Wired: Iran’s coronavirus outbreak makes no sense. What’s really going on?

But it is Iran that is concerning public health experts the most. According to the latest reports from the Iranian health ministry, the country has seen 16 confirmed deaths from Covid-19 and 95 confirmed cases. That death rate – of around 17 per cent – is “really quite high based on the China experience, and for early in the course of the epidemic is substantially high,” says Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia. So what’s going on? [...]

Some believe the Iranian government is deliberately trying to downplay the severity of the infection in the country. That seems to be supported by reports that broke on February 25 claiming Iranian police arrested 24 people, and temporarily detained another 118, for being “rumour-mongers” about the spread of coronavirus in Iran. The head of Iran’s cyber police force told the state’s official news agency that the police would block online posts that “contain rumours or fake news meant to disturb the public and increase concern in society”. [...]

He doesn’t believe that the main issue is Iran is covering up the spread of the coronavirus. “My view of the world is more cock-up than conspiracy,” he says. But the alternative could be more worrying. “I don’t think Iran has the capacity to identify all the contacts and cases that are likely to have been effective.”

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Spiegel: Right-Wing Extremists Could Win Big in Slovak Election

The other parties in the Slovak parliament, to be sure, have made clear that they do not intend to form a coalition with Kotleba under any circumstances. But whether they will remain true to their word is by no means certain. The political landscape is fissured and the liberal camp is divided: If the far-right does as well as polls suggest it could in next week's election, democracy in Slovakia could soon follow the same path as Poland and Hungary. And this despite the fact that Slovakia has long been considered an example of successful integration with the West. Slovakia's roughly 5 million citizens have for years achieved annual economic growth of at least 3 percent and the country enjoys full employment. Carmakers like Mercedes, Kia, VW and Renault are the largest employers. Slovakia adopted the euro in 2005. [...]

Ideological differences have prevented the formation of a united, democratic bloc in the center -- one that could siphon off support from SMER on the left and fend off the demagogue Kotleba on the right. The political center, though, is frayed, and the egos of the party leaders has made any kind of rapprochement difficult. [...]

In 2017, he even handed out checks to poor families worth exactly 1,488 euros ($1,610). The number is a popular code among white supremacists: The number 14 is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan popularized by the American neo-Nazi David Lane, while 88 stands for "Heil Hitler," as H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. The message that Kotleba sends to voters is that they can feel comfortable identifying with their nationalist history. And that includes the Slovak government, which during World War II was long controlled by Hitler. The clerical-fascist regime of the dictator Jozef Tiso eliminated members of the opposition and helped deport Slovak Jews, most of whom were sent to Auschwitz.

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The Conversation: We groom dogs in our own image: the cuter they are, the harder we fall

One argument is pets piggyback on this tendency, with their cuteness inspiring us to care for them. Certainly, we often treat pets like children and consider them to be members of the family. [...]

To increase cuteness, researchers made the dog’s eyes larger, the jowls smaller, or increased the space between the eyes. To make the dog more human-like, they applied colour to the dog’s irises, or gave the dog a visible smile. People typically preferred the dogs with cuter or more human-like traits. [...]

A cautionary note to end on, then, is we must keep animal welfare top of mind. It’s fine to make over a dog who enjoys it, but let’s not cause dogs stress just for the sake of entertainment.

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The Guardian: Paraguay still haunted by cataclysmic war that nearly wiped it off the map

The six-year War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay confronted the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, had inflicted apocalyptic damage on the landlocked nation.

Roughly two-thirds of Paraguay’s population perished during the conflict, including around 90% of its men. Brazil and Argentina would go on to annex enormous swaths of Paraguayan territory. [...]

The war also left a lasting impact above ground. After the conflict, tracts of public land were sold off to foreign companies to pay off war debt imposed on Paraguay, said Ernesto Benítez, a leader in the small-scale farmers’ movement. [...]

Paraguay still has the highest inequality of land ownership in the world – about 85% of agricultural land is held by just 2.5% of owners – and small-scale farmer and indigenous groups face widespread landlessness. At least 14% of Paraguayan land is in the hands of Brazilian farmers, a group that wields enormous economic and political power. [...]

As cases of sexual abuse proliferate, 584 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 were recorded to have given birth in 2018. However, these official figures are criticised for offering an incomplete picture. Elsewhere, recent emblematic cases of sexual harassment towards women in public institutions have been dismissed as “courtship”.

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CityLab: How to Make a Housing Crisis

Contract cities aren’t the first thing that come to mind for most people when they think of the affordable housing crisis that many American cities now face—these suburban communities tend not to have many homeless people or renters at risk of eviction. But in desirable regions like coastal California, contract cities have played a huge role in exacerbating housing problems outside their borders. For over half a century, they’ve been all too successful at implementing their founding mandates: preserving their physical and demographic character, and delivering consistently rising home values to homeowners. [...]

Golden Gates is at its best as a history, whose breadth demonstrates the impossibility of silver-bullet housing solutions. One of many counterintuitive origin points for California’s current crisis was San Francisco’s freeway revolts that began in the 1950s, when grassroots neighborhood activists successfully prevented highways from being constructed throughout most (but not all) of the city. The revolts marked the beginning of the state’s anti-growth movement, which challenged California’s longstanding growth-for-growth’s sake philosophy. That doctrine had brought “urban renewal” projects that transformed minority neighborhoods into bombed-out shells of their former selves and inspired proposals to fill in nearly the entire San Francisco Bay.

Anti-growth activism began as a close cousin of the state’s environmentalism, but as time went on, “the good intention of stopping sprawl soon became cover for stopping everything,” Dougherty writes. The broad language of the California Environmental Quality Act enabled this conceptual fudging, granting ordinary citizens the power to halt coastal subdivisions and green urban infill projects alike. As land use and planning power devolved to neighborhood groups, city governments followed their lead by “downzoning” large swaths of their land to preserve the existing urban landscape, as if it were a pristine old-growth forest.

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