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Benjamin McKeown

Learning from Fukushima | Issues in Science and Technology - 0 views

issues.org/pfotenhauer

japan fukushima disaster hazards environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 13 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Inadequate risk assessment models have been identified as another main culprit in the Fukushima disaster.
  • Benjamin McKeown on 13 Dec 16
     
    "Inadequate risk assessment models have been identified as another main culprit in the Fukushima disaster."
Benjamin McKeown

20 million starving to death: inside the worst famine since World War II - Vox - 1 views

www.vox.com/...uth-sudan-hunger-crisis-famine

food famine sudan agriculture agribusiness

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • region controlled by rebels from her same tribe
  • starvation
  • starved to death along the wa
  • ...77 more annotations...
  • South Sudan, which is facing mass hunger on a scale unimaginable in almost every other part of the world. In February, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 South Sudanese were starving, and that 5 million more — 42 percent of the country’s population — have such limited access to proper food that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. More recent figures are not available yet, but aid agencies fear the situation could be much worse now.
  • South Sudan, the world’s newest country and one that came into existence largely because of enormous assistance from the US.
  • historic famine is also threatening Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.
  • 20 million people in those four countries are at risk of dying due to a lack of food.
  • The UN has already officially declared a full-fledged famine in parts of South Sudan and warned that the other three countries will suffer mass death from food and water shortages if “prompt and sustained humanitarian intervention” doesn’t happen soon.
  • these famines weren’t caused by natural disasters like crop failures or droughts. They were man-made — the direct result of the bloody wars and insurgencies raging in all four countries.
  • Washington, which has been slow to act, seems to finally be taking steps to help fight the famine. The Trump administration proposed massive funding cuts to America’s humanitarian food aid, but Congress rejected those cuts and instead allocated close to $1 billion in new funding.
  • “It’s entirely a man-made construct right now, and that means we have it within our power to stop that,” he said. “Wars are hard to stop; famines are not.
  • intensive care unit of an International Medical Corps hospita
  • The building is a simple temporary structure made of cinderblocks and plywood.
  • Although children under 5 years old are the most vulnerable to malnutrition and the infections it can cause in small bodies, they are also incredibly resilient and almost always bounce back if fed high-calorie foods and given proper medicine.
  • The problem is that huge numbers of South Sudanese children aren’t getting that type of food. Many, in fact, aren’t getting food of any kind.
  • The crisis in the 1980s pales in comparison to the famine happening today. Because it isn’t just happening in one country; it’s happening in four.
  • Nigeria
  • Boko Haram
  • forced from their homes to escape the group’s campaign of suicide bombings
  • including huge numbers of farmers
  • With the agricultural systems of hard-hit areas in near collapse because of the fighting, the UN estimates that at least 4.8 million people are in need of urgent food assistance.
  • The problem is that the government of Somalia doesn’t control huge swaths of the country.
  • Islamist militant group al-Shabaab.
  • The Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen has suffered from food shortages for years, but a war between the Saudi-backed government in exile and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control much of the north of the country has brought food shipments into Yemen to a grinding halt.
  • With US assistance, Saudi warplanes have destroyed bridges, roads, factories, farms, food trucks, animals, water infrastructure, and agricultural banks across the north, while imposing a blockade on the territory. For a country heavily dependent on foreign food aid, that means starving the people.
  • whatever food makes it in is so expensive that many people cannot afford to buy it. T
  • This is a gigantic failure of international diplomacy,”
  • After decades of civil war and neglect, the country finally gained its independence from the North in 2011, in large part due to the active assistance of the Obama administration and many of Washington’s key allies
  • Juba
  • There are just 200 kilometers of paved roads in a country the size of France, making it difficult for farmers to sell their crops and buy new seeds. Food shortages have haunted rural communities for some time, and cattle raiding — where armed men steal entire herds from nearby villages and towns — is a regular occurrence.
  • Even if a South Sudanese family owned cattle and had planted crops, all of that would soon disappear when war came to their doorstep. Plants would die because farmers fled and never returned. Animals would be stolen or left to starve or die from dehydration.
  • Javier Zarracina/Vox
  • Food shortages and acute hunger may have been almost inevitable for a country that had had trouble feeding itself even in the relative moments of calm before the current storm.
  • That storm erupted in 2013, when the country’s president, Salva Kiir, and his vice president, Riek Machar, went to war. Kiir accused Machar of a coup attempt, which Machar denied. In reality, the split was caused by a toxic mixture of decades of deep resentment over tribal differences heightened during the previous civil war, and a fear that the country’s oil resources would not be fairly divided.
  • Kiir, who is from the dominant Dinka tribe, controlled the country’s armed forces. Machar, from the minority Nuer group, controlled a loose network of tribal militias. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, and more than 50,000 are estimated to have died in the fighting.
  • government troops have been conducting “counterinsurgency” efforts in areas where the people are Nuer or from other tribes considered supportive of the rebels.
  • most of the world sees it as the collective punishment of civilians.
  • Without civilians, those fighters won’t have a place to stay, receive food, receive popular support,” Jonathan Pedneault of Human Rights Watch told me. “So the aim by targeting civilians is meant to cut the grass under the feet of those fighters.”
  • That includes chasing people away from the very thing their lives depend on — food.
  • Chol and Nuer escaped into the enormous marshes that flank the White Nile river, which provide places to hide from troops who are unable to access the area by truck or car.
  • But that safety can come at a huge cost: There is nothing to eat there, so people who survive attacks by gunmen end up perishing slowly from hunger.
  • is only accessible by traditional dugout canoes
  • Water lily roots are the only thing people in the marshes have to eat.
  • lacks enough food to feed all the refugees. Instead, she and her family are still trying to survive based on what they can scavenge in the marshes.
  • up lilies like weeds and ripped off their small, stumpy roots.
  • Western aid agencies are operating in the nearby village of Ganyiel.
  • he rebel-held town is a market place where stalls sell tea and some dried fish from the local rivers.
  • UN helicopters. Here, international aid agencies have some of their most crucial, and remote, outposts. It seems like only a matter of time until food shipments start arriving in Thoahnom Payam, just 30 minutes away by canoe.
  • Leer
  • things are much worse
  • occupied by government troops, is destroyed and abandoned.
  • The main street of shops and stalls has been razed to the ground, with sheets of steel scattered about in the grass and rusting vehicles lining the side of the main dirt road.
  • A few miles down that road is rebel-held land
  • A few hundred people — originally residents of Leer and the surrounding villages — had crept out of hiding as news spread of a food drop by an aid plane.
  • All of these people had left family members in the marshes, waiting anxiously for them to bring back the food. These thin, tired people were the strongest and most capable of making the journey.
  • sitting silently under trees as bags of maize, recently dropped from a plane circling above, were piled up by volunteers wearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) bibs
  • She had six children starving in the marshes, waiting for her to return with food.
  • waiting to be given seeds and tools to plant them with. The ICRC handed out hoes and axes as well as maize seeds to grow some crops in rebel-held land outside the swamps. If they planted before the rains came, then they could harvest in August. Many of the people sitting near me will die long before the crops are ready to eat.
  • Before the war, he said, the region was capable of feeding itself.
  • There were a lot of cattle and livestock in this area,” he told me, standing next to a crowd of people sitting in line on the ground. “They were farmers, there was commerce, there was a market here where I am standing right now. All of this is gone now.”
  • Government soldiers had burned down the small market when they had taken the area earlier in the conflict. Now villagers who once bought and sold food here are being kept alive with charitable handouts. The town wasn’t always starving. It got that way because of war.
  • For those fleeing war, hunger can seem like an affordable price to pay for safety
  • It would take truly horrific violence for South Sudanese parents to flee into the marshes given the very real — and in some ways likely — chances of watching their children starve to death there. But that kind of horrific violence, unfortunately, is part of daily life in many parts of the country.
  • Most of them had the deep horizontal scars of the Nuer tribe markings across their foreheads.
  • “I don’t know why the government is doing this,” he added. “We are their people.”
  • the most fortunate of South Sudan’s starving people are the ones who have reached camps run by the United Nations, where Western aid agencies are providing food, shelter, and medical facilities
  • The organizations are keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive; the problem is that millions more live in remote areas of this vast country that the aid groups simply can’t get to. The aid workers themselves are also increasingly at risk.
  • South Sudan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, but it has quickly become the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian workers. More than 80 aid workers — mostly South Sudanese — have been killed since the conflict began. Female foreign aid workers were gang-raped by rampaging government soldiers who stormed a hotel in Juba during last July’s violence in the capital.
  • three South Sudanese employees of the UN’s World Food Program were violently murdered in the western city of Wau. The WFP said they were trying to get to the warehouse during an outbreak of violence but were killed along the way. Two died of machete wounds, and another was shot.
  • Looting is a huge problem
  • Every time we have to pull out of an area, entire stocks of food and supplies are taken.”
  • Charities have been forced by the government to leave areas where their help is needed. In Leer, access has been granted again by the government, but it’s patchy. There used to be compounds and warehouses for some aid agencies there, but they were all burned down during the fighting.
  • International aid agencies in South Sudan are in a tough position. Caught between an increasingly belligerent and threatening government and the more than 5 million people on the brink of starvation, they are trying to keep people alive without openly condemning the government for their part in starving them in the first place. If they do, they risk being kicked out of the country.
  • On February 20, just days after the UN officially declared that South Sudan was in the midst of a famine, the government in Juba shocked the world by announcing a hike in visa prices for aid workers — from $100 to $10,000. That hasn’t been implemented, but it’s a stark reminder to aid agencies that their relationship with the government is increasingly shaky.
  • Journalists are also struggling to gain access to the country as the government hopes to control the image of the hunger crisis and steer the rhetoric away from it being war-driven.
  • Once inside, intimidation is rife. In nearly 10 years of reporting from conflict zones, I have never worked in an environment where government intimidation is so strong.
  • The government shut Al Jazeera English’s bureau in Juba on May 2 after objecting to a story where a reporter interviewed Machar’s rebels, and an American NPR reporter was detained for several days after being arrested at his hotel in the capital by security forces.
  • For South Sudanese journalists, it’s even worse: They’ve faced a violent campaign against them since the beginning of the war. In August 2015, President Kiir said publicly, “The freedom of press does not mean that you work against your country. And if anybody among them does not know this country has killed people, we will demonstrate it one day on them.” Three days later, a reporter working for the independent New Nation paper was shot dead in the street.
  • The government of South Sudan will not realistically be able to stop the news of its famine, nor the fact that it was entirely man-made, from being reported. But we’re rapidly approaching the point of no return: Without an immediate and sustained effort to end the violence ravaging South Sudan and the other three nations, the world will for the first time in living memory be faced with four simultaneous famines.
  • The worst humanitarian disaster since World War II will have been one that was caused by, and therefore could have been prevented by, humans.
Benjamin McKeown

MWC 2016: Facebook uses AI to map people's homes - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-35633915

HL internet

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • We believe this data has many more impactful applications, such as socio-economic research and risk assessment for natural disasters," Facebook said in a blog.
  • "I am torn in my reaction between excitement at the technical innovation and concern about the public policy issues," said Emily Taylor, an associate fellow at the Chatham House think tank.
  • customers
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But the British Red Cross charity said the initiative could potentially help it locate vulnerable communities.Finer details
  • Facebook intends to use the maps to inform its Internet.org initiative, which aims to connect more people to the internet.
  • The company is currently developing drones that would extend internet signals beyond cities via lasers beamed between the aircraft.
  • "There are many areas globally that still remain off the digital map," said British Red Cross maps expert Andrew Braye."These areas are also home to vulnerable communities at risk from natural disasters or conflict.
  • "Organisations that share open data are enabling the humanitarian sector to respond more rapidly."The information is then available to emergency responders and assists with decision-making."
Benjamin McKeown

'China's Worst Policy Mistake'? by Nicholas D. Kristof | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...chinas-worst-policy-mistake

population one child policy

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 10 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • n China and abroad, that those adopted babies, mostly girls, were unwanted in a male chauvinist society and abandoned by their parents. Many of those children, some of them now young adults, should know that it’s far more complicated than that. They are the products not of unloving parents, not so much of a misogynist tradition, but of a government policy that sundered families.
  • All fertile married women in their region were obliged to pee into a cup for a pregnancy test every three months; a positive result could lead to a mandatory abortion. Any couple that somehow evaded the controls risked a fine, the demolition of the family home, and forced sterilization.
  • Officials now had their salaries docked if there were babies born without permission in their localities, and the village leader had lost half his salary for that reason.
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  • The local official in charge of family planning promised a $380 reward, presented anonymously, to anyone who informed on an unauthorized baby. Someone reported on Victory,
  • The one-child policy, unlike many Chinese missteps, was not a product of Chairman Mao’s zeal or ideology; in fact, China was extricating itself from Maoism when it adopted the one-child policy.
  • “One child isn’t too few, two are just fine, three are too many.” And within about a decade it managed without coercion to reduce the average number of births per woman from six to three, a remarkable achievement. It’s rarely acknowledged that the biggest drop in Chinese fertility came not from the one-child policy, but earlier during this voluntary birth control campaign.
  • If it had continued, China’s birth rates would have continued to drop, as they have for the rest of the region (Malaysia today averages just under two births per woman; Bangladesh averages 2.2).
  • In retrospect, Western sympathizers were right about the need to curb population growth in China—and blind to the brutality of China’s policy. Partly that’s because China covered up the abuses and pretended that the policy was essentially voluntary, backed by fines but not by force.
  • Internationally, the most visible legacy of the one-child policy is the large number of Chinese-born children who have been adopted in the West
  • because an unauthorized birth would lead her husband to be fired from his job as well as to a large fine and her forced sterilization.
Benjamin McKeown

The Brussels attack is giving way to a terrible isolationist sentiment. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...le_isolationist_sentiment.html

anti-globalization HL nationalism

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • nstead of calling for solidarity against a common threat, a spokesman for the anti-European U.K. Independence Party declared that the open borders of Europe “are a threat to our security,” even though the U.K. is not part of Europe’s Schengen border treaty.  A columnist for the Daily Telegraph declared Brussels the “jihadist capital of Europe,” and mocked those who call for staying in the EU on the grounds of safety. Meanwhile, American news organizations fell over themselves to get instant reactions from Donald Trump, who had just told the Washington Post that he didn’t see the point of NATO, which “is costing us a fortune.” He didn’t disappoint: “[W]e have to be very careful and very vigilant as to who we allow in this country.”
  • “my country will be safer” if it pulls out of its international alliances is growing.
  • the illogical idea
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Every terrorist attack on U.K. soil in recent memory was carried out by British (or Irish) citizens and not foreigners; nuclear deterrence requires allies and coordinated responses; barbed wire cannot stop a cyberattack. The small-minded, short-sighted isolationists ignore reason and logic, instead substituting panic and fear.
  • Of course there are reasons for this change: German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to apparently “invite” Syrian immigrants into Europe last summer has left many Europeans feeling queasy and out of control.
  • The only way to fight jihadism is through our existing military, economic, and political alliances
  • And the only way to ensure that we have international support in the future, when a tragedy takes place on our soil—and it will—is to offer our support for a tragedy unfolding on allied soil right now. 
Benjamin McKeown

Frozen conflict | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ims-north-pole-frozen-conflict

arctic coasts

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • IN 2007 a Russian-led polar expedition, descending through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean in a Mir submarine, planted a titanium Russian tricolour on the sea bed 4km (2.5 miles) beneath the North Pole. “The Arctic has always been Russian,
  • Denmark has staked a claim to the North Pole, too. On December 15th it said that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), some 900,000 square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland belongs to it (Greenland is a self-governing part of Denmark).
  • Canada, which plans to assert sovereignty over part of the polar continental shelf (
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • he prize for these countries is the mineral wealth of the Arctic, which global warming may make more accessible.
  • an eighth of the world’s untapped oil
  • perhaps a quarter of its gas.
  • Drilling for oil and gas there is extremely expensive, and falling oil prices have made the economics of Arctic energy even less favourable. This gives would-be prospectors an interest in co-operating, not in adding to the risks and costs.
  • The melting of the summer sea ice has also opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe via the top of the world; 71 cargo ships plied the north-east passage last summer, up from 46 in 2012
  • Russia
  • carried out extensive combat exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the cold war
  • re-equipping old Soviet bases there and in July tested the first of its new-generation rockets,
  • Sweden spent part of the summer searching for a Russian submarine that it suspected of slipping into its territorial waters.
  • countries may control an area of seabed if they can show it is an extension of their continental shelf.
Benjamin McKeown

Europe needs many more babies to avert a population disaster | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pe-brink-depopulation-disaster

population migration

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • “We have provinces in Spain where for every baby born, more than two people die. And the ratio is moving closer to one to three.”
  • Spain has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, with an average of 1.27 children born for every woman of childbearing age, compared to the EU average of 1.55.
  • hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and migrants leave in the hope of finding jobs abroad.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The result is that, since 2012, Spain’s population has been shrinking.
  • The paradox is that as police and security forces battle to keep them at bay
  • Record numbers of economic migrants and asylum-seekers are seeking to enter the European Union this summer and are risking their lives in the attempt
  • In Portugal, the population has been shrinking since 2010.
  • Portugal’s population could drop from 10.5 million to 6.3 million by 2060.
  • In Italy the retired population is soaring, with the proportion of over-65s set to rise from 2.7% last year to 18.8% in 2050.
  • Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world: 8.2 per 1,000 population between 2008 and 2013,
  • On average, Britain’s population grew at a faster rate over the last decade than it has done over the last 50 years.
  • a direct threat to economic growth as well as pensions, healthcare and social services.
  • the grey vote.
  • “During the same time frame, expenditures on pensions rose by more than 40%. We’re moving closer to being a gerontocratic society – it’s a government of the old.”
  • In 2012, the regional government launched a multi-pronged initiative to address the falling fertility rate, with plans to roll out measures such as home and transport subsidies for families and radio advertisements urging women to have more children.
  • The region of Galicia is one of the few in Spain that has addressed the issue.
  • “these issues will only be solved by a miracle.”
  • ack of financial security that prompts many Italians to live with their parents well into their 30s. The difficulty for mothers to return to the workplace also means women must make considerable sacrifices if they decide to have children.
  • give low-income couples a monthly “baby bonus” of €80
  • The youth jobless rate hit 44.2% in June, while overall it stood at 12.3%.
  • By 2060 the government expects the population to plunge from 81 million to 67 million,
  • In order to offset this shortage, Germany needs to welcome an average of 533,000 immigrants every year, which perhaps gives context to the estimate that 800,000 refugees are due to come to Germany this year.
  • Only Scandinavia appears to be weathering the demographic storm with any success, partly thanks to generous parental leave systems, stable economies, and, in the cases of Sweden and Norway, high net immigration.
  • n Sweden it is possible to combine motherhood with a working life,”
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