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The United States authorised the departure of non-emergency embassy staff from Israel on Friday, as it threatened strikes on Iran and pressed its biggest military build-up in the Middle East in decades.The move came a day after a round of Oman-mediated talks between Iran and the US seen as a last-ditch bid to avert war, though initial optimism was tempered by Tehran warning Washington must drop “excessive demands” to reach a deal.As the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, was due to arrive off the coast of ally Israel, the US embassy there announced it was allowing non-emergency government personnel and family members to leave “due to safety risks”. “Persons may wish to consider leaving Israel while commercial flights are available,” the embassy said on its website. The New York Times reported that US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sent an email to embassy staff on Friday morning saying that those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY”. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will hold talks Monday in Israel on Iran, the State Department announced.Growing fears of conflict spurred China to join other countries in warning its citizens to leave Iran “as soon as possible”. Britain too withdrew its embassy staff from Iran.- ‘Our right’ -Iranian and Omani officials presented Thursday’s talks in Geneva as positive, but the United States has not publically commented on their outcome. In their capital Tehran, ordinary Iranians expressed distrust of the United States and hoped negotiations would lead to economic reprieve for their sanctions-hit nation. The high cost of living had sparked protests in December that rocked Iran’s clerical leadership, leading to a crackdown that killed thousands of people according to rights groups.”Whatever the outcome of the negotiations… it should lead to some improvement in people’s economic situation. Not just a little — it is our right,” Ali Bagheri, 34, told AFP. Hamid Beiranvand, 42, said Iran should “not give any concessions” as Washington “breaks promises”, but that “everyone prefers that a war doesn’t happen”. – Talks to continue -Trump on February 19 gave Iran 15 days to reach a deal. While Iran has insisted discussions focus solely on nuclear issues, Washington wants Tehran’s missile programme and its support for militant groups curtailed.Without specifying what demands he was referring to, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Friday that “success in this path requires seriousness and realism from the other side and avoidance of any miscalculation and excessive demands”.Following the talks, Araghchi told state TV the negotiations “made very good progress and entered into the elements of an agreement very seriously, both in the nuclear field and in the sanctions field”.He said the next round would take place in “perhaps less than a week”, with technical talks at the IAEA to begin in Vienna on Monday.Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi also cited “significant progress” in the talks on X. The IAEA confirmed the technical discussions and called on Iran to cooperate with it “constructively”, stressing “the utmost urgency” of its request to verify all its nuclear material, according to a confidential report seen by AFP. – ‘Extremely alarmed’ -Trump said in his State of the Union address this week that Iran was working on missiles that could reach the United States and accused Iran of “pursuing sinister nuclear ambitions”. Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme was peaceful and called the claims “big lies”.Trump’s accusations were delivered in the same forum in which then-president George W. Bush laid out the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.Washington already had more than a dozen warships in the Middle East, including another aircraft carrier, before deploying the Gerald R. Ford. A previous attempt at negotiations collapsed when Israel launched strikes on Iran last June, beginning a 12-day war that the US briefly joined to bomb Iranian nuclear sites. The UN rights chief Volker Turk said he was “extremely alarmed” at the risk of a regional escalation around Iran and raised concerns over domestic issues in Iran, where protests have resumed. “I hope the voice of reason prevails,” he said. burs-sw/ser

OpenAI announced Friday a massive $110 billion funding round valuing the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion, with SoftBank, Nvidia and Amazon each making multi-billion-dollar commitments as the artificial intelligence company races to meet surging global demand.The investment round — one of the largest in Silicon Valley history — includes $30 billion from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, $30 billion from chip giant Nvidia, and up to $50 billion from Amazon, with additional investors expected to join as the round progresses.Alongside the capital injection, OpenAI announced strategic partnerships with both Amazon, the world’s biggest cloud company through its AWS division, and Nvidia, whose AI chips remain unparalleled in their capacity for AI training.”SoftBank, Nvidia, and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale,” OpenAI said in a statement.The eye-watering level of funding reflects the soaring costs of computing power and comes amid lingering questions about whether OpenAI and other AI companies can generate sufficient revenue to cover those costs.The Amazon investment will begin with $15 billion, followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met, the companies said.According to reports, these include OpenAI going public or achieving artificial general intelligence, a sometimes ill-defined standard of AI capability that more closely matches human-level ability.OpenAI and Amazon also struck a deal in which the ChatGPT maker will use two gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips.Amazon’s cloud computing rival Microsoft, which did not participate in the funding round, remains a major shareholder of OpenAI and a strategic partner.In the announcement, OpenAI cited a series of user metrics pointing to a breakneck pace of AI adoption.Even if short of its previous forecasts, ChatGPT now counts more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying consumer subscribers, with January and February on track to be the platform’s biggest-ever months for new subscriptions, the company said.It added that more than nine million businesses pay to use ChatGPT for workplace tasks, while its Codex software development tool has seen weekly users more than triple since the start of the year to 1.6 million.The figures are intended to reassure more skeptical investors who have questioned OpenAI’s ability to secure revenue, with user growth for its flagship ChatGPT slowing.The company this month began rolling out advertising for its non-premium users in a bid to bring in more revenue.According to The Information tech news, OpenAI now predicts that it will burn more than twice as much cash through 2030 than previously predicted, spending $665 billion on the costs of running and training its AI.Competition has ramped up too.Arch-rival Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, continues to gain ground and grab headlines for its well-regarded Claude AI models.Anthropic earlier this year secured a $30 billion funding round.Google’s AI model Gemini has also emerged as a potent competitor, with Elon Musk’s xAI also attracting investment and users.

Iran said Friday that in order to reach a deal, the United States will have to drop its “excessive demands”, tempering the optimism expressed after talks seen as a last-ditch bid to avert war.The Oman-mediated talks follow repeated threats from President Donald Trump to strike Iran, and with the United States conducting its biggest military build-up in the region in decades.Trump on February 19 gave Iran 15 days to reach a deal, and while Iran has insisted the discussions focus solely on its nuclear programme, the US wants Tehran’s missile programme and its support for militant groups curtailed.The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump’s negotiating team would demand that Iran dismantle its three main nuclear sites and hand over all its remaining enriched uranium to the United States.Without specifying what demands he was referring to, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Friday told his Egyptian counterpart that “success in this path requires seriousness and realism from the other side and avoidance of any miscalculation and excessive demands”.Following the talks in Geneva on Thursday, Araghchi told state TV that the negotiations “made very good progress and entered into the elements of an agreement very seriously, both in the nuclear field and in the sanctions field”.He said the next round would take place in “perhaps less than a week”, with technical talks at the UN’s nuclear agency to begin in Vienna on MondayOmani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi also announced technical discussions were to be held next week in Vienna.”We have finished the day after significant progress in the negotiation between the United States and Iran,” he said in a post on X.Araghchi, in a post on X, called the latest round of talks “the most intense so far”.”It concluded with the mutual understanding that we will continue to engage in a more detailed manner on matters that are essential to any deal — including sanctions termination and nuclear-related steps,” he wrote.UN nuclear chief Rafael Grossi joined the negotiations, a source close to the talks told AFP.- ‘Big lies’ -US President Donald Trump said in his State of the Union address that Iran had “already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America”.He also accused Iran of “pursuing sinister nuclear ambitions”, though Tehran has always insisted its programme is for civilian purposes.The accusations were delivered in the same forum in which then-president George W. Bush laid out the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.The Iranian foreign ministry called these claims “big lies”.On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that Iran is “not enriching right now, but they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can”, adding that Tehran “refuses” to discuss its ballistic missile programme and “that’s a big problem”.Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian insisted ahead of the talks that the Islamic republic was not “at all” seeking a nuclear weapon.US Vice President JD Vance told the Washington Post on Thursday there was “no chance” that a long-threatened strike on Iran would result “in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight”.Parallel to the talks is a dramatic US military buildup in the region, with the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, sent to the Mediterranean this week.Washington currently has more than a dozen warships in the Middle East: one aircraft carrier — the USS Abraham Lincoln — nine destroyers and three other combat ships.It is rare for there to be two US aircraft carriers in the region.The maximum range of Iran’s missiles is 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles), according to what Tehran has publicly disclosed.However, the US Congressional Research Service estimates they top out at about 3,000 kilometres — less than a third of the distance to the continental United States.A previous attempt at negotiations collapsed when Israel launched strikes on Iran last June, beginning a 12-day war that the US briefly joined to bomb Iranian nuclear sites.In January, Tehran launched a mass crackdown on nationwide protests, killing thousands of people according to rights groups.Protests have since resumed around Iranian universities.

Tech titan Amazon is working to step out of Nvidia’s shadow with custom “Trainium” chips designed specially for machine learning as billions of dollars are poured into artificial intelligence (AI).Amazon subsidiary Annapurna Labs in Austin, Texas, was testing the longevity of its latest generation Trainium during a recent visit by AFP to the facility.Texas is emerging as a US tech world El Dorado, luring investments with cheap energy, relaxed regulations, tax incentives and reasonably affordable real estate for massive data centers.Amidst a deafening roar, UltraServers packed with 144 of the Trainium AI-accelerator chips were being put through their paces at Annapurna in a routine check prior to delivery.After years of relying on suppliers for chips, the e-commerce powerhouse’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit began designing its own, acquiring Israeli startup Annapurna Labs in 2015.First came Graviton and Inferentia chips in 2018, the former for general cloud computing and the latter for powering AI models.The first Trainium debuted in 2020, followed by a second generation that touted a big boost in performance.Trainium 3 chips put into action in December are touted as doubling the capabilities of the second generation despite being smaller than a credit card.Kristopher King, head of the Annapurna lab in Austin, contended that the latest Trainium chips can cut the cost of developing and running generative AI models by as much as 40 percent compared to using graphics processing units (GPUs) that are now deemed the “gold standard” for AI.- Failure not an option -Along with pricing Trainium chips competitively, AWS is out to make reliability a selling point since data centers need to operate non-stop for long stretches at a time.AI development requires hundreds of thousands of chips operating simultaneously for weeks, according to Annapurna head of engineering Mark Carroll.”If there’s a failure or unavailability during this phase you have to go back, or even start from scratch,” Carroll said.Unlike other major players in AI processors, AWS doesn’t sell its chips.Instead, AWS uses Trainium exclusively in its own data centers, leasing computing capabilities to customers.AWS opted to customize its chips to harmonize them with its software, particularly a Bedrock platform that lets customers chose from a wide range of competing AI models including Anthropic, OpenAI and other rivals, according to the lab.Trainium is positioned as a cost-saving option in an AI market considered “supply constrained” because of insatiable appetite for high-performance GPUs from industry leader Nvidia and competitors such as AMD.Even though Trainium 3 is only a few months old, Annapurna is already designing a new generation of the chip.A launch date for Trainium 4 has yet to be disclosed, but Carroll says it will have six times the processing performance of its predecessor.As Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta and other tech rivals race to field ever-improved AI models, pressure is intense for chips to make the technology smarter, faster, cheaper and less power-hungry.Nvidia began manufacturing its industry-leading Rubin grapics processing unit less than a year after the release of then top-of-the-line Blackwell.The first version of Trainium took about 18 months to create, while the second generation was readied in nine months and Annapurna is “trying to maintain that pace”, Carroll said.

Melania Trump will preside over a UN Security Council meeting next week, her office has announced, in the first such appearance by a US first lady.”First Lady Melania Trump is set to make history at the United Nations, taking the gavel as the United States assumes the Security Council Presidency to emphasize education’s role in advancing tolerance and world peace,” her office said in a statement Wednesday.The meeting at 3:00 pm (2000 GMT) on Monday will focus on education, technology, peace and security and marks the first time a sitting US first lady presides over the Security Council, the statement added.Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said Thursday that the visit represents “a sign of the importance that the United States feels towards the Security Council and the subject” of education.”I can confirm that, according to our records, this will be the first time a First Lady, or first gentleman, for that matter, has ever presided over a Security Council meeting,” he added, noting that the spouses of heads of state have previously participated on behalf of non-members of the Council. During his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Donald Trump boasted: “No one cares more about protecting America’s youth than our wonderful first lady.”Melania’s visit comes as the president spearheads his “Board of Peace” initiative, which some critics have said is a way to circumvent the UN Security Council.Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has withdrawn support from several major UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization. Nevertheless, the United States recently paid $160 million to the cash-strapped UN’s general budget, of which it owes roughly $2 billion in contributions, in addition to $2 billion in outstanding payments for the UN peacekeeping budget.

Former US president Bill Clinton will be grilled by a Congressional panel on Friday on his well-documented links to Jeffrey Epstein, as Democrats seek to shift focus onto Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender.Clinton features prominently throughout the latest Epstein files disclosures, with the former president insisting that he broke ties with him well before the disgraced billionaire’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses.Mere mention in the files released by the US Department of Justice does not imply wrongdoing, and Clinton has not been accused of a crime or formally investigated. He follows his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who testified Thursday, defiantly calling for President Trump — who like Bill Clinton had ties with Epstein — to appear before the panel.”If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes… it would ask (Trump) directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” she said in an opening statement published online.The depositions are being held behind closed doors even though the Clintons called for them to be open and televised, a move Bill Clinton denounced as akin to a “kangaroo court.”The grilling comes with greater peril for the former president than for his wife, as he has acknowledged extensive interactions with Epstein, but said he never visited the shady financier’s private Caribbean island.Epstein associated with the world’s rich, famous and powerful, and was convicted in 2008 for soliciting sex from girls as young as 14. He died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while facing trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.The Republican-led House Oversight Committee is probing those who were linked to Epstein, particularly in light of the Justice Department’s disclosures of millions of new documents related to its investigation of him.Hillary insisted that she had neither flown on Epstein’s plane nor visited his island.The Clintons had initially rejected subpoenas ordering them to testify in the panel’s probe, but the Democratic power couple agreed to do so after House Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress.- Newly released pictures -Hillary Clinton said in her opening statement to the panel that it “justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.” “Let me be as clear as I can. I do not.”Democrats say the investigation is being weaponized to attack Trump’s political opponents rather than to conduct legitimate oversight.Bill Clinton features prominently in the trove of investigative files related to Epstein released by the Justice Department but has not been accused of any wrongdoing.Previously unseen photographs from the files include one showing the former president reclining in a hot tub, part of the image obscured by a stark black rectangle. In another, Clinton is pictured swimming alongside a dark-haired woman who appears to be Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.Clinton has acknowledged flying on Epstein’s private plane several times in the early 2000s for Clinton Foundation-related humanitarian work.David Markus, an attorney for Maxwell, said recently that Clinton and Trump are “innocent of any wrongdoing.”The depositions are being held in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons reside.Dozens of journalists have converged on the wealthy hamlet and the Secret Service erected metal barricades around the arts center where the depositions are happening.Republican committee chair James Comer said at the conclusion of Hillary’s appearance that lawmakers had “a lot of questions for her husband tomorrow.”

When director and screenwriter Clint Bentley decided to adapt “Train Dreams” for the big screen, he hoped he could captivate audiences with the tale of an ordinary man living in extraordinary times — the early 20th century. Now, that vision — starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones — is up for four Oscars, including the coveted best picture prize.Bentley’s gamble on the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson appears to have paid off.”It’s been overwhelming,” the 41-year-old filmmaker told AFP.”I wanted to give something to the audience with the film and take them on a journey. But you never know how it’s going to be received.””Train Dreams” tells the story of Robert Grainier (Edgerton), a reserved logger and railroad worker in Idaho, and his wife Gladys (Jones), over the course of his entire life.The Netflix film stands as both the story of the American northwest’s transition to the modern era and a beautiful meditation on love, friendship, grief, loss and hope.”It’s lovely that people are connected and seeing themselves in it,” said Bentley. “The story is really beautiful.””Train Dreams” was filmed in Washington state and has so far won several prizes during Hollywood’s awards season, especially for cinematographer Adolpho Veloso.”A lot of movies really helped me in my life. So it’s amazing to be a small part of a movie that is doing that to other people,” Veloso told AFP. “I feel like that’s the reason I wanted to do films in the first place, because movies were important for me, because I love movies,” said the 36-year-old Brazilian. “Train Dreams” won the top best feature prize at the Spirit Awards honoring independent films, as well as awards for Bentley and Veloso.At the ceremony earlier this month in Santa Monica, Bentley reflected on the challenges and rewards of taking on such an ambitious project with a limited budget, including the construction of a period locomotive… from plywood.”It was just a lot of steps along the way that all of us figured it out,” explained Bentley, whose first Oscar nomination came last year for best adapted screenplay for “Sing Sing.”He told AFP he especially values the Spirit Awards, because they offer important visibility to smaller films with scant resources, especially as they vie for Academy Awards with big studio projects.”It really gives them a boost in a beautiful way,” he said.

The young woman at the center of a landmark social media addiction lawsuit testified on Thursday that YouTube and Instagram fueled her depression and suicidal thoughts as a child, a decline in her mental health that the defense attributed to a dysfunctional family and offline troubles.Visibly nervous in her pink floral dress, Kaley G.M. told jurors that she became hooked on social media, starting with YouTube videos at the age of six.”I was at a young age and I would spend all my time on it,” Kaley testified when asked to explain why she thought she was addicted to YouTube. “Anytime I tried to separate myself from it, it just didn’t work.”Even when she was bullied on Instagram, she still stayed on the app. “If I was off, I would just feel like I was missing out.”Under cross examination, however, Kaley talked about feeling neglected, berated and picked on by family members, causing depression and anxiety that had nothing to do with social media.In the highly anticipated testimony, Kaley’s lawyer sought to portray her as an emotionally fragile user who was ensnared as a child by YouTube and Instagram and whose use of those apps caused her lasting harm.Kaley described scenes from her childhood in which her mother would have her leave her phone in the living room at night, only for her to retrieve it once her mom went to bed and return it before morning.”I would be really upset,” she said, when she was denied access to the apps.Her lawyer Mark Lanier said court records indicate that on one day she was on Instagram for 16 hours.She said her mother pushed her into therapy at around age 12, and that during the first session she said she could not engage with her family at home because of “excessive worrying because of social media.””I stopped engaging with them as much because I was spending all my time on social media,” she recalled.She also described her heavy use of filters on Instagram from a young age to make her eyes bigger and her ears smaller. The jury was shown a video in which she complained about being fat.Shown a banner featuring dozens of her Instagram pictures, Kaley said “almost all of them have a filter on.”When asked if her life, health, sleep and grades would have been better without social media, Kaley answered: “Yes.”But Kaley was also shown messages from her younger days in which she contended she did not feel safe in her home and was relentlessly yelled at by her mother.- Seeking job in social media -In a surprising twist, Kaley said she would like to become a social media manager and capitalize on the skills she has built since a young age.Kaley’s case is the first of three trials expected in the same court that will help determine whether Google and Meta deliberately designed their platforms to encourage compulsive use among young people, damaging their mental health in the process.The landmark trial is expected to last until late March, when the jury will decide whether Meta, which owns Instagram, and Google-owned YouTube knowingly designed addictive apps that harmed her mental health.Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week and pushed back against accusations that his social media company had done too little to keep underage users off his platform and had profited from their presence.The outcome of the Los Angeles trial is expected to establish a standard for resolving thousands of lawsuits that blame social media for fueling an epidemic of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and suicide among young people.Similar lawsuits, including some brought by school districts, are making their way through federal court in Northern California and state courts across the country.

It’s hard to recognize Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon”: he’s short, bald, slightly greasy-looking and uncomfortable in his own skin.The role is a far cry from the dashing young leading man who wowed audiences when he broke through decades ago with 1989 coming-of-age drama “Dead Poets Society” and Gen X classic “Reality Bites” a few years later.But his portrayal of legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart, an alcoholic who drank himself out of one of America’s most famous songwriting partnerships, is a tour-de-force — one that has landed the 55-year-old an Oscar nomination for best actor.The dialogue-heavy chamber piece — basically a theatrical play on celluloid — is the fruit of Hawke’s decades-long collaboration with director Richard Linklater, which began more than 30 years ago with 1995’s “Before Sunrise.””The magic to the relationship is that it’s a little bit like riding a bike; you just don’t think about it,” Hawke told AFP.”He sent me this script and the two of us just both felt this is one of the most ice-hot pieces of writing we’d ever come across,” Hawke told AFP.”And we wanted to share it with the world.””Blue Moon” takes place almost entirely in the bar of a Broadway restaurant where Hart takes refuge during the premiere of “Oklahoma!” — the first major show his long-time collaborator Richard Rodgers created with Oscar Hammerstein.Robert Kaplow’s dense and literary script is utterly dominated by Hawke, who told one journalist he had more dialogue in the first 30 minutes of screentime than in the entirety of his last four films.But, despite a bit of camera trickery and some digital effects, it is the physicality of a diminutive, balding and unattractive man that was a more time-consuming challenge for Hawke — the work of a decade for a script he first read in 2014.”I didn’t think I needed to age into it, but Rick (Linklater) did,” Hawke told trade title The Wrap.”Rick knew that time was only going to help me. And funnily enough, it’s not just aging, not just your face cracking and falling apart. I thought I was ready when I was 40, but I wasn’t.”I got more and more interested in what people call character acting. And this part required all of it, everything I’ve learned over 30 some-odd years.”- ‘Mysterious’ -Hawke credits his lengthy partnership with Linklater — the pair announced last year they are working on a 10th feature together — for allowing him the space to strip back every vestige of vanity and build himself into this oddball lyricist.Over the course of 100 minutes, Hart reminisces about his souring collaboration with Rodgers (a flinty Andrew Scott), a pairing that gave the world songs like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady is a Tramp” and the titular “Blue Moon.”A not-so-closeted homosexual, he also waxes lyrical about his infatuation with a young Yale student, played by a bottle-blonde Margaret Qualley, and shares drinks with “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy).Hart keeps up a steady stream of anecdotes and witty repartee, but increasingly the mask slips; underneath it all is the yawning realization that he is utterly alone.”Nobody ever loved me that much,” he says, echoing Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in “Casablanca.”Hawke’s Oscar nomination — his fifth after supporting actor nods for “Training Day” and “Boyhood,” and two others for best adapted screenplay for “Before Midnight” and “Before Sunset” — is the result of an experience on this film he said was “mysterious.””I don’t know how I could be so lucky. I really don’t understand how the universe works,” he told AFP of his work with Linklater.”It’s been one of the most thrilling collaborations in my life.”The Oscars take place on March 15 in Hollywood.

Mark Davis was just 13 years old when he perished in a juvenile detention facility for Black boys in the eastern US state of Maryland some 140 years ago.Today, his remains lie in an abandoned graveyard in the woods, covered by dead leaves and snow, along with the graves of some 200 other Black boys and teenagers held in conditions that researchers describe as inhumane.A team from Georgetown University is investigating their deaths at the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, a segregated juvenile detention facility in Cheltenham, Maryland, and memorializing them.Known as the Forgotten Children Initiative, the project aims to document the identities of the children buried here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly in unmarked graves, in order to preserve their legacies and locate any living relatives.”Some of those children that (were) just picked up for just truancy and just never made it back home,” said Tyrone Walker, who heads a reintegration program for former inmates at Georgetown. “What did they tell their parents? Or do their parents even know? They probably thought they ran away.”Walker, an African American who in the 1990s was himself a juvenile inmate at Cheltenham, added: “Nobody’s been brought to justice. Since this happened to young Black boys, it seemed like nobody cared.”- ‘Severely neglected’ – Opened in 1873, the privately operated detention facility housed petty delinquents and orphans, said Marc Schindler, a professor at Georgetown who leads the project. Some were held on loitering charges, while others were detained over their perceived “incorrigibility.”Officially, the buried children were listed as having died of tuberculosis, pneumonia, or exhaustion, between 1877 and 1939. All of them were Black, and researchers believe many actually died because they were overworked, underfed and denied proper care.Crystal Foretia, a former policy administrator at the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), said the House of Reformation has a “vast history of physical abuse, forced labor, lack of educational opportunities.”Numerous testimonies, as well as reporting by the Baltimore newspaper the Afro-American, detail the terrible conditions in which these children were incarcerated and made to work in fields.According to Schindler, two boys who were kept in an unheated cell in freezing temperatures had their legs amputated due to frostbite, something that was not reflected in their death certificates. “Now we know that he was very, very severely neglected, if not abused, and that resulted in his death,” Schindler said of one of the youths.Rosie Clark, a Maryland volunteer who did some genealogical research on the Cheltenham burial site, asserts that many official documents were forged.”These death certificates were filled out by the people who were in charge,” she told AFP. “If a child was beaten to death, they’re not going to say it on the death certificate.”- ‘A crime scene’ – In the 1930s, the state of Maryland took over the facility, after the shooting of a Black minor by a white guard drew national attention. The modern facility now sits several hundred meters from the original site.”I had no idea that just across the fence, there was a crime scene,” said Walker, the former inmate. “This could have been me in one of those graves.”Nearby, a well-maintained veterans cemetery can be seen, its tombstones decorated with wreaths and flowers.”They recognize those veterans, rightfully so, but shouldn’t these children be recognized and honored in the same way?” Walker asked.He added: “I definitely want to see a memory project done and see the families involved. Many families never received the closure they deserved.”The Forgotten Children Initiative has already located the descendants of six of the buried children.Schindler has also identified dozens of similar sites across the United States, including one in Florida that inspired Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2020 novel “The Nickel Boys.”But the Maryland site is believed to be the largest in the country.Maryland’s DJS has just received funding to identify how many children were buried at the site and to restore their graves, and a bill has been introduced in the state legislature to create a commission of inquiry into the House of Reformation.