Today in Focus: Ebola is back – can it be contained?

The latest outbreak of Ebola, with more than 2,200 cases and more than 1,500 confirmed deaths in just over a year, is the second largest in history, despite the recent availability of an effective experimental vaccine. Political, security and cultural complications – not least a refusal to believe that Ebola exists – have thwarted efforts to overcome the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s deadly outbreak.

Senior global development reporter Peter Beaumont tells Anushka Asthana about his recent trip to North Kivu, which is at the heart of the recent outbreak. He discusses why some health officials are calling it the most complicated public health emergency in history. Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley, who reported on the 2014 outbreak, looks at how that was contained – and why the situation is potentially far more frightening this time round.

And: the Guardian’s northern editor, Helen Pidd, looks at whether the “northern powerhouse” has been a success five years after its creation.

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The Guardian: Should museums return their colonial artefacts?

Macron’s pledge and Killmonger’s heist had context. The preceding decade had brought growing demands for the restitution of artefacts taken from Africa by European colonists during the 19th century. If the case for the restitution of human remains to indigenous communities had been, by and large, acceded, the new frontier was works of art. The UN kickstarted the conversation in 2007 with article 11 of its declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, which urged states to restore “cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property” taken from indigenous people without their “free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs”. With that aim in mind, the Benin Dialogue Group was established the same year as part of an effort to get European museum curators talking to key representatives in Nigeria. [...]

A core objective of the Benin Dialogue Group was the creation of a permanent display in Benin City of objects once belonging to the former kingdom and now in continental hands. Last year, Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, called for international guidelines akin to the Washington principles (which address the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art to descendants of dispossessed, predominantly Jewish families) to help museums handle provenance research and repatriation of illegally acquired artworks in public collections. It is no coincidence that much of this thinking coincided with growing calls for western European nations to apologise for various “crimes” of empire, from the Germans in Namibia and the Dutch in Indonesia to the British in Kenya and India and the French in north Africa. [...]

At the same time, an exciting wave of new museums was announced across Africa. The Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, Senegal, was opened in 2018, with capacity for about 18,000 objects, alongside a clear demand for some of that space to be filled by items currently housed in European museums. New projects are also scheduled for the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, the Museum of National History in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the JK Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Lagos. The opening of the Benin Royal Museum in Benin City is scheduled for 2021.

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Politico: How Trump’s ‘weaponized’ use of foreign aid is backfiring

President Donald Trump has so closely linked U.S. humanitarian assistance to his attempt to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro — even placing goods along the country’s border as an incentive for Venezuelans to revolt — that some groups are citing security concerns and asking U.S. officials if they can strip legally required U.S. branding from aid sent to Venezuela, three aid officials told POLITICO. [...]

The situation reflects broader fears that Trump’s unusually politicized approach to handing out U.S. aid worldwide is backfiring, tarnishing America’s brand and possibly risking the lives of people from Latin America to the Palestinian territories. [...]

“This whole idea that in Venezuela aid was going to be part of a political change process — it’s rare to see it that overt,” said Joel Charny of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has not yet received U.S. funding for work inside Venezuela. “It’s just not a good way to do aid. If you’re really concerned about the welfare of the people of Venezuela you find the ways that are available to get the maximum amount of assistance to those people.”

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FRANCE 24 English: Educated but jobless: The exodus of Italy's youth

As Brussels threatens the Italian government with disciplinary proceedings if it does not reduce its public debt, we bring you a report on Italy's youth, which has been hit hard by the economic crisis. Due to a lack of job prospects, many educated young Italians feel they have no choice but to leave the country and try their luck elsewhere in Europe. Our correspondents in Italy report.

Rare Earth: Is this Obelisk Italy's Greatest Shame?

The battle of Adwa is among the most famous battles in history. Hard to call rare. So instead, I want to talk about an obelisk.

All joking not aside, everything, of course, is a matter of perspective.

To me, for example, Italy's greatest shame is Francesco (thanks for filming the scenes in Milan, buddy). It took a lot of work salvaging this episode from the lost footage, so a huge thank you to Kata for all her effort. Unfortunately the season in Ethiopia/Somaliland was a true challenge, and there was nothing we could really do about it. Sorry! Can't win 'em all!

The Guardian: Trump in North Korea: history as farce first time round

This is what substitutes for progress in Trump’s reality TV diplomacy. If progress comes of this, then the ridiculous pageantry will be forgotten. But Trump’s fawning over Kim has already squandered leverage and humiliated America. [...]

It would all be comical if it came from a Hollywood studio. But this is real life, with real lives at stake. Trump has embarrassed himself and what the US stands for by defending Kim’s human rights abuses. He even defended Kim over the murder of a US citizen, Otto Warmbier. Last year Trump wished the American people would treat him more like the North Korean people are forced, at gunpoint, to treat Kim.[...]

The most important question is where this leaves us on the nuclear front. There’s still a possible deal on the table. When Kim and South Korean president Moon Jae-in met in Pyongyang in September and when Trump met Kim in Hanoi, Kim offered to close the Yongbyon nuclear facility in exchange for sanctions relief. Details need to be ironed out but the bones of a deal are there. An interim deal, if implemented, would be significant and could lay the groundwork for more progress.

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Forbes: Europe Circumvents U.S. Sanctions On Iran

The three governments announced the successful implementation of INSTEX at a meeting of the Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on June 28, 2019. The meeting was chaired on behalf of the EU by the Secretary General of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Helga Schmid, and was attended by representatives of China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran. [...]

This was widely seen as a setback for the EU, which had been hoping that SWIFT would defy the U.S. and maintain payment services to Iran. But European governments were still determined to find a way of keeping trade with Iran going. If SWIFT wouldn’t help, they would create something to replace SWIFT for Iranian trade. Thus, INSTEX was born.

Exactly how does INSTEX facilitate trade with Iran without making sanctions-busting cross-border payments? In a word – barter. INSTEX matches the Euro payments of companies buying goods from Iran with the Euro receipts of companies selling goods to Iran. Imagine a company based in France wants to sell transport equipment to a buyer in Iran. Receiving Euro payments directly from that buyer would break U.S. sanctions. So instead, the French company would register the sale documentation with INSTEX. INSTEX would look on its own books for a company buying foodstuffs from Iran. It would match the two cash flows so that in effect the two European companies pay each other. The goods would still travel to and from Iran, but the money would stay entirely within the EU. [...]

Secondly, as the JCPOA statement indicated, the aim is to open INSTEX to third countries. China and Russia were both present at the meeting, and both have an interest in trading with Iran. Crucially, their trade could include oil. The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) observes that “the SPV is more likely to succeed if it links with revenues related to Iran’s oil exports to countries such as China, India, and Japan.”

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NBC News: Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you

She calls it an “oscillation” that would lead her to “mirror matter,” but the idea is fundamentally the same. In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a ring of powerful magnets and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates — some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own. [...]

The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn’t find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Mister Spock with a goatee — sorry "Star Trek" fans). But current theory allows that you might find mirror atoms and mirror rocks, maybe even mirror planets and stars. Collectively, they could form an entire shadow world, just as real as our own but almost completely cut off from us. [...]

A decade ago, Anatoli Serebrov of Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia introduced the idea that ordinary neutrons sometimes cross over into the mirror world and transform into mirror neutrons. At that point, we could no longer detect them — it would be as if some of the neutrons simply vanished. “That would make the neutron lifetime look wrong,” Broussard explains, because some of the neutrons would have been disappearing from the test equipment while the researchers were studying them. [...]

Zurab Berezhiani, a physicist at the University of L’Aquila in Italy who has conducted his own mirror neutron searches, offers an intriguing explanation: Dark matter has been hard to find because it is hidden away in the mirror world. In this view, dark matter and mirror matter are one and the same. If so, the mirror world is not just ubiquitous, it is far more massive than our own. At a recent physics conference, Berezhiani expanded on the idea, outlining a possible parallel reality full of mirror stars, mirror galaxies and mirror black holes. Maybe even dark life?

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Politico: Conservatives rebel against Merkel’s EU top jobs plan

Among the national leaders to speak out against the proposal were Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. That opposition, along with Poland, Romania and other countries that had already voiced resistance to Timmermans, was enough to make the Osaka plan a political nonstarter. [...]

“As EPP, we haven’t agreed to the package that was negotiated in Osaka. I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot opposition to the proposal that was made in Osaka from the EPP’s point of view," Varadkar said, arriving at the Council's Europa building. "The vast majority of the EPP prime ministers don’t believe that we should give up the presidency of the Commission quite so easily, without a fight.” [...]

Rangel noted that the EPP had officially tapped two other prime ministers, Plenković and Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, as its official negotiators in the leadership deliberations. “Mr. Plenković and Mr. Karins,” Rangel said. “They speak on behalf of the EPP.”

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