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anonymous

Five additional coffins found at 1921 Tulsa massacre search site - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Crews searching an excavation site at Oaklawn Cemetery for the remains of those killed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre found five coffins on Thursday afternoon.This brings the total amount of coffins found at the "mass grave feature" to 20 thus far, according to the city of Tulsa.
  • An eight-member team from the Tampa, Florida, office of Cardno Inc., an environmental and infrastructure company, is expected to be at Oaklawn Cemetery up to six to eight weeks completing the exhumation process.
  • Though ground-penetrating radar identified 12 coffins, a funeral home ledger suggests there may be 18 bodies in the area. The excavation team is preparing for the possibility of finding as many as 30.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Once the bodies are exhumed, the city and its public oversight committee will determine the next steps for "storing remains, DNA testing and genealogical research, and commemorating the gravesites and honoring the remains," said a city news release.
  • The work — which will unfold behind a screening fence with researchers, cultural monitors, historians, morticians, a forensic anthropologist and a videographer — may take months, the city says. That's not counting the efforts to identify the bodies and determine if they are indeed victims of the massacre.
anonymous

Opinion | So You Want to 'Save Women's Sports'? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-athletes-womens-sports.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.
  • The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”
  • The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?
  • The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.
  • Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.
  • That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.
  • Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.
  • The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.
  • It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.
  • If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.
  • At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.
johnsonel7

Israel's Netanyahu Indicted on Charges of Fraud, Bribery and Breach of Trust - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nyahu-corruption-indicted.html

israel politics trump

shared by johnsonel7 on 21 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted Thursday on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in a set of long-running corruption cases, throwing his political future into doubt and heightening the uncertainty and chaos surrounding Israel’s fitful, yearlong struggle to choose its next leader.
  • “The public interest requires that we live in a country where no one is above the law,” Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said in a televised evening news conference.
  • “Law enforcement is not a choice,” he added. “This is not a matter of left or right. This is not a matter of politics.”
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  • But with Israel’s political system already in uncharted territory, having failed to settle upon a new prime minister despite two elections and three attempts at forming a government since April, the criminal case against him could make it far more difficult for him to retain power.
  • In striking parallels to President Trump’s characterizations of the investigations against him, Mr. Netanyahu has called the investigation a “witch hunt,” and his allies have called it the product of a “deep state” conspiracy against Mr. Netanyahu — though Mr. Netanyahu himself appointed many of the key law-enforcement officials investigating him
  • The three cases against Mr. Netanyahu all involve trading official favors.In the most serious, in which he was charged with accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust, Mr. Netanyahu was accused of providing regulatory benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars as a bribe to the parent company of Walla, a leading Israeli news website, for favorable coverage of the prime minister and his family, and rough treatment of his adversaries.
johnsonel7

Boris Johnson: Brexit will mark 'new chapter' for UK, says PM - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-50956221

johnson britain brexit

shared by johnsonel7 on 01 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • In his new year message, the prime minister said he hoped the country would "move forward united" after it leaves the EU on 31 January.He vowed to govern "for everyone", not just those who backed him at the polls.
  • The Conservatives' resounding election victory on 12 December had "driven an electoral bulldozer" through the deadlock in Parliament, he said, and offered a way out of the "division, rancour and uncertainty" surrounding the Brexit debate since the 2016 referendum vote.
  • Ahead of what is traditionally the most difficult time of the year for the health service, Mr Johnson insisted it was his "top priority" and his ambition was to provide "state of the art" healthcare which remained free at the point of use."The loudest message I heard during the election campaign is that people expect us - expect me - to protect and improve the NHS."
cartergramiak

Russian PM and government quit as Putin proposes constitutional changes | World news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-that-would-weaken-successor

politics putin

shared by cartergramiak on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Vladimir Putin has embarked on a sweeping reshuffle of Russia’s leadership, accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and proposing constitutional amendments that would limit the power of a potential successor as president if he steps down in 2024.
  • The 67-year-old has in effect ruled Russia since 2000, making him the longest-serving leader since Stalin, and what he plans to do in 2024 remains the most important political question in the country.
  • “The main result of Putin’s speech: what idiots (and/or crooks) are all those who said that Putin would leave in 2024,” wrote Alexei Navalny, a vocal leader of Russia’s opposition.
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  • Under term limits, Putin left the presidency for four years in 2008 in a tumultuous period during which Russia fought a war in Georgia, faced growing anti-Kremlin protests, and failed to block a Nato intervention in Libya. By 2012, Putin was back, and his temporary replacement, Dmitry Medvedev, no longer seen as a viable successor in the long term.
nrashkind

Kim Kardashian West gives a face to America's mass incarceration problem in trailer for... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Kim Kardashian West is hoping to give a second chance to those impacted by America's mass-incarceration problem. On April 5, viewers will be able to witness some of her efforts.
  • "There are a lot of people making bad choices after a life of trauma," Kardashian West says in the trailer, adding that she's been receiving letters from people who are incarcerated. "People deserve a second chance."
  • "There are millions impacted by this broken justice system, and I wanted to put faces to these numbers and statistics,"
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  • The trailer features a face that has made headlines with Kardashian West before
  • In 2018, Johnson, a first-time nonviolent drug offender who'd been serving a life sentence since 1996, was freed from prison after President Trump commuted her sentence. Her freedom came just days after Kardashian West pleaded Johnson's case to Trump.
  • "[Kardashian West's] energy and influence have made an immediate impact that has stretched all the way to the White House,"
  • "Her story is entirely unique, and this documentary is the kind of immersive, exclusive storytelling that our viewers have com
  • The documentary will premiere Sunday, April 5, on Oxygen at 7 pm ET/PT.
anniina03

Newfoundland snow: Residents digging their way out of record-breaking snowfall - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

culture history Crisis

shared by anniina03 on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A record-breaking snowfall in Newfoundland, Canada, has left residents with the enormous task of digging themselves out of piles and piles of snow.St. John's International Airport recorded 76.2 cm (30 inches) of snow Friday, according to Environment Canada, breaking the previous daily snowfall record set on April 5, 1999, of 68.4 cm (26.93 inches).
  • Of course it's not a laughing matter for everyone. A state of emergency remained in effect for parts of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador on Sunday morning, including St. John's and Paradise. St. John's officials still wanted people to stay off the roads, but lifted some restrictions Sunday morning, allowing gas stations to open and pharmacies to open from noon until 7 pm.
  • More snow is on the way, CNN meteorologist Allison Chinchar said. It was snowing in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick on Sunday morning, but that system was expected to move east into Newfoundland and Labrador Sunday evening and into the overnight hours.
Javier E

'If you wanted to design a virus dispersion hub, you could do worse': the Cheltenham Fe... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...racecourse-cheltenham-festival

pandemic UK response history policy politics culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, argues that these committees were neither independent enough, nor experienced enough in public health. “Our advisers appeared to be utterly ignorant,” he says now. “They did not look at the evidence, or they did not believe it. It was a case of British exceptionalism – that China didn’t know how to handle a pandemic like this, but we did. What planet were they on? There was no risk assessment done for Cheltenham. The only advice from Boris Johnson was a generic statement about the need for ‘business as usual’.”
  • Minutes from Sage meetings released by the government show that, on 4 February, the committee judged that shutting down public gatherings would “probably be ineffective in creating any meaningful delay in spread” of the disease. One week later, the “consensus” view among the government’s modellers was that “in most larger events, such as sports matches, attendees will come into close contact with at most a handful of people, so the risk to attendees is low”. Three weeks later, on 5 March, Sage noted: “There is no evidence to suggest banning very large gatherings would reduce transmissions.”
  • By then, Horton says, the projection of hundreds of thousands of deaths was well established. “Sage knew by early March, and advised government of the potential death toll. But the government ignored it.”
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  • Instead of acting hard and fast, the government’s advisory groups went for herd immunity, says former chief scientific adviser Sir David King. “They opted for ‘behavioural nudges’, a light-touch gamble, saying: ‘Wash your hands, stay at home if you feel ill.’ Every other country was taking a different view.”
  • Anthony Costello, a former World Health Organization director and professorial research associate at the Institute for Global Health at UCL in London, agrees. “They got it wrong. Effectively, they were saying that Covid should be allowed to let rip. And there was no one there to challenge them.”
Javier E

Why Britain Failed Its Coronavirus Test - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...615166

uk pandemic failure response

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Britain has not been alone in its failure to prevent mass casualties—almost every country on the Continent suffered appalling losses—but one cannot avoid the grim reality spelled out in the numbers: If almost all countries failed, then Britain failed more than most.
  • The raw figures are grim. Britain has the worst overall COVID-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 46,000 dead according to official figures, while also suffering the Continent’s second-worst “excess death” tally per capita, more than double that in France and eight times higher than Germany’s
  • The British government as a whole made poorer decisions, based on poorer advice, founded on poorer evidence, supplied by poorer testing, with the inevitable consequence that it achieved poorer results than almost any of its peers. It failed in its preparation, its diagnosis, and its treatment.
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  • In the past two decades, the list of British calamities, policy misjudgments, and forecasting failures has been eye-watering: the disaster of Iraq, the botched Libyan intervention in 2011, the near miss of Scottish independence in 2014, the woeful handling of Britain’s divorce from the European Union from 2016 onward
  • What emerges is a picture of a country whose systemic weaknesses were exposed with appalling brutality, a country that believed it was stronger than it was, and that paid the price for failures that have built up for years
  • The most difficult question about all this is also the simplest: Why?
  • Like much of the Western world, Britain had prepared for an influenza pandemic, whereas places that were hit early—Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan—had readied themselves for the type of respiratory illness that COVID-19 proved to be.
  • Britain’s pandemic story is not all bad. The NHS is almost universally seen as having risen to the challenge; the University of Oxford is leading the race to develop the first coronavirus vaccine for international distribution, backed with timely and significant government cash; new hospitals were built and treatments discovered with extraordinary speed; the welfare system did not collapse, despite the enormous pressure it suddenly faced; and a national economic safety net was rolled out quickly.
  • One influential U.K. government official told me that although individual mistakes always happen in a fast-moving crisis, and had clearly taken place in Britain’s response to COVID-19, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that Britain was simply not ready. As Ian Boyd, a professor and member of SAGE, put it: “The reality is, there has been a major systemic failure.”
  • “It’s obvious that the British state was not prepared for” the pandemic, this official told me. “But, even worse, many parts of the state thought they were prepared, which is significantly more dangerous.”
  • When the crisis came, too much of Britain’s core infrastructure simply failed, according to senior officials and experts involved in the pandemic response
  • The human immune system actually has two parts. There is, as Cummings correctly identifies, the adaptive part. But there is also an innate part, preprogrammed as the first line of defense against infectious disease. Humans need both. The same is true of a state and its government, said those I spoke with—many of whom were sympathetic to Cummings’s diagnosis. Without a functioning structure, the responsive antibodies of the government and its agencies cannot learn on the job. When the pandemic hit, both parts of Britain’s immune system were found wanting.
  • The consequences may be serious and long term, but the most immediately tragic effect was that creating space in hospitals appears to have been prioritized over shielding Britain’s elderly, many of whom were moved to care homes, part of what Britain calls the social-care sector, where the disease then spread. Some 25,000 patients were discharged into these care homes between March 17 and April 16, many without a requirement that they secure a negative coronavirus test beforehand.
  • There was a bit too much exceptionalism about how brilliant British science was at the start of this outbreak, which ended up with a blind spot about what was happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, where we just weren’t looking closely enough, and they turned out to be the best in the world at tackling the coronavirus,” a former British cabinet minister told me.
  • The focus on influenza pandemics and the lack of a tracing system were compounded by a shortfall in testing capacity.
  • Johnson’s strategy throughout was one that his hero Winston Churchill raged against during the First World War, when he concluded that generals had been given too much power by politicians. In the Second World War, Churchill, by then prime minister and defense secretary, argued that “at the summit, true politics and strategy are one.” Johnson did not take this approach, succumbing—as his detractors would have it—to fatalistic management rather than bold leadership, empowering the generals rather than taking responsibility himself
  • “It was a mixture of poor advice and fatalism on behalf of the experts,” one former colleague of Johnson’s told me, “and complacency and boosterism on behalf of the PM.”
  • What it all adds up to, then, is a sobering reality: Institutional weaknesses of state capacity and advice were not corrected by political judgment, and political weaknesses were not corrected by institutional strength. The system was hardwired for a crisis that did not come, and could not adapt quickly enough to the one that did.
  • Britain’s NHS has come to represent the country itself, its sense of identity and what it stands for. Set up in 1948, it became known as the first universal health-care system of any major country in the world (although in reality New Zealand got there first). Its creation, three years after victory in the Second World War, was a high-water mark in the country’s power and prestige—a time when it was a global leader, an exception.
  • Every developed country in the world, apart from the United States, has a universal health-care system, many of which produce better results than the NHS.
  • When the pandemic hit, then, Britain was not the strong, successful, resilient country it imagined, but a poorly governed and fragile one. The truth is, Britain was sick before it caught the coronavirus.
  • In asking the country to rally to the NHS’s defense, Johnson was triggering its sense of self, its sense of pride and national unity—its sense of exceptionalism.
  • Before the coronavirus, the NHS was already under considerable financial pressure. Waiting times for appointments were rising, and the country had one of the lowest levels of spare intensive-care capacity in Europe. In 2017, Simon Stevens, the NHS’s chief executive, compared the situation to the time of the health sevice’s founding decades prior: an “economy in disarray, the end of empire, a nation negotiating its place in the world.”
  • Yet from its beginnings, the NHS has occupied a unique hold on British life. It is routinely among the most trusted institutions in the country. Its key tenet—that all Britons will have access to health care, free at the point of service—symbolizes an aspirational egalitarianism that, even as inequality has risen since the Margaret Thatcher era, remains at the core of British identity.
  • In effect, Britain was rigorously building capacity to help the NHS cope, but releasing potentially infected elderly, and vulnerable, patients in the process. By late June, more than 19,000 people had died in care homes from COVID-19. Separate excess-death data suggest that the figure may be considerably higher
  • Britain failed to foresee the dangers of such an extraordinary rush to create hospital capacity, a shift that was necessary only because of years of underfunding and decades of missed opportunities to bridge the divide between the NHS and retirement homes, which other countries, such as Germany, had found the political will to do.
  • Ultimately, the scandal is a consequence of a political culture that has proved unable to confront and address long-term problems, even when they are well known.
  • other health systems, such as Germany’s, which is better funded and decentralized, performed better than Britain’s. Those I spoke with who either are in Germany or know about Germany’s success told me there was an element of luck about the disparity with Britain. Germany had a greater industrial base to produce medical testing and personal protective equipment, and those who returned to Germany with the virus from abroad were often younger and healthier, meaning the initial strain on its health system was less.
  • However, this overlooks core structural issues—resulting from political choices in each country—that meant that Germany proved more resilient when the crisis came, whether because of the funding formula for its health system, which allows individuals more latitude to top up their coverage with private contributions, or its decentralized nature, which meant that separate regions and hospitals were better able to respond to local outbreaks and build their own testing network.
  • Also unlike Britain, which has ducked the problem of reforming elderly care, Germany created a system in 1995 that everyone pays into, avoids catastrophic costs, and has cross-party support.
  • A second, related revelation of the crisis—which also exposed the failure of the British state—is that underneath the apparent simplicity of the NHS’s single national model lies an engine of bewildering complexity, whose lines of responsibility, control, and accountability are unintelligible to voters and even to most politicians.
  • Britain, I was told, has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its center. The pandemic revealed the British state’s inability to manage the nation’s health:
  • Since at least the 1970s, growing inequality between comparatively rich southeast England (including London) and the rest of the country has spurred all parties to pledge to “rebalance the economy” and make it less reliant on the capital. Yet large parts remain poorer than the European average. According to official EU figures, Britain has five regions with a per capita gross domestic product of less than $25,000. France, Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden have none
  • If Britain were part of the United States, it would be anywhere from the third- to the eighth-poorest state, depending on the measure.
  • Britain’s performance in this crisis has been so bad, it is damaging the country’s reputation, both at home and abroad.
  • Inside Downing Street, officials believe that the lessons of the pandemic apply far beyond the immediate confines of elderly care and coronavirus testing, taking in Britain’s long-term economic failures and general governance, as well as what they regard as its ineffective foreign policy and diplomacy.
  • the scale of the task itself is enormous. “We need a complete revamp of our government structure because it’s not fit for purpose anymore,” Boyd told me. “I just don’t know if we really understand our weakness.”
  • In practice, does Johnson have the confidence to match his diagnosis of Britain’s ills, given the timidity of his approach during the pandemic? The nagging worry among even Johnson’s supporters in Parliament is that although he may campaign as a Ronald Reagan, he might govern as a Silvio Berlusconi, failing to solve the structural problems he has identified.
  • This is not a story of pessimistic fatalism, of inevitable decline. Britain was able to partially reverse a previous slump in the 1980s, and Germany, seen as a European laggard in the ‘90s, is now the West’s obvious success story. One of the strengths of the Westminster parliamentary system is that it occasionally produces governments—like Johnson’s—with real power to effect change, should they try to enact it.
  • It has been overtaken by many of its rivals, whether in terms of health provision or economic resilience, but does not seem to realize it. And once the pandemic passes, the problems Britain faces will remain: how to sustain institutions so that they bind the country together, not pull it apart; how to remain prosperous in the 21st century’s globalized economy; how to promote its interests and values; how to pay for the ever-increasing costs of an aging population.
  • “The really important question,” Boyd said, “is whether the state, in its current form, is structurally capable of delivering on the big-picture items that are coming, whether pandemics or climate change or anything else.”
sidneybelleroche

Haiti kidnap: Gang wants $17 million ransom for American and Canadian missionaries, rep... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sidneybelleroche on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The gang that kidnapped a group of 17 American and Canadian missionaries in Haiti has asked for $1 million each for their release
  • The 16 American citizens and one Canadian were kidnapped by the powerful "400 Mawozo" gang on Saturday after visiting an orphanage in Croix-des-Bouquets, a northeast suburb of the capital Port-au-Prince
  • the missionaries were being held in a safe house right outside the suburb by the gang
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  • The FBI and Haitian police are in contact with the kidnappers, adding that negotiations could take weeks
  • The kidnapped missionaries are affiliated with the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, which confirmed the kidnapping on Sunday in a statement, saying the abducted group was made up of five men, seven women and five children.Read More
  • the five children abducted included an 8-month-old baby and minors ages 3, 6, 14 and 15.
  • Their abduction is part of a wave of indiscriminate kidnappings that has become more brazen as the country suffers from political instability, civil unrest, lack of quality healthcare and severe poverty.
  • The 400 Mawozo has been growing in strength for the past three years, numbering up to 150 members, and has essentially taken control of Croix des Bouquets
  • Kidnapping for ransom is a hallmark activity of the gang. They have abducted dozens of people this year alone, including foreign nationals
  • kidnappings have surged in Haiti this year -- with a nearly 300% increase since July, CARDH said.
  • The 400 Mawozo has typically demanded ransoms of around $20,000
sidneybelleroche

Haiti prosecutor seeks charges against PM Ariel Henry in connection with president's as... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

crisis history

shared by sidneybelleroche on 14 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • Haiti's top prosecutor is seeking charges against Prime Minister Ariel Henry in connection with the assassination of the late President Jovenel Moise.
  • Bedford Claude previously invited Henry to testify about the case, citing evidence that a key suspect in the assassination called him in the hours after the murder
  • That suspect, former Haitian Justice Ministry official Joseph Felix Badio, is currently believed to be on the run.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • he is discussing possible charges against Henry with the judge.
Javier E

Li Keqiang: China 'saddened and deeply worried by Ukraine situation' | News | The Times - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...r-says-pm-li-keqiang-jqksg6wv7

china ukraine situation

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • The Chinese premier has described the situation in Ukraine as disconcerting and pledged “best efforts” from his government to help negotiations for peace.
  • “The Ukraine situation has grabbed the world’s attention, and the Chinese side is deeply worried and greatly saddened,” Li said at his once-a-year press conference on the sidelines of the annual national parliament. “We sincerely hope the Ukraine situation can be eased and peace be restored as early as possible.
  • “We will make our best efforts to support Russia and Ukraine to overcome difficulties and conduct negotiations that should result in peace. We support and encourage all efforts that can help solve the crisis peacefully. The urgent task is to avoid the situation from escalating or getting out of control, which is the consensus of the international community and all sides.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The West hopes that Beijing, as Moscow’s most powerful ally, can mediate for a ceasefire but Beijing has only reaffirmed its “comprehensive, co-operative partnership” with Moscow and used the war to further denigrate Washington before the Chinese people.
  • Yet, despite its criticisms of western sanctions against Russia, there is no sign that the Chinese government has undermined them, Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, said
  • William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told the Senate intelligence committee yesterday that Beijing did not anticipate the difficulties that the Russians were going to encounter.
  • “I don’t think they anticipated that the Russian military was going to prove largely ineffective so far. I don’t think they anticipated that the West would react with such resolve,”
Javier E

Britain's Guilty Men and Women - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671812

history uk pm crisis decline politics

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point.
  • when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?
  • He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”
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  • 1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.
  • The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
  • When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010
  • For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over
  • Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.
  • In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!
  • May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.
  • Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.
  • Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.
  • Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen
  • Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.
  • Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.
  • For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.
  • A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.
  • A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.
  • May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.
  • Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.
  • In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.
  • Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.
  • each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.
Javier E

The Liz Truss Travesty Becomes Britain's Humiliation - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671738

uk decline poverty institutions humiliation pm crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers
  • Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.
  • Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position. It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance.
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  • What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy.
  • Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.
  • We are now almost 15 years past the seismic financial crisis of 2008 and on to our fifth prime minister. Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.
Javier E

Trump and Johnson Were Accused of Breaking Rules. One Lost Party Support. - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hnson-trump-conservatives.html

rules party support trump johnson uk pm truth democracy

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Even before the vote on Monday, the condemnation of Mr. Johnson by his Tory colleagues on the privileges committee was striking. Not only was it a stinging rebuke of a popular, if factually challenged, politician, but it was also a clarion call for the restoration of truth as the bedrock principle in a democracy.
  • “The outcome is much worse than expected,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington, who noted that the committee had been expected to recommend at most a 30-day suspension. “Its severity suggests the committee had a broader purpose in their decision: that of reaffirming the fundamental importance of truth in British politics.”
  • “It’s the first time where he has finally been caught out,” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in the Brussels bureau of The Daily Telegraph in the 1990s and wrote a critical biography of him. “If he hadn’t been caught out today, that would have been pretty much a mortal blow to British democracy.”
Javier E

To move on, consign Boris Johnson and his vanity to spam - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...d-his-vanity-to-spam-ccks8kfdr

vanity pm uk boris truth effects

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • Some voters, we should admit, enthused about Johnson because he made them laugh. I am haunted by the memory of a woman who told a BBC radio interviewer back in 2018: “I want Boris to become Tory leader because he will make politics fun!” But politics, and especially government, is not meant to be fun.
  • He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It is striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty, but is incapable of giving it to others. He has neither principles nor personal convictions, save about his own ambitions and desires. Far from being the genial Mr Nice Guy he seeks to project, Tony Soprano would find him a tad ruthless.
  • He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.
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  • A decade or two ago, while many foreigners did not especially like the British, they respected us as sensible, decent people who made our society work. Today, that sentiment has vanished, swept away by Johnson and Liz Truss, his own unworthy nominee to succeed himself.
  • At the end of Act 2 of Henry IV Part 2, jesting Falstaff pleads with Prince Hal not to “banish plump Jack”. The prince coldly answered: “I do. I will.” When the crown was placed upon Henry’s brow, the comedy of the fat charlatan was indeed played out, the scoundrel banished.
  • The Conservative Party, and the British people, have been very foolish to humour their own Falstaff through these past sorry years. If they cannot banish plump Boris now, they sacrifice all hope of regaining the respect for Britain which has been sacrificed to his cavorting.
Javier E

Opinion | Boris Johnson's Repressive Legislation Reveals Who He Really Is - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ris-johnson-britain-bills.html

PM civil liberties UK policy politics

shared by Javier E on 10 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Amid the chaos wrought by the pandemic, Brexit tumult and increasing questions about the stability of Mr. Johnson’s individual position, the full scale of the impending assault on civil liberties has — understandably — not yet come into focus for much of the British public. The list of legislation is long and deliberately overwhelming. But pieced together, the picture is bleakly repressive.
  • It’s a truism that nations sleepwalk into tyranny, and England — the most politically powerful of the nations comprising Britain — is no exception. For decades it has possessed all the necessary ingredients: ever more spiteful nationalism, press fealty sold to the highest bidder and a fervent, misplaced belief that authoritarianism could never set up shop here, because we simply wouldn’t let it.
  • In this event, though, concerted opposition to Mr. Johnson’s plans has not materialized.
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  • His place in the history books, however, is secured. He will forever be the libertine whose pursuit of personal freedom and “control” saw his countrymen robbed of theirs.
Javier E

Opinion | The Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab. These 5 Key Points Explain Why. - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-lab-leak.html

pandemic origin covid china lab history investigation

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
  • If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.
  • The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
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  • Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
  • Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
  • When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
  • The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.
  • The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature
  • The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
  • Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.
  • By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
  • In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.
  • owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.
  • While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
  • Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
  • When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
  • At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl
  • In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
  • Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
  • In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.
  • In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”
  • The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.
  • ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.
  • In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.
  • Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
  • An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”
  • Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
  • SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
  • One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.
  • The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
  • In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed
  • To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
  • A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019
  • More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
  • Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.
  • Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.
  • With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections
  • investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
  • Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.
  • No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
  • In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals
  • In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.
  • it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.
  • a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.
  • Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.
  • it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.
  • Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.
  • A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic
  • Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.
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