Great Barrier Reef obituary goes viral, to the horror of scientists

Huffington Post reports: Dead and dying are two very different things.

If a person is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, their loved ones don’t rush to write an obituary and plan a funeral. Likewise, species aren’t declared extinct until they actually are.

In a viral article entitled “Obituary: Great Barrier Reef (25 Million BC-2016),” however, writer Rowan Jacobsen proclaimed ― inaccurately and, we can only hope, hyperbolically ― that Earth’s largest living structure is dead and gone.

“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness,” reads the sensational obituary, published Tuesday in Outside Magazine. “It was 25 million years old.”

There’s no denying the Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble, having been hammered in recent years by El Niño and climate change. In April, scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies found that the most severe coral bleaching event on record had impacted 93 percent of the reef.

But as a whole, it is not dead. Preliminary findings published Thursday of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority surveys show 22 percent of its coral died from the bleaching event. That leaves more than three quarters still alive ― and in desperate need of relief.

Two leading coral scientists that The Huffington Post contacted took serious issue with Outside’s piece, calling it wildly irresponsible. [Continue reading…]

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There may be two trillion other galaxies

galaxies

Brian Gallagher writes: In 1939, the year Edwin Hubble won the Benjamin Franklin award for his studies of “extra-galactic nebulae,” he paid a visit to an ailing friend. Depressed and interred at Las Encinas Hospital, a mental health facility, the friend, an actor and playwright named John Emerson, asked Hubble what — spiritually, cosmically — he believed in. In Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Gale E. Christianson writes that Hubble, a Christian-turned-agnostic, “pulled no punches” in his reply. “The whole thing is so much bigger than I am,” he told Emerson, “and I can’t understand it, so I just trust myself to it, and forget about it.”

Even though he was moved by a sense of the universe’s immensity, it’s arresting to recall how small Hubble thought the cosmos was at the time. “The picture suggested by the reconnaissance,” he wrote in his 1937 book, The Observational Approach to Cosmology, “is a sphere, centred on the observer, about 1,000 million light-years in diameter, throughout which are scattered about 100 million nebulae,” or galaxies. “A suitable model,” he went on, “would be furnished by tennis balls, 50 feet apart, scattered through a sphere 5 miles in diameter.” From the instrument later named after him, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, we learned from a series of pictures taken, starting five years later, just how unsuitable that model was.

The first is called the Hubble Deep Field, arguably “the most important image ever taken” according to this YouTube video. (I recommend watching it.) The Hubble gazed, for ten days, at an apparently empty spot in the sky, one about the size of a pinhead held up at arm’s length — a fragment one 24-millionth of the whole sky. The resulting picture had 3,000 objects, almost all of them galaxies in various stages of development, and many of them as far away as 12 billion light-years. Robert Williams, the former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, wrote in the New York Times, “The image is really a core sample of the universe.” Next came the Ultra Deep Field, in 2003 (after a three-month exposure with a new camera, the Hubble image came back with 10,000 galaxies), then the eXtreme Deep Field, in 2012, a refined version of the Ultra that reveals galaxies that formed just 450 million years after the Big Bang. [Continue reading…]

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If we don’t act now, all future wars may be as horrific as Aleppo

Paul Mason writes: To single day of fighting in June 1859, among the vineyards and villages near Lake Garda, left 40,000 Italian, French and Austrian soldiers dead or wounded. The Battle of Solferino might have been remembered simply for its carnage, but for the presence of Henry Dunant. Dunant, a Swiss traveller, spent days tending the wounded and wrote a memoir that led to the founding of the Red Cross and to the first Geneva convention, signed by Europe’s great powers in 1864.

Solferino inspired the principle that hospitals and army medical personnel are not a legitimate target in war. Today, with the bombing of hospitals by the Russians in Syria, the Saudis in Yemen and the Americans in Afghanistan, those who provide medical aid in war believe that principle is in ruins.

So far this year, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 21 of their supported medical facilities in Yemen and Syria have been attacked. Last year an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was destroyed by a US attack, in which those fleeing the building were reportedly gunned down from the air, and 42 patients and staff died.

A UN resolution in May urged combatants to refrain from bombing medical facilities. MSF says that the resolution “has made no difference on the ground”. Four out of the five permanent members of the UN security council, it says, are actively involved in coalitions whose troops have attacked hospitals.

To understand the renewed popularity of killing sick people in hospital beds, it’s not enough to point – as MSF does – to the new techniques of war, such as drones and special forces. Something has been eroded about our perception of humanitarian principles. [Continue reading…]

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Russia has ‘playbook’ for covert influence in Eastern Europe, says report

Reuters reports: Russia has mounted a campaign of covert economic and political measures to manipulate five countries in central and eastern Europe, discredit the West’s liberal democratic model, and undermine trans-Atlantic ties, a report by a private U.S. research group said.

The report released on Thursday said Moscow had co-opted sympathetic politicians, strived to dominate energy markets and other economic sectors, and undermined anti-corruption measures in an attempt to gain sway over governments in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Serbia, and Slovakia.

“In certain countries, Russian influence has become so pervasive and endemic that it has challenged national stability as well as a country’s Western orientation and Euro-Atlantic stability,” said the report of a 16-month study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and the Sofia, Bulgaria-based Center for the Study of Democracy.

The publication of “The Kremlin Playbook: Understanding Russian Influence in Eastern and Central Europe” coincides with an unprecedented debate in the United States over whether Russia is attempting to interfere in the Nov. 8 presidential election with cyber attacks and the release of emails from the campaign of Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories are making his supporters paranoid — and dangerous

Quartz reports: At an Oct. 11 rally in Newton, Iowa, Mike Pence was confronted by a call for revolution.

“I’m on social media all day, every day, non-stop since last June pushing Trump and one of the biggest things I can tell you that a lot of us are scared of is this voter fraud,” a Trump fan named Rhonda told him. “I’ll tell you just for me, and I don’t want this to happen, but for me personally, if Hillary Clinton gets in, I’m ready for a revolution because we can’t have her in.”

“Don’t say that,” Pence said quickly, his hand wavering, his eyes on the floor.

“But I’m saying it. I’m like Trump!” Rhonda replied.

This is not the first time Trump fans have threatened to take action if their candidate loses in November. Such threats date back to the primaries, when some Trump supporters began telling reporters that they would take up arms and form militias should their racist, sexist hero face defeat. The calls continued into the general election, when they were echoed by Trump advisors like Roger Stone, who proclaimed that there would be a “bloodbath” if Trump loses. On August 1, following a crash in the polls, Trump himself proclaimed that the election was rigged, a claim he has repeated constantly since. [Continue reading…]

The election is rigged is a line that’s easy to parrot, but think about it — think hard. If the election was actually rigged, how could Trump even have become the Republican nominee let alone got this close to becoming president?

For better or worse, the insanity of this election shows the inherent unpredictability of a system that isn’t rigged.

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Donald Trump on the loose: A timeline of every alleged grope, and assault

The Daily Beast reports: In the days since a video emerged showing Donald Trump bragging about his ability to get away with sexually assault, several women have stepped forward to allege the Republican presidential nominee touched them inappropriately. Together, their allegations amount to a substantial list of alleged sexual harassment and assault dating back to the early 1980s. Trump has denied every allegation against him. [Continue reading…]

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The West’s decline is of its own making

Judy Dempsey writes: A park close to the European Parliament in Brussels has been given a face-lift, if that is the right term. Apart from being spruced up, the area now contains new sculptures in the form of twelve ostriches. And yes, the ostriches have their heads stuck in the sand. If Europe as well as the United States weren’t suffering such a malaise as they are today, the symbolism of these birds wouldn’t matter.

But three recent events only confirm how the West continues to duck fundamental issues in ways that will leave it weaker and increasingly unable to project itself politically, socially, and economically.

The first event was the decision by the United States to cut off talks with Russia on trying to end the war in Syria. John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, who was in Brussels on October 4, tried to defend his country’s role in Syria. In a speech hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, he decried Russia’s support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s relentless bombing of civilian targets, and the way Syrian government forces were using barrel bombs and chlorine gas against their opponents.

What Kerry omitted, hardly surprisingly, was how the United States in particular had crossed its own so-called redlines when it came to Syria. U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision not to intervene, despite saying in August 2012 that any use of chemical weapons would be a redline the United States would not tolerate, gave Russia and other players a free hand to play out their cynical geostrategic interests in that wretched country. [Continue reading…]

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Migrant and refugee children are victims of more bullying than their peers

By Simona Carla Silvia Caravita, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

As migrants and refugees begin to settle into new lives across Europe, they face many challenges – from securing residency papers, to learning a new language and finding work. For children, new schools can also be difficult places to grow up. In our recent research we found that migrant and refugee children in Italian schools were more likely to be bullied than their peers, many because their schoolmates already held prejudices against them.

Rates of bullying among children are high across the world, according to a recent report from the UN’s special representative on violence against children. There is a big social cost to being bullied and these children face a greater risk of poor health, internalised stress, and suicidal thoughts.

Negative outcomes of bullying are now not only being reported in high-income countries, where the majority of research is conducted. A new briefing published by UNICEF’s Office of Research has looked at bullying among adolescents in low- and middle-income countries and the effect this has on young adults. It showed how adolescents in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam who were bullied by peers at age 15 tended to experience negative effects at age 19. These included lower self-esteem, a lower perception of their own success (known as self-efficacy) and more strained relationships with their peers and with their parents.

In our research, we wanted to look at the factors that increase the risk of bullying among particularly vulnerable children. The recent European immigration crisis, and in particular the situation in Italy and Greece, called our attention to the problem of bullying among migrant and refugee children attending Italian schools.

In 2013 and 2014, 9% of the Italian school pupil population were migrant and refugee children, according to data from the Italian Minister of Education Bullying of migrant and refugee children because of their migrant status, similar to victimisation of children of a particular ethnic group, is known as bias-based bullying.

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Britain, get real: Brexit means whatever the EU says it means

Joris Luyendijk writes: If you still believe Britain will get a sweet deal out of Brexit because “the EU needs the UK more than vice versa”, ask yourself: why don’t we hear European politicians pleading with Britain “not to punish the EU over Brexit”? Why is the pound plunging against the euro and not the other way around? Why do we not hear of companies escaping from the EU to “free-trading Britain” while there is almost a traffic jam in the other direction? Why do EU leaders look rather relaxed when Brexit comes up, even cracking the odd joke or two about sending the British foreign minister, Boris Johnson, a copy of the Lisbon treaty so he can read up on reality?

The negotiating cards with the EU are “incredibly stacked our way”, the Brexit minister, David Davis, told the House of Commons on Monday. The cards certainly are “incredibly stacked” – but not in the way Davis imagines.

To understand why, get a map of the EU and find Slovenia, a nation of 2 million people. No, that is Slovakia, with 5.4 million, almost three times bigger. Next look up Lithuania (population: 3.3 million), Latvia (2 million), Estonia (1.3 million) and Luxembourg (500,000).

Now repeat after me: all these EU members, as well as the other 21, hold veto power over whatever deal the UK (65 million) manages to negotiate with the EU (population: 508 million).

That is right, 1.2 million Cypriots can paralyse the British economy by blocking a deal, and the same holds true for Malta (400,000). Did I mention the Walloon parliament in Namur (get that atlas out again) has veto power too? And then there is, of course, the European parliament in Strasbourg. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May in ‘U-turn’ over pre-article 50 Brexit debate in parliament

The Guardian reports: Theresa May has accepted the need to have “full and transparent” parliamentary scrutiny before triggering Brexit, as Labour demanded answers to 170 questions about leaving the EU.

In a last-minute concession, the government accepted a Labour motion calling for MPs to have more say over the strategy for leaving the EU before article 50 is triggered by the end of March.

May had been facing her first government defeat over the motion on Wednesday, as a number of Conservatives indicated they were prepared to vote with Labour to demand greater public debate over the Brexit negotiating strategy.

The concession does not go as far as specifying that MPs should get a formal vote on article 50 or any Brexit deal and slightly amends Labour’s version to say the government’s negotiating position must not be undermined.

However, it does mean there will have to be a substantive parliamentary debate on No 10’s strategy at a later date before the UK embarks on Brexit. One Tory MP said this meant the Commons would have to broadly approve the negotiating position before article 50 is invoked. [Continue reading…]

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Activists decry British plan to suspend key human rights convention

VOA reports: Rights activists and lawyers are up in arms over Britain’s plan to suspend an international human rights convention during times of war, a step the government said would protect British troops from “spurious” legal claims of torture and murder against them.

The move by British Prime Minister Theresa May followed years of mounting anger in the Conservative Party and the country’s tabloid press over thousands of cases filed against soldiers who served in Iraq. The British government has spent about $135 million since 2004 defending the cases, many of which were launched under the European Convention on Human Rights, and the government has paid out $24 million in the settlement of 326 cases without admitting liability.

Britain’s tabloid press has railed against what they see as meddling, unelected European judges, arguing they are wrecking British law.

Under the plan, Britain would temporarily suspend parts of the Human Rights Convention before planned military actions. The suspensions would mainly focus on Article 2, which imposes upon the 47 signatory states the duty to refrain from unlawful deprivation of life, to investigate suspicious deaths and to prevent avoidable deaths.

Established in 1953 and effective across Europe, the convention grew out of a continent-wide determination never to see again the appalling rights violations of the Second World War and was inspired partly by Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill. It was drafted in large part by the British Conservative politician and Nuremberg trials prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe. [Continue reading…]

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Muslim mothers unite to stop their kids from joining ISIS

The Daily Beast reports: Edit Schlaffer, a jolly, petite woman, has seen many crying and terrified mothers of radicalized Muslim boys. Often the women have lost their children to the so-called Islamic State, to jihadist suicidal attacks, to violent battles.

Today, Schlaffer and her unique group called Women Without Borders (Frauen Ohne Grenzen) know exactly what their mission is: to help mothers around the world to stop their children from radicalizing, from joining international extremist groups.

It is a hard job to teach a mother who is often too stressed to listen, to watch, to feel the concealed emotions of her son. But Schlaffer and her Women Without Borders are building confidence among the mothers they train so they stop feeling helpless.

Schlaffer, a mother of two, founded Women Without Borders in 2002. Today they are five women working in a cozy office in Vienna with a few Central Asian carpets on the floor.

“Parenting for Peace!” is the main slogan of the Mothers Schools they have opened in nine countries and are expanding in the Balkans, in Macedonia. [Continue reading…]

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Guns, empires and Indians

David J Silverman writes: It has become commonplace to attribute the European conquest of the Americas to Jared Diamond’s triumvirate of guns, germs and steel. Germs refer to plague, measles, flu, whooping cough and, especially, the smallpox that whipsawed through indigenous populations, sometimes with a mortality rate of 90 per cent. The epidemics left survivors ill-equipped to fend off predatory encroachments, either from indigenous or from European peoples, who seized captives, land and plunder in the wake of these diseases.

Guns and steel, of course, represent Europeans’ technological prowess. Metal swords, pikes, armour and firearms, along with ships, livestock and even wheeled carts, gave European colonists significant military advantages over Native American people wielding bows and arrows, clubs, hatchets and spears. The attractiveness of such goods also meant that Indians desired trade with Europeans, despite the danger the newcomers represented. The lure of trade enabled Europeans to secure beachheads on the East Coast of North America, and make inroads to the interior of the continent. Intertribal competition for European trade also enabled colonists to employ ‘divide and conquer’ strategies against much larger indigenous populations.

Diamond’s explanation has grown immensely popular and influential. It appears to be a simple and sweeping teleology providing order and meaning to the complexity of the European conquest of the Western hemisphere. The guns, germs and steel perspective has helped further understanding of some of the major forces behind globalisation. But it also involves a level of abstraction that risks obscuring the history of individuals and groups whose experiences cannot be so aptly and neatly summarised. [Continue reading…]

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How Julian Assange turned WikiLeaks into Trump’s best friend

BloombergBusinessweek reports: Early on in his captivity, Assange attempted to learn how to play poker. He was awful at reading his fellow players and poorly equipped to hide his own emotions when he tried to bluff. “He is not capable of faking stuff,” says [Angela] Richter [a theater director and WikiLeaks collaborator who remains a friend of Assange]. She recalls that Assange eventually gave up looking at his opponents’ faces at all and spent the games staring exclusively at the cards on the table. “That’s when he started to win.”

Richter brings this up when I ask her to explain Assange’s apparent support of Trump. “He is shameless,” she concedes, referring to Assange’s anti-Clinton tweets. “But I think he only seems to make mistakes in the moment because he is seven or eight steps ahead.” She opposes Trump but sees Assange’s recent political advocacy as the result of a cold and totally reasonable calculation about what is best for WikiLeaks. “For him, the choice of Trump and Clinton is bad and bad,” Richter says. “Of course, he’s taking the chance to intervene. He might think Trump is terrible, but it might be more interesting to have Trump. If Hillary becomes president, it’ll all be the same.”

Put another way: Assange sees an opportunity in derailing the Clinton candidacy — a chance to reassert WikiLeaks’s relevance by helping to dent the legacy of one of the most powerful political families in America while at the same time elevating an unlikely candidate to the highest office on earth. If you’re in the business of critiquing power structures, it doesn’t really get any better than that.

Assange’s turn toward Trump has also exposed WikiLeaks to a large and previously untapped audience of conspiracy-minded, antigovernment types. “He’s going on shows like Hannity [on Fox News] because they will have him,” says James Spione, who directed the whistleblower documentary Silenced. In Spione’s view, the Trump flirtation is a put-on, a chance to get Assange and his organization in front of viewers. “He’s being pragmatic,” Spione says. In a recent tweet, WikiLeaks claimed that its approval ratings in the U.S. were up 27 percent over the past three years, an apparent validation of the new strategy.

The idea that Assange is mugging for Trump supporters to get attention is a cynical motivation to attribute to such an idealistic fellow, but the same explanation could easily apply to CNN or any of the hundreds of other respectable media outlets that have simultaneously scolded Trump’s daily transgressions while lavishing his campaign with nonstop coverage. Trump has in turn become an expert at using outrageous statements to earn free airtime from news outlets eager for ratings and page views. Trump is now a few points away from the presidency, despite his recent troubles and the fact that he has spent almost nothing on political advertising.

Assange has said that he expects Clinton to be elected president, “almost certainly,” but the possibility of a Trump win may also be motivating his calculation about whom to support. Assange believes that the Obama administration, with then-Secretary Clinton playing a leading role, pushed for him to be investigated criminally. It’s hard to imagine Clinton, who was in charge of the State Department when Assange’s source hacked it, would pursue WikiLeaks any less vigorously than Obama has. As if to make the point, WikiLeaks recently tweeted an anonymously sourced report that claimed Clinton had once asked, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” in reference to Assange. (Clinton said she did not recall making the statement and that if she had, it would have been a joke.)

Meanwhile, Ecuador will hold a presidential election in early 2017, and the current head of state (and Assange’s main protector), President Rafael Correa, has indicated he won’t run for reelection. “That might provoke a deep fear for Assange,” says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks contributor who is now a member of parliament in Iceland. Her theory is that Assange might worry that with Correa out, Ecuador could reject his asylum claim, effectively sending him into the arms of the U.S.. If that were to happen, Assange might prefer that the U.S. be run by President Trump rather than President Clinton.

The Trump campaign declined to say whether a Trump administration would seek to pursue Assange. The Republican candidate cited WikiLeaks twice during the second presidential debate. In addition, a number people close to Trump have given hints that he might view Assange more favorably than Clinton. The day after the WikiLeaks press conference, Trump ally Roger Stone, who has previously referred to Assange as “a freedom fighter” and “a truth teller,” told Jones that the rape case against Assange was “a complete frame.” Stone expressed confidence that an October Surprise is still forthcoming. “This payload is coming,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Politico reports: “I love WikiLeaks!” Donald Trump exclaimed at a rally Monday night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, exuberant about the hack of the personal email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. [Continue reading…]

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Trump campaign CEO wanted to destroy Speaker Ryan

The Hill reports: Steve Bannon, the chairman of the right-wing news outlet Breitbart who became CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, gave explicit orders to his staff to destroy Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

On editorial conference calls, the Breitbart chairman would often say “Paul Ryan is the enemy,” according to a source who worked with Bannon at the news organization.

A former Breitbart staffer said Bannon used to rage against Ryan all the time.

Bannon views Ryan as a leader of an elite globalist cabal determined to sell out America by opening its borders on immigration and trade.

“Bannon has Alex Jones-level paranoia about Paul Ryan,” the source said, referring to the right-wing radio host and conspiracy theorist who runs the pro-Trump website Infowars.

“He goes on these amazing rants,” the source added of Bannon. “He thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military operations are biggest motivation for homegrown terrorism, FBI study finds

The Intercept reports: A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of “homegrown” terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to “radicalization,” concluding that it remained near impossible to predict future violent acts.

The study, reviewed by The Intercept, was conducted in 2012 by a unit in the FBI’s counterterrorism division and surveyed intelligence analysts and FBI special agents across the United States who were responsible for nearly 200 cases, both open and closed, involving “homegrown violent extremists.” The survey responses reinforced the FBI’s conclusion that such individuals “frequently believe the U.S. military is committing atrocities in Muslim countries, thereby justifying their violent aspirations.”

Online relationships and exposure to English-language militant propaganda and “ideologues” like Anwar al-Awlaki are also cited as “key factors” driving extremism. But grievances over U.S. military action ranked far above any other factor, turning up in 18 percent of all cases, with additional cases citing a “perceived war against Islam,” “perceived discrimination,” or other more specific incidents. The report notes that between 2009 and 2012, 10 out of 16 attempted or successful terrorist attacks in the United States targeted military facilities or personnel. [Continue reading…]

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