If you’ve dreamed of taking a long rail journey in the U.S., now is a good time to buy a ticket. Amtrak on Tuesday launched a 2-for-1 ticket sale on select routes nationwide, including the Coast Starlight between L.A. and Seattle, and the Southwest Chief between Chicago and L.A. The catch: You have to buy tickets by Jan. 12.

The Bring a Companion for Free sale applies to coach seats as well as pricier roomettes and bedrooms. For example, L.A.-Portland, Ore., fares start at $123 for two coach seats, $397 for a roomette and $691 for a bedroom (sleeps at least two, with shower and toilet). L.A.-Albuquerque costs $86 for two coach seats, $267 for a roomette and $476 for a bedroom.

Other destination pairs include New York City and Chicago or Charleston, S.C.; and Chicago and Washington, D.C., or Memphis, Tenn.

With the deal, you buy now and travel between Feb. 1 and June 12, except April 10 and 13, and May 22 through 25.

Info: Amtrak sale

Disneyland on Tuesday launched its annual limited-time ticket discounts for Southern Californians. Each local resident who pays $199 will receive three one-park-per-day tickets to be used on separate visits. The discount pencils out to $67 for each admission, provided you use all three tickets between now and May 21. As a savings comparison, an individual single-day ticket usually costs between $104 and $149, depending on when you visit the Anaheim theme park.

The three-ticket package, good for children or adults, includes one Magic Morning early admission to Disneyland on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays. Visitors eligible for the local discount may buy up to five ticket packages. SoCal residents also may buy Park Hopper tickets (with a Magic Morning admission) for three separate visits for $254, instead of $355.

Tickets must be purchased now through May 18. The discount is good for residents who live in ZIP Codes 90000-93599 in Southern California, and 21000-22999 in Baja California, Mexico.

Disneyland will be opening its newest attraction, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, on Jan. 17. It promises to bring visitors into battle with characters in the “Star Wars” empire, such as BB-8, Poe, Finn and Rey. It’s located in the Star Wars land that opened in May. Also, California Adventure rolls out a Lunar New Year celebration Jan. 17 to Feb. 9, featuring the character Mulan and toasts to Mickey and Minnie for the Year of the Rat.

Info: You can buy SoCal residents tickets online or through a travel agent.

Click Here: Japan Rugby Shop

In the largest such study ever, researchers examining data from more than 252,000 women have determined that there is no statistically significant link between the use of talc-based baby powder and ovarian cancer.

One might think that such results would crimp the tide of lawsuits accusing talc manufacturers, particularly Johnson & Johnson of responsibility for their customers’ cancer.

One would be wrong. Plaintiffs lawyers have cited other scientific studies they say establish the connection sufficiently for juries to assign blame, so the courtroom battle of data and experts will go on.

“The study doesn’t change the landscape in terms of the data we’re dealing with,” Lynn O’Dell, a leading plaintiffs lawyer in cases naming Johnson & Johnson, told me.

More than 12,000 such lawsuits have been filed across the country in state and federal courts, blaming Johnson & Johnson’s products for ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. Some have yielded eye-catching monetary verdicts while testing the ability of juries and judges to assess the conflicting scientific presentations.

Plaintiff attorney Lynn O’Dell

In August 2017, a Los Angeles jury hit Johnson & Johnson for $417 million in damages in the case of Eva Echeverria, who alleged that she contracted ovarian cancer after nearly lifelong, daily applications of the company’s baby powder in to her genital areas. But last year a state appeals court ordered a new trial in the case. Echeverria died after the original verdict.

The latest study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., underscores the murkiness of the science in those cases. Let’s take a look at the scientific battlefield.

Epidemiological studies fall into two main categories and, in the case of talc and ovarian cancer, two divergent results.

One category encompasses case-control studies, which are retrospective — the researchers select subjects who have contracted a disease, and search into their histories to determine what may have caused it. The case-control studies seeking the link between baby powder and ovarian cancer would ask women with cancer whether and how much they used baby powder over their lifetimes, among other things.

The oft-identified flaw in that process is that the subjects’ responses could be marred by poor recollection or the desire to pinpoint a cause of disease, which is known as “recall bias.”

The second category is cohort studies, in which researchers follow a group of subjects over time, tracking their life experiences and their health conditions and seeking correlations and, it’s hoped, cause-and-effect relationships.

In general, case-control studies show stronger links between ovarian cancer and baby powder use than cohort studies.

“We’ve convincingly shown that there’s a causal relationship,” Daniel W. Cramer, a Harvard epidemiologist whose case-control studies have been a mainstay of the plaintiffs bar in the Johnson & Johnson cases and has often served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, told me.

The cohort studies generally have found no statistically significant connection. That’s true of the latest study, which didn’t involve new research but rather reanalyzed data from four prior cohort studies — two studies of nurses totaling more than 143,000 subjects; about 40,000 subjects of the federally funded “Sister Study,” which follows women whose sisters had breast cancer but did not have the disease themselves; and more than 73,000 subjects of the federally funded Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study, which follows postmenopausal women.

Of the more than 252,000 women in the study group, 2,168 developed ovarian cancer. The researchers found that women who had ever used powder developed ovarian cancer more frequently than those who never had, but the difference fell below statistical significance.

Indeed, according to an editorial comment published by JAMA along with the study, the difference is so small that it “should not be selectively highlighted by the statistically unsophisticated reader as evidence of a relationship.”

The editorial did point to an important obstacle in the search for a connection between powder and ovarian cancer: The disease is relatively rare, making it difficult to detect “small increases or decreases in cancer rates.”

The researchers reported, furthermore, that they could detect “no clear dose-response trends for duration and frequency of powder use in the genital area.” In other words, they found no changes in the risk of ovarian cancer based on how long or regularly women used the powder — a marker typically sought by epidemiologists trying to identify cause and effect.

The journal advocated focusing future research on the timing and duration of powder use by women with intact reproductive tracts — that is, who have not undergone hysterectomies or tubal ligations — who might be more susceptible to talc-related ovarian cancer. But as the editorialists also pointed out, such studies would take years and, since the use of talc has dropped sharply among younger generations, they “may not be feasible.”

That returns us to the question of how much we can really know about the links between baby powder and ovarian cancer. The disease is rare, its possible causes various and the role of talc still conjectural at best.

Yet the message of verdicts at the $400-million level is that the facts are incontrovertible.

Jury verdicts in cases in which the scientific data point to a draw are based not on scientific evidence as such, but on juries’ assessments of the defendant companies’ behavior. As we’ve pointed out before, that places companies such as Johnson & Johnson at a great disadvantage in the courtroom, especially when the plaintiff is an innocent individual suffering from a terminal disease.

O’Dell yields no ground in her conviction that the verdicts against Johnson & Johnson are warranted by the evidence. But she also alluded to the nonscientific factor in juries’ big punitive damage awards.

“Juries recognize that we’re talking about a product with no therapeutic benefit,” she told me. “It’s a cosmetic. Juries see that and they see the failure of Johnson & Johnson to warn consumers or remove the product from the market, and I think they’re outraged.”

U.S. stocks mostly fell on Tuesday, but the big rush for safety that coursed through global markets after the United States killed a top Iranian general on Friday slowed somewhat in the hours before Iran retaliated with rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.

Gold’s momentum eased a day after touching its highest price in nearly seven years, several Asian and European stock markets clawed back much of their losses from Monday and benchmark U.S. crude dropped for the first time in four days. The S&P 500 dipped but remained within 0.6% of its record at close of trading, and the measure of fear in the stock market moved lower.

The market’s return to a wait-and-see approach wasn’t that surprising to some investors, even as talk remained tough in the increasingly tense U.S.-Iran confrontation and U.S. officials braced for an Iranian response to their drone strike against Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The market may be more focused on the upcoming earnings season for U.S. companies and the forecasts that CEOs will give for 2020 profits, said Rich Weiss, senior portfolio manager at American Century Investments. After a year in which the S&P 500 surged roughly 30%, despite profits for big companies falling, he said investors will need to see more solid growth to justify near-record prices.

“We definitely pay attention and are keeping an eye on” the U.S.-Iran tensions, Weiss said. “But it’s not what we alter investment strategy on.”

“The market seems to be looking right past” the tensions, he said. “I’m much more concerned about the fundamentals. The lack of earnings visibility is troubling.”

The S&P 500 fell 9.10 points, or 0.3%, to 3,237.18. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 119.70, or 0.4%, to 28,583.68, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 2.88, or less than 0.1%, to 9,068.58.

Energy stocks dropped with the price of crude. Benchmark U.S. oil fell 57 cents to settle at $62.70 per barrel. It had jumped more than $2 per barrel over the last two days. Brent crude, the international standard, fell 64 cents to $68.27 a barrel.

That helped drag Halliburton down 2.8% and Chevron down 1.3%. Apache was an outlier, and the oil and gas producer surged 26.8% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after it and Total said they have found a significant amount of oil off the coast of Suriname.

Asian stock markets had some of the day’s strongest gains and clawed back much of their losses from Monday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6%, South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.9% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.3%.

Click Here: France Rugby Shop

NEW DELHI — 

Commercial airlines on Wednesday rerouted flights crossing the Middle East to avoid possible danger amid escalating tensions between the United States and Iran.

The flight restrictions reflected fears that the conflict between the longtime foes could ratchet up following Iranian ballistic missile strikes Tuesday on two Iraqi bases that house U.S. troops. Those strikes were retaliation for the U.S. killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Suleimani in a drone strike near Baghdad last week.

Poland’s national carrier, PLL LOT, said Saturday — even before Iran’s retaliatory strike — that it was changing routes to bypass Iran’s airspace.

Paris-based Air France and Dutch carrier KLM both said Wednesday they had suspended all flights over Iran and Iraq airspace indefinitely.

Australian carrier Qantas said it was altering its London to Perth, Australia, route to avoid Iranian and Iraqi airspace until further notice. The longer route meant that Qantas would have to carry fewer passengers and more fuel to remain in the air for an extra 40 to 50 minutes.

Malaysia Airlines said that “due to recent events,” its planes would avoid Iranian airspace.

Singapore Airlines also said that its flights to Europe would be rerouted to avoid Iran.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it was barring American pilots and carriers from flying in areas of Iraqi, Iranian and some Persian Gulf airspace. The agency warned of the “potential for miscalculation or mis-identification” for civilian aircraft amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran.

Such restrictions are often precautionary in nature to prevent civilian aircraft from being confused for ones engaged in armed conflict. The FAA said the restrictions were being issued due to “heightened military activities and increased political tensions in the Middle East, which present an inadvertent risk to U.S. civil aviation operations.”

Following the FAA, India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation advised Indian commercial carriers to avoid Iranian, Iraqi and Persian Gulf airspace.

German airline Lufthansa said it had canceled its flight from Frankfurt to Tehran on Wednesday and another flight Saturday in Erbil in light of the current situation. Lufthansa subsidiary Austrian Airlines also canceled service to Erbil.

Swiss International Air Lines, another Lufthansa subsidiary, also said it was avoiding Iranian and Iraqi airspace for the time being.

The Russian aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, issued an official recommendation for all Russian airlines to avoid flying over Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman “due to existing risks for the safety of international civil flights.”

Russia’s biggest private airline, S7, said it would reroute its twice-a-week flight from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk to Dubai.

Russian carrier Ural Airlines was working up alternative routes for its flights to Bahrain, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah to avoid flying over Iranian airspace, the carrier’s spokeswoman said Wednesday.

At least two Kazakh airlines — Air Astana and SCAT — were considering rerouting or canceling their flights over Iran following the crash of a Ukrainian airliner that killed 176 people.

The plane had taken off from Imam Khomeini International Airport in the Iranian capital when a fire struck one of its engines, said Qassem Biniaz, a spokesman for Iran’s Road and Transportation Ministry.

Kazakh officials said that Air Astana, the country’s flagship carrier, “is currently holding a meeting on whether to reroute or ban” flights. SCAT, one of the largest airlines in Kazakhstan, told Russia’s Interfax news agency that it was also considering rerouting flights.

United Arab Emirates-owned budget airline FlyDubai said it had canceled a scheduled flight Wednesday from Dubai to Baghdad but was continuing flights to Basra and Najaf.

Emirates airline flights between Dubai and Baghdad were canceled.

“The safety of our passengers, crew and aircraft is our number one priority and will not be compromised,” Emirates said in a statement.

Qatar Airways, however, said its flights to Iraq were operating normally. “The safety of our passengers and employees is of the highest importance, and we continue to closely monitor developments in Iraq,” the airline said in a statement.

And Buta Airways, an Azerbaijani low-cost carrier, said Wednesday it was not planning to suspend or reroute daily flights between Baku, the country’s capital, and Tehran.

BEIJING — 

Oil prices rose and global stock markets fell Wednesday after Iran fired missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of an Iranian general.

Brent crude futures, the benchmark for international oils, spiked more than $3 per barrel in London before retreating.

Stock markets in London and Frankfurt opened lower and Tokyo’s benchmark fell nearly 2% before recovering some of its losses. Hong Kong and Shanghai also retreated.

“Investors appear to be pricing for an all-out war,” said Jingyi Pan of IG in a report.

The Pentagon said Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at bases in Iraq used by U.S. troops. President Trump tweeted “All is well!” and that casualty and damage assessments were ongoing, adding “So far, so good!”

Iran’s foreign minister described the missile firings as “proportionate measures in self-defense.”

Financial markets have been on edge about possible U.S.-Iranian conflict and disruption of oil supplies since last week’s killing of Gen. Qassem Suleimani by a U.S. drone in Baghdad.

Brent crude was up 78 cents at $69.05. At the start of trading, it spiked $3.48 to $71.75 before retreating.

Benchmark U.S. crude was up 55 cents to $63.25 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It earlier jumped $2.95 to $65.65 before settling back.

Higher prices for imported oil could push up inflation in economies including China and India, making it harder for central banks to support growth by easing monetary policy, said Rajiv Biswas of IHS Markit in a report.

Click Here: Japan Rugby Shop

In early trading, London’s FTSE 100 lost 0.6% to 7,525.48 and Frankfurt’s DAX shed 0.7% to 13,134.26. France’s CAC 40 lost 0.5% to 5,98049.

On Wall Street, the future for the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 0.2% and that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 0.4%.

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 index lost 0.3% in trading that closed before the Iranian attack. The Dow shed 0.4% and the Nasdaq composite slipped less than 0.1%.

In Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index fell 1.6% to 23,204.76 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.9% to 28,087.92.

The Shanghai Composite Index lost 1.2% to 3,066.89 and South Korea’s Kospi retreated 1.1% to 2,151.31.

Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 shed 0.1% to 6,817.60 and India’s Sensex shed 0.2% to 40,770.06.

Taiwan, New Zealand and Southeast Asian markets also retreated.

Before the latest attack, the rush by investors into safe assets had been abating.

Gold’s momentum eased Tuesday after touching its highest price in nearly seven years.

In currency markets, the dollar was little-changed at 108.43 yen. The euro declined to $1.1139 from $1.1152.

TIJUANA, Mexico — 

The fentanyl crisis that has claimed growing numbers of lives in the United States has been showing up on the streets of Tijuana, where intravenous drug users are often unknowingly injecting the powerful synthetic drug, according to a newly released research study.

While Mexico is more commonly portrayed as both a producer and corridor for fentanyl shipments bound for the United States, the study gives a rare glimpse into a developing consumption problem — and authors are hoping public policymakers will take note.

The 15-month study examined the deadly phenomenon of illicit fentanyl use that up to now has gone largely undocumented in Mexico. The report, published last month by the scientific journal Addiction, was spearheaded by Mexico’s National Institute for Psychiatry and Prevencasa, a Tijuana nonprofit that works with intravenous drug users.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Drug cartels have found fentanyl cheaper and easier to manufacture compared to the resource- and labor-intensive process of growing poppies and processing them into heroin.

The effort to document fentanyl use in Tijuana came after researchers began noting a spike in overdoses among intravenous drug users on Mexico’s northern border. Increasingly, these consumers have been switching from black tar heroin to a white powder sold as heroin that is referred to in Tijuana as “china white.”

“Two or three years ago, for every 10 locations where heroin was sold, eight were black tar and three were china white,” said Alfonso Chavez, one of the report’s authors and coordinator of Prevencasa’s needle exchange program. “There’s been an incredible transition. Now for every 10 sale locations, two are black tar and eight are china white.”

The drug users said the cost for a dose of the white powder was about 50 pesos, or $2.50 — equivalent to the cost of a dose of black tar heroin.

The study, conducted from May 2018 through July 2019, involved 89 heroin users who participated in the needle exchange program. The research team collected users’ drug paraphernalia weekly, testing for evidence of fentanyl on syringe plungers, metal cookers and drug wrappings.

In 59 of the samples, the users believed they were consuming pure heroin in white powder form, but the testing revealed that 55 contained fentanyl. Of nine samples of powder containing a mixture of heroin and crystal meth, all showed evidence of fentanyl. In five samples of white powder mixed with black tar, two contained fentanyl.

None of the pure black tar samples contained fentanyl, which “suggests that black tar is more difficult to adulterate, which could explain why the white powder presentation is replacing the black tar heroin that has been traditionally used in this region.”

During the course of their research, the investigators witnessed 20 overdoses during a six-month period. In all five of the cases where they were able to recover and test drug paraphernalia, they found evidence of fentanyl.

As its illicit use has dramatically increased in the United States, drug overdose deaths have shot up. Roughly 28,400 people died from synthetic opioid overdose, including fentanyl, in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In San Diego County, 92 people died from fentanyl-related overdoses in 2018, with the rate of deaths growing in 2019.

Mexico has no such data. Most of the news stories involving fentanyl in Tijuana focus on seizures of contraband rather than tallies of local overdose deaths. San Diego has been by far the most common gateway for fentanyl seziures crossing the border.

With close to 2,200 homicides in Tijuana in 2019, the state medical examiner’s office has been overwhelmed. “They don’t have the resources to assign people to say “this person died from a fentanyl overdose, this person did not,” said Chavez of Prevencasa.

The study’s authors are hoping that their study draws the attention of policymakers and brings resources to the issue. Most urgent are supplies of naloxone — a medication that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose — for the city’s public hospitals and ambulances.

“More than being a research project, our hope is to have some impact on public policy,” Chavez said.

Dibble writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Click Here: Italy Rugby Shop

TIJUANA — 

Tijuana once again topped the list as the city in Mexico with the highest number of homicides in 2019, surpassing other municipalities across the country by hundreds of killings.

The city closed out the year with approximately 2,185 homicides — a reduction of about 321 slayings from the record-breaking 2018, which earned Tijuana the title of most violent city in the world by a Mexican nonprofit advocacy group.

It’s the second year in a row there have been more than 2,000 homicides in this border city of about 1.8 million people where small-time dealers fight and die for the right to sell drugs to a growing local market. Tijuana has also long been the battleground for international drug-trafficking organizations fighting for control of routes to the U.S.

On Tuesday, the last day of the year, the body of a young man between 25 and 30 years old was found around noon on Miguel Hidalgo Avenue in the Colonia 3 de Octubre neighborhood. He had been shot in the head, according to local police. Later in the afternoon, a man at the General Hospital of Tijuana succumbed to gunshot wounds he sustained earlier in the week.

Those two homicides were the last reported in 2019, but sometimes the final numbers tick up because more victims are either discovered or identified after year’s end.

Mexico’s Secretary of Public Safety Alfonso Durazo said at a news conference in mid-December that a special strategy backed by the newly-formed national guard and the Mexican army has managed to slightly reduce the number of homicides in Tijuana. He said the strategy includes patrolling high-conflict zones within the city and manning checkpoints.

The trend is continuing downward, though that might not yet be fully reflected by the high year-end totals, he said.

For example, the death toll was two on Dec. 31, 2019, compared with seven on the last day of 2018.

“That figure that had reached 24 homicides a day has gone down. Usually, [now] it is at three, four and sometimes it shoots at five cases … but we continue with the commitment to reduce them because even one homicide seems too high of a figure,” said Durazo.

Carlos Flores, commissioner of the State Security and Investigation Guard for Baja California, said that the high number of homicides in Tijuana pushed the state to No. 2 for homicides in Mexico for 2019.

“Tijuana has been representing between 70% to 75% of the problem [in Baja California], so our main focus is here,” said Flores. “When we talk about a second place, that is Ensenada, but it is a very far second place,” said Flores. Officials reported slightly more than 250 homicides in Ensenada in 2019.

The total number of homicides for Baja California was 2,841 as of Dec. 27, according to Flores.

Though prosecutors were encouraged by any small dent in the skyrocketing homicide trends, Flores acknowledged they were not yet satisfied with their results, which he said “were obviously still way too high.”

He said there has been a 57% increase in arrest warrants issued in homicide cases last year compared with 2018.

Authorities are trying to fight criminal groups by charging all those who may be associated with a homicide, rather than just the person who pulled the trigger. But, in a country where just one in 10 homicides are solved and the conviction rate is less than 6%, it’s an uphill battle.

Click Here: FIJI Rugby Shop

“We are focusing on fighting impunity in this crime,” Flores said.

According to data from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, the country had 154,557 homicides between 2010 and 2016, and in 95% of those cases, no one has been convicted. In Baja California, 6,443 people were slain during the same period and just 252 people were sentenced for those crimes — less than 4%.

Investigators said the root cause of the bloodshed follows trends from 2018 with lower-level drug dealers battling over street corners to control the local methamphetamine market in Tijuana.

Law enforcement officials also say the rise of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG, which has gained power by forging alliances with remnants of the once-powerful Arellano Felix Cartel, has contributed to the violence. This summer, the organization unsuccessfully tried to seize complete control of Tijuana from the weakened Sinaloa Cartel after the downfall of its leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

A March 2018 policy report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project described the CJNG as “an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel that has managed to rebrand itself, consolidate splintered criminal networks and emerge as one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico.”

Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

WASHINGTON — 

President Trump on Tuesday backed away from his threats to target Iranian cultural sites if Iran were to retaliate against the U.S. for killing one of its top generals.

Targeting cultural sites is a war crime.

After first tweeting the threat and later reiterating it to reporters as he flew back to Washington over the weekend, Trump retreated Tuesday, saying, “I like to obey the law.”

But he still sounded offended by the idea that such sites would be off-limits during armed conflict.

“Think of it,” Trump said during an Oval Office appearance. “They kill our people. They blow up our people. And then we have to be very gentle with their cultural institutions?”

Trump added: “But I’m OK with it. It’s OK with me.” He then issued yet another stern warning to Iran to stand down, saying, “If Iran does anything they shouldn’t be doing, they are going to be suffering the consequences, and very strongly.”

On Monday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper distanced the Pentagon from Trump’s threats to bomb Iranian cultural sites despite international prohibitions on such activity.

Esper said the U.S. would “follow the laws of armed conflict.” Asked if that ruled out targeting cultural sites, Esper pointedly added, “That’s the laws of armed conflict.”

It all began over the weekend when Trump tweeted Saturday that if Iran attacked any American assets to avenge the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the U.S. had 52 targets across the Islamic Republic that “WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”

He added that some are “important to Iran & Iranian culture.”

Anger spread quickly across Iran, and Trump repeated the threat to reporters traveling with him as he flew back to Washington on Sunday after spending two weeks at his Florida resort.

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalated sharply after Trump ordered a drone strike in Iraq that killed Suleimani, head of Iran’s powerful Quds Force. The U.S. said Suleimani was killed because he was making plans to attack American diplomats and service members in the Middle East.

Targeting cultural sites is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention for their protection. Separately, in 2017, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning the destruction of heritage sites. Attacks by the Islamic State group and other armed factions in Syria and Iraq prompted that vote.

UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency, has called on governments to remember that cultural sites are not targets.

Trump’s tweet also caused concern in Washington. One U.S. national security official said the threat against Iranian cultural sites had caught many in his administration off-guard and prompted calls for others in his government, including Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, to clarify the matter. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly to the issue, called such a clarification necessary to affirm that the U.S. military would not intentionally commit war crimes.

When asked about the president’s tweet, Pompeo said Sunday the U.S. would “behave” within the law. Questioned about the matter again Tuesday, Pompeo said every action taken by the U.S. would be “consistent with the international rule of law,” though he did not specifically rule out Iranian cultural sites.

He then blamed Iran for damaging its culture.

Iran is home to two dozen UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including Persepolis, with its ancient ruins that date to 518 B.C.; the 17th century grand mosque of Isfahan, located in a teeming bazaar; and the Golestan Palace in the heart of Tehran, where the last shah to rule Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was crowned in 1967.

In life he was a hero to many, but in death Gen. Qassem Suleimani became what all Iranians revere: a martyr.

As Suleimani’s casket made its way through the streets of Tehran, his image instantly became part of a near-sacred iconography that in times of turmoil and conflict has united and emboldened this nation against its enemies. Pictures and murals of Iran’s most glorified figures, including religious leaders and soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war, tower over cities and towns, as if protectors watching from on high.

President Trump’s decision to target Suleimani in an airstrike may have killed Iran’s most gifted military strategist, but it elevated the general to a pantheon of martyrs that has endured for centuries. Their images are sewn into a folklore that is at once government propaganda and a vivid reminder — some murals flash like rainbows over street corners — of how deep national devotion and the piety of Islam inspire the country.

“Religious leaders in Iran are extremely apt and capable in producing symbolism and creating a culture of politics in which they can incorporate nationalism and faith,” said Ali Akbar Mahdi, a sociology professor at Cal State Northridge. “They are utilizing all kinds of symbolism and tying it in sense of victimhood and how Shiites have suffered and now have to fight.”

Draped in thick sweaters to shield themselves from the cold winter air, several mourners who had gathered outside the funeral procession at Tehran University crouched down on the pavement, weeping as they buried their heads in their hands.

When he was alive, Suleimani had been regarded as a national hero by everyone from shopkeepers to the Islamic Republic’s top elites. In many ways, the outpouring over his death, and the images it has evoked, has been unmatched by anyone except the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had a close relationship with the 62-year-old salt-and-pepper-haired Suleimani, wept at his funeral and referred to him as a “living martyr.”

In the days since the U.S. drone attack that killed him, Suleimani’s visage, flickering on banners and posters and electronically beamed over Tehran, has become inescapable in the Islamic Republic and across much of the Middle East. His death has spurred a fierce anti-American backlash, and edged Iran closer to war as it threatens to walk away from the 2015 accord to limit it’s nuclear capabilities. Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles that targeted at least two military bases used by U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, the Pentagon said Tuesday night.

From the 1979 Islamic Revolution to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and up to today’s wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, martyrdom — the idea that a person could sacrifice his life for both the nation and Islam — has helped shaped the country’s religious and political life. So potent are images here that paintings of soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war, which killed an estimated 500,000 Iraqis and Iranians, spurred young men from the provinces to take up arms.

The martyrdom of Suleimani is rooted in one of the most fundamental tenets in Shiite Islam: sacrificing oneself in the name of justice and against the oppressor. This tenet marks Islam’s second branch and emerged in the 7th century during battle of Karbala, where the well-known Shiite figure Imam Hussein was killed.

Throughout his time in that role, Suleimani, a construction worker who rose to be commander of the Quds Force, developed relationships with various militia and terrorist groups in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, helping to expand Iran’s regional influence. He also played a major role in the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq in 2016.

While the temptation to draw comparisons of the fallout of Suleimani’s death to the martyrdom of others throughout Iranian history is strong, some scholars cautioned against it.

“That was a particular moment in Iran’s recent history. It has moved on from that culturally and politically,” said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “People might think that Iranians love martyrdom or that Shiite Muslims aspire to martyrdom, and that this is a collective national goal of Iran, but that’s not true.”

But that’s not true of Suleimani’s legacy. Whereas other top leaders in Iran had to navigate internal domestic politics, which could be polarizing and dividing, Suleimani’s role as commander took him out of Iran and into different countries, helping him escape the factional fights happening at home and further enhancing his stature.

“He is considered a man who is able to move above the conflict, and if there has to be change in Iran, he was going to be that person to lead the transformation,” Mahdi of Cal State Northridge said.