Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged south africa

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
delgadool

Vaccines Adapted for Variants Will Not Need Lengthy Testing, F.D.A. Says - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-variants.html

politics pandemic

shared by delgadool on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • vaccine developers would not need to conduct lengthy randomized controlled trials for vaccines that have been adapted to protect against concerning coronavirus variants.
  • “The emergence of the virus variants raises new concerns about the performance of these products,” Dr. Woodcock said in a statement Monday. “We want the American public to know that we are using every tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic, including pivoting as the virus adapts.”
  • Moderna has already begun developing a new version of its vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against a virus variant that originated in South Africa, known as B.1.351, which seems to dampen the effectiveness of the existing vaccines.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The agency said the testing could be done in a single age group and then extrapolated to other age groups.
  • The newly tweaked Covid-19 vaccines would be authorized under an amendment to the emergency authorization granted to the original vaccine, regulators said.
nrashkind

Coronavirus protests spread to Senegal's capital - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...senegals-capital-idUSKBN23B028

shared by nrashkind on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Protestors in Dakar set tyres on fire and threw stones at security forces on Wednesday night during protests over a nationwide dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed almost three months ago because of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • The unrest in Senegal’s capital followed similar action in the holy city of Touba a night earlier, where crowds of people torched an ambulance, threw rocks and looted office buildings.
  • She said that while she did not approve of youths taking to the streets after curfew, and throwing rocks at the police, the president needed to listen, and to help people.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • A Reuters witness saw the army and police deployed to some neighbourhoods to contain the unrest.
  • There were also protests in the Kaolack region in the south of the country, a local official said.
  • The growing unrest in Dakar and Touba highlights a dilemma for many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where measures to protect citizens’ health are also damaging the livelihoods of millions who work in the informal sector, stirring up tensions.
  • Unable to shuttle passengers between Touba and Dakar, taxi driver Same Diop has started begging in the street alongside dozens of other drivers struggling to support their families.
  • Touba’s main boulevards were littered with charred tyres and broken branches on Wednesday in the wake of the overnight protest there
  • scores of demonstrators set fire to an ambulance outside a coronavirus treatment centre.
  • This frightened us
Javier E

The triumph of experience over hope - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html

hope experience pandemic

shared by Javier E on 13 May 20 - No Cached
  • For about a month, I was hopeful that we could achieve a “South Korea solution.” Unfortunately, it’s become clear that we’ve failed
  • I have written previously about the peculiar inability of American governmental institutions to do things that seem to work abroad.
  • The countries that survived SARS had a playbook ready to haul out when the next epidemic hit
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The countries that SARS bypassed also relied on experience, in a way, but that experience had taught them to hope that pandemics were something peculiar to Asia or Africa or other places where Everything Is Different. Running that playbook against this coronavirus turned out to be disastrous.
  • America’s outbreak thus far hasn’t been unusually bad. With about 250 deaths per million citizens, we’re solidly in the middle of the pack.
  • The United States is underperforming Germany and Canada but roughly on par with Switzerland, and we’re doing significantly better than France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Britain.
  • there are countries that learned from the experience of others, notably Germany. Like us, Germany is large and rich and has a bustling trade with China. Moreover, Germany’s political framework also gives local governments significant autonomy. Yet Germany’s death rate is only about a third of ours, and declining, while the United States seems stuck on a high plateau.
  • In fact, death rates are declining sharply in most of the countries I mentioned, except for Canada and the United States.
  • It’s understandable if a country that hasn’t weathered a serious pandemic in a century needed to learn what to do from hard experience. But it’s starting to look like we still haven’t, and won’t, unless that experience gets harder still.
Javier E

Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ro-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic

china pandemic politics policy censorship origins

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • By now, with worldwide infections at thirty-five million and counting, and with near-total silence on the part of the Chinese government, the market has become a kind of petri dish for the imagination.
  • One common Chinese conspiracy theory claims that the U.S. Army deliberately seeded the virus during the 2019 Military World Games, which were held in Wuhan that October. On the other side of the world, a number of Americans believe that the virus was released, whether accidentally or otherwise, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose research includes work on coronaviruses.
  • There’s no evidence to support these theories, and even the prevalent animal-market connection is unclear. There weren’t many wildlife dealers in the market—about a dozen stalls, according to most published reports—and Wuhan natives have little appetite for exotic animals.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • There are three hundred and twenty-one testing locations in the city, and the system is so extensive that in June, when Beijing suffered an outbreak, Wuhan hospitals sent seventy-two staffers to the capital to help with tests.
  • When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighborhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities.
  • Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.”
  • Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated.
  • Zhang said the experience of working through the pandemic had left him calmer and more patient. He drove more carefully now; he wasn’t in such a rush.
  • I often asked Wuhan residents how they had been personally changed by the spring, and there was no standard response. Some expressed less trust in government information; others said they had increased faith in the national leadership.
  • Wuhan had most recently reported a locally transmitted symptomatic case on May 18th. It’s the most thoroughly tested city in China: at the end of May, in part to boost confidence, the government tried to test every resident, a total of eleven million.
  • I never met a cabdriver who had been swab-tested less than twice, and a couple had been tested five times. Most of the cabbies had no relatives or friends who had been infected; swabbing was simply required by the city and by their cab companies.
  • “I tend to take a charitable view of countries that are at the beginning stage of epidemics,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me, in a phone conversation. According to her, it’s unrealistic to expect that any country could have stopped this particular virus at its source. “I’ve always believed that this thing was going to spread,” she said
  • The physician who handled testing told me that, on average, his hospital still recorded one positive for every forty thousand exams. Most of these positives were repeat patients: after having been infected during the initial run of the virus, they recovered fully, and then for some reason, months later, showed evidence of the virus again. So far, most of the positives had been asymptomatic, and the physician saw no indication that the virus was spreading in the city.
  • In town, there were few propaganda signs about the epidemic, and Wuhan newspapers ran upbeat headlines every morning (Yangtze Daily, August 29th, front page: “STUDENTS DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN SCHOOLS”). Movie theatres were open; restaurants and bars had no seating restrictions. At the Hanyang Renxinghui Mall, I saw barefaced kids playing in what may have been one of the last fully functioning ball pits on earth, a sight that seemed worthy of other headlines (“CHILDREN DO NOT HAVE TO WEAR MASKS IN WUHAN BALL PITS”).
  • Across town, colleges and universities were in the process of bringing back more than a million students. Wuhan has the second-highest number of students of any city in China, after Guangzhou.
  • Wuhan memories remained fresh, and the materials of documentation were also close at hand. People sometimes handed over manuscripts, and they took out their phones and pulled up photographs and messages from January and February. But I wondered how much of this material would dissipate over time.
  • In town, I met two Chinese journalists in their twenties who were visiting from out of town. They had been posted during the period of the sealed city: back then, anybody sent to cover events in Wuhan had to stay for the long haul.
  • One was a director of streaming media whom I’ll call Han, and he had found that government-run outlets generally wanted footage that emphasized the victory over the disease, not the suffering of Wuhan residents. Han hoped that eventually he’d find other ways to use the material. “It will be in the hard drive,” he said, tapping his camera.
  • After that, Yin reported on a number of issues that couldn’t be published or completed, and she often talked with scientists and officials who didn’t want to say too much. “One person said, ‘Ten years later, if the climate has changed, I’ll tell you my story,’ ” Yin told me. “He knew that he would be judged by history.” She continued, “These people are inside the system, but they also know that they are inside history.”
  • Such fare is much more popular in Guangdong, in the far south. It’s possible that the disease arrived from somewhere else and then spread in the wet, cool conditions of the fish stalls. A few Wuhan residents told me that a considerable amount of their seafood comes from Guangdong, and they suggested that perhaps a southerner had unwittingly imported the disease,
  • When I spoke with scientists outside China, they weren’t focussed on the government’s early missteps
  • In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic—a period of isolation is crucial. Throughout the Communist era, there have been many moments of quarantined history: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In every case, an initial silencing has been followed by sporadic outbreaks of leaked information. Wuhan will eventually follow the same pattern, but for the time being many memories will remain in the sealed city.
  • Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP, a global-health center at Columbia University, pointed out that Chinese scientists had quickly sequenced the virus’s genome, which was made available to researchers worldwide on January 11th. “I honestly think that they had a horrific situation in Wuhan and they were able to contain it,” she said. “There were mistakes early on, but they did act, and they shared fast.”
  • For much of El-Sadr’s career, she has worked on issues related to AIDS in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere. After years of research, scientists eventually came to the consensus that H.I.V. most likely started through the bushmeat trade—the first human was probably infected after coming into contact with a primate or primate meat.
  • El-Sadr views the coronavirus as another inevitable outcome of people’s encroachment on the natural world. “We are now living through two concomitant massive pandemics that are the result of spillover from animal to human hosts, the H.I.V. and the COVID pandemics,” she wrote to me, in an e-mail. “Never in history has humanity experienced something along this scale and scope.”
  • There’s a tendency to believe that we would know the source of the coronavirus if the Chinese had been more forthcoming, or if they hadn’t cleaned out the Huanan market before stalls and animals could be studied properly.
  • Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong, told me that the C.N.B.G. vaccine has already been given to a number of Chinese government officials, under an emergency-use approval granted by the authorities. “I know a few government officials personally, and they told me that they took the vaccine,” he said, in a phone conversation. He thought that the total number was probably around a hundred. “It’s middle-level officials,” he said. “Vice-ministers, mayors, vice-mayors.”
  • Daszak believes the virus probably circulated for weeks before the Wuhan outbreak, and he doubts that the city was the source. “There are bats in Wuhan, but it was the wrong time of year,” he told me. “It was winter, and bats are not out as much.”
  • His research has indicated that, across Southeast Asia, more than a million people each year are infected by bat coronaviruses. Some individuals trap, deal, or raise animals that might serve as intermediary hosts. “But generally it’s people who live near bat caves,”
  • Daszak said that he had always thought that such an outbreak was most likely to occur in Kunming or Guangzhou, southern cities that are close to many bat caves and that also have an intensive wildlife trade.
  • He thinks that Chinese scientists are probably now searching hospital freezers for lab samples of people who died of pneumonia shortly before the outbreak. “You would take those samples and look for the virus,” he said. “They’ll find something eventually. These things just don’t happen overnight; it requires a lot of work. We’ve seen this repeatedly with every disease. It turns out that it was already trickling through the population.”
  • Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization based in New York. EcoHealth has become the target of conspiracy theorists, including some who claim that the virus was man-made. Daszak and many prominent virologists say that anything created in a lab would show clear signs of manipulation.
  • There’s also speculation that the outbreak started when researchers accidentally released a coronavirus they were studying at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But there’s no evidence of a leak, or even that the institute has ever studied a virus that could cause a COVID-19 outbreak.
  • “Scientists in China are under incredible pressure to publish,” Daszak said. “It really drives openness and transparency.”
  • He has spent a good deal of time in Wuhan, and co-authored more than a dozen papers with Chinese colleagues. “If we had found a virus that infected human cells and spread within a cell culture, we would have put the information out there,” he said. “In sixteen years, I’ve never come across the slightest hint of subterfuge. They’ve never hidden data. I’ve never had a situation where one lab person tells me one thing and the other says something else. If you were doing things that you didn’t want people to know about, why would you invite foreigners into the lab?”
  • In April, President Trump told reporters that the U.S. should stop funding research connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shortly after Trump’s comments, the National Institutes of Health cancelled a $3.7-million grant to EcoHealth, which had been studying how bat coronaviruses are transmitted to people.
  • I asked Daszak why, if he has such faith in the openness of his Wuhan colleagues, the Chinese government has been so closed about other aspects of the outbreak. He said that science is one thing, and politics something else; he thinks that officials were embarrassed about the early mistakes, and in response they simply shut down all information.
  • At the beginning of July, China National Biotec Group, a subsidiary of a state-owned pharmaceutical company called Sinopharm, completed construction of a vaccine-manufacturing plant in Wuhan. The project began while the city was still sealed. “That’s the politically correct thing to do,” a Shanghai-based biotech entrepreneur told me. “To show the world that the heroic people of Wuhan have come back.”
  • But Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist who has collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for sixteen years on research on bat coronaviruses, told me that it’s typical to fail to gather good data from the site of an initial outbreak. Once people get sick, local authorities inevitably focus on the public-health emergency. “You send in the human doctors, not the veterinarians,” he said, in a phone conversation. “And the doctors’ response is to clean out the market. They want to stop the infections.”
  • Pharmaceutical executives have also been expected to lead the way, like the construction manager who donned P.P.E. in order to escort his workers into the patient ward. “Every senior executive at Sinopharm and C.N.B.G. has been vaccinated,” He said. “Including the C.E.O. of Sinopharm, the chairman of the board, every vice-president—everyone.” The Chinese press has reported that vaccinations have also been administered to hundreds of thousands of citizens in high-risk areas around the world.
  • In the West, China’s image has been badly damaged by the pandemic and by other recent events. The country has tightened political crackdowns in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and, in May, after Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the virus, China responded furiously, placing new tariffs and restrictions on Australian goods ranging from barley to beef.
  • But He believes that the situation is fluid. “All of these feelings can turn around quickly,” he told me. “I think that once China has a vaccine, and if they can help other countries, it can make a huge difference.”
  • There’s also a competitive element. “China wants to beat America,” He said. He believes that the C.N.B.G. vaccine will receive some level of approval for public use by the end of October. “Chinese officials are thinking that Donald Trump might approve a U.S. vaccine before the election,” he said. “So their goal is to have a vaccine approved before that.”
  • No matter how quickly the Chinese develop a vaccine, or how effectively they have handled the pandemic since January, it’s unlikely to make Westerners forget the mistakes and misinformation during the pandemic’s earliest phase.
  • Some of this is due to a cultural difference—the Chinese response to errors is often to look forward, not back. On January 31st, Fang Fang commented in her diary, “The Chinese people have never been fond of admitting their own mistakes, nor do they have a very strong sense of repentance.” It’s often hard for them to understand why this quality is so frustrating for Westerners. In this regard, the pandemic is truly a mirror—it doesn’t allow the Chinese to look out and see themselves through the eyes of others.
  • The pandemic illuminates both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Chinese system, as well as the relationship between the government and the people. They know each other well: officials never felt the need to tell citizens exactly what happened in Wuhan, but they understood that American-level casualties would have been shocking—given China’s population, the tally would have been more than a million and counting.
  • In order to avoid death on that scale, the government also knew that people would be willing to accept strict lockdowns and contribute their own efforts toward fighting the virus.
  • In turn, citizens were skilled at reading their government. People often held two apparently contradictory ideas: that the Party lied about some things but gave good guidance about others. More often than not, citizens could discern the difference. During the pandemic, it was striking that, when the Chinese indulged in conspiracy theories, these ideas rarely resulted in personally risky behavior, as they often did in the U.S.
  • Perhaps the Chinese have been inoculated by decades of censorship and misinformation: in such an environment, people develop strong instincts for self-preservation, and they don’t seem as disoriented by social media as many Americans are.
  • Early in the year, I corresponded by WeChat with a Wuhan pharmacist who worked in a hospital where many were infected. On February 26th, he expressed anger about the early coverup. “My personal opinion is that the government has always been careless and suppressed dissent,” he wrote. “Because of this, they lost a golden opportunity to control the virus.”
  • In Wuhan, we met a few times, and during one of our conversations I showed him what he had written in February. I asked what he would do now if he found himself in Li Wenliang’s position, aware of an outbreak of some unknown disease. Would he post a warning online? Contact a health official? Alert a journalist?The pharmacist thought for a moment. “I would tell my close friends in person,” he said. “But I wouldn’t put anything online. Nothing in writing.”
  • I asked if such an event would turn out differently now.“It would be the same,” he said. “It’s a problem with the system.”
  • He explained that, with an authoritarian government, local officials are afraid of alarming superiors, which makes them inclined to cover things up. But, once higher-level leaders finally grasp the truth, they can act quickly and effectively.
Javier E

How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count? - 0 views

www.nature.com/...d41586-021-01429-6

ancient human origins number counting anthropology archaeology linguistics history Culture math

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • Rafael Núñez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the leaders of QUANTA, accepts that many animals might have an innate appreciation of quantity. However, he argues that the human perception of numbers is typically much more sophisticated, and can’t have arisen through a process such as natural selection. Instead, many aspects of numbers, such as the spoken words and written signs that are used to represent them, must be produced by cultural evolution — a process in which individuals learn through imitation or formal teaching to adopt a new skill (such as how to use a tool).
  • Although many animals have culture, one that involves numbers is essentially unique to humans. A handful of chimpanzees have been taught in captivity to use abstract symbols to represent quantities, but neither chimps nor any other non-human species use such symbols in the natural world.
  • during excavations at Border Cave in South Africa, archaeologists discovered an approximately 42,000-year-old baboon fibula that was also marked with notches. D’Errico suspects that anatomically modern humans living there at the time used the bone to record numerical information. In the case of this bone, microscopic analysis of its 29 notches suggests they were carved using four distinct tools and so represent four counting events, which D’Errico thinks took place on four separate occasions1.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • D’Errico has developed a scenario to explain how number systems might have arisen through the very act of producing such artefacts. His hypothesis is one of only two published so far for the prehistoric origin of numbers.
  • It all started by accident, he suggests, as early hominins unintentionally left marks on bones while they were butchering animal carcasses. Later, the hominins made a cognitive leap when they realized that they could deliberately mark bones to produce abstract designs — such as those seen on an approximately 430,000-year-old shell found in Trinil, Indonesia6. At some point after that, another leap occurred: individual marks began to take on meaning, with some of them perhaps encoding numerical information
  • The Les Pradelles hyena bone is potentially the earliest known example of this type of mark-making, says D’Errico. He thinks that with further leaps, or what he dubs cultural exaptations, such notches eventually led to the invention of number signs such as 1, 2 and 37.
  • Overmann has developed her own hypothesis to explain how number systems might have emerged in prehistory — a task made easier by the fact that a wide variety of number systems are still in use around the world. For example, linguists Claire Bowern and Jason Zentz at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, reported in a 2012 survey that 139 Aboriginal Australian languages have an upper limit of ‘three’ or ‘four’ for specific numerals. Some of those languages use natural quantifiers such as ‘several’ and ‘many’ to indicate higher values
  • here is even one group, the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon, that is sometimes claimed not to use numbers at all10.
  • In a 2013 study11, Overmann analysed anthropological data relating to 33 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies across the world. She discovered that those with simple number systems (an upper limit not much higher than ‘four’) often had few material possessions, such as weapons, tools or jewellery. Those with elaborate systems (an upper numeral limit much higher than ‘four’) always had a richer array of possessions.
  • In societies with complex number systems, there were clues to how those systems developed. Significantly, Overmann noted that it was common for these societies to use quinary (base 5), decimal or vigesimal (base 20) systems. This suggested to her that many number systems began with a finger-counting stage.
  • This finger-counting stage is important, according to Overmann. She is an advocate of material engagement theory (MET), a framework devised about a decade ago by cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris at the University of Oxford, UK12. MET maintains that the mind extends beyond the brain and into objects, such as tools or even a person’s fingers. This extension allows ideas to be realized in physical form; so, in the case of counting, MET suggests that the mental conceptualization of numbers can include the fingers. That makes numbers more tangible and easier to add or subtract.
  • The societies that moved beyond finger-counting did so, argues Overmann, because they developed a clearer social need for numbers. Perhaps most obviously, a society with more material possessions has a greater need to count (and to count much higher than ‘four’) to keep track of objects.
  • An artefact such as a tally stick also becomes an extension of the mind, and the act of marking tally notches on the stick helps to anchor and stabilize numbers as someone counts.
  • some societies moved beyond tally sticks. This first happened in Mesopotamia around the time when cities emerged there, creating an even greater need for numbers to keep track of resources and people. Archaeological evidence suggests that by 5,500 years ago, some Mesopotamians had begun using small clay tokens as counting aids.
  • Overmann acknowledges that her hypothesis is silent on one issue: when in prehistory human societies began developing number systems. Linguistics might offer some help here. One line of evidence suggests that number words could have a history stretching back at least tens of thousands of years.
  • Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel at the University of Reading, UK, and his colleagues have spent many years exploring the history of words in extant language families, with the aid of computational tools that they initially developed to study biological evolution. Essentially, words are treated as entities that either remain stable or are outcompeted and replaced as languages spread and diversif
  • Using this approach, Pagel and Andrew Meade at Reading showed that low-value number words (‘one’ to ‘five’) are among the most stable features of spoken languages14. Indeed, they change so infrequently across language families — such as the Indo-European family, which includes many modern European and southern Asian languages — that they seem to have been stable for anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 years.
Javier E

Dark things are happening on Europe's borders. Are they a sign of worse to come? | Dani... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-migrants-climate-displacement

migration climate europe borders crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Together, these stories suggest that the “push-back” – the forcing away of migrating people from a country’s territory, even if it places them in harm’s way or overrides their right to asylum – is becoming an entrenched practice. Once something that would take place largely in the shadows, it is being done increasingly openly, with some governments trying to find ways to make the practice legal. The UK’s proposal has been strongly criticised by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, whose representative said it would “unavoidably” put lives at risk.
  • Just as shocking as the claims themselves is the fact that the revelations have largely been met with a shrug of indifference by EU officials, whose funding helps prop up border defences in both countries. Twelve member states are even demanding that the EU adjusts its rules so that it can finance “further preventive measures”, including walls and fences, at its external borders.
  • In south-eastern Europe, an international team of investigative journalists have revealed that Croatia and Greece are using a “shadow army”, balaclava-clad plainclothes units linked to those countries’ regular security forces, to force people back from their borders. In Croatia, these units have been filmed beating people with clubs at the border with Bosnia. In Greece, they are accused of intercepting boats in the Aegean and setting the passengers adrift on life-rafts in Turkish waters. (Croatia has promised to investigate reports of abuse, while Greece denies the practice.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In Poland, the government has just passed an emergency law allowing authorities to turn back refugees who cross into the country “illegally”. It is the latest development in a diplomatic standoff with Belarus, which has cynically been encouraging people from Iraq, Iran and parts of Africa to cross into the EU, in response to sanctions imposed on it earlier this year. Poland’s hardline response leaves many people trapped in the no man’s land between the two countries.
  • Priti Patel, the home secretary, claims this is an essentially benevolent measure: if boats in the Channel are turned around, it will eventually stop people attempting the dangerous trip in the first place. In fact, it undermines a key principle of international maritime law that makes it a duty to rescue people in distress.
  • In the UK, the Home Office has quietly tried to amend its draconian nationality and borders bill, currently at committee stage, by introducing a provision that gives Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if they fail to save lives at sea.
  • These developments are harmful in their own right, but they also set a disturbing precedent for how countries in rich parts of the world might deal with future displacements of people – not just from war and persecution, but from the climate crisis as well.
  • Three recent stories, from three different corners of Europe, suggest that governments are crossing a new threshold of violence in terms of how they police their borders.
  • This is not only a problem for today: it is a dress rehearsal for how our governments are likely to deal with the effects of the climate crisis in years to come.
  • a new report by the World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by water shortages, crop failure and rising sea levels by 2050.
  • Unfortunately, many of our politicians are primed to see displacement first and foremost as a civilisational threat. That was the logic of Boris Johnson’s comments ahead of the launch of Cop26 in Glasgow, when he claimed – incorrectly – that “uncontrolled immigration” was responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, and that a similar fate awaits the world today
  • In this telling, an environmental disaster that affects us all is transformed into a question of how the wealthy and powerful can preserve their privileges.
  • they are backed up by a burgeoning border security industry. A recent report by the Transnational Institute warns of what it calls “the border-industrial complex”, a growing multibillion dollar industry that ranges from security infrastructure to biometrics and artificial intelligence. The global market in fences, walls and surveillance alone is projected to be worth $65-$68bn by 2025.
  • Richer parts of the world have already begun to militarise their borders, a process that has accelerated in response to the refugee movements of the past decade.
  • What’s required, instead – beyond action to reduce emissions – is a plan to help people adapt to changing living circumstances and reduce global inequality, along with migration policies that recognise the reality of people’s situations
  • A major new US study commissioned by the Biden administration recommends new laws to protect climate migrants, but it is strikingly light on detail.
kennyn-77

Climate Change Poses a Widening Threat to National Security - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-change-national-security.html

climate climate change threat security military immigration

shared by kennyn-77 on 21 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The Biden administration released several reports Thursday on climate change and national security, laying out in stark terms the ways in which the warming world is beginning to pose significant challenges to stability worldwide.
  • the first such document to look exclusively at the issue of climate, said that risks to American national security will grow in the years to come. After 2030, key countries will face growing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance, the report said.
  • The document makes three key judgments. Global tensions will rise as countries argue about how to accelerate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; climate change will exacerbate cross-border flash points and amplify strategic competition in the Arctic; and the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely in developing countries that are least equipped to adapt.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The document also states that China and India, with large populations, will play key roles in determining how quickly global temperatures rise.
  • When it comes to the odds of countries around the world meeting the commitment made at the 2015 climate conference in Paris to keep the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius, the intelligence report said the odds were not good.
  • “High-emitting countries would have to make rapid progress toward decarbonizing their energy systems by transitioning away from fossil fuels within the next decade, whereas developing countries would need to rely on low-carbon energy sources for their economic development.”
  • That report said the military would begin to spend a significant portion of its next budget on climate analysis in its national security exercises and analysis.
  • Its bases are vulnerable to flooding, fires, drought and rising sea levels. Flooding harmed the Navy Base Coronado during a particularly tough hurricane year, the Naval Air Station Key West was hit by severe drought several years ago and a wildfire in 2017 burned 380 acres on Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, among myriad other examples.
  • Beyond harming its basic infrastructure, droughts, fires and flooding can harm the Pentagon’s the performance of its aircraft, the ability to do testing activities and a host of training exercises.
  • moving to directly integrate concept of climate change as a threat multiplier into all aspects of defense strategy, planning, force posture and budget,”
  • cited the growing United States rivalry with China as an example of why the two issues are linked. “The Pentagon must bring a climate lens to its strategic assessment of Chinese foreign policy and behavior on the world stage,” said Ms. Sikorsky, who is now director of the Center for Climate and Security. “Otherwise it will get answers to key questions about China’s strength and strategy wrong.”
  • The department said climate change’s effect on the Northwest Passage, the waters between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and through the Arctic Ocean, are already apparent. With the ice melting, the area has become easier to navigate and has opened it up to competition with Russia and China.
  • ith deadly and destructive hurricanes driving migrants to leave their homes in Central America and flee to the United States through Mexico. This has overwhelmed border officials at times since 2014 and particularly during the last six months.
  • looking at how climate change is already pushing people around the world to migrate, both within countries and between them. The report notes one forecast suggesting that climate change could lead to almost three percent of the populations of Latin America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa moving within their countries by 2050 — more than 143 million people.
  • “Even in the United States, one extreme event can result in a relatively high degree of permanent relocation of low-income populations exposed to chronic and worsening conditions over time,” the report says.
lilyrashkind

Some evidence shows omicron appears in your throat first. Should at-home Covid tests ch... - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...swab-home-covid-test-rcna12096

tests crisis

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • As omicron cases continue to sweep the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is being urged to gather more information about how well at-home Covid-19 tests are able to detect the variant.
  • But medical experts argue that anecdotes from people who test negative with a nasal swab at home but then test positive with a throat swab can be misleading. FDA officials say there isn’t enough data to support the practice. “We do know the tests are picking up on omicron, but with less sensitivity,” acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said during a Senate Health Committee hearing Tuesday. “What we need to do is to see whether the throat swab could provide more sensitivity.”
  • None of the at-home rapid antigen tests available over the counter in the U.S. are designed for throat swabs. There’s also a reason medical professionals are the ones who perform throat swabs for other infections, such as strep throat. Swabbing the back of your own throat is not easy to do. 
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The United Kingdom’s National Health Service recommends swabbing both the nose and the throat when using a rapid antigen, or later flow, Covid test, the kind used at home.
  • “The virus grows in your nose and throat and somewhat at different time scales,” Michael Mina, chief science officer for the biotech software company eMed, who was an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said at a testing technology news briefing this week.
  • “The agency recommends that individuals closely follow the tests’ instructions,” FDA spokesperson Jim McKinney told NBC News in an email.
  • Dr. Jonathan Li, an infectious disease physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, cautions against altering the testing strategy that has been validated and authorized by the FDA.
  • “What we’ve learned is that every variant seems to have its own characteristics, and it’s important that we not be locked into thinking we know everything based on what we’ve learned from the last variant,” he said
  • Before advocating the altered approach, Li said, he would need to see data that showed it was effective. User error will likely be higher with self-administered throat swabs compared with nasal swabs, he said.
  • “The nose and the throat have different pH levels and we have seen people take Coke or coffee and put it in an antigen test and had a line to appear,” she said. “We don’t know exactly why this happens, but the hypothesis is acidity.” 
  • Miller notes that a small preprint paper out of South Africa, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that more detectable virus may reside in the throat than in the nose when a person is infected with omicron compared to the delta variant, though the study compared PCR to antigen, or rapid, tests, which are not the same type of tests. 
  • Miller said that although she would not be surprised if omicron indeed does show up in the throat before it does in the nose, that concrete data has yet to be shown. 
  • According to Matt Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic, the fact that positivity rates are soaring in the U.S. is a testament to how well Covid tests are still working.
  • According to Miller, it’s best to take a rapid test on day one, day two and day three of symptoms if you are testing negative but your symptoms persist. You should also isolate. “If you have symptoms, you have Covid until proven otherwise,” she said. 
Javier E

China's New COVID Crisis Could Spawn the Worst Variant Yet - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/ld-spawn-the-worst-variant-yet

china covid-19 evolution lineage risks analysis

shared by Javier E on 18 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Then came Omicron. The new lineage, which first appeared in South Africa last fall, is by far the most transmissible. Some experts described the earlier form of Omicron, the BA.1 sublineage, as the most contagious respiratory virus they’d ever seen, owing in part to key mutations on the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect human cells.
  • The BA.2 sublineage that soon replaced BA.1 is even worse: potentially 80 percent more contagious than BA.1. There’s also a very rare “recombinant” form of Omicron called XE that combines the qualities of BA.1 and BA.2 and might be 10 percent more transmissible than even BA.2.
  • BA.1 and BA.2 shrugged off China’s strict social distancing. Even the most fleeting contact between family members, neighbors and coworkers was enough to ignite a viral firestorm in China starting in January.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The virus kept spreading. By early April officials were logging an average of around 15,000 new cases a day. A spike in deaths followed. In Hong Kong alone, nearly 9,000 people have died since mid-February. To be clear, that’s a fraction of the infections and deaths that countries with fewer restrictions tallied during the worst of their own COVID surges. What’s so worrying in China is the trend—and the potential for cases, and deaths, to keep going up and up.
  • “It could be that we are seeing the resurgences in China, including the emergence and spread of new sub-strains, primarily because the population there never achieved high levels of natural immunity,”
  • You can’t build up natural antibodies across a large population if no one is ever exposed to the virus. That’s the downside of total lockdowns
  • The antibodies in recovered COVID patients lend strong immunity that, combined with vaccinations across large groups of people, can help blunt the impact of a new lineage. Michael for one said he believes natural immunity is stronger and longer-lasting than immunity resulting from even the best messenger-RNA vaccines.
  • “They also used inactivated viruses in their Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which I had expected to be more robust than mRNA vaccines in terms of producing a more diversified immune response that could counter new mutants, et cetera,” Michael said, “but apparently it would seem that this response has waned, making people susceptible again to new strains.”
  • even if they are reasonably effective, the vaccines are unevenly distributed in China. The government’s attacks on foreign jabs has had the effect of encouraging anti-vax attitudes, especially among older Chinese who might be less media-savvy than their younger counterparts.
  • just half of the most vulnerable age group–over-80s–is fully vaccinated. That plus the lack of natural immunity has left millions of Chinese exposed to aggressive lineages that can punch right through lockdowns.
  • . “Any place can be a source of new variants, but those places with low levels of population immunity and unchecked spread of the virus are the most likely,”
  • Each individual infection, unchecked by antibodies, tends to produce two mutations every two weeks,
  • “What if we had 50 million people pull slot-machine levers simultaneously at the same time?” Moshiri asked. “We would expect at least one person would hit the jackpot pretty quickly. Now, replace the slot machine with ‘clinically-meaningful SARS-CoV-2 mutation,’ and that’s the situation we're in.”
  • All that is to say, the longer COVID rates remain high in the world’s most-populous country, the greater the chance that the next major lineage will be Chinese.
  • New lineages are inevitable from one country or another, of course. The trick is to slow the rate of mutation so that fresh vaccine formulations, therapies and public-health policies can at least keep pace with major changes in the virus.
  • billion people with uneven rates of vaccination by potentially low-quality jabs and very little natural immunity to back up the shots.
Javier E

Ocean Currents in the Atlantic Could Slow by Century's End, Research Shows - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...antic-ocean-tipping-point.html

atlantic ocean turning point environment crisis tipping point

shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
  • That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
  • A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.
  • the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.
  • As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.
  • Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.
  • In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).
  • These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.
  • adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.
  • Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.
  • Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.
  • scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.
  • Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.
  • “Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”
  • They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.
  • Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.
  • they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.
  • Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.
  • Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.
  • Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,
  • Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
  • “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”
Javier E

Book Review - Churchill's Empire - By Richard Toye - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Hari-t.html

churchill empire racism history

shared by Javier E on 04 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.
  • When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” It “would spread a lively terror.” (Strangely, Toye doesn’t quote this.)
  • it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn’t everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
  • In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.
  • Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
  • If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.
  • This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”
Javier E

(2) What Was the 'Soviet Century'? - by André Forget - Bulwark+ - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...what-was-the-soviet-century

soviet russia culture policy crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state
  • “A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.
  • the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.
  • The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.
  • Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed
  • Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”
  • As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.
  • Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”
  • Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.
  • There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.
  • Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal
  • it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.
  • But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.
  • Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them
  • it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like
  • Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.
  • given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).
  • In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?
  • The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.
  • Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.
  • Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state
  • Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.
  • In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.
  • The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.
  • As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”
  • None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.
  • in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
  • Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.
  • It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.
  • Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.
  • The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends
  • the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.
Javier E

At risk: 10 ways the changing climate is creating a health emergency | Global developme... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-is-wrecking-peoples-lives-acc

health effects climate change

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • 1. Floods and disease
  • As life becomes less tolerable for humans, animals and plants, things will get easier for disease-causing organisms. More than half of all known diseases have been made worse by the climate crisis
  • A warming world makes outbreaks of water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio more likely.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.
  • 2. Mosquitoes on the march
  • Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala
  • Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.
  • 3. Human-animal contact
  • Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.
  • Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.
  • It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.
  • 4. Severe weather events
  • Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.
  • 5. The air that we breathe
  • Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.
  • Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.
  • 6. The psychological cost
  • Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.
  • If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.
  • When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.
  • In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.
  • 7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies
  • Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.
  • Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.
  • Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies
  • 8. Food insecurity
  • More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.
  • As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.
  • 9. The stress of extreme heat
  • The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U
  • When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.
  • In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.
  • In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h
  • 10. Millions on the move
  • It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.
  • If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,
  • That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.
Javier E

UN calls for immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine | Ukraine | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ussian-withdrawal-from-ukraine

UN resolution ukraine war

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • The resolution on Thursday night saw 141 countries in favour with seven against and 32 abstentions, including China.
  • Ukraine’s allies failed to improve on numbers seen in the last vote on the issue in October immediately after Russia annexed republics in the east of Ukraine. In that vote 143 countries backed the resolution, with five against and 35 abstentions.
  • Among the big countries abstaining on Thursday, Thailand said it did not want to become involved in a morality play, adding that billions of bystanders were bearing the brunt of the war.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • South Africa stressed that the principles of territorial integrity in the UN Charter were sacrosanct, and applied in the case of Ukraine, but claimed the resolution would not advance the cause of peace.
  • The Chinese deputy envoy to the UN, Dai Bing, said the west was throwing fuel on to the fire by arming Ukraine. That would only exacerbate tensions, he said.
  • Leading the abstention camp, he claimed: “One year into the Ukraine crisis, the conflict is still grinding on and growing in scale, wreaking havoc to countless lives. A spillover effect is intensifying. We are deeply worried about this. China’s position on the Ukraine issue is consistent and clear. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected. The purposes and principles of the UN Charter should be observed. The legitimate security concerns of all countries should be taken seriously.”
  • Catherine Colonna, the French foreign minister – one of many European foreign ministers to travel to New York for the debate prior to the vote – warned that those that abstained would in fact be siding with the aggressor
  • he said none could sleep easy in a world in which a great power – one with nuclear weapons and a permanent Security Council member – could, at its own discretion, decide to attack its neighbours.
  • “Russia is trying to convince some of you that its attempts to upset the world order and impose a strength-based order will work in their favour. This is an illusion. The facts bear this out. It was Russia and Russia alone that wanted the war.”
Javier E

Opinion | Omicron Is Not the Final Variant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-variant-omicron.html

pandemic policy history response analysis projection

shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • To mitigate the impact of future variants, the world needs to establish and strengthen virus monitoring and surveillance systems that can identify emerging variants quickly so that leaders can respond.
  • Here’s how it works: Scientists regularly get samples of the virus from people who are infected and sequence those samples. This helps scientists pick up on notable changes in the virus. Spikes in cases in certain areas can also alert scientists to look deeper. When researchers find something notable, they can alert colleagues for further study.
  • Networks of laboratories worldwide should be equipped to study the properties of any new variant to assess its potential impact on available tests, vaccines’ effectiveness and treatments.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Scientists in South Africa and Botswana who are already doing this kind of routine surveillance of the coronavirus were able to rapidly warn their research networks and the rest of the world about Omicron. Going forward, such findings must also trigger an effective collective response.
  • When concerning variants are identified, there needs to be a global agreement on how countries should jointly react to mitigate any health and economic harms.
  • Every country must also ramp up its testing infrastructure for the coronavirus.
  • Most important, the global vaccination effort must be scaled up to blunt the continued circulation of the virus.
  • During surges, countries need to increase access to the measures that can lower risk of infection, like masks. The right mask, worn properly and consistently in indoor public spaces, can provide some protection against all variants
  • Now that there are drugs available to treat infections, country leaders and drug companies must ensure that there’s plenty of supply and that it is available to everyone.
  • The world got lucky with Omicron. It’s unimaginable what would have happened if that highly contagious variant had caused disease as severe as Delta has
Javier E

Opinion | Campus Protesters Are Demanding Colleges Divest From Israel. That Is Intellec... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...est-campus-protest-israel.html

divestment israel campus activism

shared by Javier E on 09 May 24 - No Cached
  • Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.
  • But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic.
  • This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end?
  • Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid.
  • So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?
  • But even if an endowment could provide a list of every underlying investment, it would likely then be inundated for more calls to divest, for more discovered connections — however small — to Israel, and for reasons related to other offenses discoverable with an online search
  • The answer, of course, is that endowments can’t be in the moral adjudication business — and they should never have headed this way
  • This does not mean that investing should be a returns-at-any-cost exercise. But it does mean that the real world does not always provide objective answers to how to balance benefits and consequences of companies providing products and services:
« First ‹ Previous 181 - 197 of 197
Showing 20▼ items per page