students in the hallway, the authorities said on Wednesday after viewing security camera footage of the attack.

When students at Oxford High School first heard the gunshots, they rushed for cover and used chairs to barricade themselves behind classroom doors. Within five minutes, the authorities said, 11 people had been shot.

"I was just kind of sitting there shaking," said Dale Schmalenberg, 16, who said he was in calculus class when his teacher heard a gunshot and locked down the classroom. "I didn't really know how to respond."

Sheriff Michael Bouchard released the names of the victims at a news conference Tuesday night. Credit... Nick Hagen for The New York Times

The gunman fired about 30 shots with a semiautomatic handgun before being apprehended by deputies in the school hallway, the authorities said.

Michael McCabe, the Oakland County undersheriff, said the suspect, who had been in class earlier on Tuesday, "gave up without any problems."

Investigators were looking over many hours of security camera footage to track the suspect's actions, Sheriff Michael Bouchard told reporters on Wednesday, but his targets "appeared random." Investigators had not determined a possible motive for the shooting, which the sheriff described as "absolutely brutally cold hearted."

The authorities on Tuesday identified those killed as Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; and Tate Myre, 16, who died in a sheriff's squad car while on the way to a hospital. A fourth student, Justin Shilling, 17, died on Wednesday morning at McLaren Oakland Hospital in Pontiac, Mich.

"There was no time to wait," Sheriff Bouchard said of the deputy who put Tate into his car. The teenager had recently won honors as a linebacker and tight end on his football team.

On Tuesday night, more than 25,000 people signed an online petition to rename the school's stadium after Tate Myre, who had recently earned an all-region award from the Michigan High School Football Coaches Association.

Six other injured students ranged in age from 14 to 17, officials said, including at least two who were in critical condition and another who was in serious condition. They included a 15-year-old boy who had been shot in the head, a 17-year-old girl who had been hit in the chest and a 14-year-old girl who had been wounded in the chest and neck.

Several students remained in critical condition on Tuesday night from injuries sustained during the shooting. Credit... Nick Hagen for The New York Times

The only adult who was injured, an unidentified 47-year-old teacher whose shoulder was grazed by a bullet, had been discharged from the hospital, he added.

Few details are known about Ethan Crumbley, a sophomore at Oxford High School and a resident of Oxford Village, a suburb with a population of fewer than 3,500 people.

When she announced charges against his parents on Friday, Karen D. McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor, gave a detailed accounting of his alleged actions leading up to the shooting.

On the morning of the Nov. 30 shooting, she said, the suspect's parents were urgently called into the high school after one of his teachers found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot and a laughing emoji, and the words, "Blood everywhere," and, "The thoughts won't stop. Help me."

The day before the shooting, a teacher had seen the suspect searching online for ammunition for the gun in class, which led to a meeting with school officials, the prosecutor said. After being informed by the school about their son's behavior, Mrs. Crumbley texted to her son: "LOL, I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught," Ms. McDonald said.

School officials told the parents during the in-person meeting on Tuesday that they were required to seek counseling for their son, Ms. McDonald said. The teenager's parents did not want their son to be removed from school that day, and did not ask him whether he had the gun with him or search the backpack he brought with him to the office, Ms. McDonald said.

During a video arraignment on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities told a judge that investigators had recovered two videos from the suspect's cellphone, which were made the night before the attack. The student is seen talking about shooting and killing students the next day at Oxford High, they said. A journal in his backpack also detailed his desire to "shoot up the school," the authorities said.

His lawyer entered a not-guilty plea on his behalf.

The 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun used in the shooting had been bought by the suspect's father four days before the shooting, according to the authorities, who said that his mother had referred to the weapon on social media as her son's "Christmas present."

The authorities said that they did not believe that the student had planned the shooting with anyone else and that they were still investigating.

The suspect was charged as an adult on Wednesday with one count of terrorism causing death and four counts of first-degree murder, which could lead to a life sentence if he is convicted.

Prosecutors said on Wednesday that the suspect had planned the attack "well before the incident."

"I am absolutely sure after reviewing the evidence that it isn't even a close call," said Karen D. McDonald, the Oakland County prosecutor. "It was absolutely premeditated."

Ms. McDonald said she had decided to charge the suspect as an adult because of the severity of the crime and her belief that it had been planned.

Although many underage school shooters arm themselves with guns from home, the adults responsible for the weapons are rarely charged, experts say.

"I can't think of a high-profile mass shooting where the parents were prosecuted," said Allison Anderman, director of local policy at theGiffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

But the prosecutor, Ms. McDonald, said that in this case she believed that the gunman's parents bore some responsibility for not preventing the shooting.

"I am in no way saying that an active shooter situation should always result in a criminal prosecution against parents," she said. "But the facts of this case are so egregious - reading this document, looking at it, reading the words 'help me,' with a gun, blood everywhere. This doesn't just impact me as a prosecutor and a lawyer, it impacts me as a mother."

She added, "The notion that a parent could read those words and also know their son had access to a deadly weapon, that they gave him, is unconscionable and I think it's criminal. It is criminal," she said.

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What We Know About the Michigan High School Shooting

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A 15-year-old student was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and terrorism. His parents face involuntary manslaughter charges. A gunman opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan on Tuesday afternoon, shooting 11 people. Four students were killed and several others were left critically and seriously injured.

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11/30 - Josephine Baker enters the Pantheon - NYT

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11/30 - Josephine Baker enters the Pantheon - NYT

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President Emmanuel Macron hailed the American-born dancer and French resistance fighter as a symbol of unity in a time of sharp division.

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Ms. Baker, an American-born dancer and French resistance fighter, became the first Black woman to be honored at the Panthéon, the nation's hallowed tomb of heroes. Credit Credit... Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

PARIS - Josephine Baker, born in Missouri and beloved of France, whose life spanned French music-hall stardom and American civil rights activism, on Tuesday became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon, the nation's hallowed tomb of heroes.

On a gray afternoon, 46 years after her death in Paris, soldiers from the Republican Guard bore a flag-draped coffin up the red-carpeted stairs of the Panthéon, where Ms. Baker joined 75 men and five women, including the author Émile Zola, the scientist Marie Curie, and the resistance hero Jean Moulin.

The coffin carried soil from the United States, France and Monaco - places that shaped Ms. Baker's life. Her body, at the request of the family, will stay in Monaco.

The colonnaded facade of the Panthéon, with its engraved dedication to the "great men" of France, was lit with a remarkable collage of images ranging from Ms. Baker's wild nights performing at the Folies Bergères in 1926 to her appearance in front of the Lincoln Memorial beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Aug. 28, 1963, as he spoke the words, "I have a dream."

The ceremony beneath the cupola that rises above Paris marked the culmination of an extraordinary journey that began in the misery and racial segregation of St. Louis; led her to fame as the provocative dance star of "les années folles," or crazy years, of 1920s Paris; and took her on to passionate political engagement in the cause of Europe's freedom from the threat of fascism and American racial equality.

At a time of tension in France over issues of race and gender, and of friction with the United States, President Emmanuel Macron chose to honor Ms. Baker as a woman with "every form of courage and audacity," and "an American who found refuge in Paris and captured what it is to be French."

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President Emmanuel Macron of France delivers a speech during a ceremony for Ms. Baker at the Panthéon. Credit... Pool photo by Sarah Meyssonnier

Five months from a divisive presidential election, he portrayed Ms. Baker as a symbol of unity - what he called "the beauty of collective destiny." He held her up as an example of immigrant success, and of the multitudes a single life may contain.

"France is Josephine," Mr. Macron declared, standing before the coffin. From the right to the left of the political spectrum, at least for a day, everyone seemed to agree.

The longing cadences of "J'ai Deux Amours," or "I Have Two Loves," perhaps Ms. Baker's most famous song, filled the frescoed mausoleum during the ceremony. Its avowal that Ms. Baker's heart went out at once to "Paris et mon pays" - "Paris and my country" - seemed to capture her unusual odyssey.

At the time the song was recorded in 1930, Ms. Baker was still an American citizen. She became French in 1937, 12 years after her arrival in France. She is the first person of American origin to be entombed in the Panthéon, a distinction that was marked by the lighting Monday of the Empire State Building in the red, white and blue of the French flag.

"She had a double affection for the two countries," Ms. Baker's daughter, Marianne Bouillon-Baker, said at an American reception on the eve of the entombment.

After the racial violence she witnessed as a Black American child and the repeated humiliations of segregation and discrimination, Ms. Baker, who was born Freda Josephine McDonald, said she found a freedom and dignity in France for which she was "eternally grateful."

Other Black American artists, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright, had similar experiences, with the result that France is particularly sensitive to American criticism that its avowedly colorblind social model masks widespread discrimination.

Members of the public attends the ceremony dedicated to Josephine Baker in Paris, on Tuesday. Credit... Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Mr. Macron said that Ms. Baker's life had encapsulated "a universal struggle." Her goal was not "to define herself as Black before defining herself as American or French." Her guiding idea was not the "irreducibility of the Black cause," but to be "a free and dignified citizen, completely," he added.

His words appeared to reflect his government's rejection of what it often portrays as divisive American identity politics that threatens to undermine French universalism. Mr. Macron's characterization of Ms. Baker's beliefs was consistent with his government's fierce defense of universalism. Still, her presence on the Mall with Dr. King and her repeated expressions of outrage at the treatment of Blacks in the United States make clear that the specific Black fight for equality was very important to her.

Ms. Baker became an object of wild Parisian fascination when, just 20, she appeared in 1926 at the Folies Bergères theater dressed in little more than a skirt made of 16 rubber bananas at a show called "The Negro Review."

The cabaret played off white male colonial obsessions with Black women and their bodies in a France then fascinated by Black and African arts. Clowning and exaggerating, gyrating and waving her arms, Ms. Baker contrived to use and subvert the stereotypes, ridiculing them through what Mr. Macron called her use of the "burlesque."

Her fame extended far and wide; writers from Jean Cocteau to Ernest Hemingway fell under her thrall. But when artistic folly of the 1920s yielded to the Fascist military folly of the 1930s, Ms. Baker demonstrated that she did not take her success, or the gifts of her adoptive country, for granted. She joined the resistance.

It was in her Free French uniform, hung with her various French military and civilian honors, that she appeared with Dr. King at the March on Washington. "I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents," she said. "But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad."

She exhorted the crowd to fight on. "You can't go wrong," she said. "The world is behind you."

A photograph of Ms. Baker projected on the Panthéon. Credit... Pool photo by Thomas Coex

Gabriel Attal, the government spokesman, told Europe 1 radio that Ms. Baker was a "magnificent symbol who incarnates the love for France that can also come from people who are not born here."

His statement seemed pointed at immigration, which remains an explosive subject in France - the main theme of the election, along with purchasing power at a time of economic difficulty. If Ms. Baker embraced France, many immigrants, particularly from North Africa, have found that much harder because of the prejudice they have encountered.

The Pantheon ceremony came on the same day as Éric Zemmour, a hard-right polemicist and TV star with fierce anti-immigrant views, declared his candidacy for the presidency. Polls suggest he has significant support.

Of Ms. Baker, Mr. Macron said: "She did not defend a certain skin color. She had a certain idea of humankind and fought for the freedom of everyone. Her cause was universalism, the unity of humanity, the equality of everyone ahead of the identity of each single person."

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Josephine Baker Becomes First Black Woman Inducted Into France's Tomb of Heroes

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President Emmanuel Macron hailed the American-born dancer and French resistance fighter as a symbol of unity in a time of sharp division. PARIS - Josephine Baker, born in Missouri and beloved of France, whose life spanned French music-hall stardom and American civil rights activism, on Tuesday became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon, the nation's hallowed tomb of heroes.

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11/26 - The Essential Musical Dramatist Who Taught Us to Hear - NYT

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11/26 - The Essential Musical Dramatist Who Taught Us to Hear - NYT

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Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)

With a childlike sense of discovery, Stephen Sondheim found the language to convey the beauty in harsh complexity.

Stephen Sondheim in 1999. His lyrics, Jesse Green writes, "had both a greater density of meaning and a lighter footprint on their music than anyone else's." Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

One of the greatest American composers, clearly the greatest lyricist - and, by virtue of those two rarely linked greatnesses, the essential musical dramatist of our time - wanted to talk about double acrostics.

This was not quite what I expected when I met the man in 2004. But Stephen Sondheim, who died on Friday at 91, leaving a life's outpouring of rapturous, hilarious, gorgeous and tortuous song in his wake, was, in my first interview with him, and in every interview since, uninterested in reputation.

Thinking about " The Frogs," the 1974 musical he wrote to be performed at the Yale University swimming pool, and which he was in the process of revising for Lincoln Center Theater, he preferred to recall the fun he'd had with Burt Shevelove, his collaborator on that show as well on "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum."

But double acrostics? How, I asked, could a man whose lyrics were trickier, deeper and more full of joy than even the most subversive puzzles - which he'd written plenty of in his youth - find pleasure in those drudgy Sunday morning time sucks?

"No, no," he said. "You don't understand. We did them out loud. No pens. No paper." Which was like saying you could do needlepoint blindfolded.

And of course that's essentially what he did: prick holes in the dark to form patterns of light. As he wrote of the painter Georges Seurat in "Sunday in the Park With George," he taught us "how to see."

I have often thought of those double acrostics, their letters tossed through the air like shuttlecocks, in trying to understand how Mr. Sondheim managed to do what he did.

Though he rejected the idea that lyrics were poetry, his lyrics nevertheless had both a greater density of meaning and a lighter footprint on their music than anyone else's. Though he was at first dismissed as a minor, "unhummable" melodist, over the course of his 15 scores for the stage (and several in other mediums) he gradually retuned the ear of theatergoers until they were able to recognize the beauty in his harsh complexities. And though he graciously bowed to his book writers, it was he who elevated their plot points into drama by shaping them first into individual jewels of songs and then stringing them into chains.

Underlying all these achievements - and his skill with double acrostics - was something I can only call computational brilliance: He had more brain cells constantly at work storing, sorting and recalling information than most of us. To find a rhyme for "personable," it takes, to start, random access to an inventory of English sounds so vast that it beggars any thesaurus. (No rhyming dictionary could help him find, as he did in "Company," this astonishing solution: "coercin' a bull.") But then, too, his ear had to hear beneath the shock of the rhyme to the shape of the sound, and set it on music that would mimic instead of fight it.

On its own, his verbal agility, and musical sensitivity, though prodigious, would not have produced great characters like Sweeney in "Sweeney Todd," Desiree Armfeldt in "A Little Night Music" and Fosca in "Passion" (who barely rhymes at all). Innately understanding how the component elements of musical theater could be forged into drama was his overriding gift, and in that sense he often seemed like a magician and an archaeologist in one. A rhyme in "Follies," blossoming from a newly discovered pairing into a surprise triple flower, brings the psychology of Phyllis, its sophisticated leading lady, into deep, then deeper focus. "She made compliance/Into a science./One of the giants," the chorus sings of her, and a brittle queen becomes a neurotic superstar.

Also worth noting: The song, "Ah, but Underneath," is just one of three he wrote for the same spot in the show, each new one as insightful as the last but with a completely different concept and rhyme scheme, bringing out different elements of Phyllis's personality.

What is especially remarkable about Mr. Sondheim's nearly unparalleled emotional insight into his characters is that he did not seem emotionally comfortable in person. I often noticed in interviews that he would turn his head away and to the side, like a sleeping bird. (Bradley Whitford, who plays Mr. Sondheim in Lin-Manuel Miranda's movie " Tick, Tick ... Boom! " reproduces that gesture perfectly.) He did not always seem to understand other people's feelings in situ.

But in words, and onstage, he was Freud himself, bringing to the American musical theater its most fully realized psychological portraits. Despite their Grand Guignol doings and music hall style, Sweeney and his accomplice Mrs. Lovett - he kills his barbershop customers, she bakes them into pies - are up there dramatically with Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth. In this greatest of Mr. Sondheim's works, which is, for many, the best American musical, we are forced to understand and, more perversely, root for some of the worst deeds ever imagined for the stage.

Certainly, Mr. Sondheim did not achieve that illusion by working from his own knowledge of cannibalistic revenge. Years of pleasure in listening to the score and playing it at the piano and seeing its every revival, revisal and miniaturization have led me to think the insight comes from the other direction: from a willingness, like a scientist's, to assume the position of no knowledge at all. When musical theater writers approach material they think they already understand, they most often write what was already understood, and in the same old words. That was the limitation of Mr. Sondheim's mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II.

But Mr. Sondheim never stopped being a student, starting at the very beginning, each time he wrote, with sounds and letters and words. He discovered what he needed to make his characters come to life beneath the previously unexplored trapdoors of the musical scale, in the secret seams of the dictionary. He remained in that sense childlike, with an almost magical belief in discovery. (That's why he was also a great teacher.) The joy he must have felt in finding that he could make Armfeldt (a name he did not choose) rhyme with "charm felt" - and thus define a character in a couplet - was the same joy he gave us. People might remain surprising forever, his life's work showed us, as long as words and music did too.

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The Essential Musical Dramatist Who Taught Us to Hear

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Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) With a childlike sense of discovery, Stephen Sondheim found the language to convey the beauty in harsh complexity. One of the greatest American composers, clearly the greatest lyricist - and, by virtue of those two rarely linked greatnesses, the essential musical dramatist of our time - wanted to talk about double acrostics.