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The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay

The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers — and eventually an effective vaccine.

The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings — that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full — is a fantasy, most experts said.

YASNOHORODKA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Standing amid the charred remains of a roadside hotel on a major highway near Kyiv, Isa Akayev explained what drove him to build his Muslim volunteer unit and fight for Ukraine.

Many Tatars opposed Moscow's annexation of Crimea, which had followed the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president amid mass street protests.Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Tatars - Akayev’s grandparents among them - in 1944, accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany.They were only allowed to return with their descendants in the 1980s - as Akayev did from Uzbekistan in 1989 - and many welcomed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation.

become a fully-fledged unit of Ukraine's army.Dozens of other volunteer battalions sprang up in 2014 and began helping Ukraine's unprepared regular army to fight in the Donbas. They included two Chechen units, a Georgian one, and several with a right-wing nationalist ethos. Some have since disarmed while others have joined the regular army.Russia has been scathing about such units. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the eve of the war that providing shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to former volunteer battalions was evidence of a "militaristic psychosis".A Ukrainian presidential envoy said in March that such volunteer battalions now numbered more than 100. Ukraine's government celebrates them as heroes, celebrating their exploits on an annual volunteers' day.

In a military training class north of Kiev late last month, volunteer ­instructor Viktor Mosgovoi led 30 would-be officers through hours of jumps, breathing exercises and group massages — Ukraine’s first mandatory psychological training for recruits

Most of them followed along with blank looks or smirks on their faces. A few erupted into giggles. “Sing a song about what you see,” Mosgovoi suggested as a way to beat the battlefield blues. “And don’t drink.”

In nearly a quarter-century of independence, Ukraine’s military has seen so little combat that the country’s defense minister estimated the nation had only 6,000 battle-ready troops a year ago. Over the past 10 months, the Ukrainian army has drafted almost 70,000 soldiers in a war against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.

Berg, who lived in Columbia, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was the last known survivor of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as the several units of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War came to be called

One of the last, killed a year and a half later, was James Lardner, a 24-year-old from a famous literary family, who traveled to Spain as a New York Herald Tribune correspondent and then decided to fight.

World War II has largely pushed that conflict out of our collective memory, but it was momentous for the people of Spain, and for the 40,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries, 2,800 of them American, who fought in it. Eighty years ago this July, a large group of right-wing army officers staged a coup against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic.

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.

This contagion has a weakness.

rguments will rage for a long time about whether the United States could have won the war in Afghanistan with another approach — or even won at all. But after the nation invested two decades, more than $2 trillion, and the lives of almost 2,500 military personnel, the outcome remains the same.

The U.S. military now faces the challenge of processing this defeat on two different levels: as individuals, among those who deployed and fought, and as an institution, in which the military’s leaders should now help the all-volunteer force process this painful outcome while simultaneously ensuring that it remains strong and capable of winning the nation’s future wars.

Institutionally, the U.S. military faces three critical tasks. First, it has both a moral and a practical obligation to dissect what went wrong during the 20 years of war and to demonstrate that it has processed and learned from those hard lessons.

“The Mormon Church is very different than any other church. … Traditional Christianity and Judaism make a clear distinction between what is spiritual and what is temporal, while Mormon theology specifically denies that there is such a distinction.”

To Latter-day Saints, opening megamalls, operating a billion-dollar media and insurance conglomerate, and running a Polynesian theme park are all part of doing God’s work. Says Quinn: “In the Mormon [leadership’s] worldview, it’s as spiritual to give alms to the poor, as the old phrase goes in the Biblical sense, as it is to make a million dollars.”

“There are religious groups that own radio stations, but they don’t also own cattle ranches. There are religious groups that own retreats, but they don’t also own insurance companies,” says Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa and co-author of the recently published book Could I Vote for a Mormon for President? “Given their array of corporate interests, it would probably make more sense to refer to them as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Holdings Inc.”

This rebellious city in western Ukraine, which basically declared itself autonomous as the nation’s political crisis escalated into deadly violence this week, is the recruiting center for volunteers to staff the bloodied protester ramparts in the capital, Kiev, 330 miles to the east.

The deadly violence in Kiev energized the residents of Lviv, whose cultural and historic ties to

oland are strong and where a rugged nationalism has long been a dominant spirit

Meant to run on hardware already in the field, like Blackberry devices, RapidFTR can add a child to the system with only scant bits of information. If a child cannot give their full name, or is too young or too scared speak, a photo alone can begin the process. The app works both with and without a wireless connection, by syncing to a server later, if needed.

His earlier projects in the N.Y.U. program were more whimsical. He created things like automated telephone pranks, but the child reunification app became his master’s thesis, and he later joined UNICEF as an employee. With the assistance of some pro-bono engineering from the software company Thoughtworks, he was able to get the program going and then recruited an army of volunteers to build RapidFTR

Today the program is entirely open-source and driven by volunteers. Mr. Just, too, has now become a volunteer for his own app, in addition to teaching the “Design for UNICEF” class that he was once a student in.

In 2010, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court effectively blew apart the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside groups and their use of corporate and labor money in elections. That same year, a related ruling from a lower court made it easier for wealthy individuals to finance those groups to the bottom of their bank accounts if they so chose. What followed has been the most unbridled spending in elections since before Watergate. In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion.

The result was a massive power shift, from the party bosses to the rich individuals who ran the super PACs (as most of these new organizations came to be called). Almost overnight, traditional party functions — running TV commercials, setting up field operations, maintaining voter databases, even recruiting candidates — were being supplanted by outside groups.

With the advent of Citizens United, any players with the wherewithal, and there are surprisingly many of them, can start what are in essence their own political parties, built around pet causes or industries and backing politicians uniquely answerable to them. No longer do they have to buy into the system. Instead, they buy their own pieces of it outright, to use as they see fit. “Suddenly, we privatized politics,”

Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish resistance to the Nazi regime, deliberately let himself be captured by the Germans in 1940 so that he could gather information about Hitler’s concentration camps. Inside Auschwitz, he set up resistance cells — even as he almost died of starvation, torture and disease.

Then Pilecki helped build a radio transmitter, and, in 1942, he broadcast to the outside world accounts of atrocities inside Auschwitz — as the Nazis frantically searched the camp looking for the transmitter. He worked to expose the Nazi gas chambers, brutal sexual experiments and savage camp punishments, in hopes that the world would act.

Finally, in April 1943, he escaped from Auschwitz, bullets flying after him, and wrote an eyewitness report laying out the horror of the extermination camps. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for an attack on Auschwitz.

their paper describes the results of an experiment they arranged in the state of Queensland, Australia. Mujcic and Frijters liken the racial overtones of Queensland's history to those of the American South; it took until 1963 for black Aboriginals to gain the right to vote in Australia. In their experiment, Mujcic and Frijters enlisted 29 volunteers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to board public buses, tell the drivers that they lacked the roughly $3.50 needed to ride, and say that they needed to get to a stop about a mile away. They were then asked to record whether the driver let them stay onboard. (They were also told to note the time of day and the weather conditions

the experiment yielded data on more than 1,500 encounters between volunteers and drivers. Nearly two-thirds of the volunteers’ pleas were successful, but the rate at which they were granted differed greatly across ethnicities. White participants were given a lot more leeway than black ones: 72 percent of white subjects were allowed to stay onboard, while only 36 percent of black ones were. The rate for South Asian subjects was around 50 percent, and for East Asians it was 73 percent.

“Many people conceptualize prejudice as being subjective, emotional, and open to the interpretation of the victim. However, thinking of prejudice in this way can lead to ‘victim blaming’ because people assume that the victim’s depiction of the events is self-serving. By quantifying these biases, researchers make the bias more objective.”

For now, scientists are asking a lot of questions about Covid-19 booster shots, but they don’t yet have many answers.

Different pathogens affect our immune system in different ways. For some diseases, like the measles, getting sick once leads to lifelong protection from another infection. But for other pathogens, our immune defenses wane over time.

But early signs are encouraging. Researchers have been drawing blood from volunteers in vaccine trials and measuring their levels of antibodies and immune cells that target the coronavirus. The levels are dropping, but gradually. It’s possible that with this slow rate of decline, vaccine protection will remain strong for a long time.

This access to higher-level PPE was based on the assumption thatICU wards are more dangerous because treatments such as continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), used to support patients’ breathing, generated large amounts of aerosols – which linger in the air and can be breathed into the lungs.

Staff working in other hospital areas, GP surgeries and care homes are issued with looser-fitting surgical masks, which afford little protection against these tiny particles, but block larger virus-carrying droplets.

The new research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, turns these assumptions on their head.

examining the relative contributions of different modes of transmission — whether through contaminated surfaces; tiny aerosols; or large, liquid-laden droplets expelled by coughs or sneezes — remains a daunting task for experts in the field

“We’ve been studying the flu for 102 years and still don’t know for sure how it’s transmitted,”

The researchers deliberately infected 52 volunteers with a strain of influenza, a setup called a human challenge trial. They then had these “donors” mix and socialize with 75 healthy “recipients” for four days to test how often the virus got passed to others.

Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits — in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.

In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers — friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues — will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people — or computers — with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.

“You don’t want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out,” said a Romney campaign official who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. “A lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes.”

One in coma after clinical trial in France

The oral trial was conducted by a private laboratory in the western city of Rennes.

Media reports that the drug is a cannabis-based painkiller have been denied by the health ministry.

It has been a little over a year since the #MeToo movement made it safer for women to speak out about the toxic aspects of workplaces in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Since then, many tech companies and venture-capital firms have begun developing internal policies and diversity initiatives that they hope will shake up a culture that was previously defined by the idea that the single white man with no obligations outside of work is the best kind of employee.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the most profound cultural disruptions are happening in a subtle and less public way, influenced by the women in tech who are fed up with the status quo and want change to happen more quickly.

“Changing culture is all about these kinds of micro moments,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab who has conducted research on troubling workplace behavior in the tech industry. “It is the micro moments that will become the macro and change the norms of professionalism.”