A transitional council responsible for choosing Haiti’s next leadership has been established after weeks of uncertainty, according to a decree published in Haiti’s official state journal.

The move comes a month after Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry announced he would step down once the council is inaugurated and names a new prime minister and cabinet.

The council, composed of seven voting members and two non-voting observers, is tasked with choosing and appointing a new prime minister as well as an “impartial” electoral council, the decree reads.

It will exercise certain presidential powers until a new president-elect is inaugurated, which must take place no later than February 7, 2026.

The council’s mandate will end on that date and cannot be extended, the decree reads.

The members of the council are Fritz Alphonse Jean, Louis Gérald Gilles, Edgard Leblanc Fils, Emmanuel Vertilaire, Smith Augustin, Lesly Voltaire, Laurent Saint Cyr, Frinel Joseph and Régine Abraham, according to a press release from the council.

The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) welcomed the news in a statement on Friday.

“The establishment of the nine-member broad-based, politically inclusive Council signals the possibility of a new beginning for Haiti,” the statement read.

According to CARICOM, one of the first priorities of the newly installed council will be to urgently address the security situation in the region.

CARICOM, which worked with Haiti last month to develop a framework for the transitional council, said there are still challenges ahead, but that it would support Haiti as it determines its future.

Since February, attacks by an insurgent alliance of gangs in capital Port-au-Prince have made the city’s international airport and seaport nonfunctional, breaking vital supply lines of food and aid and triggering an exodus of evacuation flights for foreign nationals.

Cut off from the world, more and more Haitians are now going hungry, aid workers are warning. According to the United Nations, nearly 5 million people in Haiti are suffering from acute food insecurity, in what the World Food Programme’s country director Jean-Martin Bauer described as the worst humanitarian crisis to hit the Caribbean nation since the 2010 earthquake.

Hundreds of armed Israeli settlers stormed a village in the occupied West Bank on Friday, setting fire to several homes and cars in one of the largest attacks by settlers this year, according to Palestinian officials.

At least one Palestinian man was killed by gunfire in the village of Al-Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, according to the head of the village council Amin Abu-Alia, who is related to the deceased.

About 25 others were also injured in the rampage, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, the scale of which has not been seen since hundreds of settlers stormed through the villages of Turmusayya and Huwara in two separate incidents last year.

According to Abu-Alia, Israeli security forces had informed Palestinian officials that the settlers were looking for an Israeli teenager who had gone missing earlier in the day.

He estimated that between 1,000 and 1,200 settlers surrounded the village, and around 500 stormed it just after midday local time on Friday, blocking all the roads in the area.

According to Abu-Alia, the Israeli military arrived at the scene at around 3 p.m. local time, but did not stop the settlers from attacking the village. Instead, Israeli soldiers allowed them to raid homes, prevented Palestinian residents from moving around and blocked ambulances from reaching the injured, he alleged.

“Security forces operated to disperse the violent riots. During the incident, rocks were hurled at IDF soldiers, who responded with fire. Hits were identified. Furthermore, IDF and Israel Border Police forces operated to withdraw Israeli civilians who entered the town of Al Mughayyir,” it added.

A statement from the Palestinian Red Crescent said 11 ambulances drove to the scene of Friday’s attack to pick up the wounded, reporting that several people were injured by bullet fragments.

Earlier on Friday, IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said IDF forces had been working to search for the missing 14-year-old, who was last seen near an Israeli settlement and around 2 kilometers from Al-Mughayyir.

“IDF forces from the air and on the ground, including special forces, have been working since the early afternoon, along with the Israel Police and other forces, in the search for the 14-year-old boy who has been missing since this morning in the Malachei Ha’Shalom area in the Binyamin Brigade,” he said in a post on X.

Israeli tanks launched a “targeted attack” where several journalists were working at Nuseirat camp, including a cameraman and correspondent working for TRT Arabi, according to a statement by the Jerusalem bureau chief for Turkish state broadcaster TRT. One journalist sustained wounds that left him in critical condition.

TRT cameraman Sami Shehada lost a leg, while the correspondent, Sami Barhoum, suffered minor injuries, the statement said.

“This incident, occurring amidst ongoing conflict coverage, highlights the severe risks journalists face in conflict zones. This deliberate attack against media professionals, marked clearly with “PRESS” on their jackets, is part of a broader pattern of violence that has claimed the lives of 140 journalists since the conflict began,” TRT’s statement added.

“It will not stop me from working, even if I have to walk on crutches. I will show the whole world the crimes of the Israeli occupation against civilians, people and journalists. I am one of them and I will not leave my camera even if I die,” he continued, telling Al-Sawalhi to get well soon.

Video filmed by Al-Sawalhi showed people walking around the camp, pushing around donkey carts over rubble when artillery shelling targets the area. People, including children, women, and elderly, are then seen rushing to take cover inside shops, looking around cautiously for any sign of Israeli tanks before grabbing their belongings and running away in panic.

Repeated artillery fire and gunshots can be heard in the near distance.

Moments later, Saleh could be seen in video crossing the street when intense artillery fire hit the road a few meters away from where Al-Sawalhi was filming, forcing him to back away and take cover.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has been the deadliest period for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) began gathering data in 1992. As of April 12, 2024, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 95 journalists and media workers” have been among those killed in the besieged enclave.

UN experts have warned that “targeted attacks and killings of journalists are war crimes,” adding that journalists have “come under attack” despite being “clearly identifiable in jackets and helmets marked ‘press.’”

The nature of such attacks indicates that “killings, injury, and detention are a deliberate strategy by Israeli forces to obstruct the media and silence critical reporting,” the UN experts said in a statement in February.

Grace Forrest is the founding director of Walk Free, the Australian-based anti-slavery organization responsible for publishing the Global Slavery Index (GSI).

The GSI provides national estimates of modern slavery for 167 countries, drawn from thousands of interviews with survivors collected through surveys and vulnerability assessments.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Grace Forrest: It’s an incredible honor to receive the “Freedom from Fear” award, and the organization, the Roosevelt Foundation, has such a rich history in international law and human rights. “Freedom from Fear” itself is usually around categorizing the protection of civilians in conflict and disarmament around world conflict zones. And I think it’s incredible that they have given the platform to the area of modern slavery, where tens of millions of people are living, not free from fear at all – where, frankly, their freedom from fear is most categorized as not having their freedom to choose.

From that experience, working on the frontline, I learned the hard way that for every person that is pulled out, another person will go in. Modern slavery is sadly one of the most profitable organized crimes in the world, and it was from that experience that we founded Walk Free, which is an international human rights organization, focused on the eradication of modern slavery in all its forms, in our lifetime.

Grace Forrest: The Global Slavery Index is the world’s most comprehensive data set on measuring and understanding modern slavery. It’s built-in partnership with people with lived experience from countries throughout the world, and it’s built from measuring modern slavery throughout the world through Gallup World poll, in partnership with the ILO and IOM, where we create something called the global estimates of modern slavery. From that data baseline, we build out a vulnerability metric to understand the number of people living in modern slavery across 167 countries. On top of this we also have a government response index which looks at what each and every country can do, or frankly, what they’re not doing to combat modern slavery on their shores and in their supply chains.

The Global Slavery Index, now in its fifth edition, has shockingly found that in the last five years there’s been a 10 million person increase of the number of people living in modern slavery globally. So that has taken our figure to 50 million people living in modern slavery throughout the world, 28 million people living in forced labor, 22 million people living in forced marriages.

What is unique as well about the Global Slavery Index is we look at who is responsible for the prevalence of forced labor in the world and in the supply chains of the goods we buy and use every day. And the answer is simple: it is the G20 countries. Twenty of the world’s most powerful nations responsible for 75% of the world’s trade and hundreds of billions of dollars of import risk every year of goods that we buy and use every day. It could be as close as the shirt on your back, the coffee you drank this morning, or the television that you’re watching. And by measuring and ranking this import risk, we’re about putting the onus back on where this risk is occurring and who is most responsible for affecting it. So the Global Slavery Index is a very important tool in showing the world how large the scale of the problem is.

Grace Forrest: The 10 million person increase of the number of people living in modern slavery in the last five years can be attributed to compounding crises. From the Covid-19 pandemic to the climate crisis to protracted conflict, we know that all these areas of crises exacerbate vulnerability to human trafficking and modern slavery.

We know that vulnerability is going up. What we are not seeing alongside this is the political will to match it. The fact there are three G20 countries in the top 10 countries of prevalence in our last Global Slavery Index is deeply concerning. We need to look at modern slavery and human trafficking as the intersectional issue that it is. There cannot be climate solutions that are based on exploiting people at the front of those supply chains, from the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, to people working in the Congo for essential minerals for batteries. You cannot build a green transition based on the same historical systems of exploitation that our current economy comes from.

So I think that it’s time that modern slavery is seen as deeply intersected with the climate crisis. It’s time that there are modern slavery responses built into how we respond to conflict and distress migration. And certainly, the Covid-19 pandemic ripped the veil down on the vulnerability of our global supply chains, and the fact that the world’s most vulnerable people were hit hardest and fastest by that pandemic each and every time.

Grace Forrest: I think the quickest way that any one of us gives up our power is by not knowing how much of it we have, and the first thing that we can do to understand our interconnectivity, and what we can do to fight human trafficking and modern slavery is to first understand how we’re all connected to it. So, as I said earlier, this could be as close as the shirt on your back. We know that cotton is an industry that, frankly, has never not been exploitative. It is connected to historical slavery, it is deeply connected to modern slavery, and even though countries speak very proudly about abolishing the slave trade, when we look at industries like cotton, we really need to ask the question, did wealthy countries actually abolish slavery, or did they simply outsource the problem?

Exploitation is by design, not default. And I think understanding how we are connected to it, and asking questions of companies, asking questions behind everything that we do, is so critical as a starting point, because we’ve been hoodwinked into thinking in the 21st century that we shouldn’t know who made our clothes and where they came from, and that’s simply not good enough, especially when we know the fashion industry is one of the leading industries globally in relation to modern slavery. So ask, “who made your clothes?” Ask questions about where your coffee comes from, where your television comes from, and it’s not about one person having to change everything. It’s about a sea of voices of consumers. Frankly, in the global north, coming together to say, we do not want to consume human suffering with the goods we buy and use every day, because by default, that is how our system is running, and we can do better.

Countries within Europe have just passed a really critical piece of legislation called the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. And what this does is have companies look for instances of vulnerability, of forced labor within their supply chains, and proactively work to fix it. Industries working together that are high risk. There’s no reason why the United States should not have legislation such as this. There’s no reason why every G20 country shouldn’t have legislation such as this. So I think it’s about understanding that where you put your money and where you put your vote, it deeply matters. Vote for people that care about the issues that you care about. As we head into an election year in so many parts of the world, it’s time we ask ourselves, do we see our values reflected in the leaders around us, and remember that elected officials work for you, so ask questions and demand answers.

Belgium will investigate suspected Russian meddling in European Parliament elections after the country’s intelligence services confirmed “pro-Russian interference networks,” Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said on Friday.

Moscow’s objective “is to help elect more pro-Russian candidates to the European Parliament” in order to weaken the EU’s support for Ukraine, De Croo told reporters.

A recent investigation by Czech authorities uncovered a “pro-Russian influence operation in Europe” involving espionage, said De Croo, which highlighted that Moscow has approached EU members of parliament and even paid some to promote a “Russian agenda.”

“Belgian intelligence services confirmed the existence of pro-Russian interference networks” with activities in several European countries including Belgium, said De Croo, adding that Belgium’s judicial authorities confirmed that Russian interference would be subject to prosecution.

“The cash payments did not take place in Belgium, but the interference does,” De Croo added.

He did not name suspects or give further details of agencies or people alleged to be involved in the influence peddling.

‘A new reality’

Russia has not publicly commented on Belgium’s allegations.

“The goal is very clear: a weakened European support for Ukraine serves Russia on the battlefield, and that is the real aim of what has been uncovered in the last weeks,” he said. “These are very serious concerns and that is why I have taken action… we cannot allow this type of Russian menace in our midst. We need to act and we need to act both on the national level and we also need to act on the EU level.”

He went on to say that Belgium has a responsibility as one of the seats of EU institutions “to uphold that every citizen’s right to a free and safe vote can be maintained,” but that “more tools to fight Russian propaganda and to fight Russian disinformation” are also needed on an “EU level.”

“We are in a new reality and we need to adapt to that new reality,” he said.

Belgium currently holds the presidency of the EU. The next elections to the European Parliament will take place from June 6-9, according to the European Council. 

The EU has donated billions to Ukraine in military support since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and has sanctioned Russian officials. But Viktor Orban – Hungarian Prime Minister and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin – has held up Kyiv’s membership negotiations with the EU and delayed aid deals.

Far-right and populist parties, some of whom are considered sympathetic to the Kremlin, are expected to make gains at the European Parliament elections. There are concerns that this would influence – and possibly weaken – the EU’s overall support for Ukraine.

European support for Ukraine has become increasingly important as US support for Kyiv has faltered in recent months. European officials regularly discuss how possible it would be for the gap in funding to be plugged and fear what implications a Donald Trump return to the White House might mean.

Israel this week has begun to take several major steps to ramp up humanitarian aid to Gaza amid intense pressure from the United States, but humanitarian officials said progress was slow-going and that much more needed to be done, as warnings grew of famine in the Palestinian enclave.

Israel says it has nearly doubled the number of aid trucks entering Gaza daily this week and overnight the Israeli military opened a new crossing point into northern Gaza, allowing a first convoy of trucks in.

McGoldrick also stressed that Israel’s responsibility does not end at getting aid trucks in, but also ensuring that humanitarian aid agencies have the ability to safely distribute the aid inside Gaza.

Israel last week approved the reopening of the Erez crossing between Israel and northern Gaza for the first time since the October 7 Hamas attacks, as well as using the Israeli port of Ashdod to help transfer more aid. The announcement came hours after US President Joe Biden pushed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more aid into the enclave.

The opening of the port has yet to materialize, but Israel’s military has now opened a new crossing point into northern Gaza – opting to open a new one rather than retrofitting the Erez crossing to accommodate aid trucks. The military declined to specify the location of the crossing or the number of aid trucks.

Israel’s plans to ramp up aid come as USAID Administrator Samantha Power said Wednesday it is “credible” to assess that famine is already occurring in parts of Gaza as the war between Israel and Hamas continues. Power is the first US official to publicly agree with an assessment that famine is already taking place.

McGoldrick has welcomed the new announcements by the Israeli government but says more needs to be done to facilitate operations inside Gaza.

“We get lots of trucks coming from Israel, we can’t automatically put those trucks straight into Gaza, they have to be taken off or they have to be segregated from water, from food, from medical items, they then get loaded onto trucks, and then they then go out into Gaza,” McGoldrick explained. “Getting 400 trucks from Kerem Shalom doesn’t mean 400 trucks go into Gaza.”

COGAT, the Israeli agency that coordinates the inspection and delivery of humanitarian assistance for Gaza, said the daily number of trucks entering Gaza has doubled from last week’s numbers, but UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian affairs which tracks the flow of aid into Gaza, has not reported a similar increase.

COGAT said 419 humanitarian aid trucks were inspected and transferred to Gaza on Monday, followed by 468 trucks on Tuesday – the highest one-day figure since the start of the war – and another 298 trucks on Wednesday.

According to UNRWA, however, only 246 trucks entered on Monday, followed by 212 on Tuesday and 141 on Wednesday.

Before the war began, around 500 trucks of supplies were entering Gaza each day.

One reason for the difference in numbers is due to how Israel and the UN count the trucks coming in.

Israel counts trucks arriving at their crossings for inspection and entry, while UN agencies count trucks inside Gaza that arrive for distribution, according to UN humanitarian affairs office (UNOCHA) spokesman Jens Laerke.  Between the two tallies are several inspections, rejected items and the unloading and reloading of aid onto different trucks.

Laerke added that comparing day to day numbers of trucks “makes little sense,” given the delays that take place at crossings and warehouses.

COGAT, meanwhile, has accused the UN of “colossal failures” in distributing aid and claimed hundreds of trucks’ worth of aid were piled up on the Gaza side of one crossing, waiting to be picked up UN agencies.

The disagreement over aid truck figures is the latest in a longstanding spat between Israel and the UN, during which Israeli diplomats have lambasted the organization’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, for repeatedly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, while Israel has accused UN staffers of involvement in the October 7 attacks.

Despite Israel’s promise to bring in more aid, UN agencies say Palestinians’ needs are nowhere near being met.

“There has been no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza or improved access to the north,” UNRWA said Tuesday, adding that “since the beginning of April, an average of 177 aid trucks have crossed into Gaza per day via the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) and Rafah land crossings.”

Prince William and Prince George were spotted watching their soccer team Aston Villa together on Thursday evening – their first sighting since the Princess of Wales’ cancer diagnosis.

In a quintessentially British father-son bonding moment, the 41-year-old heir to the British throne cheered the side on along with his 10-year-old, sporting a Villa-branded scarf, at the Villa Park stadium in Birmingham.

The future kings will have been in high spirits after 90 minutes given the club’s 2-1 win over top-flight French side Lille in the first leg of the Europa Conference League quarterfinal.

Many will see the heirs’ presence in the stands as a positive message that the family is adjusting well with the situation at home and royal-watchers will now be hoping to see the Prince of Wales out and about on engagements in the coming weeks.

Catherine revealed in a powerful video message on March 22 that she had started treatment after being diagnosed with cancer. The family of five then skipped attending the traditional Easter Sunday church service in Windsor.

While the Waleses were missed at the family occasion, King Charles III made a jubilant appearance at Easter – his most significant since his own cancer diagnosis – delighting fans with a surprise walkabout after the service. With the 75-year-old monarch looking so well, many have wondered in the two weeks since when he’ll appear next.

In his absence, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh stepped in on Monday to help celebrate Anglo-French relations at a ceremony honoring the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale.

London and Paris signed the historic pact on April 8, 1904, ending centuries of warring and hostilities between the two. To mark the occasion, Edward and Sophie inspected troops from both nations in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace.

Charles returned to private meetings this week, coming face to face with banknotes featuring his portrait for the first time. But some royal-watchers are looking ahead and musing over whether the monarch will be well enough to head to some of the flagship events on the horizon. Specifically, they are eyeing up the D-Day 80th anniversary ceremony in Normandy, France on June 6 or his birthday parade through central London a week later.

The King has felt frustrated at not being able to maintain his regular schedule of public interactions and was clearly in his element shaking hands and chatting with well-wishers on Easter Sunday. That was hardly surprising as it’s in these moments we’ve often seen him most at ease when he’s able to connect with people on walkabouts.

His Easter outing was seen as a roaring success but our understanding is that the King was merely testing the waters rather than signaling the start of a return to public duties.

There have not been any changes to any palace guidance on future engagements. At this stage, we understand that nothing has been ruled in or out and that occasions will be looked at on a case-by-case basis taking medical advice into account.

One trip the King did manage to get sign-off from doctor’s on was an escape to Scotland for a very special occasion. With the couple’s marriage entering its 20th year on Tuesday, it was reported that Charles and Camilla had snuck away to Birkhall on the Balmoral estate for their wedding anniversary.

Once considered among the most promising economies in Southeast Asia with a growing middle class, Myanmar is now suffering from soaring levels of poverty as a devastating civil war drives tens of millions further into destitution, according to a new United Nations report.

Almost half of Myanmar’s population of 54 million is below the poverty line, with 49.7% of people living on less than 76 US cents a day — a figure that has doubled since 2017, researchers with the UN Development Program (UNDP) found.

Three years after the military seized power in a coup, the economic situation in the country has rapidly deteriorated to a point where the middle class is at risk of being wiped out and families are forced to cut back on food, health and education due to soaring inflation, the report found.

The researchers paint an alarming picture where an additional 25% of people in Myanmar were “hanging by a thread” just above the poverty line in October 2023.

“The situation is likely to have deteriorated further by the time of this report’s release,” the authors said. “Since that time, the intensified conflict has led to more displaced people losing their livelihoods, businesses shutting down.”

Myanmar had made solid progress in reducing poverty, particularly since the start of a democratic transition from military rule in 2011 that prompted economic and political reforms.

In 2016, the country had the region’s fastest-growing economy, according to the Asian Development Bank, and between 2011 and 2019 Myanmar’s economy grew by an average 6% a year, World Bank figures showed.

The country effectively halved its poverty rate from 48.2% in 2005 to 24.8% in 2017.

But the 2021 military coup, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, plunged the country into instability and violence, and — coupled with the Covid pandemic — reversed that progress.

Poverty has not only doubled but people are also more deeply poor, the report found.

“Overall, about three quarters of the population are in poverty, but the very scary thing are those surviving now at just a bare subsistence level. So, the depth of poverty is huge,” said Kanni Wignaraja, assistant secretary-general and UNDP regional director for Asia.

Wignaraja said Myanmar’s middle class is “literally disappearing.”

“A 50% collapse of the middle class over two and a half years is quite astounding for this country, but for any country,” she said.

The report is based on more than 12,000 interviews conducted over three months between June and October 2023 and is one of the largest nationwide surveys conducted in recent years.

While poverty was widespread across the country, those living in conflict zones are being pushed deeper into destitution, with women and children disproportionately affected, the report found.

Since the coup, anti-junta resistance forces and ethnic armies have been fighting against military troops to oust it from power. The military junta has launched increasingly brutal attacks against the people of Myanmar, and ground battles, airstrikes and junta raids on villages have displaced nearly three million people.

In tiny southeastern Kayah state, where fighting has been particularly intense, half of all households reported a decline in income — the most of any area surveyed.

Even those not impacted by the fighting are suffering, the report found. The value of Myanmar’s local currency, the kyat, has plummeted, along with rising costs for food and other basic necessities.

Foreign investment in the country has sharply declined and the number of unemployed people who have migrated abroad has significantly increased.

The report found that Myanmar’s GDP has not been able to recover from the 18% drop it suffered in 2021 due to the double shock of the political crisis and pandemic.

“We had never seen the big urban areas move so fast into distress. So areas around Yangon and Mandalay are hurting really hard,” said Wignaraja.

Without immediate intervention, the humanitarian crisis will worsen “exponentially” and the impact on development will be inter-generational.

“Without immediate interventions to provide cash transfers, food security and access to basic services, vulnerability will keep growing, and impacts will be felt across generations,” said UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner in a statement.

“We call on all stakeholders — inside and outside Myanmar — to take action and preserve vulnerable households from slipping into irreversible poverty and despair.”

Prehistoric humans in Brazil carved drawings in the rock next to dinosaur footprints, suggesting that they may have found them meaningful or interesting, a new study has found.

The rock carvings, which archaeologists call petroglyphs, are at a site called Serrote do Letreiro in Paraíba, an agricultural state on the eastern tip of Brazil. Researchers first observed the marks in 1975. But they are now interpreted as relating to the footprints following recent field surveys aided by drones, which uncovered previously unseen carvings. The tracks belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, which ended 66 million years ago.

“People usually think that Indigenous people weren’t aware of their surroundings or didn’t have any kind of scientific spirit or curiosity,” said study coauthor Leonardo Troiano, an archaeologist at the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage in Brasilia. “But that’s not true. It’s very clear that they were interested in the footprints. We’ll never know if they knew about dinosaurs, but it is clear that they were curious about the prints and thought they were meaningful in some way.”

The Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs aren’t the first examples of rock art found close to dinosaur prints, but the authors of the study said they believe that the unprecedented clarity of the association between the two at this particular site could have significant implications across paleontology, archaeology and cultural heritage studies.

Geometric shapes

It’s unclear how long ago the petroglyphs were made. But the study — published in March in the journal Scientific Reports — notes that radiocarbon dating has found burial sites in the area to be between 9,400 and 2,620 years old, suggesting the tribes that left them must have lived during that time.

“These people were probably living in small communities, using natural rocky shelters that are very abundant in the area,” Troiano said.

“This region in Brazil is like the Outback in Australia — it’s really hot and there’s no shade, so it’s not easy to stand there and carve the rock. It requires a lot of effort, so when they picked this location, they were being very intentional,” he added. “They could have used so many other rock outcrops in the surroundings, but they chose this one.”

The drawings are varied in style, suggesting multiple artists might have had a hand in them. Some have shapes reminiscent of plants, while others resemble geometric forms, including squares, rectangles and circles. The circles have crosses or lines inside them, which might look like stars, Troiano said. However, what these markings mean remains a mystery.

“They all seem to be abstract, and if they represented something to the people who made them, we don’t know what it is,” he said.

The tracks at Serrote do Letreiro belong to three types of dinosaurs: theropods, sauropods and ornithopods. The researchers suspect that the people who carved the rock might have mistaken some of them for the footprints of rheas — large native birds similar to ostriches, which have tracks that look almost identical to those of theropod dinosaurs.

It’s harder to imagine what the prehistoric people could have thought of the sauropod prints, left by some of the largest herbivore dinosaurs that ever lived, and therefore unlike any animal that would have been familiar to them. Probably for this reason, an intentional association between the drawings and these particular prints is less clear, the study noted.

Dinosaur rituals

Troiano said he believes that the marks might have been left during communal gatherings.

“I think rock art creation was embedded in some sort of ritual context: people gathering and creating something, perhaps utilizing some psychotropics. We have a plant called jurema, which is hallucinogenic, and it’s still used to this day,” he said. “We can speculate that people were using it in the past as well because it’s so abundant and common in the region. I think they were interested in what the footprints represent, and I suppose they identified them as footprints. They noticed it wasn’t random.”

There are other sites, Troiano said, with petroglyphs in the vicinity of dinosaur footprints — in the United States and Poland — but they are displaying “nowhere near the same level of intentionality,” he said. Intentionality is defined not only by how close the drawings are to the prints but also whether or not they overlap with them. If they don’t overlap, it suggests “thoughtfulness” by the makers, the study suggests.

Troiano added that he’s working on a follow-up paper that will go deeper into the interpretation and the analysis of the Serrote do Letreiro petroglyphs, building upon the findings of the current study.

The direct association of the drawings with dinosaur fossil tracks is unique and may shed more light on rock art importance, meaning and significance, according to Radosław Palonka, an associate professor of archaeology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who has worked on similar petroglyphs but was not involved in the study.

“The fact that the locations of the rock art panels have been chosen specifically is shown by, among others, the fact that representatives of the communities that created rock paintings or petroglyphs often placed them very close to older images left by other cultures,” Palonka said via email. “This was the case in various parts of the world where rock art was practiced, and it is very clearly visible, among others, in the North American Southwest/U.S. Southwest, where my scientific interests are focusing.”

Jan Simek, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, agreed. “The paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people observed and incorporated fossils on the landscape into their religious experiences and interpretations,” said Simek, who also was not involved with the new petroglyphs study.

“The (Stanford University) historian of science Adrienne Mayor has shown how ancient Greeks and Romans saw fossils as evidence of giants and monsters from their own mythologies and how indigenous North American peoples saw their origin narratives in the fossils they observed scattered across their landscapes,’ Simek said via email. “The Brazil case is another archaeological example of this very human tendency to tie the spiritual world created in the imagination to unexplained things in the world around us.”

The exact timing of an expansion declaration is unclear, but it is likely in the coming weeks – and could coincide with Earth Day, the sources said.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment. The Washington Post first reported the monument expansions.

National monuments are areas of historic, cultural or natural significance that are designated for federal protection. The redrawn boundaries for the California monuments will serve several purposes, including protecting sacred sites for Native American tribes, conserving land and expanding public access to the outdoors.

“The San Gabriel Mountains are among the most pristine and beautiful public lands in the country, with more visitors annually than Yellowstone, and they are right next to one of the nation’s densest and most park-deprived population centers,” Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat from California, said in a statement. “I’d be absolutely elated for President Biden to use his executive authorities to finalize this, recognize the significance of all these lands, and unlock additional federal supports and resources.”

During the first three years of his term, Biden has conserved more than 24 million acres of public lands, most recently designating a new national monument near the Grand Canyon – the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument. Biden has also designated new monuments in Nevada and Colorado, and restored protections for national monuments in Utah that were restricted by former President Donald Trump.

Padilla said he applauded the Biden administration for “utilizing every tool in the toolbox, working with Congress when he can and using his executive authority when he needs to.”

White House senior adviser for international climate policy John Podesta nodded to future conservation announcements from the Biden administration at a Thursday event at the Washington Post.

“I worked for President Clinton, for President Obama. They both had tremendous conservation records,” Podesta said. “President Biden is just surpassing that in terms of what he’s able to do in the first term. And I think we’ve got more to come, including better use and better protection of public lands.”