VoxAdam

"There was nothing sane about Chernobyl. What happened there, what happened after, even the good we did, all of it... all of it, madness." - Valery Legasov, from HBO's Chernobyl I jest with the title of this journal, but I seek to do what I can to alleviate the mood as what we feared is upon us. Consider only that the Chernobyl exclusion site stands as a monument of Russian failure, of why Russian rule brought nothing good to the Ukraine, and hopefully some form of historical irony will play out as Vladimir Putin's military forces seek to go through this area as a shortcut to take Kyiv. But keep it in your minds that the Russian people themselves are not the enemy here. A Russian platoon surrendered to the Ukrainians upon learning that this criminal enterprise would be going forward. And Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of Russia's sole remaining "free" newspaper Novaya Gazeta and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize of 2021, has stated he shall continue to speak out against the actions

Once upon a time, there was a handsome boy, whose father had died. He went to work and came home exhausted. He was tired of working. He wished he could be a girl so he wouldn't have to work. One day, a wise man told him that if he passed under a rainbow, He would become a girl. "What's a rainbow?", he asked. It's a memory left to us by Rostam, the great hero, To free us from pain and misery. Boys turn into girls, and girls into boys. The tale upon which this journal opened may be about just what you think, or it may not; what matters is that in Afghan culture, "Kaman e Rostam", or "Arch of Rostam", so named after a Persian mythological hero, is a poetic term for the rainbow. How oft-told this tale is to children in Afghanistan, I do not know; I am not Afghan. But it is a tale told to a young girl in a movie from 2003, marking a return of Afghan cinema, after film-making had been banned in the country under the Taliban regime. Osama was originally conceived as closer to an allegory

On Monday 15th April 2019, at 18:50 (GMT+1), it wasn't London Bridge that was falling down, but the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris which caught fire, for causes as yet unknown at the time of this writing. As so often happens, a work which took a little century to complete – construction on the famous cathedral lasted from its inception in 1160 by Bishop Maurice de Sully until its official completion in 1260 – needed only a few hours to endure great, irrevocable damage. With the fire's starting point believed be either the cathedral attic or the network of wooden beams nicknamed "The Forest", the worst came to pass an hour after