The New Zealand Herald: Covid 19 coronavirus: Pathogen has been spreading in humans for decades, study finds

Researchers from Australia, Britain and the US sought clues about the disease's past and found it might have jumped from animal to humans long before the first detection in the central China city of Wuhan. In fact, these scientists have speculated that it could have been as long as a decade. [...]

It was conducted by Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute in California, Andrew Rambaut from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Ian Lipkin from Columbia University in New York, Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney, and Robert Garry from Tulane University in New Orleans.

Dr Francis Collins, director of the US National Institute of Health, said the study suggested that coronavirus had crossed from animals to humans long before it became capable of causing disease in people.

"Then, as a result of gradual evolutionary changes over years or perhaps decades. The virus eventually gained the ability to spread from human to human and cause serious, often life-threatening disease," he said in an article published on the institute's website on Thursday.

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The Daily Beast: Trump’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign Isn’t Working: Poll

A new survey conducted by Ipsos exclusively for The Daily Beast provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the president’s attempts to paint a rosy picture about the coronavirus’ spread throughout the country are not resonating beyond a small segment of the populace with a small exception for those who say they’re getting their information from Fox News. [...]

Collectively, the results present a portrait of a public that is sober minded about the coronavirus and unpersuaded by talk that life could return to normalcy soon. Over the past few weeks, Trump has suggested that the spread of coronavirus would abate as the temperature warmed. He’s repeatedly insisted that those who want a test can get one, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He’s downplayed the lethality of it by comparing it to the flu. He’s talked about a vaccine hitting the markets in weeks, if not months, and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a therapy for coronavirus, despite his own medical experts warning that there is nothing more than anecdotal data suggesting it could work. [...]

Fox News viewers were evenly split when it came to Trump’s most recent focus: getting American businesses back up and running on an expedited timeline even if it were to involve public health risk. Forty-seven percent of Fox News viewers said they agreed with the sentiment while 50 percent said they did not.

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New Statesman: The crisis chancellor trying to save Britain from economic cataclysm

Sunak has many talents. He has a razor-sharp and inquiring mind. He swiftly masters briefs, and is an assured – if not sparkling – media performer. He is polite, personable and popular far beyond the bounds of the Conservative Party. He is believed to be Westminster’s richest MP, but has no airs and graces. Insiders say he has restored morale at the battered Treasury, earned the respect and affection of his civil servants, and brings the best out of the bright young people around him. “If you can find someone who doesn’t like him and think he’s capable of the job I’d be surprised,” a former aide told me at the time of the Budget. [...]

His public image seems carefully curated. His website and social media posts are full of platitudes and pleasing photographs, but reveal little of substance. He seldom talks about himself. When he does, he tends to retell the same few stories – his debt to his industrious parents, his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Star Wars movies, his addiction to Coca-Cola, his love of Southampton football club and its legendary star forward, Matt Le Tissier. [...]

His parents were not political, but embodied traditional Conservative values. They worked hard, prospered and bought a modern detached house in a leafy cul-de-sac in Southampton’s affluent Bassett district. They raised two sons and a daughter, of which Rishi is the eldest. His father, Yashvir, was an NHS doctor with a surgery in the Upper Shirley area of the city. His mother, Usha, ran a nearby pharmacy until she sold it in 2014. As a teenager Sunak helped her with the accounts and learned, he said, how changes in taxes and national insurance contributions affected small businesses. [...]

Sunak voted three times for May’s doomed Brexit deal, and faced another fateful decision after she resigned last summer. He was close to two of the contenders to replace her – his former boss Javid, who had moved to the Home Office, and Michael Gove, whom he had supported in the 2016 leadership election. Both courted him, but he chose to back Johnson despite his hard-line promise to “crash” Britain out of the EU without a deal if necessary.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Serial killers (21 Oct 2019)

Serial killers: Laurie talks to Ian Cummins, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Salford, about the media and cultural responses to the child murders committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley two decades earlier. The Moors Murders were to provide an unfortunate template for future media reporting on serial killing, including the crimes committed by Peter Sutcliffe - the Yorkshire Ripper - as described in a new study by Louise Wattis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Teesside University. Sutcliffe murdered 13 women in the North of England between 1975 and 1980. Dr Wattis discusses the way in which these crimes shed light on how we think about fear of crime, gender and serial murder and the representation of victims and sex workers.

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The Atlantic: The Callousness of India’s COVID-19 Response

Yet even as India was gripped by demonstrations and violence, the coronavirus was making inroads into society here. The country reported its first case on January 30, but authorities steadfastly insisted that cases were one-offs and no local transmission was taking place. In recent weeks, though, India has seen exponential growth in the number of cases. Today, we are three days into a three-week nationwide lockdown, a heavy restriction on a nation of 1.3 billion people that Modi and his government have insisted will help defeat the virus.

The government is offering little in the way of a safety net. Only after the lockdown came into force, and amid growing outrage, did the finance minister finally announce an aid package. Yet its $22 billion value is a pitiful amount compared with what governments elsewhere have provided: Whereas governments in Britain, Spain, and Germany have offered stimulus plans of up to 20 percent of GDP, India’s amounts to less than 1 percent of its GDP. It provides no help for day laborers or other workers in similar unorganized sectors. It contains no measures for migrant workers. The actual amounts of support—five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of legumes, per person for the next three months, coupled with cash transfers, in some cases of 500 rupees, or $7, a month—have infuriated voters. Here in Goa, a lawyer has petitioned the high court to direct the state government to provide essential goods to the people, especially those who are living below the poverty line. [...]

There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough. For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). That private laboratories are allowed to charge $60 per test—remember, just $7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place. (The government argues that because of the size of the population, widespread testing is not feasible.) The authorities are also not meticulously contact tracing, people are fleeing isolation centers, and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities. Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients, India has one government doctor for every 10,000, according to the 2019 National Health Profile. A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists, but has just 8,350. In short, the country’s health-care system is in no position to cope with an avalanche of patients with a contagious respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India’s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle.

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Vox: Governors are starting to close their borders. The implications are staggering

As the Supreme Court recognized more than 170 years ago, “we are one people with one common country. We are all citizens of the United States, and as members of the same community must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own states.” The right of all US citizens to travel freely among the states, the Court later explained in United States v. Guest (1966), “was conceived from the beginning to be a necessary concomitant of the stronger union the Constitution created.” [...]

Thus, there are two potential reasons why Abbott’s order may be legitimate. The first is that it applies to Texans and non-Texans alike — a Houston resident who returns home from a trip to Newark will spend two weeks in isolation, just like a New York resident who travels to Dallas to visit a family member. The second is that Abbott has a “substantial reason” for imposing this order. He believes that it will reduce the number of people who enter Texas carrying a terrible disease. [...]

The premise of Edwards — indeed, the premise of the post-New Deal order — is that the federal government would provide a baseline of health, prosperity, and security to the nation as a whole. In return, the states would give up their role as the sole providers of “assistance to the needy,” and with it their power to close their borders to poor Americans.

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Science News: No, the coronavirus wasn’t made in a lab. A genetic analysis shows it’s from nature

The virus’s genetic makeup reveals that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a mishmash of known viruses, as might be expected if it were human-made. And it has unusual features that have only recently been identified in scaly anteaters called pangolins, evidence that the virus came from nature, Kristian Andersen and his colleagues report March 17 in Nature Medicine. [...]

An unfortunate coincidence fueled conspiracy theorists, says Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is “in very close proximity to” the seafood market, and has conducted research on viruses, including coronaviruses, found in bats that have potential to cause disease in people. “That led people to think that, oh, it escaped and went down the sewers, or somebody walked out of their lab and went over to the market or something,” Garry says.

Accidental releases of viruses, including SARS, have happened from other labs in the past. So “this is not something you can just dismiss out of hand,” Andersen says. “That would be foolish.” [...]

But the SARS-CoV-2 virus has components that differ from those of previously known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or viruses in nature. “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone,” Andersen and colleagues write in the study.

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Vox: The mystery of Germany’s low coronavirus death rate

Germany has the fifth-most coronavirus cases in the world, but only a fraction of the death toll that has been seen in other countries. And the reason remains a mystery. “We don’t know the reason for the lower death rate,” Marieke Degen, deputy spokeswoman of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), told me. [...]

In comparison, Italy has more 74,300 confirmed cases and over 7,500 deaths, which puts its fatality rate at 10 percent. In the United States, the fatality rate is currently at about 1.4 percent according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The huge discrepancy in fatality rates between Germany and Italy is also startling because both countries have some of the oldest populations in the world, according to the Washington, DC-based Population Reference Bureau. The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified people over the age of 60 and people with preexisting medical conditions as being at higher risk of experiencing more severe symptoms from Covid-19. [...]

But outside of Merkel’s forceful speech, Germany has more or less followed similar strategies to confront the spread of the virus as many other countries. “We don’t do anything special compared to other countries,” German virologist Martin Stürmer told me. [...]

But virologist Stürmer believes it is more likely the global fatality rate will be lower when all is said and done. “I think all over the world the rates will go down, because we have so many people with mild symptoms, which are not being tested and therefore they are not reflected in the data,” he said.

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The Red Line: Venezuela

Venezuela, home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world was once the jewel of South America, the envy of the Latin world, but now the country sits on the brink of collapse. Venezuela has gone so far now that other nations like China, Russia, and the US have begun circling like hungry vultures, looking to smash apart the nation and divide up the assets. So this week we sit down and ask where will it all go, how did we get here and what is next for this South American titan. Giancarlo Fiorella - (Bellingcat institute) Nick Mutch - (Conflict Journalist) Christopher Sabatini - (Chatham House).

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The Guardian: What Noma did next: how the ‘New Nordic’ is reshaping the food world

The New Nordic movement is bound by a set of 10 principles that stress sustainability, locality and respect for the natural world. Those ideals may sound familiar, but the scale of what its adherents are accomplishing makes New Nordic potentially far more transformative than any previous food movement. It is reaching beyond farms and fine-dining restaurants, and into halls of power, supermarket aisles, canteens and classrooms. [...]

The New Nordic movement heralded another shift in the world of fine dining. In our current era of climate emergency and brutal inequality, celebrity chefs have transformed again, from ruthless kitchen dictators such as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, or mad scientists such as Ferran Adrià, into crusaders for a better world. Where once the dream was to cook for presidents, now the aim is to work with them. Massimo Bottura, the ebullient owner of the three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, was celebrated in the 2019 Time 100 for his work feeding the homeless. José Andrés, the Spanish chef once credited with bringing tapas to the US, now has an accolade far exceeding a Michelin star: a nomination for the Nobel peace prize, for his disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. The pursuit of Michelin stars and coffee-table cookbooks has been superseded by pursuing a role in public life. [...]

Two decades ago, Denmark might have seemed a rather unconducive place for a revolution in haute cuisine, let alone in food altogether. Being generous, you could have said that it was a country of open-faced sandwiches, hot dogs and overproof alcohol. But you might also have associated it with the cheapest processed pork in the EU, known for being made in a grim factory from a candy-pink slurry of something that once was a pig. “Back then, all you could get in the centre of Copenhagen was bad French food or bad Italian food,” the food writer Andrea Petrini told me. “There was no Danish food culture.” [...]

Around the same time that Redzepi founded Mad, Meyer, who sold his majority stake in Noma in 2013, began testing New Nordic principles far beyond Scandinavia. After mapping the countries of the world on metrics such as economic development, crime rates and biodiversity, Meyer decided to open a restaurant called Gustu in Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, with another talented young Danish chef, Kamilla Seidler, at the helm. Seidler and her team used Bolivia’s fauna and flora to create the restaurant’s idiosyncratic cuisine – llama tartare, alligator escabeche and a lot of quinoa – and brought the restaurant on to the foodie radar. But more importantly, she completed the restaurant’s primary objective: training the restaurant’s Bolivian staff so she could leave Gustu in their hands.

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The Guardian: Golden Dawn: the rise and fall of Greece’s neo-Nazis

Although Golden Dawn’s members sometimes played the game of respectable politics, they were no mere rightwing populists; they were the kind of Nazis you are more likely to read about in history books. Driven by profound racism and antisemitic conspiracy theory, with a fervent devotion to Hitler, Golden Dawn combined street violence with torchlit flag-waving rallies and extreme rhetoric. One of its MPs proclaimed “civil war” to a BBC reporter, while an election candidate promised in front of a documentary crew to “turn on the ovens” and make lampshades from the skins of immigrants, a reference to what Nazi Germany did to Jews, Roma and other minorities in the Holocaust. “The Europe of nations is back,” declared the party’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, at a press conference in May 2012. “Greece is only the beginning.” [...]

Court hearings will end this spring, and a verdict is due shortly after, but Greece has already started to move on. Golden Dawn was wiped out in last year’s general election, and a new conservative government has declared the years of crisis over. Many media outlets only cover the trial sporadically. According to the centrist political commentator Yannis Palaiologos, Greece now has an opportunity to draw a line under the populism of both left and right. “As the various populist myths about the causes and possible solutions to Greece’s crisis have been revealed as delusions and outright lies,” he wrote in a piece for the Washington Post last year, “the fuel that sustained extremism has been depleted.” [...]

Golden Dawn was founded in the early 80s, initially as a Masonic society, according to the investigative journalist Dimitris Psarras, an authority on the party. For many years it remained small and semi-hidden, recruiting its members from Greece’s football hooligan scene. In the late 00s, however, it pursued a new strategy, setting up an “angry citizens” group in Saint Pantaleimon to complain about crime it linked to immigrants, mainly refugees from Afghanistan, who had recently moved into the area. Many lived in poverty or destitution, trapped by a Greek asylum system that didn’t work and an EU regulation that would not let them travel elsewhere, but a community was starting to put down roots; some Afghans had opened shops and cafes on the square. [...]

The country’s political and media class was split over how to treat Golden Dawn, since Greece’s constitution does not allow for the banning of political parties. In late 2013, when parliament voted to suspend the party’s state election funding and waive its MPs’ immunity from prosecution, the move was opposed by a minority of leftwingers, one of whom argued that Golden Dawn was “not a classic Nazi party”, since it set itself in opposition to “the dominant bourgeois forces”. In 2014, several defence lawyers for Golden Dawn members who were under investigation appeared on a TV chat show to argue that while they didn’t support the party’s views, they were doing their jobs in the interest of democracy and free speech.

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The Prospect: The political rivalry that shaped the Middle East

Journalist Kim Ghattas joins the Prospect Interview to explain the political conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran—where did it come from, and how has it fundamentally transformed the region? She also talks about lessons from the Arab Spring, and why her own background growing up in Lebanon means she’s able to tell stories that challenge popular Western narratives.

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Freakonomics: What Does COVID-19 Mean for Cities (and Marriages)?

There are a lot of upsides to urban density — but viral contagion is not one of them. Also: a nationwide lockdown will show if familiarity really breeds contempt. And: how to help your neighbor.

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The Spectator: Iceland has good and bad news about the coronavirus

In Iceland — a small country of 360,000 people with a strong healthcare system — coronavirus testing has been accompanied by population screening. Yet even with the hardline approach taken here involving early quarantining, self-isolation and infection tracing, infections have rapidly become widespread. There is no doubt that the virus’s spread has been just as far and wide in other European countries, where the number of tests is fewer and the follow-up, in many cases, much more lax.

So what can we learn from Iceland’s approach? The testing conducted by the National Health Service in Iceland along with further screening has already yielded some interesting results. Researchers at DeCode genetics have found 40 mutations of the coronavirus in Iceland alone; one individual had been infected by two variants at the same time. This is both good and bad news: the theory is that such mutations will make the virus more contagious but potentially less dangerous to those that are affected. Screening also indicates that children seem much less likely to catch the virus, but this may be influenced by the fact that children generally have mild symptoms. [...]

So have European countries really learnt anything from the experience of other places where the virus has started to wane in its severity? Too few lessons have been taken, it would seem. Graphs showing the spread of the virus in South Korea compared to Western European countries paint a startling picture. While the spread leveled off early after a significant outbreak in South Korea, European countries have continued to experience exponential growth. Other Far East countries such as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and indeed China have also appeared to have considerable success in limiting the spread of the virus.

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PolyMatter: Macau: The Story of China's Golden Child

Macau, despite its extravagance, is largely forgotten amidst the protests of its larger sibling, Hong Kong. But it too has a unique story to tell, and one that sheds light on the turbulence next-door.

Pindex: Coronavirus: How Many Will Die? w Stephen Fry

How can we stay safe from Coronavirus? Why is it spreading so fast? Is it airborne? And how long does it survive on food and surfaces?

Wendover Productions: COVID-19: How Aviation is Fighting for Survival

BBC4 Analysis: Command and Control?

When Sajid Javid resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer in February rather than accept Boris Johnson's reported demand that he dismiss his own team of special advisers and accept a new one drawn up in 10 Downing Street, many saw the episode as a crude attempt by the Prime Minister to wrest control of economic policy from the Treasury. But would such a reform necessarily be a bad thing?

Edward Stourton considers the case for economic policy being driven from the very top of government. If decision-making, in arguably the most important government department, took place on the prime minister's terms rather than having to be negotiated with a powerful colleague leading a vast bureaucracy, would that make for quicker and more streamlined decision-making that gave clearer direction to the government overall? And has in any case the time come to clip the wings of the Treasury which too often determines policy on narrowly financial grounds rather than properly allowing for the potential benefits of government spending - and which has recently signed off such alarmingly over-budget projects as HS2 and London's Crossrail?

In seeking answers to those questions, Edward speaks to the former Chancellors, Alistair Darling and Norman Lamont; to former Chief of Staff to Tony Blair in Downing Street, Jonathan Powell; to former Treasury minister, David Gauke; and and to ex-officials, including former top Treasury civil servant, Nic Macpherson.

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BBC4 Analysis: The Roots of 'Woke' Culture

Barack Obama condemned it. Black American activists championed it. Meghan Markle brought it to the Royal Family. “Wokeness” has become a shorthand for one side of the culture wars, popularising concepts like “white privilege” and “trigger warnings” - and the idea that “language is violence”.

Journalist Helen Lewis is on a mission to uncover the roots of this social phenomenon. On her way she meets three authors who in 2017 hoaxed a series of academic journals with fake papers on dog rape, fat bodybuilding and feminist astrology. They claimed to have exposed the jargon-loving, post-modern absurdity of politically correct university departments - whose theories drive “woke” online political movements.

But is there really a link between the contemporary language of social justice warriors and the continental philosophy of the 1960s and 70s? And are critics of wokeness just reactionaries, left uneasy by a changing world?

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Politico: ‘Extraordinary change’: How coronavirus is rewiring the Republican and Democratic parties

Last week, Republicans joined Democrats — and in some cases got in front of them — in calling for direct payments to Americans to help cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic. The Trump administration, after laboring for years to repeal Obamacare, said it was considering creating a special enrollment period for the program due to the coronavirus. When Donald Trump himself suggested the government could take equity stakes in private companies that receive federal aid, it was a Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, who accused the president of being a socialist.[...]

He predicted that new normal including paid sick leave, and even guaranteed income of some kind. “In other words,” Richardson said, “the era of big government is back, and both parties are going to embrace it to resolve problems. And [the change] is caused by the virus.” [...]

But unlike many past crises, the coronavirus pandemic has caused turmoil in the economy, public health and politics all at once. The death toll is rising. The stock market is in freefall. The virus has consumed Trump’s presidency and his re-election prospects, and it has all but frozen the Democratic presidential primary in time.

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Aeon: An abandoned Chinese city is the backdrop for a haunting fable on capitalism

The city of Kangbashi in northern China is empty. Although its owners continue to make a profit by speculating on rising property values, the city – complete with towering apartment complexes and elaborate recreation centres – is almost completely uninhabited. As the camera explores deserted rooftops and empty streets, a narrator begins a story – a modern fable about a cathedral built of money. Written by Michael Ende, the author of the children’s book The Neverending Story, the tale describes a church full of money-worshippers, for whom ‘Money is Truth’ and ‘Truth is a Commodity’.

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The Guardian: Electric cars produce less CO2 than petrol vehicles, study confirms

Electric vehicles produce less carbon dioxide than petrol cars across the vast majority of the globe – contrary to the claims of some detractors, who have alleged that the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity and their manufacture outweighs the benefits. [...]

Across the world, passenger road vehicles and household heating generate about a quarter of all emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. That makes electric vehicles essential to reducing overall emissions, but how clean an electric vehicle is also depends on how the electricity is generated, the efficiency of the supply and the efficiency of the vehicle. [...]

They found that in 53 out of 59 regions, comprising 95% of the world, electric vehicles and domestic heat pumps generate less carbon dioxide than fossil fuel powered cars or boilers. The only exceptions are heavily coal-dependent countries such as Poland. [...]

Mike Childs, head of science at Friends of the Earth, said: “Electric vehicles and heat pumps are absolutely critical for meeting climate goals so it’s good to see this favourable report. In the UK, both technologies will continue to make big carbon savings alongside our switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy to power the electricity grid.”

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis

Ukraine nevertheless stands apart. It is still a nation at war, yet in a survey last year, 55 percent of residents named mass emigration as the greatest threat to their country—the UN estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly a fifth of its population by 2050. And whereas politicians in Eastern Europe typically invoke demographic decline as a justification for conservative policies such as restricting abortion rights and providing financial bonuses for large families, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reverse brain drain by improving his country’s economy and rule of law. In December, he announced a program to draw young Ukrainians back from abroad with promises of preferential loans to start their own businesses upon their return. [...]

Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)

So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.

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New Statesman: The pattern of life might return to normality but the crisis will change our politics and culture forever

On 11 March, MPs of all parties crowded in the Commons chamber to hear Rishi Sunak deliver his first Budget as chancellor, despite one of their number, the health minister Nadine Dorries, having already been diagnosed with Covid-19. And six days later, Boris Johnson would tell both MPs and the British public to avoid unnecessary social contact in order to combat the disease.

That recklessness reflects another neglected political truth: that politics is a social business. The major reason Jeremy Corbyn (who was elected to the Commons in 1983) was able to become Labour leader was that many MPs who did not share his politics had over the years come to like him because of his kindness and willingness to drop everything to turn up at an event, give a short speech and support his colleagues. [...]

Yet far more alarming than the fall in Tube passenger numbers is that the numbers commuting by bus have only fallen by 10 per cent. The nine-point gap isn’t because people who travel by bus are healthier or less prone to listen to government advice. It’s because, on the whole, those who travel by bus are less wealthy and less able to work from home. No amount of well-meaning advice from the government or conscientious action by the rest of London will matter if the capital’s poorest feel compelled to continue working and to circulate, though they might be ill or emerging from a long period of near-quarantine.

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SciShow: The Wild Reasons Many Older People Wake Up So Early

You might think your grandma who wakes up at 4am just needs less sleep than younger people. Not so! Studies suggest there are some bizarre reasons older people rise at the crack of dawn, including something called brain sand!

PolyMatter: The Politics of Coronavirus

Social Europe: The Covid-19 debt deluge

Another potential consequence of the pandemic is less recognised but potentially more important: increased financial fragility, implying the potential for a debt crisis and even a broader financial collapse. After Covid-19 is contained and policies are implemented to ease the situation, supply chains will be restored and people will return to work with the hopes of recovering at least some of their lost incomes. But that real economic recovery could be derailed by unresolved financial and debt crises. [...]

A recent analysis by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development shows how sustained debts could pose a larger problem for the global economy and financial system. In 2018, total debt (private, public, domestic and external) across developing countries was equal to almost twice their combined gross domestic product—the highest it has ever been. Particularly concerning is the build-up of private debt by non-financial corporations, which now amounts to nearly three-quarters of total debt in developing countries (a much higher ratio than in advanced economies). According to UNCTAD, inherently volatile ‘foreign shadow financial institutions’ have played a major role in fuelling this accumulation, such that around one-third of private non-financial corporate debt in developing countries (with the exception of China) is denominated in foreign currency and held by external creditors. [...]

As the Turkish economist Sabri Öncü has suggested, we can start by taking our cue from the London debt agreement of 1953, which dramatically altered economic conditions for Germany, at that time a major debtor. The agreement between Germany and 20 external creditors wrote off 46 per cent of the country’s prewar debt and 52 per cent of its postwar debt, while the remaining debt was converted into long-term, low-interest loans with a five-year grace period before repayment. Most significantly, Germany had to repay its debt only if it ran a trade surplus and all repayments were limited to 3 per cent of annual export earnings. This encouraged Germany’s creditors to be vested in its export success, creating the conditions for the subsequent boom.

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Social Europe: Here we go again: Europe’s inability to face the coronavirus crisis

On March 16th, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed a 30-day closing of the union’s external frontiers. Many governments have however locked national borders, with no European co-ordination. The same day, a meeting of eurozone finance ministers—with a co-ordinated economic response anticipated—failed to take significant action. The chair, Mário Centeno, merely expressed a general will for fiscal stimulus while emphasising the permanence of European rules: ‘[T]he Stability and Growth Pact has all the flexibility needed to cater for this situation … We welcomed the commission guidance on the scope for supporting firms that is available within state aid rules.’

In fact, such rules are openly—and wisely—being broken by all governments facing the pandemic. Europe’s attitude leaves open the possibility that damaged countries are again asked to follow a stricter path of adjustment of public expenditure, leading to a new round of austerity. [...]

Policy action in the face of the pandemic is indeed difficult. Monetary-policy tools are less effective than in previous crises. On the day of von der Leyen’s announcement, new liquidity announced by the US Federal Reserve and the ECB failed to prevent a stock-market collapse. The indirect stimulus of expansive fiscal policies and tax relief is crucial to rescue damaged economies. But the most effective tool for containing the crisis is probably a large direct increase in public spending—on public services, the purchase of domestically produced goods and investment in new production activities. [...]

In fact, a key lesson from the pandemic is that health is a global public good, vulnerable to deficits in its supply and to the emergence of epidemics from any point on the planet. Another lesson is that public-health systems—with universal and egalitarian coverage—are the best protection from the pandemic. A third is that the model of Europe’s welfare state, with public responsibility for providing fundamental services—health, education, universities, research, pensions, social assistance—to all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay, is an effective alternative to the operation of markets.

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The Atlantic: The Great Toilet-Paper Panic

It started with an unsubstantiated rumor. “You can laugh now,” said Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1973, “but there is an acute shortage of toilet paper.” There wasn’t— but it didn’t matter. The broadcast sent America into a mass panic. Millions of shoppers swarmed into grocery stores to begin hoarding toilet paper. The Scott Paper Company insisted that the shortage was being artificially induced, and urged people to stop panic-buying the product. Nevertheless, for four months, toilet paper—absent from the selves—was bartered, traded, and even sold on the black market. Out of nowhere, a shortage was born.

"The Great Toilet Paper Scare" was directed by Brian Gersten (https://www.briangersten.org). It is part of The Atlantic Selects, an online showcase of short documentaries from independent filmmakers, curated by The Atlantic.

Grunge: Why People Are Hoarding Toilet Paper Amid Coronavirus Panic

Whether or not you buy into the whole "don't hoard toilet paper" thing, COVID-19 has ensured that, where once there was Angel Soft on supermarket shelves, there is now only silence. All of this raises the question, "What the heck is going on?" Well, we have an answer to that.

The reasoning behind the recent toilet paper boom is multifaceted and layered, much like toilet paper itself. In an interview with Time, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine Mary Alvord stated that the draw towards toilet paper in times of crisis is practically a primal instinct. She explained:

"We all eat and we all sleep and we all poop. It's a basic need to take care of ourselves. There is comfort in knowing that it's there."

The problem? It's not there. "It" being the availability of toilet paper, of course. While disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes are relatively predictable, appearing at around the same time every year, the novel coronavirus popped up fast and mean. Additionally, it wasn't until it had already spread that authorities at the federal level acknowledged that the virus posed any kind of threat, which led to a flashpoint of panic-buying when the gravity of the situation was felt all at once.

Financial Times: Germany’s coronavirus anomaly: high infection rates but few deaths

The apparent anomaly has sparked debate in Germany and beyond, though experts warn against drawing sweeping conclusions. They argue that the country’s low fatality rate most likely reflects the fact that the outbreak is still at a relatively early stage, and that the age profile of those affected has so far been younger than that in other countries. Younger patients without previous ailments have a much better chance of surviving Covid-19 than elderly patients.

Another factor that may help explain the variance is the unusually high number of tests being carried out in Germany. According to Lothar Wieler, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, German laboratories are now conducting about 160,000 coronavirus tests every week — more than some European countries have carried out in total since the crisis started. Even South Korea, which is conducting 15,000 tests a day and has been held up by virologists as an example to follow, appears to be testing less than Germany. [...]

In the short term at least, mass testing feeds through into a lower fatality rate because it allows authorities to detect cases of Covid-19 even in patients who suffer few or no symptoms, and who have a much better chance of survival. It also means that Germany is likely to have a lower number of undetected cases than countries where testing is less prevalent. Indeed, one notable feature of the coronavirus outbreak in Germany so far is the high number of relatively young patients: according to data from the Robert Koch Institute, more than 80 per cent of all people infected with the coronavirus are younger than 60. [...]

Last week, the federal government ordered an extra 10,000 life-saving ventilators from a German manufacturer, on top of the 25,000 that are already in place in hospitals across the country. The city state of Berlin, which has so far recorded 391 cases of Covid-19, is converting parts of the local trade fair ground into a 1,000-bed hospital for future coronavirus patients. Similar steps have been taken across the country.

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WorldAffairs: How Taiwan Contained COVID-19 + Global News

Taiwan is just 81 miles from mainland China, but it has managed to prevent an outbreak of the rapidly spreading COVID-19 disease. Stanford University’s Dr. Jason Wang explains how Taiwan acted quickly, aggressively and strategically to prevent the type of outbreaks and death rates we’re now seeing around the world. We also hear from William Yang, Taipei correspondent for Deutsche-Welle. Today’s unrelenting coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic can feel overwhelming. Though it may seem like the world around us has come to a stop, major global events march on. Stories about U.S. airstrikes against an Iran-backed militia in Iraq and Vladimir Putin’s new plan to become president for life may not be front page news today, but they will inevitably demand our attention soon.

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Failed Architecture: How The Urban Eclipsed The City: An Interview With Ross Exo Adams

Urbanisation is not and has never been entirely about cities. Beginning with the earlier colonial practices of spatial planning and its projections onto the supposedly “open” spaces of newly settled land, and continuing as a project to establish one continuous global system of social, political and economic control, “the urban” has now decisively eclipsed the city, encompassing the entirety of our planet—such that we can even talk about the urbanisation of the oceans. [...]

I describe the urban as a fundamentally new way to organise and control space, and what happens in it—a political technology that emerged sometime in the nineteenth century in Europe. By this term, I mean to describe two parallel processes we see happening in this period: on the one hand, the broad reorganisation of space across a range of major cities in Europe and, on the other, the deployment of new administrative, legal and political means by which to manage the people who had come to occupy these spaces. [...]

What I suppose I would like people to know about Cerdá is that, in my view, he provided the first and perhaps clearest account of the urban as it arose around him in Europe. This reading requires a bit of interpretive generosity since Cerdá’s project was of course not an “account” per se, but rather a proposal for a space yet to come—a space which he believed he had invented outright. Although he did invent the term urbanización, I see his work as more of a diagram that reveals how space, movement and the control of bodies could be planned for the first time.

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Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the History of Pandemics

Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked shift to agrarian communities that the scale and spread of these diseases increased dramatically.

Widespread trade created new opportunities for human and animal interactions that sped up such epidemics. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, influenza, smallpox, and others first appeared during these early years.

The more civilized humans became – with larger cities, more exotic trade routes, and increased contact with different populations of people, animals, and ecosystems – the more likely pandemics would occur.

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BBC: The plan to turn half the world into a reserve for nature

One of the major reasons for adoption of these extreme preservation goals is a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which found that more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Conducted by hundreds of researchers around the world, the study is considered the most comprehensive analysis of the state of the world’s biodiversity ever. [...]

The ambitious goal of protecting and restoring natural systems on a large scale is shared by a number of groups and people. The Wyss Campaign for Nature is working in partnership with the National Geographic Society to support the goals of the so-called “30x30” movement, a highly ambitious initiative that aims to protect 30% of the planet, on land and at sea, by 2030. [...]

The European Parliament has pledged to protect 30% of European Union territory, restore degraded ecosystems, add biodiversity objectives into all EU policies, and earmark 10% of the budget for improvement of biodiversity. In the US, politicians working with conservation organisations recently introduced a resolution to drum up support for protection of 30% of the US’s land and marine areas.[...]

The ambitious goals of campaigns like 30x30 and Half Earth have been met with criticism. Some question whether focusing on saving up to half of the land’s surface will do much for protecting the remaining biodiversity. In a 2018 paper, Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University, and others, argued that most biodiversity occurs in tropical regions, and much of it is already fragmented. They wrote how protecting broad swaths of nature in largely untouched regions – such as Canada’s boreal forest – has benefits. But the remaining large wild landscapes are mostly in temperate regions, which won’t do much for protecting biodiversity because by far most of the world’s species are in the tropics. “This begs our question of how much biodiversity will we protect if the trend to protect wild places continues,” says Pimm.

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Nautilus Magazine: Natural Selection in an Outbreak

Ebola doesn’t select people. We haven’t figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it’s definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a human host, which ends up being a fatal mistake. When I say fatal, I mean for the virus. After all, Ebola is usually not highly efficient at sustaining infection or transmitting from human to human, and eventually that chain of transmission turns into a dead end. Every Ebola outbreak has ended, even the 2014-2015 West African epidemic. [...]

The circumstances that favor Ebola spillover to humans aren’t necessarily the same ones that drive full-scale epidemics, and it’s important to understand this distinction. Natural selection is the process by which the environment dictates what will thrive. Normally, a human population is not a hospitable environment for Ebola virus. But when we have dysfunctional healthcare systems, we convert a dead-end spillover event into a large outbreak—we select Ebola. It’s no coincidence that the largest Ebola outbreaks occurred in countries with weak governments recovering from brutal civil unrest, with poor education systems and inadequate healthcare infrastructures. Ebola virus finds succor in environments where hepatitis B is uncontrolled and cholera regularly sweeps through. It’s the environments where healthcare systems lag behind rapidly growing urban populations, where road networks carry natural resources out of remote areas but medical supplies cannot find their way in, and where everyone with a fever is told they have “malaria/typhoid” because there are no laboratory facilities to tell them otherwise. It’s these human environments that select Ebola. [...]

There’s a lot of speculation about what dampens and ultimately ends an Ebola outbreak. When a spillover turns into an epidemic turns into a trickle of cases, credit goes to the highly technical international response of laboratories and treatment units, skilled local surveillance and monitoring teams, and even the increasing numbers of survivors that cannot be re-infected. What is often missing from the discussion is how communities adapted to this new threat. How they altered their environment through the use of improvised protective equipment and self- or locally-imposed quarantine. We can all learn from this resilience and resourcefulness. It is this local adaption and memory that we will depend upon, if we as a global community fail to build up the failing healthcare systems that favor Ebola.

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UnHerd: Will coronavirus change the world?

Epidemics have been around as long as civilization. Plaga — from the Greek for ‘strike’ or ‘hit’ — devastated classical Athens in the 5th century BC, when the historian Thucydides nursed sufferers; the Antonine Plague — probably smallpox or measles — killed as many as five million Romans at the empire’s peak. Far more deadly was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, which had a toll of 25 million and emptied whole regions of the eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Only in the 21st century did researchers confirm that this was the same illness that would appear eight centuries later — the Bubonic Plague. [...]

Another danger is climate change, which might turn a mild virus into a deadly one, or cause disease-carrying animals to migrate. This is what happened during the 14th century when the northern hemisphere became considerably cooler, soon after the Mongols had created the largest contiguous empire in history. [...]

In contrast, Milan perhaps had higher survival rates, because its rulers, the ruthless Visconti family, ordered that any house where the plague was identified be boarded up and its inhabitants left to starve. In a later outbreak the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, initiated the rule that all ships stay anchored for 40 days — quaranta — a sensible measure that appreciated the potential length of incubation periods. [...]

Contagious diseases historically raised fear of the outgroup, and already we have seen low-level violence against east Asians in Italy. We’re not going to get pogroms now, partly because children are largely unaffected — the fatality rate for the 0-9s in China still 0 per cent of the 416 confirmed cases —and that’s what really drives terror, but plagues do draw out our most atavistic fears. There is a theory that xenophobia is an evolutionary response to pathogens, since strangers are more likely to carry diseases that the in-group has no immunity to, and that’s why conservatives respond more strongly to disgust and value purity and cleanliness.

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Social Europe: How the new EU gender strategy fails east-central European women

The premise of the strategy is that gender equality is ‘an essential condition for an innovative, competitive and thriving European economy’, which ‘brings more jobs and higher productivity’. This is in line with what has historically driven the EU to legislate on equality between the sexes—the desire not to eradicate inequalities but to optimise the performance of the labour market by ensuring a steady supply of workers. Indeed, one of the key indicators through which the progress towards gender equality in EU member states is measured is the (increasing) proportion of women in the labour market. What this refuses to consider however, are the labour conditions which women are encouraged to enter.

As we have seen in east-central Europe, this experience has been far from emancipatory for many women, as a large proportion of the jobs created in the past three decades have been of poor quality: underpaid, low-skilled, socially undervalued and performed on zero-hours contracts. Kováts and Gregor showed in their research on Hungarian women that broad segments feel so exploited in the labour market that, rather than think how to escape home to do meaningful work and secure financial independence, their main concern is how to escape employment to be with their loved ones. This exposes the hollowness of the commission’s equation of gender equality with more women on the labour market, as at best out of touch and at worst wilfully class-blind. [...]

The narrow neoliberal framework through which the strategy challenges gender inequalities in the supply of care work is also evident in its focus on solving growing demand by encouraging (individual) men to take it up, as well as establishing institutions relieving women of these responsibilities. While both are certainly necessary, they are woefully inadequate to address the deeper underlying tension within capitalist societies—the need for reproductive labour to sustain productive labour, with the associated lack of valorisation and remuneration. Unless we fundamentally restructure ‘worker’ and ‘carer’ roles deemed separate and mutually exclusive, we cannot hope to eradicate this tension, no matter what work-life balance efforts we apply.

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Social Europe: Covid-19 is an opportunity for Europe

The Covid-19 epidemic is not just any stress test. For starters, it is likely to affect the entire world, leading to a synchronised growth slowdown or even recession. Synchronised recessions are virtually always deeper and longer-lasting than downturns affecting individual economies, and they hit open economies such as the EU particularly hard.

Compounding the problem, because every EU member state is facing a severe shock, they will be far less able to help one another than they were during the eurozone crisis that began in 2010. To be sure, Italy has suffered the most so far. But past transmission patterns elsewhere suggest that Covid-19 will continue to spread across Europe, putting every country under growing strain. [...]

The Covid-19 pandemic thus represents an opportunity for the EU to create a powerful crisis-management mechanism, which pools member states’ resources and channels them toward a co-ordinated fiscal policy. The idea of such an ‘insurance fund’ is not new: several economists championed the idea after the last crisis, when discussion of governance reform was in full swing.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

Typically the preparation of the animal is where you have exposure. By the time it’s cooked and prepared, the virus would have been dead. It’s more common that transmission is through the animal shedding or people slaughtering the animal, when they’re exposed to bodily fluids, blood, and secretions. With the avian influenza from poultry, a lot of the exposure and infections go back to the preparation of chicken for cooking. In Egypt, for instance, when you look at who was infected, more common than not it was a woman, directly responsible for slaughtering and preparing the animal. [...]

Certainly. We’ve been able to identify bats as reservoirs for coronaviruses and documented specific bat populations as reservoirs for Ebola virus. We want to understand how each of these bats operate within an ecosystem. Do they have certain behaviors and practices that either keep them remote from or proximal to human populations? The bat population in which we isolated the Ebola virus in West Africa was a species of bat that also tends to co-roost within human housing, so it elevates the opportunity for spillover. [...]

Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. [...]

Oh, sure. It was predictable. It’s like if you had no traffic laws and were constantly finding pedestrians getting whacked by cars as they crossed the street. Is that surprising? No. All you need to do is to better manage how we set up crosswalks, how we establish traffic rules and regulations. We’re not doing that. We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

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Social Europe: The corona crisis will define our era

It was February 26th when the US vice-president and the scientists united in prayer, for—or, rather, against—the coronavirus epidemic. As governor of Indiana, Pence had made a name for himself driving drastic cuts in public-health funding and access to HIV-testing. This contributed to one of the largest outbreaks of the infection ever in his home state. [...]

Already however, we know this: this type of disease cannot be efficiently fought at an individual level, but only as a society. It requires preparation, co-ordination, planning and the ability to make rapid decisions and scale up efforts. A strong state. [...]

The 2008 financial crisis did not lead to any reassessment. Quite the contrary. No one knows what conclusions we will draw this time around, at an individual and collective level. I wonder if young people might come to think that authoritarian China dealt with the crisis better than the US—the land of the free.

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The Guardian: Alleged AfD donor's firm gave money to Tory club

A company controlled by a property magnate who allegedly funded Germany’s main far-right party recently gave £50,000 to an elite organisation that donates large sums of money to the Conservative party. [...]

A series of German media reports have claimed Conle was the ultimate source of a donation of €132,000 (£115,000) to the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). German prosecutors are investigating AfD over the legality of the donation and its source. [...]

The low-profile Conle, 76, built up a property empire over many decades in Germany. He has also emerged as one of the biggest investors in London property in recent years, buying a series of historic buildings in the city centre. [...]

AfD produced a list of 14 EU citizens who it said had contributed to the donation. Some of the individuals claimed they had received money to lend their names to the donation.

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The National Interest: Gambling with 80 Million Lives: Why Erdoğan Lied about Coronavirus

When faced with both local and international disbelief about why coronavirus would bypass Turkey, Turkish authorities took a dual approach. As in China, they arrested whistleblowers. They went beyond simple repression as panelists on the state-controlled Turkish press insisted that Turkish genes rendered most Turkic peoples immune. Many Turks, Erdoğan included, may embrace the notion of both Islamic and Turkish supremacy, but his basic ignorance of science may have condemned Turks to once again prove Darwin correct. [...]

Part of the reason might be Erdoğan’s dangerous combination of arrogance and ignorance. The Turkish leader’s arrogance is reflected in the thin skin he has toward criticism. According to the Turkish Justice Ministry, Turkish police charged an average of 4,500 people each year from 2014 through 2017 with insulting the Turkish leader for criticizing Erdoğan or speaking about his corruption. (Full disclosure: I am one of them). In 2018, the Erdoğan regime initiated 26,000 new cases. Aa cracks began to show in the Turkish economy, Erdoğan spared no effort to muzzle growing criticism. Nor is the Turkish leader’s ignorance any secret as the crackdown on the free press has meant the surviving media merely amplifies the conspiracy theories in which Erdoğan and his top aides believe, such as the Jews targeting them with telekinesis, or that bands on migratory birds to be evidence of Israeli espionage. The Turkish accusation that followers of exiled theologian Fethullah Gülen contributed to the spread of the virus likely is only a matter of time. [...]

As Turkey’s economy teeters, the means to avoid catastrophe are narrowing. Looting Cypriot gas was one strategy, but even if Turkish exploration ships struck it rich, it would still be years to bring the gas to market. What Erdoğan really fears is the collapse of Turkey’s tourism industry. In 2018, the Turkish tourism industry accounts for nearly $30 billion dollars. Just a year ago, Erdoğan promised that Turkey would host 50 million tourists, raising that figure by at least 20 percent. Add into the mix Turkey’s investment of approximately $12 billion in a new Istanbul airport, expected to be the world’s largest, and one in which Erdoğan and his family are reportedly heavily invested. It seems Erdoğan sought to downplay reports of coronavirus in order to encourage tourist dollars to continue to flow. In doing so, he sought not only to play Russians, Europeans, and Americans for fools, but also endangered their lives. Unfortunately for Turkey, it will be Turks who will most pay the price as Turkey threatens to become the virus’ next big cluster. One Turkish doctor estimates that as many as 60 percent of Turks may now be infected and that Erdoğan is retarding testing in order to prevent the scale of the catastrophe from becoming known. Deaths were inevitable, but Erdoğan’s dishonest will likely cause many thousand additional deaths in his country added to the dozens Turkey reportedly has already experienced but will not officially report.

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99 Percent Invisible: Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital

As Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski observed in the early 1900s: “the map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” The point, in part, is that maps are representations of places rather than substitutes for reality, which has various physical and philosophical implications. At the same time, though, the flow of data from places to maps is not always one-directional — maps may be representations of reality, but they can shape reality, too. [...]

Finally, in 1744, the famous Cassini family of scientists in France created the first topographically accurate national map. The process was painstaking and piecemeal, and Britain wanted to do the same. Still, the whole-map approach they took wasn’t complete until 1853, 62 years after it was officially started. Then in the 1930s, they did a re-triangulation, to get more granular measurements, which took another 29 years. [...]

Occoquan, Virginia is one of those quiet, historical towns where wealthy middle-aged people go away for the weekend and buy art and BoHo clothing in small boutiques and then stroll along the waterfront, or at least, it was. Artist Lauren Jacobs was excited when in 2015 she won a juried place in a cooperative gallery in Occoquan called The Artists’ Undertaking, both to have an outlet for her work and to be part of a group of other like-minded artistic community. Her earthy, surreal mixed-media paintings and sculptures sold well for a while… until Pokémon GO came to town.

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Freakonomics: Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373 Rebroadcast)

As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?

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The New Yorker: The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics

Every plague must have its point. That’s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence, of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk, for as long as we have kept records, literary and narrative, of what happens when these things happen. The truth that there is a constant, unending, and unpredictable warfare between human and bug, which takes place in a state of moral indifference, at least on the bug’s side, is somehow profoundly counterintuitive. This war, of course, takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth, with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds, parasites and bacteria and viruses. [...]

Again and again, in the history of illness, we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe. Even as late as the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage, the idea that a “miasma” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people, and with it came a moralizing: the poor and the immigrants died because they were always in sickness, or brought it with them, or kept it inside them. [...]

One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness.

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SciShow: How Green Energy Could Bring More Rain to Africa

Africa’s Sahara desert is a prime location, some say, to build arrays of solar panels and wind turbines. But scientists are aware that building these structures can potentially have large-scale effects on the surrounding environment that are worth studying first.

Notes from Poland: Most Poles religious but few “strongly committed” to their faith, new data show

Just over 60% of Poles display “religious commitment”, according to new data released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a government agency. But just 5.5% of them are “strongly committed” to their faith, while 23% are “moderately committed” and 33% are “weakly committed”. Meanwhile, some 34% of people are “uncommitted” (meaning that they have a religion, but are not religiously active), while the remainder, 5%, are outside of any religion, reports Onet. [...]

Katarzyna Zielińska, a sociologist at the Jagiellonian University, told Notes from Poland that, although the new figures do not directly indicate any change in religiosity, the wider trend observed in recent years – shown in data from the CBOS polling institute – has shown a decline in terms of declarations of practices as well as religious belonging. [...]

The new Statistics Poland data also show significant differences between age groups, Onet notes. The 25-34 age group is the least religious – more than half of respondents in this group (51%) are either religiously uncommitted or outside of any religion, and just 17% are either strongly or moderately committed. [...]

This has been confirmed by CBOS’s data – which show that the proportion of school leavers declaring themselves believers has dropped from 81% to 63% in a decade – and also by the Pew Research Center, which has found Poland to have the biggest decline in religiosity between the oldest and youngest generations.

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Engadget: EU plans to introduce sweeping 'right to repair' legislation for electronics

If the European Parliament were to pass legislation, it would extend its eco-design law to cover phones, tablets and computers, and likely force tech companies to completely rethink the designs of their products. The legislation would also require those same companies to provide easy to access information related to the repairability and durability of their products. At the moment, most consumers have to turn to websites like iFixit to find information on how to fix their devices. "Single-use will be restricted, premature obsolescence tackled and the destruction of unsold durable goods banned," the Commission said. [...]

The plan is one part of the European Green Deal, a policy initiative the EU announced last year. Like the Green New Deal advocated by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the goal of the European Green Deal is to transform the continent's economy in light of the climate crisis. [...]

The plan is the latest attempt by the EU to tackle electronic waste. In January, European Union lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation to push to device manufacturers to adopt a shared charging cable standard. The new legislation is likely to face stiff resistance from manufacturers. Ahead of the charger vote, Apple said any regulation would "stifle innovation" and ultimately hurt consumers more than it would help them.

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The World Economic Forum: Coronavirus: how to keep things in perspective

The first cases of AIDS were described in June 1981 and it took more than two years to identify the virus (HIV) causing the disease. With COVID-19, the first cases of severe pneumonia were reported in China on December 31, 2019 and by January 7 the virus had already been identified. The genome was available on day 10. We already know that it is a new coronavirus from group 2B, of the same family as the SARS, which we have called SARSCoV2. The disease is called COVID-19. It is thought to be related to coronavirus of bats. Genetic analyses have confirmed that it has a recent natural origin (between the end of November and the beginning of December) and that, although viruses live by mutating, its mutation rate may not be very high. [...]

The strong control and isolation measures imposed by China are paying off. For several weeks now, the number of cases diagnosed every day is decreasing. A very detailed epidemiological follow-up is being carried out in other countries; outbreaks are very specific to areas, which can allow them to be controlled more easily.

The disease causes no symptoms or is mild in 81% of cases. Of course, in the remaining 14%, it can cause severe pneumonia and in 5% it can become critical or even fatal. It is still unclear what the death rate may be. Be it could be lower than some estimates so far.

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EURACTIV: Six EU countries join call for 100% renewable energy scenario

But none of the eight options, which range from business-as-usual to net-zero emission cuts, included a scenario based on 100% renewable energies. And only two of them achieve climate neutrality, which in the meantime was chosen by EU heads of states and government as the preferred option. [...]

Last week, the Commission tabled a landmark Climate Law, aiming to make the EU’s 2050 climate neutrality objective “irreversible” by turning it into a legally-binding obligation on all 27 member states. [...]

The detailed impact assessment was requested by EU member states as a prerequisite for raising the EU’s 2030 target to 50-55% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, up from 40% currently. [...]

Researchers from Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) recently unveiled their own model of a 100% system, which would involve 20 independent European regions or “islands” connected together through a “super grid”.

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The Guardian: Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to. The erosion of language to the point that “ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts” (Humphrys again) will not, cannot, happen. The clearest evidence for this is that warnings about the deterioration of English have been around for a very long time. [...]

For those who worry about language deteriorating, proper usage is best exemplified by the speech and writing of a generation or so before their own. The logical conclusion is that the generation or two before that would be even better, the one before that even more so. As a result, we should find Trevisa’s language vastly more refined, more correct, more clear and more effective. The problem is, we can’t even read it. [...]

The hard truth is that English, like all other languages, is constantly evolving. It is the speed of the change, within our own short lives, that creates the illusion of decline. Because change is often generational, older speakers recognise that the norms they grew up with are falling away, replaced with new ones they are not as comfortable using. This cognitive difficulty doesn’t feel good, and the bad feelings are translated into criticism and complaint. We tend to find intellectual justifications for our personal preferences, whatever their motivation. If we lived for hundreds of years, we would be able to see the bigger picture. Because when you zoom out, you can appreciate that language change is not just a question of slovenliness: it happens at every level, from the superficial to the structural.

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Wisecrack Edition: How Conspiracies Changed (Flat Earth, Anti-Vaxxers)

Are conspiracy theories different now? Join us, as we explore the changing nature of conspiracy theories and what they mean for the world.

WorldAffairs: Coronavirus: Bracing for a Global Pandemic

The World Health Organization is warning all countries to take the threat of a coronavirus global pandemic seriously as governments around the world are scrambling to effectively contain the spread of COVID-19. Local health officials worldwide are preparing for widespread outbreaks while encouraging citizens to remain calm. Financial markets are bracing for the worst as many schools and corporate offices are closing their doors. On this week’s episode, Ray Suarez talks with Larry Brilliant, a renowned epidemiologist, credited with playing a major role in eradicating smallpox, and Pulitzer Prize-winning global health journalist Laurie Garrett. We also get dispatches from Rafael Suarez in China, Christopher Livesay in Italy and Peter Kenyon, who recently returned from Iran.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Loneliness

Loneliness - Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York, charts the emergence of loneliness as a contemporary emotional state. Also, Janne Flora, postdoctoral scholar at Aarhus University, explores the deep connections between loneliness and modernity in the Arctic, tracing the history of Greenland and analysing the social dynamics that shaped it.

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