CityLab: More Bike Lanes Could Save up to 10,000 Lives a Year in Europe

That’s the finding from a new European Commission-funded study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health that seeks to assess the relationship between cycling’s popularity and death rates. The findings, compiled from 167 cities and published in the journal Preventive Medicine, are striking. If 24.7 percent of all journeys were taken by bike, London could see 1,210 fewer premature deaths annually, Rome could see 433 fewer, and Barcelona could see 248 fewer. Spread across the entire network of cities investigated, that’s a substantial drop in mortality. But how exactly could cycle network expansions make this happen?

Improving bike infrastructure (thus boosting cycling’s modal share) can reduce urban deaths by three key factors: air quality, public health, and collisions. By encouraging more people to switch from other forms of transit (other than walking, whose modal share the study predicts would remain stable), installing more bike lanes increases physical activity and provides health benefits. This modal shift slashes the volume of particulate-emitting vehicles on the road, meaning the air people breathe is less damaging to their health. And finally, as the modal share for motor vehicles drops, the number of people these vehicles kill in collisions drops off. [...]

Thankfully, this money could be more than recouped, the study finds. By reducing premature deaths through improvements in air quality, public fitness, and a drop in fatal road collisions, the benefits of a larger modal share more than outweigh the costs—quite strikingly so, in some cities. If Rome increased its cycling modal share by even 10 percent of its current level—still a major improvement—it could save €70 for every euro spent on bike lanes. Barcelona could save €35 for every euro spent on infrastructure, and London could save the pound equivalent of €8 for every euro spent.

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IFLScience: For The First Time Ever, Orangutans Have Been Proven To Self-Medicate

The apes were first observed chewing leaves, and then rubbing the lather formed due to the saponins released on themselves, a few years back. So far it has only been reported in the Bornean orangutan, and not in either of the other two species of the Asian great apes. Initially, the plant they were using was misidentified as being Commelina, but further and more detailed observations showed that it was actually a species known as Dracaena cantleyi.

The leaves of the plant are incredibly bitter, and the observations show that the apes chew on the leaves to make the lather before spitting out the remaining wadge. This proves that the orangutans are not eating the plant, but are presumably only interested in the substances it exudes, something that must be worth braving the disgusting taste in the first place.

And so the researchers set out to see whether or not D. cantleyi actually has any pharmaceutical properties, and if so what the apes might be achieving by rubbing the lather on their fur. Tests have now shown, the results of which are published in Nature, that the plant does indeed have medicinal properties, and is, in fact, an anti-inflammatory.

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The New York Review of Books: The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master

What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)

Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. [...]

So how is an English reader to approach Almost Zero? I asked some Russians for advice. The author and journalist Masha Gessen hadn’t read the book. “Should I?” she wondered. I told her I thought Surkov was fascinating, apparently very smart. “None of them are smart,” she said. Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina looked taken aback when I brought up Almost Zero during audience questions at her performance with the banned Belarus Free Theatre at New York’s La Mama. “I have no interest in reading it,” she replied. “I don’t think I will.” Understandably, perhaps, since Surkov was in charge of the government’s religious relations when Pussy Riot’s members were imprisoned for their punk song performance in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012. I emailed the novelist Vladimir Sorokin, whose outrageous satires, like Pelevin’s, have been attacked by the nationalist youth groups supported by Surkov. “Yes,” he wrote back from Berlin, where he now lives, “people say that it’s Surkov’s book, maybe it’s true. I’ve read twenty pages and that was enough for me. It’s secondhand literature. There is no space there, no air. Only effort and the attempt to write a ‘contemporary postmodern novel.’ It’s boring.”

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The Atlantic: The Entirely Rational Basis For Turkey's Move Into Syria

Through 94 years of independence, Turkish leaders have made clear that the nightmare of post-World-War-I dismemberment can never repeat itself. But it has, despite their best efforts—albeit in an updated form, involving the United States and Syrian territory that the Kurds call Rojava, or Western Kurdistan. This explains why, last weekend, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered his army to attack a district in northwestern Syria called Afrin. The area is under the control of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its affiliated fighting force, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). This force has been an effective partner of the United States in the fight against the self-declared Islamic State, but it is also a creature of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—a Turkish Kurdish group that both the United States and Turkey identify as a terrorist organization. [...]

And yet the Turkish operation is entirely rational—not only in terms of how the Turks view the war in Syria and its impact on their own security, but also in terms of Turkey’s geography, identity, and problematic history with great powers. Policymakers in Washington often justify Turkey’s strategic importance based on location. The country’s capital, Ankara, sits roughly at the geographic center of many U.S. foreign policy concerns in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. This geography also has its disadvantages for Turks. As a rump state of the Ottoman Empire, it shares long borders with threatening, unstable, or warring countries, a fact the Turks recognize. It is hard to have, in Atatürk’s famous words, “peace at home, peace in the world” when the fragmentation of countries on one’s borders threatens one’s own unity. Observers were shocked when, in October 2016, Erdogan questioned the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that defined the Republic of Turkey’s borders. At the time, the Turks were facing the possibility that Iraq’s Kurds would declare their independence at the same time their Syrian cousins were leveraging battlefield success and American support to do the same. [...]

The twists and turns in the Syrian civil war and the American determination not to get sucked into it, but to still defeat the Islamic State, have created a slew of inconsistencies in Washington’s approach to those two goals. Being the friend of your friend’s enemy contributes to outcomes like Turkey’s Afrin incursion, which both the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Trump administration oppose. It is true that Afrin is located in the northwest, far from the area east of the Euphrates that is of most concern to the Pentagon, but Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s declaration in response to Operation Olive Branch that “we’ll work this out” with the Turks are the words of a man—no matter how smart and learned—with little in the way of leverage. The United States is likely to accommodate itself to Turkey’s 20-mile security zone in Afrin, but the Turks do not trust (perhaps irreparably) the United States. Washington plays a central role in their century-old nightmare. 

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Social Europe: Why Greece Could Have Returned To Financial Markets Much Earlier

Those developments come into sharp contrast with the pursued objective of a nominal debt haircut in spring 2015 when then finance minister Yanis Varoufakis called for various changes in European monetary architecture through the issue of Eurobonds to resolve the Greek crisis. He sought a New Deal-type of solution via an international debt reduction conference reminiscent of the 1953 German arrangement of its post-war debt and perpetual bonds. All those proposals were rhetorical exercises because they shared the same fatal flaw, that is, they depended on the willingness of international lenders to concede favors without achieving any fiscal discipline on the part of the Greeks. Finally, Varoufakis and his team pushed for an unconventional double system of domestic payments with a shadow currency, contrary to ECB rules, which was massively risky for liquidity and would inevitably result in a Grexit and a return to drachma, while its possible implementation would have strained democracy in the country with unpredictable consequences. [...]

Diverting from this impassioned chapter in recent Greek history, we here highlight instead a policy lesson that was never discussed before: that back in 2015, the option of a return to international financial markets, which is now central to seizing political and economic gains, was wide open. However, blind with maximalist posturing and wasting time with vain plans, the Greek government failed to capitalize on this path because the blame was conveniently put on “others”, that is, on lenders.

In retrospect, the return to financial markets was the sensible approach to follow although it would have involved the adoption of structural adjustments dictated by the lenders. Was there an alternative path to liberate the country early on from lenders’ demands in return for their financial support lines? In my view, there was further room for maneuver through the issuance of structural adjustment-linked bonds based on policies determined by the Greek government alone.

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