The U.S. National Football League’s Detroit Lions dedicated their first victory in nearly a year — a dramatic, come from behind victory as time expired — to the victims of last week’s deadly Oxford High School shooting. 

At a postgame news conference Sunday, an emotional Lions Coach Dan Campbell said the victory and the game ball was dedicated to the entire Oxford community, a township about 66 kilometers north of Ford Field, the Lions’ home stadium, and all those affected. He read the names of those killed and wounded in the incident. 

Four students were killed, and seven others were injured, including a teacher, in the Nov. 30 shooting at Oxford High School. The suspect, a 15-year-old student at the school, was arrested the day of the shooting and faces multiple charges. The suspect’s parents were arrested Saturday and charged with involuntary manslaughter. 

In Campbell’s first season as coach, the Detroit Lions had lost 10 games and managed only a tie before Sunday’s winning game against division rival Minnesota Vikings. Trailing 27-23 with just four seconds remaining in the game, Lion’s quarterback Jared Goff through a touchdown to 11-yard touchdown pass to rookie receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown. 

It was St. Brown’s first career professional touchdown. It was the Lions first victory in 364 days going back to last season. 

The Lion’s players had played the game with a gold “O’ on the backs of their helmets in honor of Oxford High School. Players in the locker room following the game wore Oxford High School shirts to honor the victims. 

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press. 
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The United States “strongly condemns” a militant attack on a bus in central Mali that killed at least 31 people and wounded 17, the State Department said Sunday. 

Unidentified gunmen on Friday opened fire on the bus as it traveled from the village of Songho to a market in Bandiagara, 10 kilometers away. 

The villages sit in the heart of the Mopti region, an epicenter of violence in Mali fueled by insurgents linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. 

“The United States strongly condemns the attack on civilians on Saturday near Bandiagara, Mali, which left 31 dead and 17 injured,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a written statement. 

“We extend our deepest condolences to the Malian people and will continue to partner with them in their pursuit of a safe, prosperous, and democratic future,” Price said. 

Jihadist attacks have surged across Africa’s Sahel region, killing thousands and displacing millions across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. 
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Buck O’Neil, a champion of Black ballplayers during a monumental, eight-decade career on and off the field, joined Gil Hodges, Minnie Minoso and three others in being elected to the baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday.

Former Minnesota Twins teammates Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat also were chosen along with Bud Fowler by a pair of veterans committees.

Oliva and Kaat are the only living new members. Dick Allen, who died last December, fell one vote shy of election.

The 16-member Early Days and Golden Days committees met separately in Orlando, Florida. The election announcement was originally scheduled to coincide with the big league winter meetings, which were nixed because of the MLB lockout.

The six newcomers will be enshrined in Cooperstown, New York, on July 24, 2022, along with any new members elected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

First-time candidates David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez join Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling on the ballot, with voting results on Jan. 25.
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A Norwegian Cruise Line ship with at least 10 passengers and crew members infected with COVID-19 docked Sunday in New Orleans, where health officials said they were trying to disembark people without worsening the spread of the coronavirus illness.

Local news outlets in New Orleans confirmed the Norwegian Breakaway had arrived in the city. The ship departed New Orleans on Nov. 28. The Louisiana Department of Health said in a late Saturday news release that over the past week, the ship made stops in Belize, Honduras and Mexico.

Norwegian Cruise Line issued a statement that confirmed a “handful of COVID-19 cases among guests and crew.” The company said all of the identified cases involved people without symptoms of the illness. 

Norwegian said it requires all passengers and crew members to have been vaccinated against the coronavirus prior to departure.

“We are testing all individuals on Norwegian Breakaway prior to disembarkation, as well as providing post-exposure and quarantine public health guidance by the (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention),” the company’s statement said. “Any guests who have tested positive for COVID-19 will travel by personal vehicle to their personal residence or self-isolate in accommodations provided by the company.”

The state health department — which is working with the cruise line and state and local officials to contain the outbreak — said at least 10 people on the ship tested positive for COVID-19. More than 3,200 people were on board the ship, officials said.

Some disembarking passengers told WVUE-TV in New Orleans that they were notified about the positive cases on the ship, while others said they had no idea about the outbreak until being asked about it by a reporter.

“We didn’t hear of this until we kind of heard you talking a second ago,” said Don Canole, a passenger from North Carolina. “It would have been nice to have known. We would have taken maybe a few more precautions.”

Passengers said they were tested for COVID-19 exposure on Saturday before disembarking Sunday. The cruise line also gave passengers take-home rapid tests as they left the ship, according to WVUE.

The company said no changes to scheduled future sailings on the Norwegian Breakaway are currently planned, and the ship was scheduled to depart again Sunday evening.

Cruise ships were an early source of outbreaks last year at the start of the coronavirus pandemic as some ships were rejected at ports and passengers were forced into quarantine. The CDC issued a no-sail order in March 2020, prompting a standstill that ended last June as cruise ships began to leave U.S. ports with new health and safety requirements.
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The omicron variant of the coronavirus has now spread to 40 countries and 16 of the 50 U.S. states, but top U.S. government health officials said Sunday they are not certain about the severity of its effects on the health of people who contract it. 

“It does not look like there’s a great deal of severity to it,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show.  

He said, however, it was important to “hold judgment until we get more experience” with the variant as it spreads from country to country and across geographically widely separated U.S. states. 

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, expressed uncertainty as well, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press” show, “Does this in fact turn out to be less dangerous” than previous coronavirus variants? “Scientists are all over this, hard at work 24/7 to get these answers.” 

“It’s certainly possible,” Collins said, “that this is not the last emerging variant that will attract a lot of attention and a lot of concern.” 

U.S. President Joe Biden has imposed a ban on flights to the United States from eight southern Africa countries. Starting Monday, people traveling to the United States must have a negative COVID-19 test result no more than a day ahead of their trip, instead of the previous three-day period. 

Some experts in the U.S. have suggested that testing might soon be required on domestic flights in the U.S., but Collins said that would be “extremely onerous,” adding that he did not know how much such a requirement would inhibit the spread of the coronavirus within the country. 

“I think we’ve got it just about right” with imposition of the international travel restrictions, Collins said. Israel, Japan and Morocco have barred the entry of foreign travelers altogether. 

With the rapid advance of the omicron variant in the U.S., the number of first-time vaccinations has increased, reaching a six-month high last Thursday, even as about 60 million people eligible for inoculations remain unvaccinated, refusing shots for a variety of reasons. 

In South Africa, the omicron variant has been spreading twice as fast as the delta variant, which previously had been considered the most contagious. 

The U.S. has recorded more than 784,000 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic first swept into the country 21 months ago, more than in any other nation across the globe, and 48.9 million coronavirus cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Nearly 200 million people are fully vaccinated in the U.S. and more than 45 million people have received booster shots.   
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When John Carlin started his job at the head of the U.S. National Archives back in June of 1995, he was shocked to learn that government emails were not being preserved. 

“They, at that time, did not consider email as a record, and I said, ‘Folks, I may not be an archivist, but those are records,’” says Carlin, who served as archivist for a decade. “By September I was able to go through the process of getting that changed. More and more records now are coming in the archives in the electronic form.” 

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the official records keeper of the United States government. Among the records in its possession are presidential papers and materials, which former president Donald Trump is trying to keep out of the hands of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Presidential libraries are part of the National Archives and White House records are kept forever. 

“Authentic history is not possible without records that have been kept and preserved so their authenticity is backed up 100 percent,” Carlin says. “Accountability goes forward for a long time and people who work for the White House including the president, him or herself, can and should be held accountable. And, without those records, that cannot be done.

Overall, only 1%-3% of all of the materials created by the U.S. government during the course of conducting its business are considered important enough, for legal or historical reasons, to preserve for all time.

“The National Archives holds over 15 billion pages of textual records, over 18 million maps, charts and architectural drawings, more than 43 million images, more than 365,000 reels of film and over 110,000 videotapes, to say nothing of the billions of electronic records,” says Meghan Ryan Guthorn, acting deputy chief operating officer of the agency. “We’re focused on openness, cultivating public participation, and strengthening our nation’s democracy through public access to high-value government records. I kind of like to think of the agency like the nation’s filing cabinet.”

NARA keeps its holdings in 44 locations across the country, including the iconic National Archives building in Washington. For Carlin, the former archivist, some of the most memorable materials include those related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

 “I mean, literally, they tore apart the room that JFK died in from the assassination on that day in Dallas. Everything was kept,” Carlin says. “Everything in the room was kept.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the National Archives in 1934, but the agency has items that date back to before the nation’s founding. Well-known documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are in the National Archives, but so are naturalization records that can verify the U.S. citizenship of immigrants, and military records of everyday citizens. 

“We do not throw military personnel records away. And we don’t set a date for very practical reasons,” Carlin says. “Anybody that leaves the military, in order to be eligible for veteran benefits, has to prove they left honorably and that requires a record. And that record is kept in our archives in St. Louis. And it has to be kept preserved and made accessible.” 

The public has access to many of these records. However, some archival materials are withheld from the public for a variety of reasons, including national security concerns, donor wishes, court orders and other statutory or regulatory provisions. The National Archives encourages public participation. 

“Maintaining the records and, just as importantly, if not more importantly, providing public access to them, can help illuminate the history of a nation,” says Ryan Guthorn. “The preservation of records documents the activities of a country’s government and citizens over time. It’s a really important way to track how a country has evolved and how the rights of citizens have been protected and managed by the government.”

Presidential historian Shannon Bow O’Brien says access to original documents is critical because while people’s memories may differ, the actual records tell the true story. 

“These tell us what they were doing, when they were doing it, how they were doing it, what they said,” says O’Brien, a professor in the government department at The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts. “If you look at the documents, or you look at the paper trails that are in the archives, you can see the decision-making processes, you can see why things develop the way they developed.” 

The public can explore National Archive holdings via an online catalog and expert archivists are on hand to answer questions online.

Today, Carlin worries the agency continues to lack sufficient funding to properly do its job. 

“If you don’t have enough staff upfront to work with the agency, particularly electronic records, there’s going to be mistakes and records lost along the way that should have gone to the National Archives,” Carlin says. 

During his decade-long tenure as archivist, Carlin pursued federal and private funds to renovate the National Archives building in Washington, and added public exhibits as part of an effort to enrich the overall visitor experience. 

“The very fundamentals of our whole system are right there,” Carlin says, referring to the Charters of Freedom — the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. “It’s incredibly important and valuable that citizens take advantage of that opportunity to go there and spend a couple hours and really learn a lot about what has made this country great and what has to be supported going forward for it to stay great.”
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The United States on Saturday led a group of Western nations and allies in condemnation of the Taliban over the “summary killings” of former members of the Afghan security forces, reported by rights groups, and demanded quick investigations.

“We are deeply concerned by reports of summary killings and enforced disappearances of former members of the Afghan security forces as documented by Human Rights Watch and others,” read a statement by the United States, the European Union, Australia, Britain, Japan and others, which was released by the State Department.

“We underline that the alleged actions constitute serious human rights abuses and contradict the Taliban’s announced amnesty,” the group of nations said, as it called on Afghanistan’s new rulers to ensure the amnesty is enforced and “upheld across the country and throughout their ranks.”

Early this week Human Rights Watch released a report that it says documents the summary execution or enforced disappearance of 47 former members of the Afghan National Security Forces, other military personnel, police and intelligence agents “who had surrendered to or were apprehended by Taliban forces” from mid-August through October.

“Reported cases must be investigated promptly and in a transparent manner, those responsible must be held accountable, and these steps must be clearly publicized as an immediate deterrent to further killings and disappearances,” the countries, which include Canada, New Zealand, Romania, Ukraine and several European nations, said in their statement.

The Taliban took power in Afghanistan in mid-August as the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and the country’s military collapsed.

Washington held talks with Taliban officials earlier this week when it urged the hardline Islamist group to provide access to education for women and girls across the country.

It also “expressed deep concern regarding allegations of human rights abuses,” a U.S. spokesperson said. 
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A senior U.S. State Department official on Saturday accused Iran of reneging on the compromises it made in the last round of talks to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement and making more demands in its most recent proposals.

“We can’t accept a situation in which Iran accelerates its nuclear program and slow-walks its nuclear diplomacy,” the official said, speaking on background.

The official said that the U.S. remained committed to the talks in Vienna but that Iranian negotiators “are going to have to change the posture that they take.”

“They are not going to get a better JCPOA deal out of these talks,” the official predicted, referring to the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The State Department official’s assessment of the negotiations came one day after diplomats negotiating to revive the deal that curbed the Iranian nuclear program paused the talks until next week, with officials from the United States and Europe criticizing Iran for a lack of progress.

“What we’ve seen in the last couple of days is that Iran right now does not seem to be serious about doing what’s necessary to return to compliance, which is why we ended this round of talks in Vienna,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday, addressing a virtual conference of world leaders organized by the Reuters news agency.

“If the path to a return to compliance with the agreement turns out to be a dead end, we will pursue other options,” he added, without elaborating.

Earlier progress

A U.S. State Department spokesman said Friday on background that earlier rounds of negotiations with Iran “made progress, finding creative compromise solutions to many of the hardest issues that were difficult for all sides.” But, he said, “Iran’s approach this week was not, unfortunately, to try to resolve the remaining issues.”

European officials also expressed frustration with Iran over the talks. A statement Friday from senior officials from France, Britain and Germany — the three European powers acting as mediators in the nuclear talks — said, “This week, [Iran] has backtracked on diplomatic progress made.”

The United States and Iran resumed indirect negotiations in Vienna on Monday, with the mediators seeking to bring both sides back into compliance with the 2015 JCPOA deal. U.S. and Iranian negotiators previously held six inconclusive rounds of indirect talks in Vienna from April to June, when Iran suspended the negotiations ahead of its presidential election that month.

Under the JCPOA, Iran promised it would curb nuclear activities that could be weaponized in return for international sanctions relief. Tehran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

The U.S. administration of former President Donald Trump quit the JCPOA in 2018, saying it was not tough enough on Iran, and reimposed U.S. sanctions. Iran retaliated a year later by starting to publicly exceed JCPOA limits on its nuclear activities. Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden, has said he wants to honor the deal again if Iran does the same.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Iran’s latest breach of JCPOA limits on Wednesday, saying it had begun using advanced centrifuges at its underground nuclear facility in Fordo to enrich uranium up to 20% purity, a short step away from weapons-grade levels.

‘Nuclear blackmail’

Israel, a key U.S. ally whose destruction Iran has vowed to pursue, reacted to that news with alarm. The Israeli government said Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke by phone with Blinken on Thursday and accused Tehran of using its Fordo advances as “nuclear blackmail” in the JCPOA talks. It said Bennett urged the United States and other world powers to respond by stopping the negotiations immediately.

Speaking to reporters in Stockholm on Thursday, Blinken said, “We will not accept the status quo of Iran building its [nuclear] program on the one hand and dragging its feet in talks on the other. That’s not going to last.”

“We’re going to know very, very quickly, I think in the next day or two, whether Iran is serious or not,” he said.

That was the first time any Biden administration official had publicly stated such a specific and short time frame for assessing Iran’s negotiating position, after months of declining to do so.

Pair of Iranian proposals

On Wednesday, Iran handed two proposals to the Western powers for the U.S. sanctions that it wants to be lifted and for the nuclear limits it is prepared to resume in return for the U.S. sanctions relief.

“My understanding from the latest news reporting is that [Iran’s proposals] have been maximalist demands that are unworkable for the United States,” Jason Brodsky, policy director of U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran, said in a VOA interview.

Brodsky said Iran could accept IAEA demands to restore U.N. inspectors’ access to cameras at a centrifuge workshop in Karaj, after blocking such access for months.

“It would be a token concession to keep the process going,” he said.

Some information in this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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