Temple elephants in southern India’s Kerala state began their monthlong wellness camp at Vadakkunnathan temple, Saturday, July 17. 

Eating fruits, rice sweet balls, and other items, the elephants were seen happily interacting with people. 

The elephants are ritualistically relieved from daily chores for a monthlong restorative treatment called Aanayoottu, beginning from Saturday. 

Aanayoottu means feeding the elephants with specially prepared food, which is known for its high medicinal value. This medicinal concoction is regarded as vital for enhancing the well-being of elephants. 

The formulation is administered to the animals to protect and improve their health during the monsoon months when they are not taken for any temple processions, of which they are an essential part, and are provided with full rest. 

(Reuters)  
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Forces in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region have released about 1,000 government soldiers captured during recent fighting, the head of its ruling party said, as both sides prepared for a showdown over contested land in the west of the region.

Debretsion Gebremichael, leader of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), told Reuters by satellite phone late Friday they have released 1,000 low-ranking soldiers. “More than 5,000 [soldiers] are still with us, and we will keep the senior officers who will face trial,” he said.

He said the soldiers had been driven to Tigray’s southern border with the Amhara region on Friday, but he did not say who received them or how the release was negotiated.

Reuters could not independently confirm his account. A military spokesman said he was not immediately available to comment Saturday, and the spokesman for the Amhara regional administration said he had no information on the release.

Officials in Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s office and a government taskforce on Tigray did not answer calls seeking comment.

Fighting broke out in Tigray in November when the government accused the TPLF of attacking military bases across the region, which the party denied. The government declared victory three weeks later when it took control of the regional capital, Mekelle, but the TPLF kept fighting.

In a dramatic turn, the TPLF retook Mekelle and most of Tigray at the end of June, after the government pulled out its soldiers and declared a unilateral cease-fire.

The TPLF vowed to keep fighting, however, until it had regained control of disputed territory in the south and west of Tigray that was seized during the fighting by the government’s allies from Amhara.

Abiy said this week that the military would repel any TPLF threat, effectively abandoning the self-declared truce. Amhara and three other regions said they were mobilizing forces to support the national army in its fight against the TPLF.

Thousands of people have died in the fighting; around 2 million have been displaced and more than 5 million rely on emergency food aid.

On Friday, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry issued a statement accusing aid groups of arming rebels.

“Some aid agencies have been actively engaged in a destructive role. We have also confirmed that they have been using aid as a cover and are arming the rebel groups to prolong the conflicts,” it said.

The statement did not identify the groups and there was no immediate response from the agencies that operate in Tigray. The United Nations humanitarian organization OCHA did not respond to a request for comment.

The U.N. has said desperately needed aid is being blocked at checkpoints as convoys travel through government-held territory. Ethiopian authorities say the aid needs to be checked.
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Rescue workers searched flood-ravaged parts of western Germany for survivors on Saturday as water levels remained high in many towns and houses continued to collapse in the country’s worst natural disaster in half a century.

At least 133 people have died in the flooding, including some 90 people in the Ahrweiler district south of Cologne, according to police estimates on Saturday. Hundreds of people are still missing.

Around 700 residents were evacuated late on Friday after a dam broke in the town of Wassenberg near Cologne, authorities said.

Over the past several days the floods, which have mostly hit the states of Rhineland Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, have cut off entire communities from power and communications.

The flooding has also hit parts of Belgium and the Netherlands. At least 20 people have died in Belgium.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Armin Laschet, state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, were scheduled to visit Erftstadt, one of the hardest hit towns, on Saturday.

Laschet is ruling CDU party’s candidate in September’s general election. The devastation of the floods could intensify the debate over climate change ahead of the vote.

Scientists have long said that climate change will lead to heavier downpours. But determining its role in these relentless downpours will take at least several weeks to research, scientists said on Friday. 
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Pope Francis cracked down Friday on the spread of the old Latin Mass, reversing one of Pope Benedict XVI’s signature decisions in a major challenge to traditionalist Catholics who immediately decried it as an attack on them and the ancient liturgy.

Francis reimposed restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass that Benedict relaxed in 2007 and went further to limit its use. The pontiff said he was acting because Benedict’s reform had become a source of division in the church and been exploited by Catholics opposed to the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church and its liturgy.

Critics said they had never witnessed a pope so thoroughly reversing his predecessor. That the reversal concerned something so fundamental as the liturgy, while Benedict is still alive and living in the Vatican as a retired pope, only amplified the extraordinary nature of Francis’ move, which will surely result in more right-wing hostility directed at him.

Francis, 84, issued a new law requiring individual bishops to approve celebrations of the old Mass, also called the Tridentine Mass, and requiring newly ordained priests to receive explicit permission to celebrate it from their bishops, in consultation with the Vatican.

Under the new law, bishops must also determine if the current groups of faithful attached to the old Mass accept Vatican II, which allowed for Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin. These groups cannot use regular churches; instead, bishops must find alternate locations for them without creating new parishes.

In addition, Francis said bishops are no longer allowed to authorize the formation of any new pro-Latin Mass groups in their dioceses.

Francis said he was taking action to promote unity and heal divisions within the church that had grown since Benedict’s 2007 document, Summorum Pontificum. He said he based his decision on a 2020 Vatican survey of all the world’s bishops, whose “responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”

The pope’s rollback immediately created an uproar among traditionalists already opposed to Francis’ more progressive bent and nostalgic for Benedict’s doctrinaire papacy.

“This is an extremely disappointing document which entirely undoes the legal provisions,” of Benedict’s 2007 document, said Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales.

While Latin celebrations can continue, “the presumption is consistently against them: bishops are being invited to close them down,” Shaw said, adding that the requirement for Latin Masses to be held outside a parish was “unworkable.”

“This is an extraordinary rejection of the hard work for the church and the loyalty to the hierarchy which has characterized the movement for the Traditional Mass for many years, which I fear will foster a sense of alienation among those attached to the church’s ancient liturgy,” he said.

Benedict had issued his document in 2007 to reach out to a breakaway, schismatic group that celebrates the Latin Mass, the Society of St. Pius X, and which had split from Rome over the modernizing reforms of Vatican II.

But Francis said Benedict’s effort to foster unity had essentially backfired.

The opportunity offered by Benedict, the pope said in a letter to bishops accompanying the new law, was instead “exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”

Francis said he was “saddened” that the use of the old Mass was accompanied by a rejection of Vatican II itself “with unfounded and unsustainable assertions that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’”

Christopher Bellitto, professor of church history at Kean University, said Francis was right to intervene, noting that Benedict’s original decision had had a slew of unintended consequences that not only created internal divisions but temporarily roiled relations with Jews.

“Francis hits it right on the head with his observation that Benedict’s 2007 loosening of regulations against the Latin rite allowed others to use it for division,” he said. “The blowback proves his point.”

The blowback was indeed fierce, though it’s also likely that many will simply ignore Francis’ decree and continue as before with sympathetic bishops. Some of these traditionalists and Catholics already were among Francis’ fiercest critics, with some accusing him of heresy for having opened the door to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive Communion.

Rorate Caeli, a popular traditionalist blog run out of the U.S., said Francis’ “attack” was the strongest rebuke of a pope against his predecessors in living memory.

“Francis HATES US. Francis HATES Tradition. Francis HATES all that is good and beautiful,” the group tweeted. But it concluded: “FRANCIS WILL DIE, THE LATIN MASS WILL LIVE FOREVER.”

Messa in Latino, an Italian traditionalist blog, was also blistering in its criticism.

“Mercy always and only for sinners (who are not asked to repent) but no mercy for those few traditional Catholics,” the blog said Friday.

For years, though, Francis has made known his distaste of the old liturgy, privately labeling its adherents self-referential naval gazers who are out of touch with the needs of the church. He has cracked down on religious orders that celebrated the old Mass exclusively and frequently decried the “rigidity” of tradition-minded priests who prioritize rules over pastoral accompaniment.

Traditionalists have insisted that the old liturgy was never abrogated, and that Benedict’s 2007 reform had allowed it to flourish.

They point to the growth of traditionalist parishes, often frequented by young, large families, as well as new religious orders that celebrate the old liturgy. The Latin Mass Society says the number of traditional Masses celebrated each Sunday in England and Wales had more than doubled since 2007, from 20 to 46.

But for many, the writing was on the wall as soon as Francis stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after his 2013 election without the ermine-trimmed red velvet cape that was preferred by Benedict and is a symbol of the pre-Vatican II church.

The restrictions went into immediate effect with its publication in Friday’s official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. 
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Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan defended Friday his government’s efforts to promote a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan, rebutting allegations that Islamabad was backing the Taliban’s violent insurgency to fuel hostilities in the neighboring country.

Khan spoke at an international regional connectivity conference hosted by Uzbekistan, shortly after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani addressed the event and accused Pakistan of “playing a negative” role in the war.

The Afghan leader said that “intelligence estimates indicate the influx of over 10,000 jihadi fighters from Pakistan and other places in the last month.” Ghani went on to allege that despite pledges and assurances, Khan’s government had failed to influence the Taliban to “negotiate seriously” to find an end to the Afghan war.

Khan responded by saying he was “disappointed” by the Afghan president’s “extremely unfair” allegations, insisting that Pakistan had suffered 70,000 casualties in the last 15 years in its own battle against terrorism and that its fragile national economic progress could ill afford a prolonged instability in the immediate neighborhood.

“President Ghani, let me just say that the country that is going to be most affected by turmoil in Afghanistan is Pakistan,” he said. “The last thing Pakistan wants is more conflict … and turbulence in Afghanistan.”

The prime minister stressed that “no country has tried harder” to bring the Taliban to the dialogue table than Pakistan. “Short of taking military action against Taliban [leaders living] in Pakistan, we have made every effort to get them [to] the dialogue table and to have peaceful settlement there.”

Taliban ‘sensing victory’

Khan emphasized that the two decades of conflict, deep divisions among Afghans and the U.S. policy of seeking a military solution to the war are to blame, not Pakistan.

“When there were 150,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, that was the time to ask the Taliban to come [to] the table,” Khan said. “Why are the Taliban going to compromise when the [troop] exit date was given [by the U.S.], with only a few thousand American troops left? Why would they listen to us when they are sensing victory?”

He argued a peaceful Afghanistan is in the interest of all its neighbors.

“There are already 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. We’re petrified that there will be another flow of refugees coming in. We don’t have the capacity or the economic strength to bear another inflow of refugees. So, I can assure you again if any country is trying its best out of all the countries in the world, it’s Pakistan today,” Khan noted.

U.S. and NATO allied troops plan to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next month after nearly 20 years of engagement in the war with the Taliban. The exit, which began formally on May 1, is an outcome of Washington’s bilateral peace agreement with the insurgents that the two sides signed in February 2020.

Pakistan is credited with bringing the Taliban to the table for negotiations with the U.S. that culminated in the deal. The understanding also encouraged the insurgents to open direct peace talks with representatives of the Ghani government in Qatar last September. But the intra-Afghan dialogue has had little success.

Pakistan officials insist the pace of the U.S. military exit should have matched the pace of the peace talks. They argue the rapid troop withdrawal has diminished whatever leverage Islamabad had over the Taliban.

The Taliban have captured scores of districts and expanded insurgent influence to swaths of landlocked Afghanistan since the foreign troops started leaving the country two months ago. The insurgents have also seized control of most of the border crossings with neighboring countries, including a major trade route with Pakistan.

The intensified conflict has drawn fears of a full-fledged Afghan civil war, prompting the U.S. and regional countries to step up diplomatic efforts to press the warring sides to agree on a peace deal without delay.

Quad platform

On the sidelines of Friday’s connectivity conference in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan established a new quadrilateral diplomatic platform to support Afghan peace efforts and boost regional economic connectivity.

“The parties consider long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan critical to regional connectivity and agree that peace and regional connectivity are mutually reinforcing,” said a joint statement.

U.S. special envoy for Afghan peace Zalmay Khalilzad also attended the event organized to enhance connectivity between South and Central Asia.

The United States and the five participating Central Asia nations, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, in a joint statement issued at the end of the Tashkent conference, affirmed their commitment “to strengthening the region’s security and stability, including through Afghan peace negotiations.” It also reiterated that there is no support for the imposition by force of a new government in Afghanistan.
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