RIO DE JANEIRO: Conjoined twins born in Brazil with a fused head and brain have been separated in what doctors described Monday as the most complex surgery of its kind, which they prepared for using virtual reality. Arthur and Bernardo Lima were born in 2018 in the state of Roraima in northern Brazil as craniopagus twins, an extremely rare condition in which the siblings are fused at the cranium. Joined at the top of the head for nearly four years — most of that spent in a Rio de Janeiro hospital outfitted with a custom bed — the brothers are now able to look each other in the face for the first time, after a series of nine operations culminating in a marathon 27-hour surgery to separate them. London-based medical charity Gemini Untwined, which helped carry out the procedure, described it as the “most challenging and complex separation to date,” given that the boys shared several vital veins. “The twins had the most serious and difficult version of the condition, with the highest risk of death for both,” said neurosurgeon Gabriel Mufarrej of the Paulo Niemeyer State Brain Institute (IECPN) in Rio, where the procedure was performed. “We’re very satisfied with the outcome, because no one else believed in this surgery at first, but we always believed there was a chance,” he said in a statement. Members of the medical team, which included nearly 100 staff, prepared for the delicate final stages of the surgery on June 7 and 9 with the help of virtual reality, said Gemini Untwined. Using brain scans to create a digital map of the boys’ shared cranium, surgeons practiced for the procedure in a trans-Atlantic virtual-reality trial surgery. British neurosurgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani, the lead surgeon for Gemini Untwined, called the virtual reality prep session “space-age stuff.” “It’s just wonderful, it’s really great to see the anatomy and do the surgery before you actually put the children at any risk,” he told British news agency PA. “You can imagine how reassuring that is for the surgeons... To do it in virtual reality was just really man-on-Mars stuff.” Pictures and videos released by medical staff showed the boys lying side-by-side on a hospital bed post-surgery, little Arthur reaching out to touch his brother’s hand. In tears, the boys’ mother, Adriely Lima, described the family’s relief. “We’ve been living in the hospital for nearly four years,” she said.
CAIRO, Egypt: The doors of jihad opened for Ayman Al-Zawahiri as a young doctor in a Cairo clinic, when a visitor arrived with a tempting offer: a chance to treat Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
With that offer in 1980, Al-Zawahiri embarked on a life that over three decades took him to the top of the most feared terrorist group in the world, Al-Qaeda, after the death of Osama bin Laden.
Already an experienced militant who had sought the overthrow of Egypt’s “infidel” regime since the age of 15, Al-Zawahiri took a trip to the Afghan war zone that was just a few weeks long, but it opened his eyes to new possibilities.
What he saw was “the training course preparing Muslim mujahedeen youth to launch their upcoming battle with the great power that would rule the world: America,” he wrote in a 2001 biography-cum-manifesto.
Al-Zawahiri, 71, was killed over the weekend by a US drone strike in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden announced the death Monday evening in an address to the nation.
The strike is likely to lead to greater disarray within the organization than did bin Laden’s death in 2011, since it is far less clear who his successor would be.
Al-Zawahiri became crucial to turning the jihadi movement’s guns to target the United States as the right-hand man to bin Laden, the young Saudi millionaire he met in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Under their leadership, the Al-Qaeda terror network carried out the deadliest attack ever on American soil, the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon made bin Laden America’s Enemy No. 1. But he likely could never have carried it out without his deputy.
ALSO READ: How potent a threat is Al-Qaeda since Bin Laden’s death?
While bin Laden came from a privileged background in a prominent Saudi family, Al-Zawahiri had the experience of an underground revolutionary. Bin Laden provided Al-Qaeda with charisma and money, but Al-Zawahiri brought tactics and organizational skills needed to forge militants into a network of cells in countries around the world.
“Bin Laden always looked up to him,” said terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. Al-Zawahiri “spent time in an Egyptian prison, he was tortured. He was a jihadi from the time he was a teenager.”
When the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan demolished Al-Qaeda’s safe haven and scattered, killed and captured its members, Al-Zawahiri ensured Al-Qaeda’s survival. He rebuilt its leadership in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and installed allies as lieutenants in key positions.
He also became the movement’s public face, putting out a constant stream of video messages while bin Laden largely hid.
With his thick beard, heavy-rimmed glasses and the prominent bruise on his forehead from prostration in prayer, he was notoriously prickly and pedantic. He picked ideological fights with critics within the jihadi camp, wagging his finger scoldingly in his videos. Even some key figures in Al-Qaeda’s central leadership were put off, calling him overly controlling, secretive and divisive — a contrast to bin Laden, whose soft-spoken presence many militants described in adoring, almost spiritual terms.
Yet he reshaped the organization from a centralized planner of terror attacks into the head of a franchise chain. He led the creation of a network of autonomous branches around the region, including in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Africa, Somalia and Asia.
In the decade after 9/11, Al-Qaeda inspired or had a direct hand in attacks in all those areas as well as Europe, Pakistan and Turkey, including the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and the 2005 transit bombings in London. More recently, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen has proven itself capable of plotting attacks on US soil with an attempted 2009 bombing of an American passenger jet and an attempted package bomb the following year.
Bin Laden was killed in a US raid on his compound in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Less than two months later, Al-Qaeda proclaimed Al-Zawahiri its paramount leader.
The jihad against America “does not halt with the death of a commander or leader,” he said three months after bin Laden’s death. “Chase America, which killed the leader of the mujahedeen and threw his body into the sea.”
The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings around the Mideast threatened a major blow to Al-Qaeda, showing that jihad was not the only way to get rid of Arab autocrats. It was mainly pro-democracy liberals and leftists who led the uprising that toppled Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, the longtime goal Al-Zawahiri failed to achieve.
But Al-Zawahiri sought to co-opt the wave of uprisings, insisting that they would have been impossible if the 9/11 attacks had not weakened America. And he urged Islamic hard-liners to take over in the nations where leaders had fallen.
Al-Zawahiri was born June 19, 1951, the son of an upper-middle-class family of doctors and scholars in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His father was a pharmacology professor at Cairo University’s medical school and his grandfather, Rabia Al-Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, a premier center of religious study.
From an early age, Al-Zawahiri was enflamed by the radical writings of Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who taught that Arab regimes were “infidel” and should be replaced by Islamic rule.
In the 1970s, as he earned his medical degree as a surgeon, he was active in militant circles. He merged his own militant cell with others to form the group Islamic Jihad and began trying to infiltrate the military — at one point even storing weapons in his private clinic.
Then came the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by Islamic Jihad militants. The slaying was carried out by a different cell in the group — and Al-Zawahiri has written that he learned of the plot only hours before the assassination. But he was arrested along with hundreds of other militants and served three years in prison.
During his imprisonment, he was reportedly tortured heavily, a factor some cite as turning him more violently radical.
After his release in 1984, Al-Zawahiri returned to Afghanistan and joined the Arab militants from across the Middle East fighting alongside the Afghans against the Soviets. He courted bin Laden, who became a heroic figure for his financial support of the mujahedeen.
Al-Zawahiri followed bin Laden to his new base in Sudan, and from there he led a reassembled the Islamic Jihad group in a violent campaign of bombings aimed at toppling Egypt’s US-allied government.
In the most daring attack, Jihad and other militants tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a 1995 visit to Ethiopia. Mubarak escaped the hail of gunfire aimed at his motorcade, and his security forces all but crushed the militant movement in Egypt in the crackdown that followed.
The Egyptian movement failed. But Al-Zawahiri would bring to Al-Qaeda the tactics that he honed in Islamic Jihad.
He promoted the use of suicide bombings, to become Al-Qaeda’s hallmark. He plotted a 1995 suicide car bombing of Egypt’s embassy in Islamabad that killed 16 people — presaging the more devastating 1998 Al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200, attacks Al-Zawahiri was indicted for in the United States.
In 1996, Sudan expelled bin Laden, who took his fighters back to Afghanistan, where they found a safe haven under the radical Taliban regime. Once more, Al-Zawahiri followed.
Two years later, their bond was sealed when bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and other militant leaders issued the “Declaration of Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.” It announced that the United States was Islam’s top enemy and instructed Muslims that it was their religious duty to “kill the Americans and their allies.”
It consecrated a dramatic shift that Al-Zawahiri underwent under bin Laden’s influence, changing from his longtime strategy of attacking the “near enemy” — US-allied Arab regimes like Egypt — to target the “far enemy,” the United States itself.
Some in Al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad broke away, opposed to the move. And some Al-Qaeda militants whose association with bin Laden predated Al-Zawahiri’s always saw him as an arrogant intruder.
“I have never taken orders from Al-Zawahiri,” Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of the network’s top figures in East Africa until his 2011 death, sneered in a memoir posted on line in 2009. “We don’t take orders from anyone but our historical leadership.”
Soon after the alliance came the bombings of the US embassies in Africa, followed by the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen, an attack Al-Zawahiri is believed to have helped organize.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden fled into Pakistan as a US airstrike killed Al-Zawahiri’s wife and at least two of their six children in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
The CIA came tantalizingly close to possibly capturing Al-Zawahiri in 2003 and killing him in 2004. The CIA thought it finally had Al-Zawahiri in its sights in 2009, only to be tricked by a double agent who blew himself up, killing seven agency employees and wounding six more in Khost, Afghanistan.
In his 2001 treatise, “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” Al-Zawahiri set the long-term strategy for the jihadi movement — to inflict “as many casualties as possible” on the Americans, while trying to establish control in a nation as a base “to launch the battle to restore the holy caliphate” of Islamic rule across the Muslim world.
Al-Qaeda did make inroads in Europe. The bombers in the Madrid attacks that killed 191 were said to have been inspired by Al-Qaeda, although direct links remain uncertain. Al-Zawahiri claimed Al-Qaeda responsibility for the 2005 London transit bombings that killed 52, saying some perpetrators trained in Al-Qaeda camps.
Not all terror campaigns were successful. Al-Qaeda’s branch in Saudi Arabia was crushed by 2006. Al-Zawahiri himself had to write to the head of Al-Qaeda’s branch in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, to rein in his brutal attacks on Iraqi Shiites, which were hurting the network’s image among Muslims.
That underlined Al-Zawahiri’s ultimate failure. With his concentration on a “Muslim vanguard” carrying out dramatic attacks, he never gained widespread popular support for Al-Qaeda in the Islamic world beyond a fringe of radical sympathizers.
His answer, in “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” was for jihadis to continue hitting Americans, hoping to exploit anti-US sentiment and draw in the public. He echoed that strategy in a June 2011 video eulogy to his slain boss.
Bin Laden “terrified America in his life,” he said, and “will continue to terrify it after his death.”
UNITED NATIONS: US President Joe Biden said on Monday he is ready to pursue a new nuclear arms deal with Russia and called on Moscow to act in good faith as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said there could be no winners in any nuclear war. Both leaders issued written statements as diplomats gathered for a month-long UN conference to review the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It was supposed to have taken place in 2020, but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It occurs at a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the conference. “Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.” He warned that crises “with nuclear undertones are festering,” citing the Middle East, North Korea and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Within days of Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, Putin put the country’s deterrence forces — which include nuclear arms — on high alert, citing what he called aggressive statements by NATO leaders and Western economic sanctions against Moscow. But in a letter to participants at the NPT review conference, Putin wrote: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed, and we stand for equal and indivisible security for all members of the world community.” Arms control has traditionally been an area in which global progress has been possible despite wider disagreements. The UN conference takes place five months after Russia invaded Ukraine and as US-China tensions flare over Taiwan, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing.
Moscow and Washington last year extended their New START treaty, which caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads they can deploy and limits the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them, until 2026. “My Administration is ready to expeditiously negotiate a new arms control framework to replace New START when it expires in 2026,” Biden said. “But negotiation requires a willing partner operating in good faith.” “Russia should demonstrate that it is ready to resume work on nuclear arms control with the United States,” he said. But Russia’s mission to the United Nations questioned if the United States was ready to negotiate, accusing Washington of withdrawing from talks with Moscow on strategic stability over the Ukraine conflict. “It is high time Washington made up its mind, stopped rushing around, and told us frankly what it is that they want – escalate the situation in the area of international security or embark on equal negotiations,” Russia’s UN mission said in a statement. Biden also called on China “to engage in talks that will reduce the risk of miscalculation and address destabilizing military dynamics.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the UN conference that Washington was committed to seeking a comprehensive risk reduction package that would include secure communications channels among nuclear weapon states. “We stand ready to work with all partners, including China and others, on risk reduction and strategic stability efforts,” he said. Blinken also said a return to the 2015 nuclear deal remains the best outcome for the United States, Iran and the world, and again accused North Korea of preparing for a seventh nuclear test. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged all nuclear states to conduct themselves “responsibly.” Kishida is from Hiroshima, which on Aug. 6, 1945, became the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear bombing. “The world is worried that the threat of the catastrophe of use of nuclear weapons has emerged once again,” he told the conference. “It must be said that the path to a world without nuclear weapons has suddenly become even harder.”
YREKA, California: Two bodies were found inside a charred vehicle in a driveway in the wildfire zone of a raging California blaze that was among several menacing thousands of homes Monday in the Western US, officials said. Hot and gusty weather and lightning storms threatened to boost the danger that the fires will keep growing, The McKinney Fire in Northern California near the state line with Oregon exploded in size to nearly 87 square miles (225 square kilometers) after erupting Friday in the Klamath National Forest, firefighting officials said. It is California’s largest wildfire of the year so far and officials have not yet determined the cause. The vehicle and the bodies were found Sunday morning in the driveway of a residence near the remote community of Klamath River, the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Nearly 5,000 homes and other structures were threatened and an unknown number of buildings have burned, said Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson for the US Forest Service. The smoky blaze cast an eerie, orange-brown hue in one neighborhood where a brick chimney stood surrounded by rubble and scorched vehicles on Sunday. Flames torched trees along State Route 96 and raced through hillsides in sight of homes. Valerie Linfoot’s son, a fire dispatcher, called to tell her their family home of three decades in Klamath River had burned. Linfoot said her husband worked as a US Forest Service firefighter for years and the family did everything they could to prepare their house for a wildfire — including installing a metal roof and trimming trees and tall grasses around the property. “It was as safe as we could make it, and it was just so dry and so hot and the fire was going so fast,” Linfoot told the Bay Area News Group. She said her neighbors have also lost homes. “It’s a beautiful place. And from what I’ve seen, it’s just decimated. It’s absolutely destroyed,” she told the news group. Firefighting crews on the ground were trying to prevent the blaze from moving closer to the town of Yreka, population about 7,500. The blaze was about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) away as of Monday. A second, smaller fire in the region that was sparked by dry lightning Saturday threatened the tiny California community of Seiad Valley. Freeman said “there has been significant damage and loss along the Highway 96 corridor” that runs parallel to the Klamath River and is one of the few roads in and out of the region. She added: “But just how much damage is still being assessed.” Erratic storms were expected to move through Northern California again on Monday with lightning that threatened to spark new fires in bone dry vegetation, forecasters said. A day earlier, thunderstorms caused flash flooding that damaged roads in Death Valley National Park and in mountains east of Los Angeles. In northwestern Montana, winds picked up Monday afternoon on a fire burning in forested land west of Flathead Lake, forcing fire managers to ground all aircraft and leading the Lake County Sheriff’s Office to start evacuating residents on the northeastern corner of the fire. The fire was putting up a lot of smoke, creating visibility problems for aircraft, said Sara Rouse, a spokesperson for the fire management team. The fire, which started Friday afternoon near the town of Elmo on the Flathead Indian Reservation, measured 20 square miles (52 square kilometers), fire officials said. The Moose Fire in Idaho has burned more than 85 square miles (220 square kilometers) in the Salmon-Challis National Forest while threatening homes, mining operations and fisheries near the town of Salmon. It was 23 percent contained Monday. And a wildfire raging in northwestern Nebraska led to evacuations and destroyed or damaged several homes near the small city of Gering. The Carter Canyon Fire began Saturday as two separate fires that merged. It was about 30 percent contained by early Monday. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency Saturday, allowing him more flexibility to make emergency response and recovery effort decisions and to tap federal aid. Scientists have said climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. The US Forest service shut down a 110-mile (177-kilometer) section of the famed Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California and southern Oregon. Sixty hikers in that area were helped to evacuate on Saturday, according to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, which aided in the effort.
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky: Another round of rainstorms hit flooded Kentucky mountain communities Monday as more bodies emerged from the sodden landscape, and the governor warned that high winds could bring another threat — falling trees and utility poles. Gov. Andy Beshear said the death toll rose to 37 while hundreds of people remained unaccounted for five days after one of the nation’s poorest regions was swamped by nearly a foot of rain. The water poured down hillsides and into valleys and hollows, engulfing entire towns. Mudslides marooned some people on steep slopes. Beshear suggested many of the unaccounted for would be located when cellphone service resumes.
“When cell service gets back up, we do see a whole lot of people finding people they love and care about, so looking forward to those stories,” he said. Radar indicated that up to 4 more inches (10.2 centimeters) of rain fell Sunday, and the National Weather Service warned that slow-moving showers and thunderstorms could provoke more flash flooding through Tuesday morning. “If things weren’t hard enough on the people of this region, they’re getting rain right now,” Beshear said Monday at the Capitol in Frankfort. “Just as concerning is high winds — think about how saturated the ground has been.” The wind “could knock over poles, it could knock over trees. So people need to be careful.” An approaching heat wave means “it’s even going to get tougher when the rain stops,” the governor said. “We need to make sure people are ultimately stable by that point.”
Chris Campbell, president of Letcher Funeral Home in Whitesburg, said he’s begun handling burial arrangements for people who died. “These people, we know most of them. We’re a small community,” he said of the town about 110 miles (177 kilometers) southeast of Lexington. “It affects everybody.” His funeral home recently buried a 67-year-old woman who had a heart attack while trying to escape her home as the water rose. Campbell knew her boyfriend well, he said. On Monday, he met with the family of a husband and wife in their 70s, people he also knew personally. He said it’s hard to explain the magnitude of the loss. “I don’t know how to explain it or what to say, to be completely honest,” he said. “I just can’t imagine what they’re going through. I don’t think there really are words for it.” Campbell said his 90-year-old grandmother lost the entire home where she’s lived since 1958. She managed to escape to a neighbor’s house with only some photos. Everything else is gone, he said.
More than 12,000 utility customers remained without power. At least 300 people were staying in shelters. The floods were unleashed last week when 8 to 10 1/2 inches (20 to 27 centimeters) of rain fell in just 48 hours in parts of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia and western Virginia. The disaster was the latest in a string of catastrophic deluges that have pounded parts of the US this summer, including St. Louis. Scientists warn that climate change is making such events more common. Meanwhile, nighttime curfews were declared in response to reports of looting in two of the devastated communities — Breathitt County and the nearby city of Hindman in Knott County. Breathitt County declared a countywide curfew from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. The only exceptions were for emergency vehicles, first responders, and people traveling for work. “I hate to have to impose a curfew, but looting will absolutely not be tolerated. Our friends and neighbors have lost so much. We cannot stand by and allow them to lose what they have left,” County Attorney Brendon Miller said in a Facebook post. Breathitt County Sheriff John Hollan said the curfew decision came after 18 reports of looting. He said people were stealing from private property where homes were damaged. No arrest have been made. Hindman Mayor Tracy Neice also announced a sunset-to-sunrise curfew because of looting, television station WYMT reported. Both curfews will remain in place until further notice, officials said. Last week’s flooding extended to parts of West Virginia and Virginia. President Joe Biden declared a federal disaster to direct relief money to flooded counties, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was helping. Another relief effort came from the University of Kentucky’s men basketball team, which planned an open practice Tuesday at Rupp Arena and a charity telethon. Coach John Calipari said players approached him about the idea. “The team and I are looking forward to doing what we can,” Calipari said.
ZUPCE, Kosovo: NATO-led peacekeepers backed by helicopters on Monday oversaw the removal of roadblocks protesters had set up in Kosovo, where political tensions have flared more than two decades since a NATO campaign of airstrikes drove out Serbian forces. Kosovo police said the removal of the barricades in the north of the country allowed two border crossings with Serbia to be reopened. “Roads are now free for traffic to pass, both border crossings are open now for people and goods to cross,” the police said in a statement. The removal of the barricades came after the Kosovo government postponed the implementation of a decision that would oblige ethnic Serbs, who are a majority in the north, to apply for documents and car license plates issued by Kosovan institutions. The situation has revived faultlines with Serbia and Russia, neither of which recognize Western-aligned Kosovo as an independent state and have blocked its efforts to join the United Nations. Kosovo, recognized as a nation by more than 100 countries, is seeking to join NATO. The government’s decision to postpone followed consultations with US and EU ambassadors. “Violence will not be tolerated. Those who use violence will be punished by the rule of law with the force of law,” Prime Minister Albin Kurti told journalists on Monday. He said a total of nine road bocks had been set up.
SIMMERING DISPUTE Fourteen years after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, some 50,000 ethnic Serbs in the north still use license plates and papers issued by Serbian authorities, refusing to recognize the Kosovan government. Ethnic Serbs had parked heavy machinery including trucks filled with gravel on roads near the border with Serbia on Sunday in protest at the new policy, which the government agreed to postpone until Sept. 1. After that date, local Serbs will have 60 days to switch to Kosovo license plates and accept documents issued at the border to Serbian citizens, including those living in Kosovo without local papers. “Now, thank God, some escalation has been avoided overnight, but this situation has only been delayed for 1 month,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday. Tensions with Serbia remain high and Kosovo’s fragile peace is maintained by NATO’s KFOR mission, which has 3,770 troops on the ground. The mission issued a statement on Sunday say it was prepared to intervene in line with its mandate if stability was jeopardized. Italian peacekeepers were visible in and around then northern town of Mitrovica on Sunday. A Reuters reporter saw helicopters from the KFOR flying over the north of Kosovo, which borders Serbia. Peacekeepers were also present as the roadblocks were dismantled, standing at the roadside and chatting with residents. Earlier on Monday, the government began issuing extra documents to Serbian citizens at the biggest border crossing between Serbia and Kosovo, Merdare. Kosovo’s government said it would stop issuing the documents once road blocks are removed. A year ago, after local Serbs blocked the same roads in another row over license plates, Kosovo’s government deployed special police forces and Belgrade flew fighter jets close to the border. Serbia and Kosovo committed in 2013 to a dialogue sponsored by the European Union to try to resolve outstanding issues but little progress has been made.