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saberal

Opinion | The Risk of Suspending Coronavirus Vaccine Patents - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ronavirus-vaccine-patents.html

politics US crisis

shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • South Africa and India have petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend some intellectual property protections from Covid-19 drugs, vaccines and diagnostic technologies. In support of the effort, Doctors Without Borders began a social media campaign urging governments to “put lives over profits,” warning of “pharma profiteering” and urging support for “#NoCovidMonopolies.” The W.T.O.,
  • Development of a new medicine is risky and costly. Consider that scientists have spent decades — and billions of dollars — working on Alzheimer’s treatments, but still have little to show for it.
  • In trying to defend these rights, the drug industry has made mistakes in the past that have lost people’s trust. More than 22 years ago, for example, a group of drug companies sued the South African government for trying to import cheaper anti-AIDS drugs amid an epidemic.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • In South Africa and India, pharmaceutical companies are already working with local partners to make their vaccines available.
  • There are, to be sure, serious obstacles to distributing Covid-19 vaccines quickly and fairly around the world. But they have nothing to do with intellectual property. The challenge, rather, is speedy manufacturing.
Javier E

We Know Enough About Omicron to Know That We're in Trouble - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...621038

Covid-19 infection

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • A lot has changed for Omicron in just two weeks. At December’s onset, the variant was barely present in Europe, showing up in 1 to 2 percent of COVID cases. Now it’s accounting for 72 percent of new cases in London, where everybody seems to know somebody with COVID.
  • The same exponential growth is happening—or will happen—in the United States too, just in time for the holidays.
  • Here is some simple math to explain the danger: Suppose we have two viruses, one that is twice as transmissible as the other. (For the record, Omicron is currently three to five times as transmissible as Delta in the U.K.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • And suppose it takes five days between a person’s getting infected and their infecting others. After 30 days, the more transmissible virus is now causing 26, or 64, times as many new cases as the less transmissible one.
  • Not every case will be mild, though, and even a small hospitalization rate on top of a huge case number will be a big number.
  • Now, as my colleague Ed Yong reports, Omicron could push a collapsing health-care system further into disaster. Hospitals are already dealing with the flu and other winter viruses. They’re already canceling elective surgeries.
  • If there are no changes to behavior or policy, this year’s winter wave would peak at about double the hospitalizations of last winter at its worst, and 20 percent more deaths, according to the most pessimistic of projections
  • The most optimistic projection sees a caseload similar to last winter’s, but hospitalizations and deaths at about half of where they were back then, assuming the vaccines keep up their very high protection against severe illness.
  • Vaccine protection against severe illness should be more durable than it is against infection, but may still take a hit
  • Very preliminary data from South Africa’s largest health insurer suggest that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 70 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from Omicron infections, down from 93 percent before.
  • If that holds, it’s a “huge decrease,” Meyers says, and one that matches the assumptions of her team’s grimmer—but not grimmest—projections. When they modeled scenarios where vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization dropped by about that much, they saw a difference of tens of thousands of deaths.
  • The available evidence on Omicron’s inherent severity is likely to be biased in ways that make it appear more promising. First of all, hospitalizations lag infections.
  • Second, the first people infected may skew young and are thus more likely to have mild cases regardless of the variant
  • third, some of the mildness attributed to the virus may result instead from existing immunity. In South Africa, where doctors are reporting relatively low hospitalizations compared with previous waves, many cases are probably reinfections
  • The South Africa health-insurer data suggest that Omicron might carry a 29 percent lower risk of hospitalization than the original virus, when adjusted for risk factors including age, sex, vaccination status, and documented prior infection—but many prior infections may be undocumented, which would make the reduction in risk seem bigger than it really is. (A recent analysis of early U.K. cases found “at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta.”)
  • Either way, in the short run, we will have a massive number of Omicron cases on top of a massive number of Delta cases. Together they will infect huge numbers of people, vaccinated or not
Javier E

Restoring Henry by Michael O'Donnell | The Washington Monthly - 0 views

www.washingtonmonthly.com/...restoring_henry057190.php

kissinger foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed
  • The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.
  • [A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Tellingly, at several points in the narrative Ferguson strays from his thesis and defends Kissinger on more utilitarian grounds: the Cold War was real, its outcome was uncertain, and the United States needed every ugly advantage it could find on the geostrategic battlefield. The crimes of communist regimes vastly dwarfed Kissinger’s in scope and scale, Ferguson writes
  • The book also largely sidesteps the topic of Kissinger’s famous vanity, thin skin, and penchant for insincere flattery
  • Ferguson’s problem is not a conflict of interest: it is his ideological affinity with his subject, and his determination because of that affinity to present his man favorably
  • This begins with Ferguson’s use of language, which repeatedly seeks to bring the reader onto Kissinger’s side
  • Ferguson spends much of the book attempting to rehabilitate Kissinger’s character. He makes an unpersuasive attempt to convince readers that Kissinger was not the relentless ladder climber we think we know.
  • Ferguson is now on the hook for his next volume to weigh the strategic implications of Kissinger’s most barbaric foreign policies once he assumed power
  • Kissinger provided information and analysis to Nixon’s aide Richard Allen in breathless telephone calls, which he insisted be kept secret. Nixon’s campaign subsequently passed word to the South Vietnamese government that it could obtain better peace terms under a Nixon administration. South Vietnam pulled out of the talks just days before the U.S. election, the Democratic Party was humiliated, Nixon won the presidency—and then he immediately appointed Kissinger, a man he had met only once, his national security advisor.
  • Johnson referred to the maneuver—spiking a peace deal in order to win an election, thereby extending the Vietnam War—as treason
  • Yet Ferguson again is not convinced. He questions Allen’s reliability as a witness and contends that Nixon’s memoir does not prove that Kissinger was his insider. (Decide for yourself. Here is Nixon: “During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.”)
  • Ferguson also makes the legalistic argument that Kissinger’s intervention was not determinative, for Nixon had other informers, and North Vietnam “would surely” have found a pretext to abandon the peace talks had South Vietnam not walked out first. If we use Johnson’s terms, I suppose that reduces the charge to attempted treason.
  • Kissinger’s Shadow. Grandin, a historian at New York University, contends that Kissinger has left us with war as an instrument of policy, less as a last resort than as a kind of peacock’s strut. “Kissinger taught that there was no such thing as stasis in international affairs,” Grandin writes. “[G]reat states are always either gaining or losing influence, which means that the balance of power has to be constantly tested through gesture and deed.” (He quotes Kissinger as asking a fellow cabinet member, “Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?”)
  • The abiding concern driving Kissinger’s foreign policy was therefore maintaining credibility: action to avoid the appearance of inability to act.
  • Secrecy is very much a part of Kissinger’s legacy. His systematic efforts to keep the war in Cambodia from becoming public—false records, wiretaps, blatant lies told to Congress—are much more disturbing than the fourth-rate jiggery-pokery of Watergate
  • Ferguson downplays this too, projecting his disagreement by writing disdainfully that “we are told” Kissinger loved secrecy
julia rhodes

Political Fight in South Sudan Targets Civilians - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...south-sudan-crisis.html

US history politics crisis policy culture south sudan targets nytimes nytimes com

shared by julia rhodes on 25 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Of the 200 people he was held with, fewer than 10 survived, he said. Small groups were led away, followed by gunshots. Mr. Wang said he had seen several graves with “dead bodies, yes, so many.” He credited his survival to the fact that he speaks Dinka and did not have any of the markings on his face associated with the Nuer ethnic group.
  • On Tuesday, the South Sudanese government said it had retaken Bor, a city where an estimated 17,000 people have sought refuge at a United Nations compound.
  • In the town of Akobo, armed Nuer youths overran a United Nations base, killing Dinka civilians who were taking shelter there along with two of the peacekeepers trying to protect them. United Nations officials have said Dinka workers have been killed at oil facilities.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “We have seen the signs of this already and we do not want to see any development of this nature taking hold in this country, and we have the historical analogies fresh in our minds,” Ms. Johnson said, in a seeming reference to conflicts in Bosnia or Rwanda.
Javier E

No Escape From History - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385352

history racism moral equivalence sin American idea morality

shared by Javier E on 12 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Jim Crow and slavery were not merely the sins of Southerners and the religious right, but the sins of America, itself. Enslavement was not merely a boon for the South, but for the country as a whole. (During the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of secessionist sympathy mostly because of its economic ties to the South.) And there is simply no way to understand segregation in this country without understanding the housing policies of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the G.I. Bill signed by Democratic president Harry Truman.
  • There are now intelligent people going on television to tell us that the president should not use the word "crusade" to describe ... The Crusades.
  • The problem is history. Or rather the problem is that there is no version of history that can award the West a stable moral high-ground.
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  • Some of the most prominent Christian leaders in this country used their authority to burnish the credentials of South Africa's racist regime—not in the 1960s, in the 1980s.
  • In such a world, a certainty about which "side" is always good and which "side" is forever evil doesn't really exist. And in an uncertain world, Obama is making a wise appeal for vigilance—vigilance against the death cult of ISIS, and vigilance against the allure of death cults period—even those inaugurated in the name of one's preferred God.
Javier E

A History of the Iberian Peninsula, as Told by Its Skeletons - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iberia-prehistory-dna.html

iberia spain portugal DNA history

shared by Javier E on 19 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • With a total of 419 ancient human genomes obtained by various laboratories, Iberia offers a rich trove. Scientists have recovered only 174 ancient genomes in Britain, and just eight in Japan.
  • researchers have also uncovered evidence of migrations that were previously unknown. Iberia, it now seems, was a crossroads long before recorded history, as far back as the last ice age.
  • Iberian hunter-gatherers had a remarkable mix of genes, showing that they descended from two profoundly distinct groups of early European hunter-gatherers.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • One of these groups can be traced as far back as 35,000 years, thanks to a skeleton discovered at a site in Belgium called Goyet. The Goyet-related people spread across Europe, only to be replaced on much of the continent near the end of the Ice Age by a genetically distinct population. The earliest sign of the second group appears 14,000 years ago, known to researchers by DNA in a skeleton at an Italian site called Villabruna.
  • the Goyet and Villabruna people coexisted. Hunter-gatherers across the peninsula had a mixture of ancestry from the two peoples.
  • But whatever solitude Iberia might have offered came to an end about 7,500 years ago, when new people arrived with crops and livestock. These first farmers, originally from Anatolia, brought with them a distinctive genetic signature.
  • Ninety percent of the DNA from the later skeletons derives from the Anatolian farmers; 10 percent comes from the hunter-gatherers.
  • Starting about 6,000 years ago, Dr. Olalde and his colleagues found, hunter-gatherer ancestry in Iberian farmers actually increased to 20 percent.
  • A skeleton from an elaborate grave in central Spain about 4,400 years old belonged to a man whose ancestry was 100 percent North African
  • findings suggest that people were moving into Iberia from Africa more than 3,000 years before the rise of the Roman Empire. “These are cosmopolitan places,”
  • About 4,500 years ago, still another wave of people arrived, profoundly altering the makeup of Iberia.A few centuries earlier, nomads from the steppes of what is now Russia turned up in Eastern Europe with horses and wagons. They spread across the continent, giving up nomadic life and intermarrying with European farmers.
  • When they finally reached Iberia, these people spread out far and wide. “They really have an impact on the whole peninsula,”
  • DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.
  • To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.“I cannot say what it is,
  • he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,”
  • Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.
  • over several centuries, palaces and fortresses began to rise, and power became concentrated in the hands of a few. Dr. Risch speculated that the cultural shift had something to do with the genetic shift
  • The Bronze Age in Iberia was followed by the Iron Age about 2,800
  • Iron Age Iberians could trace some of their ancestry to new waves of people arriving from northern and Central Europe, possibly marking the rise of so-called Celtiberian culture on the peninsula.
  • scientists found a growing amount of North African ancestry in skeletons from the Iron Age. That may reflect trade around the Mediterranean, which brought North Africans to Iberian towns, where they settled down.
  • North African ancestry increased in Iberia even more after Romans took control. Now the peninsula was part of an empire that thrived on widespread trade. At the same time, people from southern Europe and the Near East also began leaving an imprint
  • The Basque speak a language that is unrelated to other European tongues. Some researchers have speculated that they descended from a population that had been distinct since the Bronze Age or earlier.Genetically, at least, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Before the Roman era, the Basque had DNA that was indistinguishable from that of other Iron Age Iberians
  • After the fall of Rome, ancient DNA in Iberia reflects its medieval history. Skeletons from the Muslim era show growing ancestry from both North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The researchers were also able to group Spaniards into five genetic clusters. On a map, these groups form five strips running north to south. Those strips line up neatly with history.
anniina03

Last survivor of transatlantic slave trade discovered - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...education-52010859

us history culture

shared by anniina03 on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The transatlantic slave trade might seem like something from a distant and barbaric era - but a historian has found evidence its last survivor was alive in living memory.
  • Matilda died in Selma, Alabama, in January 1940, at the age 83 - and her rebellious life story was the last living link with slaves abducted from Africa.
  • Matilda had been captured by slave traders in West Africa at the age of two, arriving in Alabama in 1860 on board one of the last transatlantic slave ships.With her mother Grace, and sister Sallie, Matilda had been bought by a wealthy plantation owner called Memorable Creagh.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The couple's relationship was "astonishing" for its era, she says, crossing boundaries of race, class, religion and social expectation.
  • "But Matilda's story is particularly remarkable because she resisted what was expected of a black woman in the US South in the years after emancipation," Dr Durkin says. "She didn't get married. "Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage with a white German-born man, with whom she had 14 children."
  • In her 70s, Matilda set out on another journey, travelling for 15 miles on dirt roads to a county courthouse to make a claim for compensation for her enslavement.By then, she was one of a small number of surviving slaves from Africa who seem to have made contact with each other.
cdavistinnell

Zimbabwe in limbo but Mugabe's exit is 'a done deal' - CNN - 0 views

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

Zimbabwe South Africa politics power

shared by cdavistinnell on 16 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Harare, Zimbabwe (CNN)The decades-long grip on power of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe appeared to be over on Thursday as his main opposition rival returned to the country amid efforts to form a transitional government.
  • Morgan Tsvangirai, who had been receiving cancer treatment abroad, returned to Harare after Wednesday's military takeover
  • talks were underway with military leaders about an administration that includes the opposition, with the tacit backing of key regional allies.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Zimbabwe's military seized control of state institutions early Wednesday and placed Mugabe under house arrest, but insisted it was not staging a coup, throwing the country into political limbo.
  • "There is a transition of power underway and it has tacit agreement from regional powers,"
  • Key to any transitional administration will be Emmerson Mnangagwa, the powerful former Vice President, who was widely tipped to become the country's next leader. Mnangagwa was dismissed by Mugabe last week, in a decision that triggered the latest political turmoil.
  • Mnangagwa remains one of the most powerful figures in the country and derives much of his support from the military. He has not been sighted in Harare since he was fired and his whereabouts are still unknown.
  • In a sign that power in the country is quickly shifting, several of Mugabe's longtime allies are turning on him.
  • "There are military tanks on the streets, which has never happened before," said one Harare resident. "The military is obviously now in charge despite their insistence that it's not a coup. It is."
  • The US embassy in Harare urged Americans to "limit unnecessary movements." It said that while the US government "does not take sides in matters of internal Zimbabwean politics," it was deeply concerned by the military's actions and called for restraint.
  • Mugabe, the only leader most Zimbabweans have ever known, ruled the landlocked country for 37 years with an iron fist.
  • He rose to power as a freedom fighter and was seen as Zimbabwe's Nelson Mandela. But he quickly waged a campaign of oppression to consolidate his position, extinguishing the political opposition through violent crackdowns.
  • Mugabe's hardline policies also pushed the country into poverty. Its flourishing economy began to disintegrate after a program of land seizures from white farmers, and agricultural output plummeted and inflation soared.
Javier E

Life After Oil and Gas - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...life-after-oil-and-gas.html

energy renewable gas policy environment fossil

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?
  • Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.
  • Could we? Should we?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.
  • New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030
  • “You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.”
  • “There is plenty of room for wind and solar to grow and they are becoming more competitive, but these are still variable resources — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow,” said Alex Klein, the research director of IHS Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm on renewable energy. “An industrial economy needs a reliable power source, so we think fossil fuel will be an important foundation of our energy mix for the next few decades.”
  • improving the energy efficiency of homes, vehicles and industry was an easier short-term strategy. He noted that the 19.5 million residents of New York State consume as much energy as the 800 million in sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa)
  • a rapid expansion of renewable power would be complicated and costly. Using large amounts of renewable energy often requires modifying national power grids, and renewable energy is still generally more expensive than using fossil fuels
  • Promoting wind and solar would mean higher electricity costs for consumers and industry.
  • many of the European countries that have led the way in adopting renewables had little fossil fuel of their own, so electricity costs were already high. Others had strong environmental movements that made it politically acceptable to endure higher prices
  • countries could often get 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like wind and solar without much modification to their grids. A few states, like Iowa and South Dakota, get nearly that much of their electricity from renewable power (in both states, wind), while others use little at all.
  • America is rich in renewable resources and (unlike Europe) has the empty space to create wind and solar plants. New York State has plenty of wind and sun to do the job, they found. Their blueprint for powering the state with clean energy calls for 10 percent land-based wind, 40 percent offshore wind, 20 percent solar power plants and 18 percent solar panels on rooftops
  • the substantial costs of enacting the scheme could be recouped in under two decades, particularly if the societal cost of pollution and carbon emissions were factored in
maxwellokolo

Jacob Zuma: South Africa's 'Teflon President' escapes party backlash - 0 views

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

shared by maxwellokolo on 30 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 30 Nov 16
     
    There had been speculation that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party would hold a vote of confidence on Zuma, nicknamed the "Teflon President" for his ability to survive scandals, at its National Executive Committee meeting over the weekend.
jongardner04

'Anti-apartheid like move can end Israel-Palestine conflict' - The Economic Times - 0 views

economictimes.indiatimes.com/...47498799.cms

shared by jongardner04 on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Palestinians can play a crucial role in ending the decades-long conflict with Israel by keeping up the pressure and using their collective power like the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, says Palestine's leading writer Raja Shehadeh.
Javier E

'Empire of Cotton,' by Sven Beckert - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html

cotton history economics global violence government intervention capitalism

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity.
  • The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”
  • Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton.
  • In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.
  • the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
  • Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence.
  • Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.
  • As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa.
  • The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.”
  • by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century.
  • it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well.
  • another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention.
  • it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere
  • Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent.
  • From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded
  • Britain forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import duties on British cotton.
  • he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other ways
  • Today, a “giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into clothing back to Asia
  • violence in different forms is still all too present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year
  • In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.
  • in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills a century before
redavistinnell

Church split over homosexuality would be a failure - Welby - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/uk-35278124

church split homosexuality failure

shared by redavistinnell on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Church split over homosexuality would be a failure - Welby
  • A split in the Anglican Church over the issue of homosexuality "would not be a disaster, but it would be a failure", the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.
  • Views range from liberals in the US - who do accept openly gay clergy - to conservatives in Africa, who refuse to.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Ever since the liberal Episcopal Church in America consecrated Canon Gene Robinson - a divorced man in a gay relationship - as bishop of New Hampshire in November 2003, sniping within the Communion has intensified.
  • "It would not be good if the Church is unable to set an example to the world of showing how we can love one another and disagree profoundly, because we are brought together by Jesus Christ, not by our own choice."
  • "There's nothing I can do if people decide that they want to leave the room. It won't split the communion."
  • Given the fractious Primates' meetings of the past, the Archbishop of Canterbury has done well simply in persuading all 38 to meet around one table, using much of the personal capital he built up during his visits to every single Anglican province around the globe.
  • The more liberal provinces that are open to changing Church doctrine on marriage in order to allow for same-sex unions include Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, South India, South Africa, the US and Wales.
  • A spokesman for the archbishop added the meeting would be an opportunity for national churches to decide their approach to the next Lambeth Conference - the once-in-a-decade gathering of the worldwide Anglican bishops.
  • A letter sent recently by more than 100 senior Anglicans to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York urging them to ensure the Church repents for "discriminating" against lesbian and gay Christians will be discussed too. It called for the Church to acknowledge members around the world have been treated as "second-class citizens".
johnsonma23

Why Ethiopia is making a historic 'master plan' U-turn - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-africa-35325536

ethiopia bbc

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • A controversial plan by the Ethiopian government to expand the capital, Addis Ababa, is set to be scrapped after a key member of the ruling coalition withdrew its support.
  • Rights groups say that at least 150 protesters have died and another 5,000 have been arrested by security forces. Similar protests in May 2014 left dozens of protesters dead.
  • Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn had vowed on 16 December that his government would be "merciless" towards the protesters, who he described as "anti-peace forces".
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It is unclear what impact the move will have on the economy, which is one of the fastest growing in Africa.
  • Despite the impressive development, Ethiopia is ranked 173 out of the 187 nations surveyed in the last UN Human Development Index and has high poverty indexes, mainly related to the rising population.
  • Why Ethiopia is making a historic ‘master plan’ U-turn
  • Any form of development the world over is going to upset someone, and the Ethiopian authorities have always said they would consult communities before bulldozing ahead.
  • The Oromo, who constitute about 40% of Ethiopia's 100 million inhabitants, frequently complain that the government is dominated by the Tigray and Amhara who hail from north of the capital.
  • The country's political stability is fragile and it faces numerous domestic and international disputes.
  • Ethiopia has up to 10 domestic armed rebellions,
  • long-standing rebel activity in the south-eastern state of Somali,
  • Besides the border dispute with Eritrea, which sparked a 1999-2000 war, the country shares volatile borders with Somalia and South Sudan.
  • Most of Ethiopia's population is based in the rural areas and engaged in subsistence farming.
  • While shelving the plan would be a major retreat for the government, it is a sign of political maturity of the EPRDF, which has consistently been accused by rights groups of being heavy-handed towards dissent since coming to power in 1991.
Javier E

What America Taught the Nazis in the 1930s - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...540630

america nazi racial racism legal segregation Jim Crow culture

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • ames Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, which examines how the Third Reich found sustenance for its race-based initiatives in American law.
  • how the United States, a country grounded in such liberal principles as individual rights and the rule of law, could have produced legal ideas and practices “that seemed intriguing and attractive to Nazis.” In exploring this apparent incongruity, his short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values.
  • Whitman’s other goal, which is to examine the status of racial hierarchy in the United States through Nazi eyes. “What the history presented in this book demands that we confront,” he writes, “are questions not about the genesis of Nazism, but about the character of America.”
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  • American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. A pivotal essay in that volume, Herbert Kier’s recommendations for race legislation, devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—which went beyond segregation to include rules governing American Indians, citizenship criteria for Filipinos and Puerto Ricans as well as African Americans, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation in some 30 states. No other country, not even South Africa, possessed a comparably developed set of relevant laws
  • Especially significant were the writings of the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” who spent the 1933–34 academic year in Fayetteville as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Seeking to deploy historical and legal knowledge in the service of Aryan racial purity, Krieger studied a range of overseas race regimes, including contemporary South Africa, but discovered his foundation in American law. His deeply researched writings about the United States began with articles in 1934, some concerning American Indians and others pursuing an overarching assessment of U.S. race legislation—each a precursor to his landmark 1936 book, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”).
  • Whitman’s “smoking gun” is the transcript of a June 5, 1934, conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The record reflects how the most extreme among them, who relied on Krieger’s synoptic scholarship, were especially drawn to American legal codes based on white supremacy. The main conceptual idea was Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction. In both America and Germany, the importance and meaning of race for the most part had been determined less by scientific realities or social conventions than by political decisions enshrined in law.
  • Pushing back against scholarship that downplays the impact in Nazi Germany of the U.S. model of legal racism, Whitman marshals an array of evidence to support the likelihood “that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect direct American influence.”
  • To read Hitler’s American Model is to be forced to engage with the stubborn fact that during the 1933–45 period of the Third Reich, roughly half of the Democratic Party’s members in Congress represented Jim Crow states, and neither major party sought to curtail the race laws so admired by German lawyers and judges.
  • Whitman invokes the work of political scientists who, in the separate-spheres spirit of Tocqueville, distinguish what they call a white-supremacist order from a liberal and egalitarian order. But his own book shows that such a division is too clear-cut.
  • Whitman’s history does not expose the liberal tradition in the United States as merely a sham, as many of the Third Reich’s legal theorists intimated when they highlighted patterns of black and American Indian subordination.
  • Rather, he implicitly challenges readers to consider when and how, under what conditions and in which domains, the ugly features of racism have come most saliently to the fore in America’s liberal democracy
  • Current debates over both sharply remind us that positive outcomes are not guaranteed. The very rules of the democratic game—elections, open media, and political representation—create persisting possibilities for racial demagoguery, fear, and exclusion.
rerobinson03

Opinion | This Is the Wrong Way to Distribute Badly Needed Vaccines - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...accine-covid-distribution.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 May 21 - No Cached
  • Leaders of the effort, known as Covax, argue that vaccines initially should be allocated proportionally by population.
  • Covax is important in the fight against Covid. That’s why its distribution methodology matters. It was formed last year by the World Health Organization; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations “to accelerate the development, production and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines.”
  • South Sudan, for instance, recently destroyed nearly 60,000 doses it received from Covax; Malawi destroyed 20,000. Neither was able to distribute its entire allotment before the vaccines expired.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The Covax distribution plan calls for providing each country with enough vaccine doses for roughly 20 percent of the population. Only after that would countries’ health needs be considered.
  • Peruvians are at far higher risk right now than Ghanaians of similar age and health — and both are at far higher risk than, say, Canadians or Taiwanese. By ignoring differences in risk between countries, Covax undermines its stated aim of protecting “people most at risk and those most likely to transmit the virus.”
  • Need should be the principal criterion for distributing vaccines among countries, but not the only one. Before vaccines are sent, countries must be able to distribute and administer them. Vaccinations — not vaccines — are what save lives.
  • s the global supply of vaccines expands, vaccine manufacturers and nations expecting to have extra doses, including the United States and Britain, must decide which countries to help and how many doses to send to global organizations like Covax.But if Covax’s distribution criteria remain unresponsive to need, countries with spare doses should bypass the organization and distribute them where they will reduce deaths the most.
aniyahbarnett

The Covid-19 pandemic is getting worse. What happens next is up to you. - CNN - 0 views

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

crisis pandemic

shared by aniyahbarnett on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • experts warned the start of 2021 would be a very rough time in this pandemic.
  • The United States just shattered its all-time records for the most Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths reported in one day:
  • On January 2, a record-high 302,506 new infections were reported in one day, according to Johns Hopkins University.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • "These viruses may be able to infect people who are further than 6 feet away from the person who is infected or after that person has left the space," the CDC said.
  • Many hospitals are now filled beyond capacity,
  • pandemic fatigue.
  • And many of those who are sick of taking precautions are getting sick.
  • , more people are socializing indoors.
  • "linger in the air for minutes to hours,"
  • A variant first detected in South Africa
  • Gathering with multiple friends indoors can be dangerous.
  • "If you go to a party with five or more people, almost certainly there's going to be somebody with Covid-19 at that party,"
  • more than 50% of all infections are transmitted from people who aren't showing symptoms.
  • That's an average of 3.5 people getting infected every second.Read More
  • The United States has confirmed at least 76 cases of a highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus that was first detected in the United Kingdom.
  • And the United States ranks 61st in how quickly virus samples are collected from patients, analyzed and then posted to an international database to find new variants.
  • While it may be more transmissible, there's no evidence this variant first detected in the UK is deadlier or causes more severe disease, the CDC said.
  • Some patients have been put in hospital break rooms, parking garages and gift shops.
  • As of Thursday, it has not been detected in the United States.
  • That didn't happen. Not even close.
  • As of Thursday morning, about 10.2 million vaccine doses had been administered, out of roughly 29.3 million doses that have been distributed across the United States, according to the CDC.
  • You can test
  • negative
  • but still be infected and contagious.
  • And don't think you're invincible -- even if you're young and healthy.
  • "We see severe illness among healthy, young adults with no apparent underlying causes," Hotez said.
yehbru

Covid-19 stats are dipping, as variants lurk and vaccines lag - CNN - 0 views

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

Politics US Covid Biden Vaccine Variant World Health Organization

shared by yehbru on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The United States still is at one of its worst spots of the coronavirus pandemic. Daily deaths are near a peak, and other daily stats still are stunningly high compared to where they'd been before a late 2020 surge.
  • Yet Covid-19 case and hospitalization numbers have been falling. Vaccines are here, more versions may be near and warmer weather is approaching.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci made that prediction last week, assuming 70% to 85% of the US population was vaccinated by end of summer.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • And variants of the virus that appear to be more transmissible are turning up more frequently, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which warns they could worsen the already raging spread of the virus.
  • experts including Fauci are optimistic that current vaccines will largely protect against known variants, though they warn the more the virus spreads, the greater chance mutations could defeat current vaccines.
  • Health experts had warned that the November-December holidays, with boosts in travel and indoor gatherings, would send Covid-19 cases soaring.
  • And the country has reported fewer than 200,000 new cases a day for 10 straight days -- the longest such stretch since before Thanksgiving.
  • Experts have said movements in the volume of deaths can lag weeks behind case and hospitalization numbers, because those who succumb to the disease can first be sick for weeks.
  • That includes one first identified in the UK (B.1.1.7), one first seen in Brazil (P.1) and one seen in South Africa (B.1.351).
  • Researchers also are eying a variant found in California, Fauci said Monday, though it is unclear if it is more transmissible.
  • "The best way you prevent the evolution of mutants is to suppress the amount of virus that's circulating in the population. And the best way to do that is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as you possibly can," Fauci told CNN on Monday.
  • Evidence indicates the effectiveness of vaccine-induced antibodies might be diminished against the mutant first seen in South Africa, but "it's still well within the cushion-range of being an effective vaccine," Fauci said.
  • Moderna said it would develop a potential booster shot against this variant, just to be safe.
  • Biden said Monday he hoped to eventually increase the pace to 1.5 million shots a day. The time frame also would shrink if some people get one-dose vaccines, such as the candidate from Johnson & Johnson, which is expected to reports result of its Phase 3 trials soon.
  • The World Health Organization, meanwhile, has stressed that rich nations need to do more to ensure vaccines are available worldwide.
  • Biden last week signed an executive order requiring masks in federal buildings and on federal lands, and asked Americans to wear masks for his first 100 days in office.
yehbru

Why The Coronavirus Variant From Brazil Is Especially Worrisome To Scientists : Goats and Soda : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-about-the-variant-from-brazil

Politics US Brazil Covid Vaccine Mutation

shared by yehbru on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • There's one from the U.K., which is more contagious and already circulating in the United States. There's one from South Africa, which is forcing Moderna and Pfizer to reformulate their COVID-19 vaccines and create "booster" shots, just to make sure the vaccines maintain their efficacies.
  • A variant called P.1, which emerged in early December in Manaus, Brazil, and by mid-January had already caused a massive resurgence in cases across the city of 2 million people.
  • "Manaus already had 75% of people infected [in the spring of last year]."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Scientists don't understand why the variant has spread so explosively in Brazil, and the variant carries a particularly dangerous set of mutations.
  • One study estimated that the population should have reached herd immunity and the virus shouldn't be able to spread easily in the community. So why would the city see an even bigger surge 10 months later? Could P.1 be evading the antibodies made against the previous version of the virus, making reinfections easier?
  • "So when we see a whole lot of mutations in [those surfaces], it raises the possibility that the mutations might be conferring immune escape." That is, the mutations are helping the virus evade antibodies or escape recognition by them. In essence, the mutations are providing the virus with a type of invisibility cloak.
  • "In fact, it was really quite a dramatic drop-off in sensitivity. We saw that in half of the serum, the antibodies were significantly less effective against the new variant [from South Africa]." So far, scientists haven't tested out P.1 in similar neutralization experiments, but P.1 has two mutations that scientists have already shown reduce antibody binding.
  • "We've been here before with the flu. We're having to live with influenza and figure out a way of staying ahead of the virus by making vaccines on a yearly basis," said Gupta at the University of Cambridge.
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