• « Faites du business pour le climat ! » : l’enseignement privé exploite le filon de la transition écologique | Alternatives Economiques
    https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/business-climat-lenseignement-prive-exploite/00107608

    Intitulés de diplômes trompeurs, frais de scolarité exorbitants, greenwashing : les écoles privées spécialisées dans la transition écologique fleurissent dans le paysage de l’enseignement supérieur.

    https://justpaste.it/ad95m

    #greenwashing #when_shit_hits_the_fan

    • un racket raciste

      En plus du niveau d’enseignement qui laisse à désirer, entre des vidéos Youtube sur le personal branding et des copier-coller de pages Wikipédia sur la gestion des conflits en entreprise, elle déplore la tentative de récupérer les #étudiants internationaux en attente d’un certificat de scolarité pour renouveler leur titre de séjour.
      « Dans ma classe, trois élèves sur 26 avaient la nationalité française. L’école cible les étudiants #étrangers qui ont besoin de justifier d’une formation pour leur demande de visa », explique-t-elle.

      #droit_au_séjour

    • à propos de l’enseignement supérieur privé, florilège

      – Parcoursup : comment des écoles privées partent à l’assaut des candidats déçus
      – L’enseignement supérieur privé, un marché devenu lucratif et illisible
      – La rectrice de Versailles rejoint un groupe privé d’enseignement supérieur
      – L’appétit de l’enseignement supérieur privé pour les grands commis de l’Etat
      – Les investissements tentaculaires des écoles privées sur le marché de l’immobilier
      https://justpaste.it/9g5uw

      la destruction d’une #université (#Parcoursup, #MonMaster), dont les effectifs sont désormais en baisse, incite à observer ce qui se passe dans un enseignement privé en fort développement (y compris sous la forme de l’#enseignement-à_distance ou plusieurs ex-ministres ont pris des options et des positions dirigeantes) qui intègre en même temps les franges les plus privilégiées des étudiants (concurrençant les grandes écoles), une masse d’apprentis (le financement de l’enseignement supérieur privé par les mécanismes de l’#apprentissage est une innovation récente), d’endettés soucieux de minorer leur précarisation par l’obtention de titres scolaires, et, je le découvre avec l’article posté par @sombre, d’étrangers dont l’inscription est aiguillonée par des mécanismes qui relèvent de la xénophobie d’État.

      élite, déchets, aspirants à l’intégration, notre France.

      #enseignement_supérieur_privé

  • #Air_Partner: the Home Office’s little-known deportation fixer

    International travel megacorp #Carlson_Wagonlit_Travel (#CWT) holds a £5.7 million, seven-year contract with the Home Office for the “provision of travel services for immigration purposes”, as it has done for nearly two decades. However, a key part of its work – the chartering of aircraft and crew to carry out the deportations – has been subcontracted to a little-known aviation charter outfit called Air Partner.

    Summary

    Digging deeper into Air Partner, we found a company which has been quietly organising mass deportations for the Home Office for years. We also learnt that:

    It likely arranged for the airline #Privilege_Style to carry out the aborted flight to #Rwanda, and will seek another airline if the Rwanda scheme goes ahead.
    It has organised deportation logistics for the US and several European governments.
    It is currently one of four beneficiaries of a €15 million framework contract to arrange charter deportations for the European Coast Guard and Border Agency, #Frontex.
    The company grew off the back of military contracts, with profits soaring during the ‘War on Terror’, the Arab Spring, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
    Its regular clients include politicians, celebrities and sports teams, and it recently flew teams and fans to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
    Air Partner was bought in spring 2022 by American charter airline, Wheels Up, but that company is in troubled financial waters.

    Air Partner: Home Office deportation broker

    In Carlson Wagonlit’s current contract award notice, published on the EU website Tenders Electronic Daily, the “management and provision of aircraft(s) charter services” is subcontracted to Air Partner – a detail which is redacted in documents on the UK government’s procurement site. In other words, when the Home Office wants to carry out a mass deportation flight, the task of finding the airline is delegated to Air Partner.

    The contract stipulates that for each charter flight, Air Partner must solicit bids from at least three potential airlines. Selection is on the basis of value for money. However, the contract also states that “the maximum possible flexibility “ is expected from the carrier in terms of dates and destinations. The winning bidder must also be morally comfortable with the work, although it is not clear at what point in the process a first-time deportation airline is fully informed of the nature of the task.

    The contract suggests that airlines like #Privilege_Style, #Titan_Airways, #Hi_Fly and #TUI, therefore, owe their entry into the UK deportation business to Air Partner, which effectively acts as gatekeeper to the sector. Meanwhile, #Carlson_Wagonlit books the tickets, oversees the overall operation, arranges deportations on scheduled flights, and liaises with the guards who physically enforce the expulsion (currently supplied by the company that runs Manston camp, Mitie, in a Home Office escorting contract that runs until 2028).

    The latest deal between the Home Office and Carlson Wagonlit was awarded in 2017 and runs until 31st October 2024. It is likely that Air Partner makes money through a commission on each deportation flight.

    Flying for Frontex

    Yet Air Partner isn’t just the UK government’s deportation dealer. Its Austrian branch is currently one of four companies which organise mass expulsions for the European Coast Guard and Border Agency, Frontex, in a €15 million framework contract that was renewed in August 2022. A framework contract is essentially a deal in which a few companies are chosen to form a pool of select suppliers of particular goods or services, and are then called upon when needed. The work was awarded without advertising, which Frontex can do when the tender is virtually identical as in the previous contract.

    Frontex organises deportation charter flights – either for multiple EU states at a time (where the plane stops to pick up deportees from several countries) – or for a single state. The Agency also arranges for individuals to be deported on regular commercial flights.

    Air Partner’s work for Frontex is very similar to its work for the Home Office. It sources willing aircraft and crew, obtains flight and landing permits, and organises hotels – presumably for personnel – “in case of delays”. The other beneficiaries of the framework contract are #Air_Charter_Service, #Professional_Aviation_Solutions, and #AS_Aircontact.

    Air Charter Service is a German company, sister of a Surrey-based business of the same name, and is owned by Knightsbridge private equity firm, #Alcuin_Capital_Partners. Professional Aviation Solutions is another German charter company, owned by #Skylink_Holding. Finally, Norwegian broker AS Aircontact is a subsidiary of travel firm #Aircontact_Group, ultimately owned by chairman #Johan_Stenersen. AS Aircontact has benefited from the Frontex deal for many years.

    The award was given to the four companies on the basis of lowest price, with each bidder having to state the price it was able to obtain for a range of specified flights. The companies then bid for specific deportations, with the winner being the one offering best value for money. Air Partner’s cut from the deal in 2021 was €2.7 million.

    The contract stipulates the need for total secrecy:

    [The contractor] Must apply the maximum discretion and confidentiality in relation to the activity… must not document or share information on the activity by any means such as photo, video, commenting or sharing in social media, or equivalent.

    The Frontex award effectively means that Air Partner and the other three firms can carry out work on behalf of all EU states. But the company’s involvement with deportations doesn’t stop there: Air Partner has also profited for years from similar contracts with a number of individual European governments.

    The company has done considerable work in Ireland, having been appointed as one of its official deportation brokers back in 2005. Ten years later, the Irish Department of Justice was recorded as having paid Air Partner to carry out a vaguely-described “air charter” job (on a web page that is no longer available), while in 2016 the same department paid Air Partner €240,000 for “returns air charter” – government-speak for deportation flights.

    Between August 2021 and February 2022, the Austrian government awarded the company six Frontex-funded deportation contracts, worth an estimated average of €33,796.

    The company also enjoys a deportation contract with the German government, in a deal reviewed annually. The current contract runs until February 2023.

    Finally, Air Partner has held deportation contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has been involved in deporting Mexican migrants to the US as far back as the early 2000s.1
    Relationship with the airlines

    In the first half of 2021, 22 of the EU’s 27 member states participated in Frontex flights, with Germany making far greater use of the ‘service’ than any other country. The geographic scale of Air Partner’s work gives an indication of the privileged access it has as gatekeeper to Europe’s lucrative ‘deportation market’, and ultimately, the golden land of government contracts more generally.

    For example, British carrier Titan Airways – which has long carried out deportations for the Home Office – only appears to have broken into this market in Germany and Austria in 2018 and 2019, respectively. As Corporate Watch has documented, other airlines such as Privilege Style, #AirTanker, #Wamos and #Iberojet (formerly, #Evelop) regularly run deportation flights for a number of governments, including the UK. We can assume that Air Partner’s relationships with the firms are key to these companies’ ability to secure such deals in new markets.

    Some of these relationships are clearly personal: #Alastair_Wilson, managing director of Titan Airways, worked as trading manager for Air Partner for seven years until he left that firm for Titan in 2014. By 2017, Titan was playing a major role in forcible expulsions from the UK.

    The business: from military money to deportation dealer

    Air Partner’s origins are in military work. Founded in 1961, the company started its life as a training centre which helped military pilots switch to the commercial sector. Known for much of its history as Air London, it has enjoyed extensive Ministry of Defence deals for troop rotations and the supply of military equipment. Up until 2010, military contracts represented over 60% of pre-tax profits. However, in recent years it has managed to wean itself off the MOD and develop a more diverse clientele; by 2018, the value of military contracts had dropped to less than 3% of profits.

    The company’s main business is in brokering aircraft for charter flights, and sourcing planes from its pool of partner airlines at the request of customers who want to hire them. It owns no aircraft itself. Besides governments and wealthy individuals, its current client base includes “corporates, sports and entertainment teams, industrial and manufacturing customers, and tour operators.”

    Its other source of cash is in training and consultancy to government, military and commercial customers through three subsidiaries: its risk management service Baines Simmons, the Redline Security project, and its disaster management sideline, Kenyon Emergency Services. Conveniently, while the group’s main business pumps out fossil fuels on needless private flights, Kenyon’s disaster management work involves among other things, preparing customers for climate change-induced natural disasters.

    Despite these other projects, charter work represents the company’s largest income stream by far, at 87% of the group’s profits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of this is from leasing large jets to customers such as governments, sports teams and tour operators. Its second most lucrative source of cash is leasing private jets to the rich, including celebrities. Finally, its freight shipments tend to be the least profitable division of its charter work.

    The company’s charter division continues to be “predominantly driven by government work”.2 It has been hired by dozens of governments and royal families worldwide, and almost half the profits from its charter work now derive from the US, although France has long been an important market too.

    Ferrying the mega-rich

    Meanwhile, Air Partner’s work shuttling politicians and other VIPs no doubt enables the company to build up its bank of useful contacts which help it secure such lucrative government deals. Truly this is a company of the mega-rich: a “last-minute, half-term holiday” with the family to Madeira costs a mere £36,500 just for the experience of a private jet. It was the first aircraft charter company to have held a Royal Warrant, and boasts of having flown US election candidates and supplying George W Bush’s press plane.3

    The “group charter” business works with bands and sports teams. The latter includes the Wales football team, Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Real Madrid, while the Grand Prix is “always a firm fixture in the charter calendar”.4 It also flew teams and fans to the controversial 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.5

    Crisis profiteer: the War on Terror, the Arab Spring & Covid-19

    Air Partner has cashed in on one crisis after the next. Not only that, it even contributes to one, and in so doing multiplies its financial opportunities. As military contractor to belligerent Western forces in the Middle East, the company is complicit in the creation of refugees – large numbers of whom Air Partner would later deport back to those war zones. It feeds war with invading armies, then feasts on its casualties.

    The company reportedly carried at least 4,000t of military supplies during the first Gulf War. The chairman at the time, Tony Mack, said:

    The Gulf War was a windfall for us. We’d hate to say ‘yippee, we’re going to war’, but I guess the net effect would be positive.6

    And in its financial records over the past twenty years, three events really stand out: 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’, the Arab Spring, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

    9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror was a game changer for the company, marking a departure from reliance on corporate customers and a shift to more secure government work. First – as with the pandemic – there was a boom in private jet hire due to “the number of rich clients who are reluctant to travel on scheduled services”.7

    But more significant were the military contracts it was to obtain during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. During the occupation of Afghanistan, it “did a lot of freighting for the military”,8 while later benefiting from emergency evacuation work when coalition foreign policy came to its inevitably grim conclusion in 2021.

    It enjoyed major military assignments with coalition forces in Iraq,9 with the UK’s eventual withdrawal resulting in a 19% drop in freight sales for the company. At one point, Air Partner lamented that its dip in profits was in part due to the temporary “cessation of official hostilities” and the non-renewal of its 2003 “Gulf contracts”.

    9/11 and the aggression that followed was a boon for Air Partner’s finances. From 2001-02, pre-tax profits increased to then record levels, jumping 85% from £2.2 million to £4 million. And it cemented the company’s fortunes longer-term; a 2006 company report gives insight into the scale of the government work that went Air Partner’s way:

    … over the last decade alone, many thousands of contracts worth over $500m have been successfully completed for the governments of a dozen Western Powers including six of the current G8 member states.

    Two years on, Air Partner’s then-CEO, #David_Savile, was more explicit about the impact of the War on Terror:

    Whereas a decade ago the team was largely servicing the Corporate sector, today it majors on global Government sector clients. Given the growing agenda of leading powers to pursue active foreign policies, work levels are high and in today’s climate such consistent business is an important source of income.

    Profits soared again in 2007, coinciding with the bloodiest year of the Iraq war – and one which saw the largest US troop deployment. Its chairman at the time said:

    The events of 9/11 were a watershed for the aviation industry…since then our sales have tripled and our profitability has quadrupled. We now expect a period of consolidation… which we believe will present longer term opportunities to develop new business and new markets.

    It seems likely that those “new markets” may have included deportation work, given that the first UK charter deportations were introduced by the New Labour government in 2001, the same year as the invasion of Afghanistan.

    Another financial highlight for the company was the 2011 Arab Spring, which contributed to a 93% increase in pre-tax profits. Air Partner had earlier won a four-year contract with the Department for International Development (DfID) to become its “sole provider of passenger and freight air charter services”, and had been hired to be a charter broker to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Crisis Centre.

    As people in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia took to the streets against their dictators, the company carried out emergency evacuations, including for “some of the largest oil companies”. A year later, it described a “new revenue stream from the oil & gas industry”, perhaps a bonus product of the evacuation work.

    Finally, its largest jump in profits was seen in 2021, as it reaped the benefits of converging crises: the pandemic, the evacuation of Afghanistan, and the supply chain crisis caused by Brexit and the severe congestion of global sea-shipping routes. The company was tasked with repatriation flights, PPE shipments, and “flying agricultural workers into the UK from elsewhere in Europe”, as well as responding to increased demand for “corporate shuttles” in the UK and US.10 Pre-tax profits soared 833% to £8.4 million. It made a gross profit of approximately £45 million in both 2021 and 2022. The company fared so well in fact from the pandemic that one paper summed it up with an article entitled “Air Partner takes off after virus grounds big airlines”.

    While there is scant reporting on the company’s involvement in deportations, The Times recently mentioned that Air Partner “helps in the deporting of individuals to Africa and the Caribbean, a business that hasn’t slowed down during the pandemic”. In a rare direct reference to deportation work, CEO Mark Briffa responded that it:

    …gives Wheels Up [Air Partner’s parent company] a great opportunity to expand beyond private jets…It was always going to be a challenge for a company our size to scale up and motor on beyond where we are.

    Yet Briffa’s justification based on the apparent need to diversify beyond VIP flights looks particularly hollow against the evidence of decades of lucrative government work his company has enjoyed.

    When asked for comment, a spokesperson from the company’s PR firm TB Cardew said:

    As a policy, we do not comment on who we fly or where we fly them. Customer privacy, safety and security are paramount for Air Partner in all of our operations. We do not confirm, deny or comment on any potential customer, destination or itinerary.

    The parent company: Wheels Up

    Air Partner was bought in spring 2022 for $108.2 million by Wheels Up Experience Inc, a US charter airline which was recently listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company calls itself one of the world’s largest private aviation companies, with over 180 owned or long-term leased aircraft, 150 managed fleet (a sort of sharing arrangement with owners), and 1,200 aircraft which it can hire for customers when needed.

    In contrast to Air Partner, its new owner is in deep trouble. While Wheels Up’s revenues have increased considerably over the past few years (from $384 million in 2019 to $1.2 billion in 2022), these were far outweighed by its costs. It made a net loss in 2021 of $190 million, more than double that of the previous year. The company attributes this to the ongoing impact of Covid-19, with reduced crew availability and customer cancellations. And the situation shows no sign of abating, with a loss of $276.5 million in the first nine months of this year alone. Wheels Up is responding with “aggressive cost-cutting”, including some redundancies.

    #Wheels_Up is, in turn, 20% owned by #Delta_Airlines, one of the world’s oldest and largest airlines. Mammoth asset manager Fidelity holds an 8% share, while Wheels Up’s CEO #Kenneth_Dichter owns 5%. Meanwhile, the so-called ‘Big Three’ asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street each hold smaller shareholdings.

    Among its clients, Wheels Up counts various celebrities – some of whom have entered into arrangements to promote the company as ‘brand ambassadors’. These apparently include Jennifer Lopez, American football players Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, J.J. Watt, Joey Logano, and Serena Williams.

    Given Wheel’s Up’s current financial situation, it can be safely assumed that government contracts will not be easily abandoned, particularly in a time of instability in the industry as a whole. At the same time, given the importance of Wheels Up as a brand and its VIP clientele, anything that poses a risk to its reputation would need to be handled delicately by the company.

    It also remains to be seen whether Wheels Up will use its own fleet to fulfil Air Partner’s contracting work, and potentially become a supplier of deportation planes in its own right.
    Top people

    Air Partner has been managed by CEO #Mark_Briffa since 2010. A former milkman and son of Maltese migrants, Briffa grew up in an East Sussex council house and left school with no O or A levels. He soon became a baggage handler at Gatwick airport, eventually making his way into sales and up the ladder to management roles. Briffa is also president of the parent company, Wheels Up.

    #Ed_Warner OBE is the company’s chair, which means he leads on its strategy and manages the board of directors. An Oxbridge-educated banker and former chair of UK Athletics, Warner no doubt helps Air Partner maintain its connections in the world of sport. He sits on the board of private equity fund manager HarbourVest, and has previously been chairman of BlackRock Energy and Resources Income Trust, which invests in mining and energy.

    #Kenny_Dichter is founder and CEO of Air Partner’s US parent company, Wheels Up. Dichter is an entrepreneur who has founded or provided early investment to a list of somewhat random companies, from a chain of ‘wellness’ stores, to a brand of Tequila.

    #Tony_Mack was chairman of the business founded by his parents for 23 years and a major shareholder, before retiring from Air Partner in 2014. Nowadays he prefers to spend his time on the water, where he indulges in yacht racing.

    Some of Air Partner’s previous directors are particularly well-connected. #Richard_Everitt, CBE held the company chairmanship from 2012 until 2017. A solicitor by training, prior to joining Air Partner Everitt was a director of the British Aviation Authority (BAA) and chief executive of National Air Traffic Services (Nats), and then CEO of the Port of London Authority (PLA). Since leaving the PLA, he has continued his career on the board of major transport authorities, having twice been appointed by the Department of Transport as chair of Dover Harbour Board, a two-day per week job with an annual salary of £79,500. He also served as a commissioner of Belfast Harbour.

    One figure with friends in high places was the Hon. #Rowland_John_Fromanteel_Cobbold, who was an Air Partner director from 1996 to 2004. Cobbold was the son of 1st Baron Cobbold, former Governor of the Bank of England and former Lord Chamberlain, an important officer of the royal household. He was also grandson of Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton and governor of Bengal, and younger brother of 2nd Baron Cobbold, who was a crossbench peer.

    #Lib_Dem peer #Lord_Lee of Trafford held significant shares in Air Partner from at least 2007 until the company was bought by Wheels Up in 2022. Lord Lee served as parliamentary undersecretary for MOD Procurement under Margaret Thatcher, as well as Minister for Tourism. In 2015 the value of his 113,500 shares totalled £446,000. His shares in the company were despite having been Lib Dem party spokesman on defence at the time. Seemingly, having large stakes in a business which benefits from major MOD contracts, whilst simultaneously advocating on defence policy was not deemed a serious conflict of interest. The former stockbroker is now a regular columnist for the Financial Times. Calling himself the “first ISA millionaire”, Lee published a book called “How to Make a Million – Slowly: Guiding Principles From a Lifetime Investing”.

    The company’s recent profits have been healthy enough to ensure that those at the top are thoroughly buffered from the current cost of living crisis, as all executive and non-executive directors received a hefty pay rise. Its 2022 Annual Report reveals that CEO Mark Briffa’s pay package totalled £808,000 (£164,000 more than he received in 2021) and outgoing Chief Financial Officer Joanne Estell received £438,000 (compared with £369,000 in 2021), not to mention that Briffa and Estell were awarded a package in spring 2021 of 100% and 75% of their salary in shares. Given the surge in Air Partner’s share price just before the buyout, it’s likely that the net worth of its directors – and investors like Lord Lee – has significantly increased too.

    Conclusion

    What really is the difference between the people smugglers vilified daily by right-wing rags, and deportation merchants like Air Partner? True, Air Partner helps cast humans away in the opposite direction, often to places of danger rather than potential safety. And true, smugglers’ journeys are generally more consensual, with migrants themselves often hiring their fixers. But for a huge fee, people smugglers and deportation profiteers alike ignore the risks and indignities involved, as human cargo is shunted around in the perverse market of immigration controls.

    In October 2022, deportation airline Privilege Style announced it would pull out of the Rwanda deal following strategic campaigning by groups including Freedom from Torture and SOAS Detainee Support. This is an important development and we can learn lessons from the direct action tactics used. Yet campaigns against airlines are continuously being undermined by Air Partner – who, as the Home Office’s deportation fixer, will simply seek others to step in.

    And under the flashing blue lights of a police state, news that an airline will merely be deporting refugees to their countries of origin – however dangerous – rather than to a distant African processing base, might be seen as wonderful news. It isn’t. Instead of becoming accustomed to a dystopian reality, let’s be spurred on by the campaign’s success to put an end to this cruel industry in its entirety.
    Appendix: Air Partner Offices

    Air Partner’s addresses, according to its most recent annual report, are as follows:

    - UK: 2 City Place, Beehive Ring Road, Gatwick, West Sussex RH6 0PA.
    - France: 89/91 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris & 27 Boulevard Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris.
    - Germany: Im Mediapark 5b, 50670 Köln.
    - Italy: Via Valtellina 67, 20159 Milano.
    - Turkey: Halil Rıfatpaşa Mh Yüzer Havuz Sk No.1 Perpa Ticaret Merkezi ABlok Kat.12 No.1773, Istanbul.

    Footnotes

    1 Aldrick, Philip. “Worth teaming up with Air Partner”. The Daily Telegraph, October 07, 2004.

    2 “Air Partner makes progress in the face of some strong headwinds”. Proactive Investors UK, August 27, 2021.

    3 Aldrick, Philip. “Worth teaming up with Air Partner”. The Daily Telegraph, October 07, 2004.

    4 Lea, Robert. “Mark Briffa has a new partner in aircraft chartering and isn’t about to fly away”. The Times, April 29, 2022

    5 Ibid.

    6 “AirPartner predicts rise in demand if Gulf war begins”. Flight International, January 14 2003.

    7 “Celebrity status boosts Air Partner”. Yorkshire Post, October 10, 2002.

    8 Baker, Martin. “The coy royal pilot”. The Sunday Telegraph, April 11, 2004.

    9 Hancock, Ciaran. “Air Partner”. Sunday Times, April 10, 2005.

    10 Saker-Clark, Henry. “Repatriation and PPE flights boost Air Partner”. The Herald, May 6, 2020.

    https://corporatewatch.org/air-partner-the-home-offices-deportation-fixer
    #avions #compagnies_aériennes #Home_Office #UK #Angleterre #renvois #expulsions #business #complexe_militaro-industriel

    via @isskein

  • How to add user to a group on command line ? - Ask Different
    https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/13132/how-to-add-user-to-a-group-on-command-line

    Utilisation de l’utilitaire en ligne de commande dseditgroup pour ajouter/supprimer un utilisateur à un groupe sur MacOS (l’équivalent de useradd / usermod sous Linux)
    Pour mémoire : ajouter l’utilisateur toto dans le groupe wheel :

    dseditgroup -o edit -a toto -t user wheel

    Voir aussi la man page de dseditgroup : https://ss64.com/osx/dseditgroup.html

    #dseditgroup #macos #groupe #useradd #usermod #wheel

  • John Chau, American Missionary, and the Uncontacted Tribe | GQ
    https://www.gq.com/story/john-chau-missionary-and-uncontacted-tribe


    Voici la triste histoire d’un jeune homme sérieux et doué qui a mis en danger l’existence d’une des dernières tribus vivant sans relations avec la civilisation capitaliste. Les détails de l’histoire font comprendre l’énorme danger auxquel nous sommes tous exposés à cause des croyances irrationnelles de la classe dominante étatsunienne.

    When a 26-year-old American missionary set out for a lush island in the Indian Ocean last year, it was with one objective in mind: to convert the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe, who had lived for centuries in isolation, free from modern technology, disease, and religion. John Chau’s mission had ambitions for a great awakening, but what awaited instead was tragedy.

    By Doug Bock Clark, August 22, 2019

    1. First Contact

    For 11 days in November 2018, John Chau lived mostly in darkness. While a cyclone thrashed the Bay of Bengal, Chau quarantined himself inside a safe house in the tropical backwater of Port Blair, India, never stepping outside to enjoy sunlight. The 26-year-old American missionary was hoping his body would finish off any lingering infections so that he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe that he dreamed of converting to Christianity. They’d been isolated on their remote island for enough centuries that they’d never developed modern antibodies. Even the common cold could devastate them.

    During this retreat Chau kept his mountain climber’s body hard with triangle push-ups, leg tucks, and body squats. But it was his soul that he primarily fortified, with prayer and by reading a history of the tribulations faced by pioneering American missionaries in Southeast Asia, who were an inspiration to him. “God, I thank you for choosing me, before I was even yet formed in my mother’s womb, to be Your messenger of Your Good News,” he wrote in his diary. “May Your Kingdom, Your Rule and Reign come now to North Sentinel Island.”

    After the storm finally passed, a crew of local Christians hid Chau on their 30-foot open wooden boat and struck out under darkness for the most extreme outcrop of the Andaman archipelago, on a route presumably meant to resemble that of a normal fishing expedition. As they dodged other craft, Chau recorded, “The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the Coast Guard and Navy patrols.” The Indian government bans contact with the Sentinelese as a way of protecting them from outsiders—and outsiders from them. The Sentinelese have maintained their independence by frequently repelling foreigners from their shoreline with eight-foot-long arrows.

    Bioluminescent plankton illuminated fish jumping “like darting mermaids” as the boat motored more than 60 miles. Sometime before 4:30 a.m., the crew noted three bonfires on a distant beach and then anchored outside the island’s barrier reef. While resting, eyes shut but not asleep, Chau had “a vision as I’ve never had one before,” of a meteorite—possibly representing himself—streaking toward a “frightening city with jagged spires,” seemingly Sentinel Island. Then “a whitish light filled [the city] and all the frightening bits melted away.” He couldn’t help wondering in his diary: “LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?”

    Dawn soon revealed a hut on a white-sand beach, backed by primordial jungle. Chau off-loaded from the fishermen’s boat a kayak and two waterproof cases jammed with wilderness survival supplies. He paddled a half mile in shallow water over dead coral, and as he approached shore, he heard women “looing and chattering.” Then two dark-skinned men, wearing little, if anything, ran onto the beach, shouting in a language spoken by no one on earth besides their tribe. They clutched bows, though they hadn’t yet strung arrows onto them.

    From his kayak, Chau yelled in English: “My name is John. I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.” Then, offering a tuna most likely caught by the fishermen on the journey to the island, Chau declared: “Here is some fish!” In response, the Sentinelese socketed bamboo arrows onto bark-fiber bowstrings. Chau panicked. He flung the gift into the bay. As the tribesmen gathered it, he turned and paddled “like I never have in my life, back to the boat.”

    By the time he reached safety, though, his fear was already turning to disappointment. He swore to himself that he would return later that day. He had, after all, been planning for this moment since high school. It was his divine calling, he believed, to save the lost souls of North Sentinel Island.
    2. The Calling

    On the surface, John Chau enjoyed a normal 1990s childhood in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, playing soccer and performing charitable work with his church. Family photos show a chubby-cheeked boy grinning with his Chinese psychiatrist father in national parks, his American lawyer mother presumably behind the camera. But it wasn’t just those vacations that inspired his love of the wild. One day, while still in elementary school, Chau found a book in his dad’s downstairs study and wiped dust off its cover to reveal: Robinson Crusoe. The story of a solitary castaway on a tropical island hooked him on adventure tales.

    As Chau matured, he mastered the skills necessary to strike off on his own adventures in the rugged mountains just outside Portland, earning the equivalent of an Eagle Scout award from an evangelical version of the Boy Scouts. It wasn’t just a love of exploration that drove him. Wandering through mossy forests caused him to marvel at “the beautiful creation around us that we are all called to care for” and connected him to God, like the Old Testament prophets who found the Lord while alone in the wilderness.

    As posted on Instagram: Chau took public ferries to several outlying islands to test his kayak for his final trip to North Sentinel Island.

    Chau grew up Pentecostal, a charismatic Christian movement that is generally considered intensely evangelical and conservative. His mother wrote that she worked as a fund-raiser for organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which describes itself as “Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” and then for many years on the faculty at Oral Roberts University, a historically Pentecostal institution. It was during his junior year at a small Christian high school that he underwent that American evangelical rite of passage: a mission trip to Mexico. Sermonizing months later, as seen in a video uploaded to YouTube, Chau said the trip helped him realize, “We can’t just call ourselves Christians and then the next day just be like, Yeah, you know, let’s go to a party and get drunk and get high, whatever, get wasted, and live a lifestyle that’s totally against what Christ has called us to do. We actually have to do something.” The skinny teenager in an American Eagle polo reminds his listeners that one of Jesus’s commands was: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” This passage comes from what is known as the Great Commission, and it is a primary biblical justification for missionary work.

    Though overseas missions might seem a relic of the British Empire, America dispatches a significant number of missionaries abroad each year—approximately 127,000 in 2010, for example, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. This number grew for decades because of American Protestantism’s emphasis on every believer’s responsibility to proselytize and the increasing ease of air travel, which has meant that spreading the Word internationally can be done over spring break. These factors have contributed to an explosion of self-regulated missionary groups that can seem practically freelance compared with the bureaucratized Catholic missionary orders of old. Chau would have likely believed missionary work “to be a divine obligation,” said Joshua Chen, a friend raised in a household with similar beliefs.

    Among some evangelicals, few missionaries are as celebrated as those who work with remote tribes. After returning from his high school trip to Mexico, Chau was surfing JoshuaProject.net, a website that catalogs unconverted peoples, and stumbled upon an entry for the Sentinelese. Today the site describes them as a “hostile” tribe that “need to know the Creator God exists.” Before long he was conjuring the islet on Google Maps, promising that he was going to bring the Sentinelese the Good News. His father, Patrick Chau, overheard him telling others this was his “calling,” but Patrick later wrote, “I hoped that he would be matured enough to rectify the fantasy before too late.”

    Indian anthropologists pass coconuts to the Sentinelese in 1991—one of the most notable attempts at contact to date.
    3. Satan’s Last Stronghold

    The Andamanese tribes, of which the Sentinelese are one, are “arguably the most enigmatic people on our planet,” according to a team of geneticists who published a paper in 2003 about trying to track their origins. The scientists found some evidence that they were part of the first wave of humans to reach Asia, more than 50,000 years ago—which makes sense, as their appearance is similar to that of Africans. But if that theory holds true, Asiatic peoples, who arrived later, eradicated their forebears, except for a remnant in the Andamans. This would mean that the estimated 50 to 200 surviving Sentinelese have been refugees since prehistory.

    Records from Roman, Arab, and Chinese traders, dating from the second century A.D., tell of Andamanese murdering sailors who put to shore looking for fresh water. In the 13th century, Marco Polo passed nearby and recorded from secondhand accounts that “they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race,” though he was almost certainly wrong about the cannibalism. Consequently, most people who even knew about the Sentinelese were happy to avoid them until the British Empire established Port Blair, a penal colony for rebellious Indians, on nearby South Andaman Island.

    In 1879, the 19-year-old aristocrat Maurice Vidal Portman was charged with overseeing the Andamanese and—drawn by whatever impulse has moved young men across the ages—soon led an expedition to Sentinel Island. At first he and his soldiers freely roamed a jungle that was “in many places open and park like,” he wrote, and filled with “beautiful groves of bullet-wood trees.” Eventually they discovered some recently abandoned lean-tos and evidence that their inhabitants survived by hunting sea turtles, wild pigs, and fish, as well as by foraging fruits and roots. Portman, however, was not satisfied.

    After scouring the Manhattan-size island several times, and having glancing contact with the Sentinelese, the outsiders finally stumbled across an old Sentinelese man with his wife and child. The old man was tackled before he could fire his bow, and the whole family, along with three other Sentinelese children captured about the same time, was abducted back to Port Blair where Portman kept all of them in his house. (Over two ensuing decades of ostensibly civilizing the natives, Portman habitually photographed naked Andamanese captives, though it doesn’t seem that any of the disturbing pictures that survive are of the Sentinelese.) The old Sentinelese man and his wife rapidly died of sickness, and Portman eventually released the surviving children back to the island with gifts—and, perhaps, pathogens. “This expedition was not a success,” Portman wrote. “We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers. It would have been better to have left the Islanders alone.”

    Some have speculated that Portman turned the Sentinelese against outsiders. Certainly his misadventures couldn’t have helped. But historical records suggest that the Sentinelese had isolated themselves long before Portman, perhaps because Southeast Asian kingdoms had raided them for slaves. Regardless, the Sentinelese violently maintained their independence until the British Empire collapsed, shortly after World War II, and the new Indian government eventually realized that some of its citizens didn’t even comprehend they were Indian.

    Consequently, in March 1974, a team of Indian anthropologists attempted to befriend the Sentinelese. As they approached the island, the anthropologists were guarded by policemen equipped with shields and shadowed by a film crew. The Indians had brought three Andamanese from a friendly tribe to interpret. “We are friends!” they shouted through a loudspeaker from a boat offshore. “We come in peace!” Evidence suggests the Sentinelese’s language has diverged from those of nearby tribes so much they are mutually unintelligible. But from about 80 yards away, one archer bent so far back that he seemed to aim at the sun, then launched an unmistakable reply. In a recording of that moment, an eight-foot bamboo shaft, with an iron nail lashed to its tip, plunges out of the heavens, ricochets off the boat’s railing, and into the water. When the camera refocuses, a Sentinelese man is pumping both fists in what is obviously a victory dance as the boat retreats.

    The anthropologists then motored up the coast, leaving coconuts, bananas, and plastic buckets on a deserted beach, and later watched as the Sentinelese carried away the offerings. But even that did not win over the tribe: The expedition was halted when the film director was wounded in the thigh by an arrow. When the anthropologists subsequently tried to leave even more gifts, the tribe immediately speared a bound live pig with their long arrows and buried it in the sand. A cotton doll left to test if they would let a human-shaped object cross their beach into the island’s interior suffered a similar fate.

    After that, anthropologists continued to make intermittent and unsuccessful visits to the island, and sometimes the outside world washed up on its shores. In 1981, a Panamanian freighter ran aground on the barrier reef during a storm. A few days later, a lookout spotted about 50 naked “wild men” waving bows and arrows on the beach. As described in The American Scholar, the crew then radioed the Regent Shipping Company’s Hong Kong office and begged for an airdrop of guns: “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.” Robert Fore, an American pilot who was working nearby, ended up landing a helicopter on the ship’s deck in high winds and plucking more than 30 sailors and their dog to safety. Fore had flown combat missions in Vietnam, he said, “but this was unique.” They left behind a ship’s worth of iron to be hammered into arrowheads, as well as tons of less useful chicken feed.

    The most recent contact of note was in 2006, when two Indian fishermen, believed to be drunk on palm wine, drifted ashore. Other poachers watched from outside the barrier reef as the Sentinelese hacked them to death with what were probably adzes, which an anthropologist has speculated that the tribe “must have endowed with magical power, to keep away the evil spirits.” When a helicopter investigated the deaths, archers drove it away, but not before rotor wind whipped sand off shallow graves—revealing a pair of corpses. After some time, the bodies were reportedly dug up and hung like scarecrows on bamboo poles, facing the sea.
    4. God’s University

    Chau learned this violent history while researching the tribe on his laptop. As he read on a missionary’s blog the summer after his freshman year of college: “The Sentinelese may be the greatest missions challenge anywhere!” Instead of being daunted, though, he appears to have tried to strike up a correspondence with the missionary, writing, “Hi! I genuinely believe that God has called me to go to the Sentinelese.”

    Chau was attending Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oral Roberts, nicknamed “God’s University,” has the stated goal of fostering “evangelistic capability” in its students. In 2018, the school sent about a seventh of its student body abroad on missions. Chau enrolled in History of Missions, a course in which he learned, as a syllabus put it, “a people-to-people strategy working from within the culture” for proselytizing. According to Dan McCarthy, a friend who said he took the class and later went on a mission overseas with him, this meant: “You learn the culture of those people. You learn their language. You blend in, and then you hope you get a chance to share Jesus because they ask questions about how you’ve been modeling His love. You don’t go in and force it down their throats.”

    Putting theory into practice, Chau worked with the university’s Missions and Outreach department, under Bobby Parks, a boyishly handsome and enthusiastic 30-something. Chau helped Parks coach refugee children in soccer for Park’s not-for-profit organization and perform local missions. Parks would later describe on social media his mentorship of Chau as similar to how the older apostle Paul guided the younger Timothy. While at Oral Roberts University, Chau traveled twice to South Africa—once with Parks’s department and later to coach and teach “life values” at a Christian soccer academy, one of the countless institutions that accept short-term missionaries in the world-spanning evangelical travel industry. Chau also represented his faith closer to home. Nicole Hopkins, a university friend, said that when her sister was in the hospital for a year, John provided her with daily support but “never pushed the gospel on her during that season.” Hopkins said that a couple of years later “my sister became a Christian and she says John’s actions were a big part of her believing God is real.” Despite his conviction, Chau doesn’t seem to have been an in-your-face proselytizer; secular friends said he barely discussed religion with them. After these experiences, Chau wrote, “ORU missions gave me direction in my life.”

    Other than his dedication to missions, Chau was basically a typical college student, albeit at a school without frat parties. He had an affinity for root beer, discussed Jesus for hours, and signed a pledge to abstain from “unscriptural sexual acts, which include any homosexual activity and sexual intercourse with one who is not my spouse.” Even in such a God-fearing environment, Chau stood out for his piety, making Hopkins “question whether or not I was as sold out for Christ as I claimed to be,” as she later wrote on social media. Despite his conservative background, he was “hardly the stereotypical, Bible-thumping ‘fundamentalist,’ ” said a friend, who came out to him as homosexual. In a message responding to that revelation, Chau wrote, “I see people as people, sons and daughters of God as their identity,” and said he would be willing to bless his queer brothers as much as his straight brothers. Chau was “an introverted social butterfly,” said another friend—reserved at first, but forging many deep relationships over time. Hopkins wrote me: “I’ve never met a man who loved others so selflessly.” And yet whenever Chau could, he left the city of Tulsa—which he described as “relatively devoid of natural beauty”—for the spiritual solitude of the woods. He cultivated a backpacker vibe, sprinkling his speech with “stoked” and “rad,” and bulked up through constant athletic activity.

    Upon graduating with a degree in exercise science, in 2014, Chau led a third mission trip to South Africa for the department run by Parks. Then, according to his personal blog, it was on to an autonomous region in northern Iraq to organize soccer games in refugee camps for Parks’s organization. After the high of adventures like these, Chau settled into a one-year AmeriCorps contract on a disaster-preparedness team back in Oklahoma. Staring at the gray felt walls of his workspace in October, he Instagrammed, “Never thought I’d be working in a cubicle. #reallife #whereisthebreeze #tooquiet.” But as he waited out the dreary winter, Chau laid plans for the following summer that would eventually take him to the Andaman archipelago.

    When June arrived, Chau road-tripped across the States, anthems from the likes of Angels & Airwaves shaking his rattletrap car. In California he passed a month-long course to become a wilderness emergency medical technician that involved simulations with actors employing “tons of (fake) blood” and actual helicopters, which jazzed him with a “flood of adrenaline,” he wrote.

    Then, in August, as a final test to harden himself before India, he embarked on an ambitious 120-mile trek through the Northwest’s Cascade mountains with two friends. Chau had plotted a route through backcountry that proved impractical, so they ended up trailblazing for two days over mountains—until they found themselves with no way forward except downclimbing a dry yet slippery waterfall. He later said that as he descended, “I remember thinking about how strong the contrast was between the vibrant beauty and life seen in view,” referring to the mountainous panorama below, “and the stark potentiality of death lingering at every misstep.” It was the “scariest” thing he had ever done. But the realization of “how fragile life is” inspired his personal motto: “Make the most of every good opportunity today because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow!”

    Soon after making it out of the woods, Chau boarded a plane for the Andaman archipelago.
    5. Giant Seeds

    Improbable as Chau’s calling seemed, there was an outside chance that he might befriend the Sentinelese, for it had almost happened once before. In 1967, Triloknath Pandit became the lead government anthropologist for the Andamans and promptly started depositing gifts on Sentinel’s beaches. Pandit said his project “wasn’t idle curiosity. Whatever knowledge we were able to obtain could help us protect [the Sentinelese]” and fight ignorant myths.

    For years the Sentinelese had remained hostile, as in 1974, when the film director was struck by the arrow. But after more semi-annual offerings, Pandit observed, in 1988, a “Sentinelese [who] started dancing with an adze in his hand” after presents were left on the beach. The next month, as Pandit and other anthropologists deposited bags of coconuts, some Sentinelese approached as close as ten yards. “All the Sentinelese took the gifts and expressed their joy through gestures,” he later wrote. “We reciprocated in kind.”

    In January 1991, expecting nothing unusual, Pandit dispatched a junior anthropologist, Madhumala Chattopadhyay, to help lead a gift drop—and was stunned when she reported that Sentinelese had waded out to the boat to accept the offerings. Perhaps, she suggested to me, her female presence had signaled that the researchers didn’t have warlike intentions. The next month, the horn of Pandit and Chattopadhyay’s boat echoed at dawn. Later that day, about a dozen Sentinelese splashed out to them. Soon, Pandit and others were standing in the water and passing out coconuts. There exists a photo in which Pandit, in sunglasses and a tank top, holds out a coconut to a naked Sentinelese man, who accepts it with a single hand. For a moment, modern citizen and hunter-gatherer, both, held the giant seed.

    Pandit was so exhilarated that he didn’t notice the lifeboat drifting off, making it look as if he intended to stay. Suddenly a Sentinelese youth pulled a knife from his bark belt and drew a circle with his other hand, as if saying, “I’m going to carve out your heart.” Pandit retreated and threw back an ornament of green leaves that had been given to him. The Sentinelese man tossed him a lifeboat oar that was floating nearby. The two worlds had once more separated. But Pandit was greatly encouraged and wrote in a trip report, “We felt we must carry a lot more coconuts on our future visits.”

    The next year, however, Pandit says, he struck mandatory retirement age. Perhaps feeling the Sentinelese were more trouble than they were worth, the government decided to forgo any future visits. “I regret not visiting them again,” Pandit told me in his apartment on the mainland. He was now in his 80s, and health problems meant that he was unlikely to ever return. “I think had we continued for another year or so, maybe they would have extended an invitation to come ashore.”
    6. An Incredible Adventure

    “My life becomes an incredible adventure when I follow the call of God,” Chau captioned an Instagram photo of himself riding a motorbike down a hectic street in October 2015, soon after arriving in the Andaman Islands. “I’m excited to see where He leads!” Foreigners are primarily allowed to shuttle between seedy Port Blair and a handful of resort beaches, as much of the island chain is reserved for four hunter-gatherer tribes, including the Sentinelese. But Chau quickly began testing the archipelago’s security. “John knew it was illegal,” said John Ramsey, a friend. “His facade was just that he was a traveling adventure tourist.” As Dependra Pathak, the director general of the Andaman police said, “He built the logistical support and friendships he needed during those trips.”

    Chau stayed in a $13-a-night hotel, with only a fan to stir the tropically hot air, and rode packed public buses to scuba-diving excursions, where he would question guides for more information that might help him get to Sentinel. Acquaintances of Chau’s—whose identities I have withheld, since the Indian police have asked them not to speak to journalists—described him as “enthusiastic” and “friendly.” He cultivated a wide network of contacts, from tourist guides to fishermen, and strove unsuccessfully to learn the Hindi language. Most importantly, he connected with the local Christian community, a minority in the Hindu nation. He preached at a local church and in social media posts thanked Oral Roberts’s Missions and Outreach department for teaching him to always have a sermon handy, tagging one of them “#relationshipbuilding #missions.” Parks, his former boss there, responded: “Praying for you Chau boy. Proud of you. Keep loving big.” (Parks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Chau was correct in his assumption that locals would eventually show him the way to Sentinel Island, but after several weeks his path there wasn’t yet clear. He would have to return the next year.

    For four years, Chau made annual visits to the Andamans, bringing gifts for a widening circle of friends until it felt like a “home away from home.” According to the Indian police and two local sources, he became close to “Alex,” a 28-year-old engineer who lived in Port Blair. Alex is Keralese, descended from a small sect of intensely Christian Indians who, tradition has it, were converted about two decades after the Crucifixion by the apostle Thomas, who’d sailed on a spice trader to southern India. At first, Alex warned Chau against his mission, but according to Indian police, Chau eventually won him over. (A lawyer for Alex said that charges had not yet been proven in court, and so the narrative of him helping Chau was “false for now.”) Alex introduced Chau to a small community of Karen, an ethnic minority from Myanmar who’d been converted to Christianity by American missionaries. During Chau’s second visit to the Andamans, in late 2016, he likely bused through the jungle reserve of a friendlier hunter-gatherer tribe, the Jarawa, to reach the remote Karen village on its outskirts. There lived the fishermen who would eventually ferry him to Sentinel Island. On returning home, Chau had an argument with his father about whether he was following the Scriptures in pursuing his missionary work. After that, they decided to “agree to disagree.”

    Now that he had an idea about how to get to Sentinel Island, Chau began to prepare with characteristic relentlessness for what he might do once he set foot on shore. A list written by Chau shows that in 2017 he read 47 missionary and anthropological books. In 2018 he read 65. He contacted several missionary organizations with reputations for supporting attempts to reach uncontacted peoples and missionaries who had actually done so, plumbing them for information. Chau even discussed with a missionary engineer using a drone to make contact, but he eventually decided it had to be done face-to-face. Any plans to make an attempt in 2017 may have been scuttled when he stepped too close to a large rattlesnake near the cabin he lived in while working at an environmental-science school in the California mountains. From his hospital bed he Instagrammed numerous shots of his grotesquely swollen foot, smeared in blood, tagging one of them #selfrescue.

    Chau was still rehabbing when he arrived that summer at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, which runs an intensive two-month training in how to translate the Bible into new languages. Fellow participant Kaleb Graves remembered, “[Chau] was the center of just about every conversation when he was comfortable,” and other aspiring missionaries were drawn to his “sense that every second was an adventure.” And yet Graves remembered that Chau also seemed “outside the norm” of the class, and they bonded while avoiding communal chapel and discussing how “all chapels feel exactly the same—you’ve heard that sermon, you’ve sung those songs—and you know time alone is the best way to encounter God.” Graves noted that Chau would often take long solitary hikes. “He seemed sort of lonely, despite everything,” Graves said. “If you think you have this one monumental divine task, but you can’t share it, you’ve got to cover up that loneliness, and maybe that’s why he was so friendly with everyone.” Chau’s friend Ramsey said, “John received a fair amount of attention from girls,” but “he didn’t want any romantic attachments because he was focused on his mission—and he was afraid that a heart could get broken.”

    Since Chau had acquired some basic tools to try to crack the Sentinelese language, there was just one more form of training he would undergo. Later that summer, when Chau visited Ramsey’s home, the two friends had a heart-to-heart. Ramsey asked him, “What are you going to do with your life, bro?” Though Chau had previously described his missionary hopes in general terms, now he explained his specific calling to the Sentinelese. Even more, he asked Ramsey and Ramsey’s mother, who was a trained editor, to look over his application to All Nations, an organization that supports missionaries targeting “neglected peoples” in places where such work can be illegal or dangerous. Chau had long known of All Nations: His first Oral Roberts mission trip to South Africa had also been supported by All Nations. Ramsey said there wasn’t any point in trying to dissuade Chau from going: “He’d already made the decision.”

    In the fall of 2017, Chau attended an All Nations program, one of the many unregulated missionary courses in America. As the New York Times reported, Chau’s training culminated with him hiking several hours through an area south of Kansas City. When he managed to track down a mocked-up tribal village, Americans dressed in secondhand clothes threatened him with spears and babbled an unintelligible language to simulate what he might experience on Sentinel Island. Chau distinguished himself as “one of the best participants in this experience that we have ever had,” the international executive leader of All Nations told the Times. (All Nations disputed the Times’ description of the event, explaining that no weapons were used and that it trained participants “to share the Good News of Jesus in a way that is cross-culturally sensitive,” but said that it had not raised its concerns directly with the newspaper.) Then he took one more preparatory trip to the Andamans, in early 2018.

    Finally, as autumn arrived that year, Chau said goodbye to his siblings and parents, knowing it could be for the last time. Since he first began to speak of going to Sentinel Island while in his teens, his parents had encouraged him to pursue medicine instead, or, failing that, to save souls in a less dangerous location. His father, Patrick, wrote in an essay about him, the existence of which was first reported by Outside, “John became the victim when my [influence],” of a more moderate Christianity, “failed to counter the irrational religious and glamorized ambition of adventures of exploration.” Patrick blamed John’s immersion in the “fanatical evangelical extreme” on professional troubles that damaged his ability to be a role model for John during his high school years. John’s elder brother and sister seem to have happily followed their father’s path into medicine and a moderate Christianity, but Patrick noted that John was always different from the more obedient pair. John may have also sought his own path outside the home because of his parents’ disharmony. Elkanah Jebasingh, an Indian friend, said that during visits John prayed for his parents’ strained marriage. John’s social media was replete with pictures of him hiking with his mother and fishing with his father, along with loving testimonies about both—but by the time of his final visit, after years of arguments, parents and son had become entrenched in their views. Patrick wrote me that before saying goodbye, John “did not have a sustained argument with me, but only a few words.” Then Patrick cited a Chinese proverb that translates as “When words get sour, adding words is useless.”

    On his way to India, Chau stopped in South Africa to see Casey Prince, an American ex–pro soccer player who ran the academy where Chau had coached during his first Oral Roberts missions. Chau had stayed in Prince’s house on two previous visits to South Africa, and the two became so close that Casey’s wife, Sarah Prince, claimed him as “family.” He admired the Princes for spending nearly a decade living in and ministering to Cape Town’s poorer communities, and now he sought their advice on integrating with the Sentinelese. When Chau had described his calling during previous visits, Casey had privately doubted whether his plan was possible, but “I now saw [John] was totally serious,” he said. They discussed how Chau would need to spend years learning the tribe’s language and culture, and then sensitively introduce them to the gospel. “The best-case scenario would be ‘I’ll see you and all my friends and family in ten years,’ ” Casey said. “Success would still be a huge sacrifice.” Chau also received counsel from a South African missionary, whom he calls “Pieter V.” in his diary, who regaled him with stories of eluding Indian authorities and who, Chau suggests elsewhere, successfully preached to the Jarawa tribe in the Andamans from 1997 to 2003.

    Chau’s final plan probably looked similar to a 27-step one laid out in a document that he had shared with confidants earlier that year. In the section “Initial Contact (2018),” Chau wrote he would overcome the Sentinelese’s mistrust with gifts and then communicate “my desire to stay with them…using pictures, drawings in sand, and/or drawings in waterproof notebook.” Once he had sufficiently learned the language and culture, he explained in section “Long-Term Contact (2018-?),” he would use “oral storytelling” to find “culturally applicable stories” that would “translate the Gospel into a context [the Sentinelese] can understand without Western cultural additions.” He hoped to identify and then convert a few influencers in the tribe, who would help him win over everyone else and lead an indigenous church. He even envisioned eventually dispatching them as missionaries to the Jarawa. “After all of the evangelism and discipleship has been passed on to local tribal believers,” he wrote in his “Exit Plan” section, he might paddle a “dugout canoe/kayak” to a beach near Port Blair. But if leaving the tribe seemed too likely to get him caught and expose everything, “I could potentially reside for the rest of my life on the islands.”

    Soon, Chau’s month of respite was finished. He sent a final email to a select group of supporters, saying goodbye, asking for prayers, and offering updates on his plans. Signing off, he described seeing outside of Cape Town a “horrific car crash” that had resulted in several corpses. “It was a stark reminder to me of how fragile our lives on earth are,” he wrote. Then he paraphrased Ephesians, “Use your time carefully…. Understand what the Lord Jesus wants you to do, and do it.” Throughout the letter, he sounds like a man who is confident he is fulfilling his destiny.

    “It was weird, to have your hugs and part ways with him saying, ‘I could arrive on the island and get shot with arrows,’ ” Casey said. “It makes you think of what it was like for people going off to war in the past.” Before Chau left, Sarah said, they had several conversations about how he had tried to “check his motives with God, asking ‘if I’m just being an adventure junkie, or rebelling, or a religious extremist.’ But he just kept feeling that this is what God was calling him to do.” They also discussed the fact that though “he loved and respected his family,” he was going against the wishes of his parents. “He knew they weren’t at peace,” said Sarah, “but he had peace at the end, leaving them—he had given it to God in his heart.” When they separated, Sarah felt divinely inspired to share a psalm with Chau: “I will not die, but live, and will proclaim what the Lord has done.”

    When Chau landed in Port Blair, in October, he likely already carried with him most of what he needed to go all the way: a collapsible kayak, two waterproof cases full of equipment—including fishing gear, medicine, multivitamins, and picture cards to help communicate—as well as gifts, like safety pins, that the Andaman police believe he chose by researching what offerings other hunter-gatherers had appreciated. Shortly after Chau’s own arrival, Parks, Chau’s former boss at Oral Roberts, and another evangelical friend from college met him at Alex’s “safe house” apartment.

    Police director Pathak believes the other Americans were there to “encourage [Chau] to feel enthusiasm” about the mission. They had timed their trip to see Chau off to North Sentinel, but once the cyclone spun up, they had to leave before the seas calmed. Chau waited out the bad weather. According to Pathak, Chau then paid the five Karen fishermen about $350, a windfall in a country where a billion people survive on less than $5.50 a day, to sneak him out to sea at night. The next morning the Sentinelese rebuffed Chau’s first attempt to save them.
    7. The Biblical Shield

    “I felt some fear, but mainly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away,” Chau wrote in his diary on returning to the Karen’s boat. But after a quick meal of fresh-caught fish, rice, and dal, he paddled about a mile up the coast. Once he was out of sight of the Sentinelese, he buried his larger waterproof case so he would have a secret stash of supplies should the tribe accept him. Then he returned to the fishermen’s boat and outfitted his kayak with two more gift fish; his waterproof Bible; his second, smaller waterproof case; and his “initial contact response kit”—which included dental forceps, to pull arrows from his body, and a chest-seal bandage. Then he paddled back to the island.

    As he neared the beach, he heard shouts and drumming. From the sand, about six Sentinelese began yelling at him in a language full of high-pitched b, p, l, and s sounds, seemingly led by a man wearing a crown of flowers and standing on a tall coral rock. Chau stayed offshore, trying to keep out of arrow range, and parroted their words. They burst out laughing most of the time, meaning the phrases were probably bad or insulting, Chau thought.

    Eventually, two men traded their bows for paddles and approached him in a dugout canoe. He dropped the fish into the waves and backed away. The men detoured to grab them. Chau discerned increasing friendliness from the tribespeople, and so he paddled very close to land as more Sentinelese arrived—most unarmed, though one boy wielded a bow with a nocked arrow. Chau kept waving his hands to signal, unsuccessfully, for the kid to disarm. The wind had nudged Chau’s kayak into the shallows. The canoe slid in behind Chau, cutting off his escape. Chau threw the two paddlers a shovel as a gift, but one of them still clutched his bamboo knife. The kid with the bow and nocked arrow approached. Chau figured this was it. So he disembarked to show that he, too, had two legs. Then he preached to them from Genesis, likely reading from his waterproof Bible.

    Chau found himself inches from the Sentinelese man who didn’t have a knife. The hunter-gatherer stood about Chau’s height—five feet six—and had yellowish clay smeared in circles on his face. Chau noted a fly land on the man’s cheek. Hastily, Chau handed over his gifts and, in his rush, gave the tribespeople essentially everything he had. Surely, the Sentinelese couldn’t help but be moved by his good intentions?

    Then things started happening confusingly fast. The men grabbed the kayak and made off with it. The boy suddenly fired his bow. Miraculously, the arrow struck the waterproof Bible that Chau was holding, saving him.

    Chau grabbed the arrow and felt the sharpness of the nail-like arrowhead. He retreated, shouting and stumbling. The Sentinelese let him wade over the submerged dead coral. He swam nearly a mile back to the boat, thinking in his panic that rocks in the bay were pursuing canoes. Back on board, he confronted the fact that he had lost his kayak and had no access to any of his supplies. Though, he journaled, “I’m grateful that I still have the written Word of God.” Chau now had to make a momentous choice alone. “It’s weird—actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared. There, I said it,” he wrote in his diary, his handwriting becoming increasingly agitated. “I DON’T WANT to Die! Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue?”
    8. The First One to Heaven

    The sun smoldered on the waves. Chau prayed. Practically anyone else would have asked the fishermen to return to Port Blair, but judge the situation from Chau’s point of view. He considered the Sentinelese to be living in “Satan’s last stronghold” and destined for hell unless he rescued them for heaven. To him, there could have been no greater act of love than risking his life to save them from eternal torment. Even more, according to police director Pathak, he indicated to the fishermen that the arrow striking the Bible was a sign of God’s protection. “John assumed that they wouldn’t automatically welcome him and that the only way to win them over was to be like, ‘I’m here, and I’m not going away,’ ” said Casey Prince, his mentor in South Africa. And if Chau gave up now, he was unlikely to get another chance.

    Chau knew he could perish if he returned to shore, and he was prepared for that. As Jim Elliot, a missionary whom Chau idolized, said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Like many evangelicals, Chau grew up celebrating Elliot, whose widely publicized story helped launch, in the late 1950s, the missionary boom that is still ongoing today. It is uncanny how closely Chau followed Elliot’s footsteps. They grew up miles from each other, hiked the same mountains, and formed convictions as teenagers that they were called to uncontacted tribes. Shortly after graduating from college, Elliot was lanced to death by an Ecuadoran tribe infamous for killing outsiders. However, after a few years, Elliot’s widow and other missionaries converted some of the tribesmen who slew Elliot—leading many evangelicals to declare the original mission a success. Should he die at the hands of the Sentinelese, Chau may have reasoned, he would simply be following Elliot’s example—and that of the original missionary, Jesus Christ.

    But it’s also doesn’t seem that Chau viewed confronting the Sentinelese again as seeking martyrdom. “I can say explicitly that John wasn’t on a suicide mission,” said Jimmy Shaw, who taught the History of Missions Class taken by Chau at university, remained close to him, and was privy to his plans. “He was a person of faith. If he died, then he died. But he was a believer, and he believed he was going to get the chance to share the gospel with those who’d never otherwise have a chance to hear it. And that was the risk worth taking.” The mission plan he had shared with supporters also included his return. And not long before, he had told Sarah Prince that he hoped one day to have children and a family like hers, “if God wants it for me.”

    Though the odds of success may have seemed daunting, after overcoming so many previous challenges, Chau may have thought he could beat this one, too, by himself. Or he may have hoped for a miracle. Pentecostalism, the Christian movement Chau grew up in, gets its name from the miracle of the Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit empowered the apostles to convert foreigners by preaching in their languages. After baptism, many Pentecostalists speak in what they believe are similarly divinely inspired “tongues,” and they celebrate stories of modern missionaries performing Pentecost-like miracles. Chau’s friend McCarthy, who is now a Pentecostal minister, said, “He definitely had the gift of speaking in tongues,” though it is unclear if Chau thought that gift would manifest in this context.

    And, ultimately, converting the tribe may have been only of secondary importance to Chau. For many evangelicals, trying to discern every twist and turn of God’s master plan is impossible and presumptuous. Instead, the best a believer can do is follow what directives they can grasp. “To John, the measure of success has always been obedience,” said Hopkins, his friend. And Shaw described a video, which he believed was likely meant to be shared only if Chau did not return, in which Chau declared that the measure of a person was their obedience to Christ. So if John had felt God wanted him to go, then he would have gone.

    Whatever Chau’s final reasoning, as afternoon descended into evening, he wrote in his diary, “LORD let Your will be done. If you want me to get actually shot or even killed with an arrow, then so be it. I think I could be more useful alive though, but to You, God, I give all the glory of whatever happens.”

    Watching the sun burn out, Chau was moved to tears and wondered if “it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets.” He described intensely missing his family, friends, and Parks, and wished there was “someone I can talk to and be understood.” He finished his thoughts for the day: “Perfect LOVE casts out fear. LORD Jesus, fill me with Your perfect love for these people!”

    The next morning, after a “fairly restful sleep” on the boat, he wrote, “I hope this isn’t my last notes but if it is, to God be the glory.” He stripped down to his black underpants, as Pandit had taken off his clothes so as not to spook the naked Andaman tribes. Then he stroked toward land.

    The fishermen motored out to sea, as Chau had requested. Pieter V., the missionary whom Chau had consulted in South Africa, had told him that he believed that the Jarawa tribe didn’t kill him when he landed because he had no boat. Chau also didn’t want the fishermen to have to witness him possibly being slaughtered. The fishermen carried away Chau’s diary and two letters, one of which was to Alex. “I think I might die,” Chau confessed in it. But he comforted his friend: “I’ll see you again, bro—and remember, the first one to heaven wins.”

    The next day, the fishermen returned to the island. They motored along the coast, searching for signs of Chau.

    Eventually they spotted something on the beach. They looked closer. It was a body in black underpants. And it was being dragged by the Sentinelese, with a rope tied around its neck.
    9. A Strenuous Case

    When I met police director Pathak in his office this summer, he described the situation as “a very, very strenuous case.” According to him, after discovering the body, the fishermen had rushed back to Port Blair and, crying, turned over Chau’s journal and letters to Alex. Alex then contacted Parks, who in turn informed Chau’s mother. Chau’s mother then alerted the U.S. Consulate General in India, which contacted the Andaman police. In the subsequent investigation, Pathak had to decide: Could a people who didn’t recognize laws be prosecuted under them? Should Chau’s remains be recovered? Chau had written, “don’t retrieve my body,” and Chau’s family posted on his Instagram account, “We forgive those supposedly responsible for his death.” So Pathak decided the rights of the “uncontacted group needed to be respected.”

    But though Chau was beyond the laws of this world, the fishermen and Alex were soon imprisoned, before being released on bail. The lawyer representing them said that the punishment of his clients was “not fair,” as Chau went to the island of his own free will, and noted that Chau must not have thought about how the subsequent legal troubles would “badly affect” their lives. According to Pathak, the Indian police had also begun the bureaucratic process to request American assistance to talk to Parks.

    The sufferings of Alex and the fishermen was the last thing that Chau would have wanted: He worried deeply that they could be harmed should his mission go awry. In his final email to supporters, he directed that if he perished they should tell the media, “I am simply an ‘adventurer’…and please do not mention the real reason for why I went to the island.” This was to lessen the chances of “persecution of local area Christians, [and] the imprisonment of the local team members.” He explained that he had built a website and Instagram account that looked like those of an adventure bro to throw people off the trail. Instead of desiring posthumous Elliot-like fame, he preferred to be remembered as a fool.

    As Chau had predicted, when the story of his death spread worldwide, in November 2018, the criticism of him was fierce. Much of it followed the red herrings he had left, but information about his missionary purpose came out soon enough, once the fishermen confessed. Pandit, the anthropologist, said, “I felt sad that the young man should lose his life, but this was a foolish thing to do.” In the news, some commentators characterized his attitude as “puritanical, prejudiced, and patronizing.” Survival International, an NGO that advocates for uncontacted tribes, declared, “The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected.” The organization warned that by supposedly saving the tribe, Chau might have ended up destroying them.

    The Andaman tribes numbered about 5,000 people when the British arrived, but today only a few hundred remain. These survivors are wracked with measles and consumed by alcohol, subjected to “human safaris” by tourists, and have increasingly become dependent on government handouts. When I joined a hundred-car convoy through the jungle reserve of the Jarawa tribe, crossing between Port Blair and another town, I saw 11 Jarawa squatting on the roadside and staring at the traffic as if watching TV.

    This was “the danger of contact” that had made Pandit “worried about the future” when he first handed the coconut to the Sentinelese back in 1991, despite his simultaneous excitement at the meeting. Pandit knew the poisonous fruit that seed could bear, because he had already led the acculturation of a Jarawa clan. In the mid-1970s he felt he had no choice; they were fatally ambushing settlers on the outskirts of Port Blair. He won their trust with gifts and then lived with them for stints before imposing government oversight. When I interviewed him this year, however, he clearly thought they had suffered from the decades of contact. “Once, they laughed so much more than us,” he said. He thinks that the Sentinelese probably have had a happy life, similar to that of the Jarawa, before his arrival, easily fulfilling their needs in their tropical Eden. Hunter-gatherers are often called “the original affluent society,” as anthropologists have found they average only three to five hours of work a day, are more egalitarian, and have fewer mental health issues. (Although it is important not to romanticize their shorter life spans and other disadvantages.) Ultimately it’s not that Pandit thinks the Sentinelese should be barred from modernizing, only that they have the human right to choose whether to do so—and they have conscientiously objected. “Change should be for the better,” Pandit said. “But if we as an external force bring the change, are we sure we are helping?”

    Though the Sentinelese have no knowledge of what has happened outside their barrier reef, they seem to have intuited Pandit’s fears. And they have adopted a defensive strategy that has preserved them as one of the approximately 100 uncontacted groups still abiding on earth.
    10. A Rebellious People

    As harshly as some individuals criticized Chau, I was struck by how often people who knew him described him as a considerate, capable young man. Even those who didn’t agree with his final actions grieved. As Nathan Fairchild, his boss at the environmental camp in California, told me through tears: “There’s a tendency when people pass away to knight them, but even when John was living, everyone would have praised him the same way.”

    Many evangelicals were outspoken in celebrating his sacrifice. “There was no colonial intention,” said Ramsey, Chau’s friend. “[John’s] motivation was love for these people.… I think he’s up there in heaven.” Oral Roberts University released a statement that concluded: “We are not surprised that John would try to reach out to these isolated people in order to share God’s love. We are deeply saddened to hear of his death.” Parks, Chau’s boss, wrote on social media that Chau was “one of the best and most selfless human beings there ever was.” Many Christians spoke of being inspired to do missions themselves—missions that might reach all the way to Sentinel Island. On the Facebook page “I Admire John Allen Chau,” a post described a young American declaring at a missionary conference, “I am called to go to the people JOHN Allen Chau tried to reach.” Ramsey said, “I could see John as a modern Jim Elliot, someone who made a greater impact in death than life.” At All Nations’ annual fund-raiser in April 2019, the organization celebrated Chau and featured as the keynote speaker the grandson of a missionary pilot who perished alongside Elliot.

    And yet not all Christians supported Chau’s actions, including many prominent evangelicals, such as the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Christian missionary work has evolved over the ages, and it is now profoundly important for missionaries to be sensitive to the culture of the people they are sent to,” said Ben Witherington III, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky. “Chau is a pretty classic example of how not to do missions in the 21st century.” Some field missionaries criticized Chau as insensitive, ineffective, and even ignorant of biblical directives. As Mark 6:11 commands: “And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.” The detractors and supporters of Chau often seemed to be screaming past one another about different realities. Where some people saw a sensitive missionary prepared by years of training, others saw an overconfident, underprepared young American cheered to his death by his mentors.

    One recent afternoon, while pondering all this, I flipped open an edition of the waterproof Bible that had stopped the arrow the Sentinelese boy had fired at Chau. He recorded the verses that the shaft broke on, which conclude in Isaiah 65:1–65:2: “I am sought of them that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not: I said, Behold me, behold me, unto a nation that was not called by my name. I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people, which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts.”

    While Chau didn’t record if he interpreted the “rebellious people” as the Sentinelese or if the verse impacted his decision to return to the island once again, it’s telling he swam ashore the next morning. And yet Witherington, the Asbury seminary theologian, who has written a book about deciphering Isaiah, said, “I don’t dismiss Chau’s sincerity or sacrifice, but the question is whether he interpreted Isaiah rightly—and the answer for that, I think, is clearly no.” Two more theologians confirmed that in the above passage, the “rebellious people” are actually those inside the church, as God is criticizing the Israelites for worshipping false idols.

    In all my months of reporting, I never found any evidence that Chau even once questioned his calling. His certainty was so absolute that he was willing to bet not only his life on it but the lives of the Sentinelese. (Multiple doctors have stated that his self-quarantine wouldn’t have worked.) But one inscrutable thing about religion is that while it offers definitive answers, believers draw different answers from the same words, and often different answers throughout their lives.

    Patrick Chau, John’s father, was born in China, endured six years of forced labor harvesting rice during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, escaped to the United States, studied medicine at Oral Roberts University, which John would attend, and eventually brought John up evangelical. But during a weeks-long correspondence with me, Patrick described how over the past decade he had begun to find biblical truths in the Confucianism of his youth. He came to believe that the commonalities undergirding world religions meant that people “not following Western religious terms could still be following the teachings of the Bible.” In this context, he decided, “the theology of the Great Commission”—of missions—“is the byproduct of Western colonization and imperialization, and not Biblical teaching at all.” He wrote, “I have no common opinion in faith with my youngest.” John “was not there yet.”

    I wrote back: “But it seems you think that he would have come to that realization, in time?”

    “Eventually,” Patrick answered. “I hoped.”

    The central message of Jesus and Confucius that he tried to get his son to accept was: “Fairness. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. It is the only standard of right and wrong in the whole Bible.”

    The morning of his death, Chau wrote his final letter, addressed to his parents and siblings: “You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed.” He concluded: “I love you all and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ.” He signed it with a scrawl that looks a lot like “JC.”
    11. Christlike Love

    We can’t know precisely what happened when Chau encountered the Sentinelese for the final time. Shortly after reports of Chau’s death, his mother told the Washington Post that she still believed he was alive because of “my prayers.” She later declined my interview requests, explaining to acquaintances that she preferred to let Chau tell his own story when he returned. Patrick concluded his essay memorializing John: “This is [the] riddle of life I cannot see through now,” and then paraphrased a verse from the Book of Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

    Chattopadhyay, the anthropologist, speculated that when Chau emerged from the lagoon, the tribe would have likely warned him with “utterances and hand gestures” to go away, fearing “he would try to enslave them.” Pandit added, “The Sentinelese don’t go out of their way to do violence.… But of course he couldn’t understand.”

    And so Chau crossed the line in the sand that the Sentinelese hadn’t even let a foreign doll transgress all those years ago. And of course they shot him.

    A skilled hunter doesn’t aim for an instant kill with a relatively fragile bamboo arrow tipped with an iron nail—the human brain and heart are small targets and encased in bone.

    No, the projectile would have been aimed at Chau’s large and soft gut. Once he was crippled, the Sentinelese would have charged in, wielding their long arrows like spears.

    But before then, Chau would have had time to confront the fact that he was going to die.

    And I have faith that he welcomed his killers with Christlike love.

    Doug Bock Clark is a GQ correspondent.

    A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2019 issue with the title “Contact.”

    #christianisme #mission #proselytisme #impérialisme #USA #Inde

  • The Art of Thinking Long-Term Even When Money Is Running Out (https...
    https://diasp.eu/p/9129473

    The Art of Thinking Long-Term Even When Money Is Running Out

    HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20046065 Posted by davesuperman (karma: 1145) Post stats: Points: 170 - Comments: 24 - 2019-05-29T22:04:44Z

    #HackerNews #art #even #long-term #money #out #running #the #thinking #when HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 121 - Loop: 255 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 91

  • Chronique BD - #Wheelie + #La_porte_ouverte
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/les-promesses-de-l-aube/wheelie-la-porte-ouverte

    Ce matin, on a parlé d’enfants sur Radio Panik.

    Claire et Stéphanie, du musée d’Ixelles, sont venues nous présenter le projet Wheelie - ou comment amener l’art aux tous-petits (réponse : à #vélo, what else ?) - qui a besoin d’un petit coup de pouce.

    Puis Jean-Marc et Anne-Geneviève, de l’asbl La porte ouverte ont témoigné de leur expérience de familles accueillant des enfants placé·es : engagement, disponibilité et beaucoup, beaucoup d’amour. Pour en savoir plus sur l’accueil familial : http://www.lesfamillesdaccueil.be et https://www.pleegzorgvlaanderen.be.

    En bonus, la chronique BD de Pierre.

    Crédits photo : Wheelie / musée (...)

    #art #action_culturelle #musée_d'Ixelles #musée_chez_soi #familles_d'accueil #placement_familial #enfants_placés #art,vélo,Wheelie,action_culturelle,musée_d’Ixelles,musée_chez_soi,familles_d’accueil,La_porte_ouverte,placement_familial,enfants_placés
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/les-promesses-de-l-aube/wheelie-la-porte-ouverte_06677__0.mp3

  • Shadow IT Makes Developers Scrappy
    https://hackernoon.com/shadow-it-makes-developers-scrappy-d194518c21f9?source=rss----3a8144eabf

    And Other Sh*t Hackers Say: a round-up of the most viewed posts from the Hacker Noon Community (now in Public Beta)Join the conversation at http://community.hackernoon.com/In working toward becoming the best place for tech professionals to publish, we also created a very productive way for tech professionals to procrastinate — the Hacker Noon Community, it’s a virtual water cooler for the technology industry.If you’ve not yet got in on that action (Y U No sign up today..?), here’s a round-up of the most popular posts in a few of our top categories./CryptoWhat’s the best way to short shitcoins?Shoutout to contributor Han Yoon for directing us to:Gate.io 1BitMax.io 1Huobi ProPoloniexAre the top exchanges with shitcoins to short. Bitfinex also has a handful, but they haven’t added any new margin (...)

    #hackernoon-community #hacker-noon-community #where-hackers-hang-out #hackernoon-top-story #hacker-forum

  • Where Hackers Hang Out
    https://hackernoon.com/where-hackers-hang-out-c43eb09e175a?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    Hackernoon Community Enters Public BetaWe are excited to be starting the public beta of the Hacker Noon Community. There’s some great ongoing discussions from our private beta — from product decisions for Hacker Noon 2.0 to favorite old-school video games (or decentralized applications) to what could replace Facebook (or Google). Building a cool new product aside, everyone seems interested in some Hacker Noon stickers (limited supply ?). If you’d like to introduce yourself to meet more of the community, here’s the thread.Browse by category:/Crypto/Editorial/General/Podcast/Product/Random/Software-Development/Sponsors/TechnologyThere are also private groups for contributing writers and shareholders.This instance is powered by Discourse and hosted by DigitalOcean. Discourse will also power our (...)

    #hackernoon-forum #hacker-forum #where-hackers-hang-out #hackernoon-community #hacker-community

  • When is The #singularity Coming ?
    https://hackernoon.com/when-is-the-singularity-coming-21cb436e1172?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3--

    The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization — WikipediaThere is a big gap between the the consumer, business world, and recent developments in deep tech. This article aims to build a bridge and explain why this is important for future progress.We’ll have a look at how software gets built today and analyze the blueprint of innovation. Before reaching our conclusion, we’ll have a look at the newest and most untertapped AI breakthrough.At the very end, i hope you’ll discuss whether or not anybody can predict when a certain breakthrough in tech is going to happen.A short story from the fiftiesLet me take you back to the Cold War. 7 years (...)

    #graph-database #neo4j #when-is-the-singularity #artificial-intelligence

  • TNI sur Twitter : “Giant corporations have taken control of our food. For them, food is money: companies and their shareholders aren’t interested in what food means to the people who grow and eat it. They are interested in the profits they can make from it. #WHES19” / Twitter
    https://twitter.com/TNInstitute/status/1086680182600187905

    #agroindustrie #concentration #semences #nourriture #aliments

  • Why I Hate Answering “Where Are You From?”
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    I’ve realized how much as a “Third #culture Adult” I now detest answering this question. I wrote a whole paper on this topic when working on my master’s degree and I can honestly say that I still not perfect my answer.It’s confusing for everyone. Including me.I’m British, American, Pakistani, Indian, Asian, South Asian, Austinite, Californian, and hopefully, one day a New Yorker. Yeah, there you go. But that tells you very little about me…what were the assumptions running through your head?Imagine the juggling I have had to do…man…I feel the headache coming on…When I was younger, my parents felt a sense of shame admitting where they were from based on pressures from the British society we were trying to assimilate to. My father faced discrimination based on his last name…people assumed our (...)

    #where-are-you-from #identity #travel #diviersity

  • Nearly 2,000 Children Separated From Adults At Border In 6 Weeks : NPR
    https://www.npr.org/2018/06/16/620451012/dhs-nearly-2-000-children-separated-from-adults-at-border-in-six-weeks

    The Department of Homeland Security says 1,995 minors were separated from their “alleged adult guardians” at the southern border in just over a monthlong period.

    A DHS spokesman said the separations occurred between April 19 and the end of May under the administration’s relatively new “zero tolerance” policy, in which parents have also been arrested.

    The Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border has brought attention to a little-known government agency. The Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for finding homes for unaccompanied migrant children, those who attempt to enter the country without their parents. Now the agency also has to shelter those the government has separated from their families.

    The government says more than 10,000 children are in shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The office is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

    États-Unis. La séparation systématique des familles sollicitant l’asile bafoue le droit international.
    https://www.amnesty.org/fr/latest/news/2018/05/usa-routine-separation-of-asylum-seeking-families-violates-international-la

  • Les États-Unis séparent désormais les parents migrants de leurs enfants | Slate.fr
    http://www.slate.fr/story/162252/etats-unis-separent-parents-migrants-enfants

    Avant l’élection de Donald Trump, les familles de migrants et demandeurs d’asiles qui étaient interpellées à la frontière mexicaine étaient détenus ensemble dans des centres de rétention, en attente de jugement. Mais les directives du gouvernement ont changé : maintenant, les parents et enfants sont détenus séparément, parfois dans des villes différentes, et même dans le cas d’enfants très jeunes.

    Depuis plusieurs mois, des centaines de cas de séparations ont été rencensés par les associations de défense des droits civiques.

    « Ce qui se passe ici est sans précédent. Ici en Arizona, nous avons vu plus de 200 cas de parents séparés de leurs enfants. Certains de ces enfants sont très jeunes, nous voyons régulièrement des enfants de deux ans, et la semaine dernière, il y avait un enfant de 53 semaines sans ses parents », expliquait Laura St. John de l’organisation The Florence Project, sur MSNBC.

    L’association de défense des droits civiques ACLU a engagé une procédure légale contre cette pratique du gouvernement, qu’ils considèrent comme une violation de la Constitution des États-Unis.

    Sur Twitter, le journaliste Chris Hayes a partagé des extraits de la plainte dans lesquels sont décrits plusieurs cas de séparation, comme celui de Miriam, venue du Honduras, qui dit avoir été séparée de son bébé de dix-huit mois et ne pas l’avoir vu pendant plus d’un mois. En mars, un procès de l’ACLU avait permis de réunifier une mère congolaise demandeuse d’asile avec sa fille de sept ans. Elles avaient été séparées pendant quatre mois.

    La nouvelle approche, introduite par le ministère de la Justice, consiste à condamner les personnes qui ont traversé la frontière illégalement à des crimes, et non plus à des infractions civiles, comme c’était le cas auparavant. Les adultes sont donc placés en prison, et non en centre de rétention, alors que les enfants sont gérés par une autre entité administrative, qui détient habituellement les mineurs qui traversent seuls la frontière.

    Interviewé par MSNBC, un avocat de l’ACLU a dit que c’était « la pire chose » qu’il avait vue en 25 ans de travail sur les droits des immigrés.

    « Je parle à ces mères et elles décrivent leurs enfants qui hurlent "maman, maman, ne les laisse pas m’emmener". »

    Il y a quelques jours, le chef de cabinet de la Maison Blanche John Kelly a défendu la pratique en disant qu’il s’agissait d’une dissuasion efficace et que les enfants seraient « placés dans des foyers ou autres ».

    • New York (États-Unis), de notre correspondant.- « Les fédéraux ont perdu, oui, perdu, 1 475 enfants migrants. » L’éditorial de The Arizona Republic a révolté les réseaux sociaux. Des Américains se sont pris en photo avec cette question : « Où sont les enfants ? » (#wherearethechildren), devenue en quelques jours un mot-clé populaire. « L’inhumanité doit cesser », explique Joaquín Castro, représentant démocrate du Texas, qui appelle à une manifestation cette semaine à San Antonio.

      À l’origine de cette indignation, l’information rapportée par The Arizona Republic est, de fait, assez spectaculaire. Le 26 avril, Steven Wagner, un responsable du Département de la santé américain chargé de la gestion des réfugiés, a annoncé au cours d’une audition au Sénat que ses services, alors qu’ils tentaient de prendre contact avec 7 635 mineurs placés chez des proches ou dans des familles d’accueil, se sont révélés « incapables de localiser 1 475 » d’entre eux, soit 19 % de l’échantillon contacté.

      9 mai 2018. Cette famille vient de franchir la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis près de McAllen, Texas. © Reuters 9 mai 2018. Cette famille vient de franchir la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis près de McAllen, Texas. © Reuters

      Il s’agit de mineurs non accompagnés, la plupart originaires du Honduras, du Guatemala et du Salvador, des pays d’Amérique centrale ravagés par les violences. Placés quelques semaines en foyer après avoir tenté de traverser la frontière avec les États-Unis via le Mexique, ils sont ensuite confiés par les autorités à des proches, des parents ou des familles d’accueil en attendant l’examen de leur dossier par les services de l’immigration.

      Les 1 500 enfants manquant à l’appel ne sont pas forcément aux mains de trafiquants, exploités à vil prix ou livrés à eux-mêmes. « On ne sait pas combien d’entre eux n’ont pas été localisés parce que eux ou leurs proches, qui peuvent très bien être leurs parents, sont partis sans laisser d’adresse pour réduire les risques d’être renvoyés dans leur pays », explique la journaliste Dara Lind, spécialiste des questions migratoires sur Vox.com.

      Mais l’incertitude qui pèse sur leur sort a de quoi inquiéter : plusieurs médias, comme Associated Press et la chaîne PBS, ont révélé des cas de violences sexuelles, de travail forcé ou de mauvais traitement.

      « Vous êtes la plus mauvaise famille d’accueil du monde. Vous ne savez même pas où ils sont », a lancé à Steven Wagner la sénatrice Heidi Heitkamp. L’accusation de l’élue démocrate tape juste, sauf que sous l’administration Obama, qui avait dû faire face à une explosion du nombre de mineurs non accompagnés, le suivi était tout aussi défaillant.

      En 2014, les procédures de vérification des familles d’accueil avaient même été allégées pour faciliter les placements, livrant les enfants à des dangers accrus. En 2016, le Sénat avait préconisé des mesures de suivi renforcées, qui n’ont jamais été mises en place, faute de ressources et de volonté politique : le département de la santé considère en effet qu’une fois placés, les mineurs ne sont plus de sa responsabilité…

      Il y a un mois, l’« aveu » de Steven Wagner devant le Sénat n’aurait ainsi pas fait beaucoup de bruit. Mais tout a changé depuis que le président Trump, frustré de ne pas voir avancer son projet de mur avec le Mexique, en colère contre sa propre directrice du Département de la sécurité intérieure (DHS), a autorisé des mesures d’une extrême sévérité contre l’immigration irrégulière.

      Au nom de la « tolérance zéro », Jeff Sessions, “attorney general” (l’équivalent du ministre de la justice), un dur de dur connu pour sa hargne contre les clandestins, a annoncé le 7 mai la poursuite systématique des étrangers qui « traversent la frontière de façon illégale », une façon de décourager les candidats à l’immigration – au rythme de 40 000 personnes « appréhendées » chaque mois, on voit mal comment les procureurs vont suivre. Il a surtout déclaré que les enfants « clandestins » seront désormais « séparés » de leurs parents. De quoi susciter l’indignation générale. Au vu de la façon dont les mineurs non accompagnés sont traités dans les familles d’accueil, cette annonce sonne comme une provocation.

      « Cette horreur est insupportable, a twitté Walter Schaub, ancien directeur sous Obama et Trump du Bureau pour l’éthique gouvernementale, une agence fédérale anticorruption. Décider d’arrêter encore plus d’enfants alors même qu’on sait déjà que ce qui leur arrive est une violation immorale des droits humains. »

      « C’est de la torture », commente l’ACLU, une grande organisation de défense des libertés publiques, qui a engagé une action en justice collective contre le gouvernement. « La pire chose que j’ai vue en vingt-cinq ans, dit Lee Gelernt, l’avocat de l’ACLU, interrogé sur la chaîne MSNBC. Ces mères vous racontent leurs enfants qui crient “maman ! maman !”, “ne les laisse pas m’emmener !”, des enfants de cinq ans, de six ans. On va traumatiser ces enfants pour toujours. »

      « Cette pratique viole les droits des demandeurs d’asile inscrits dans la Constitution », ajoute Eunice Lee, codirectrice du centre de recherche sur le genre et les réfugiés Hastings College of the Law à San Francisco (Californie).

      Reuters Reuters

      Fin avril, le New York Times, citant des données officielles, a révélé que cette pratique est en réalité d’ores et déjà en place. Entre octobre et avril, écrit le quotidien, 700 enfants, dont 100 tout-petits de moins de quatre ans, ont été privés de leurs parents. Le département de la santé refuse de dire combien de ces familles restent aujourd’hui éclatées.

      Au vu des positions de l’administration Trump, qui cherche à lutter contre l’immigration mais aussi à décourager par tous les moyens l’exercice du droit d’asile, cette politique n’est guère surprenante. Elle avait été évoquée quelques semaines après l’investiture de Donald Trump par John Kelly, alors directeur de la sécurité nationale. Aujourd’hui chef de cabinet de Donald Trump, Kelly a affirmé à la radio publique NPR que non seulement la séparation des familles n’est « pas cruelle », mais qu’elle est aussi un « puissant moyen de dissuasion » contre l’immigration.

      Pendant sa campagne, et depuis son entrée à la Maison Blanche, Donald Trump a promis de « stopper » l’immigration illégale. Il s’en est pris aux Mexicains « violeurs » et « criminels », aux « pays de merde », a taxé publiquement des immigrés d’« animaux ». Il a annoncé l’envoi de la garde nationale à la frontière et a attisé sa base en s’en prenant à une « caravane » de réfugiés d’Amérique centrale qui cherchaient à obtenir l’asile aux États-Unis.

      Depuis son arrivée à la Maison Blanche, son administration s’est employée à détricoter les dispositifs protégeant les jeunes migrants. Trump lui-même a estimé que les mineurs qui passent la frontière « ne sont pas tous innocents » et nourrissent la violence des gangs.

      « Les enfants seront pris en charge, placés dans des foyers ou autre », a promis John Kelly. En l’occurrence, le « ou autre » pourrait désigner des bases militaires. Selon le Washington Post, des enfants séparés de leurs familles pourraient être bientôt placés dans des centres de l’armée, au Texas ou dans l’Arkansas.

  • What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Wh...
    https://diasp.eu/p/7028394

    What Data Does Facebook Collect When I’m Not Using Facebook, and Why?

    HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16852411 Posted by rock_hard (karma: 232) Post stats: Points: 161 - Comments: 136 - 2018-04-16T20:27:20Z

    #HackerNews #and #collect #data #does #facebook #not #using #what #when #why HackerNewsBot debug: Calculated post rank: 152 - Loop: 161 - Rank min: 100 - Author rank: 15

  • when #currency is inflated,
    https://hackernoon.com/when-currency-is-inflated-995f1ea7494d?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    Written April 2015 in #yerevan’s Vernissage Market.you make peopletalk aboutmoney longer:8 is 80040 is 4,000200 is 20,000see the extracommas, timeandzeros.when currency is inflated, was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

    #inflation #pepsi-table #when-currency-is-inflated

  • Octave Klaba sur la panne de OVH
    http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=28247

    Comment by OVH - Friday, 10 November 2017, 00:27AM

    Bonjour,
    Ce matin à 7h23, nous avons eu une panne majeure sur notre site de Strasbourg (SBG) : une coupure électrique qui a mis dans le noir nos 3 datacentres SBG1, SBG2 et SBG4 durant 3h30. Le pire scénario qui puisse nous arriver.

    Le site de SBG est alimenté par une ligne électrique de 20kV composée de 2 câbles qui délivrent chacun 10MVA. Les 2 câbles fonctionnent ensemble, et sont connectés à la même source et sur le même disjoncteur chez ELD (Strasbourg Électricité Réseaux). Ce matin, l’un des 2 câbles a été endommagé et le disjoncteur a coupé l’alimentation des datacentres.

    Le site SBG est prévu pour fonctionner, sans limite de temps, sur les groupes électrogènes. Pour SBG1 et SBG4, nous avons mis en place, un premier système de 2 groupes électrogènes de 2MVA chacun, configurés en N+1 et en 20kV. Pour SBG2, nous avons mis en place 3 groupes en N+1 de 1.4MVA chacun. En cas de coupure de la source externe, les cellules haute tension sont reconfigurées automatiquement par un système de bascule motorisé. En moins de 30 secondes, les datacentres SBG1, SBG2 et SBG4 sont ré-alimentés en 20KV. Pour permettre toutes ces bascules sans couper l’alimentation électrique des serveurs, nous disposons d’onduleurs (UPS) sachant fonctionner sans aucune alimentation durant 8 minutes.

    Ce matin, le système de basculement motorisé n’a pas fonctionné. L’ordre de démarrage des groupes n’a pas été donné par l’automate. Il s’agit d’un automate NSM (Normal Secours Motorisé), fournit par l’équipementier des cellules haute-tension 20kV. Nous sommes en contact avec lui, afin de comprendre l’origine de ce dysfonctionnement. C’est toutefois un défaut qui aurait dû être détecté lors des tests périodiques de simulation de défaut sur la source externe. Le dernier test de reprise de SBG sur les groupes date de la fin du mois mai 2017. Durant ce dernier test, nous avons alimenté SBG uniquement à partir des groupes électrogènes durant 8H sans aucun souci et chaque mois nous testons les groupes à vide. Et malgré tout, l’ensemble de ce dispositif n’a pas suffi aujourd’hui pour éviter cette panne.

    Vers 10h, nous avons réussi à basculer les cellules manuellement et nous avons recommencé à alimenter le datacentre à partir des groupes électrogènes. Nous avons demandé à ELD de bien vouloir déconnecter le câble défectueux des cellules haute tension et remettre le disjoncteur en marche avec 1 seul des 2 câbles, et donc limité à 10MVA. La manipulation a été effectuée par ELD et le site a été ré-alimenté vers 10h30. Les routeurs de SBG ont été joignables à partir de 10h58.

    Depuis, nous travaillons, sur la remise en route des services. Alimenter le site en énergie permet de faire redémarrer les serveurs, mais il reste à remettre en marche les services qui tournent sur les serveurs. C’est pourquoi chaque service revient progressivement depuis 10h58. Notre système de monitoring nous permet de connaitre la liste de serveurs qui ont démarré avec succès et ceux qui ont encore un problème. Nous intervenons sur chacun de ces serveurs pour identifier et résoudre le problème qui l’empêche de redémarrer.

    A 7h50, nous avons mis en place une cellule de crise à RBX, où nous avons centralisé les informations et les actions de l’ensemble des équipes. Un camion en partance de RBX a été chargé de pièces de rechange pour SBG. Il est arrivé à destination vers 17h30. Nos équipes locales ont été renforcées par des équipes du datacentre de LIM en Allemagne et de RBX, ils sont tous mobilisés sur place depuis 16H00. Actuellement, plus de 50 techniciens travaillent à SBG pour remettre tous les services en route. Nous préparons les travaux de cette nuit et, si cela était nécessaire, de demain matin.

    Prenons du recul. Pour éviter un scénario catastrophe de ce type, durant ces 18 dernières années, OVH a développé des architectures électriques capables de résister à toutes sortes d’incidents électriques. Chaque test, chaque petit défaut, chaque nouvelle idée a enrichi notre expérience, ce qui nous permet de bâtir aujourd’hui des datacentres fiables.

    Alors pourquoi cette panne ? Pourquoi SBG n’a pas résisté à une simple coupure électrique d’ELD ? Pourquoi toute l’intelligence que nous avons développée chez OVH, n’a pas permis d’éviter cette panne ?

    La réponse rapide : le réseau électrique de SBG a hérité des imperfections de design liées à la faible ambition initialement prévue pour le site.

    La réponse longue :
    En 2011, nous avons planifié le déploiement de nouveaux datacentres en Europe. Pour tester l’appétence de chaque marché, avec de nouvelles villes et de nouveaux pays, nous avons imaginé une nouvelle technologie de déploiement de datacentres, basée sur les containers maritimes. Grâce à cette technologie, développée en interne, nous avons voulu avoir la souplesse de déployer un datacentre sans les contraintes de temps liées aux permis de construire. A l’origine, nous voulions avoir la possibilité de valider nos hypothèses avant d’investir durablement dans un site.

    C’est comme ça que début 2012, nous avons lancé SBG avec un datacentre en containers maritimes : SBG1. Nous avons déployé 8 containers maritimes et SBG1 a été opérationnel en seulement 2 mois. Grâce à ce déploiement ultra rapide, en moins de 6 mois nous avons pu valider que SBG est effectivement un site stratégique pour OVH. Fin 2012, nous avons décidé de construire SBG2 et en 2016, nous avons lancé la construction de SBG3. Ces 2 constructions n’ont pas été faites en containers, mais ont été basées sur notre technologie de « Tour » : la construction de SBG2 a pris 9 mois et SBG3 sera mis en production dans 1 mois. Pour pallier aux problèmes de place début 2013, nous avons construit très rapidement SBG4, l’extension basée encore sur les fameux containers maritimes.

    Le problème est qu’en déployant SBG1 avec la technologie basée sur les containers maritimes, nous n’avons pas préparé le site au large scale. Nous avons fait 2 erreurs :
    1) nous n’avons pas remis le site SBG aux normes internes qui prévoient 2 arrivées électriques indépendantes de 20KV, comme tous nos sites de DCs qui possèdent plusieurs doubles arrivées électriques. Il s’agit d’un investissement important d’environ 2 à 3 millions d’euros par arrivée électrique, mais nous estimons que cela fait partie de notre norme interne.
    2) nous avons construit le réseau électrique de SBG2 en le posant sur le réseau électrique de SBG1, au lieu de les rendre indépendant l’un de l’autre, comme dans tous nos datacentres. Chez OVH, chaque numéro de datacentre veut dire que le réseau électrique est indépendant d’un autre datacentre. Partout sauf sur le site de SBG.

    La technologie basée sur les containers maritimes n’a été utilisée que pour construire SBG1 et SBG4. En effet, nous avons réalisé que le datacentre en containers n’est pas adapté aux exigences de notre métier. Avec la vitesse de croissance de SBG, la taille minimale d’un site est forcément de plusieurs datacentres, et donc d’une capacité totale de 200.000 serveurs. C’est pourquoi, aujourd’hui, pour déployer un nouveau datacenter, nous n’utilisons plus que 2 types de conceptions largement éprouvées et prévues pour le large scale avec de la fiabilité :
    1) la construction de tours de 5 à 6 étages (RBX4, SBG2-3, BHS1-2), pour 40.000 serveurs.
    2) l’achat des bâtiments (RBX1-3,5-7, P19, GRA1-2, LIM1, ERI1, WAW1, BHS3-7, VIH1, HIL1) pour 40.000 ou 80.000 serveurs.

    Même si l’incident de ce matin a été causé par un automate tiers, nous ne pouvons nous dédouaner de la responsabilité de la panne. A cause du déploiement initial basé sur les containers maritimes, nous avons un historique à rattraper sur SBG pour atteindre le même niveau de normes que sur les autres sites d’OVH.

    Cet après-midi, nous avons décidé du plan d’actions suivant :
    1) la mise en place de la 2ème arrivée électrique, totalement séparée, de 20MVA ;
    2) la séparation du réseau électrique de SBG2 vis-à-vis de SBG1/SBG4, ainsi que la séparation du futur SBG3 vis-à-vis de SBG2 et SBG1/SBG4 ;
    3) la migration des clients de SBG1/SBG4 vers SBG3 ;
    4) la fermeture de SBG1/SBG4 et la désinstallation des containers maritimes.

    Il s’agit d’un plan d’investissement de 4-5 millions d’euros, que nous mettons en route dès demain, et qui, nous l’espérons, nous permettra de restaurer la confiance de nos clients envers SBG et plus largement OVH.

    Les équipes sont toujours en train de travailler sur la remise en route des derniers clients impactés. Une fois l’incident clos, nous appliquerons les SLA prévus dans nos contrats.

    Nous sommes profondément désolés pour la panne générée et nous vous remercions des encouragements que vous nous témoignez durant cet incident.

    Amicalement
    Octave

    #OVH #Panne #Datacenters

  • Depuis https://seenthis.net/messages/568682 il y a eu des évolutions pour le plugin #alternc-borgbackup pour #alternc.
    Pour les vielles distributions #Debian, un paquet compatible de #borgbackup est proposé. Ce paquet reprend les binaires officiels pour linux et propose donc une retro-compatibilité avec les paquets officiels des versions récentes.
    De plus comme pour #alernc-certbot un dépôt est proposé pour télécharger les dernières versions du plugin compatible à partir de #wheezy

    N’hésitez pas à tester et à faire vos retours, la documentation est encore fraîche :)
    Bon tests

  • #Where_animals_go

    For thousands of years, tracking animals meant following footprints. Now satellites, drones, camera traps, cellphone networks, and accelerometers reveal the natural world as never before. Where the Animals Go is the first book to offer a comprehensive, data-driven portrait of how creatures like ants, otters, owls, turtles, and sharks navigate the world. Based on pioneering research by scientists at the forefront of the animal-tracking revolution, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s stunning, four-color charts and maps tell fascinating stories of animal behavior. These astonishing infographics explain how warblers detect incoming storms using sonic vibrations, how baboons make decisions, and why storks prefer garbage dumps to wild forage; they follow pythons racing through the Everglades, a lovelorn wolf traversing the Alps, and humpback whales visiting undersea mountains. Where the Animals Go is a triumph of technology, data science, and design, bringing broad perspective and intimate detail to our understanding of the animal kingdom.

    http://wheretheanimalsgo.com

    #animaux #faune #cartographie #visualisation #itinéraires #trajectoires #livre

  • http://www.lrl-cemea-pdll.org/spip.php?article314

    Live Ceméa Wheezy
    jeudi 12 septembre 2013

    Le « Live Ceméa Wheezy Gnome » est la dernière version du projet de live DVD des ceméa.

    Le projet de live est basé sur le live dvd Debian Gnome, ce dernier est seulement complété par une série d’applications de création multimédia.

    Le live est utilisé pour installer facilement et rapidement des ordinateurs avec les logiciels Luciole et Toonloop fonctionnels.
    Le projet a la volonté de rester très proche du live Debian Gnome original, pour simplifier son développement, pas son utilisation généraliste.
    Voir en bas de page des liens vers d’autres projets de live généraliste avec une personnalisation plus avancée, vers la simplicité d’utilisation.

    #debian
    #wheezy

  • Photographer #Kiyun asked her friends at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to “write down an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.”

    The term “microaggression” was used by Columbia professor Derald Sue to refer to “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” Sue borrowed the term from psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce who coined the term in the ’70s.

    http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/racial-microagressions-you-hear-on-a-daily-basis

    #racisme #microracisme #xénophobie #microxénophobie #photographie #photo #micro_racisme #racisme_quotidien #racisme_ordinaire

    • #Fernando_Sdrigotti : Where are you from ?

      #Where_are_you_from? I can’t think of any other question that I’ve heard with more frequency than this one – at least during these 12 years that I’ve lived in London. I’ve always found it strange. Perhaps because hearing that question made me aware of me “not being from here”. Being an Argentine I had – wrongly or mischievously – been told that I was a bit from here, less Latin American, more European, blah blah. Of course, I wasn’t – I know that now. It took one migration officer for me to realise that. What hadn’t initially sunk in did so during my first job interview, or my first experience with “dating” (spiteful word), or even the first time I called back home and had to think of my mother’s number preceded by an international code. Not being from here affects your everyday life. This happens to any deterritorialised person. Yet the way we experience not being from here has shifted radically, here in the UK, in 2014.

      http://www.migrantvoice.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=493%3Afernando-sdrigotti-

      #d'où_viens_tu ?