Canada's Chinese community faces racist abuse in wake of coronavirus

Leyland Cecco in Toronto,The Guardian•January 28, 2020

Photograph: Canadian Press/REX/Shutterstock

When Toronto resident Terri Chu tweeted that she and other Chinese mothers feared the “inevitable wave of racism” that would accompany the spread of coronavirus around the world, she didn’t realize how visceral the reactions would be.

“My Twitter has just exploded with vitriol since this morning,” she said on Tuesday. “But it’s just par for the course, growing up as a minority when you’re not part of a dominant class.”

Related: What is the coronavirus and how worried should we be?

Canada has so far seen three confirmed cases of the virus, which originated in China, but members of the country’s Chinese community have already become the target of racism.

The country saw a similar wave of xenophobia during 2003 Sars outbreak, which also started in China.

During that panic, many Chinese-run businesses in Canada took steep losses as fear overrode public health advice: Toronto lost an estimated C$1bn as residents and tourists avoided the city, especially areas with a high concentration of Chinese businesses.

The irrational public worry that paralyzed much of the city seems to be returning, said Amy Go, the interim president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.

“I was hopeful it wasn’t going to be like 2003. But it’s is. It’s happening now and it’s just going to be amplified [by social media].”

When a popular Toronto blog, reviewed a new Chinese restaurant on Instagram on Monday, the post quickly received a torrent of racist comments.

And nearly 9,000 parents in the York school district – an area north of Toronto – signed a petition demanding students who had traveled to China in the last 17 days be prevented from attending school.

“This has to stop. Stop eating wild animals and then infecting everyone around you,” wrote one petition signer. “Stop the spread and quarantine yourselves or go back.”

On Monday, the board – which represents 208 schools – condemned the petition amid fears students will be targeted based on their ethnicity.

“We are aware of an escalated level of concern and anxiety among families of Chinese heritage,” wrote York board chair Juanita Nathan and education director Louise Sirisko. “Individuals who make assumptions, even with positive intentions of safety, about the risk of others, request or demand quarantine can be seen as demonstrating bias and racism.”

Chu said fears about the coronavirus were disproportionate.

“Air pollution and the proliferation of STDs are far greater public health risk to my kids than the coronavirus right now – it’s being completely blown out of proportion,” she said. The total death toll of Sars in Canada was 44, she said. “Last year in Toronto, 41 people got hit by cars.”

Related: Boarding schools with Chinese pupils urged to be alert for xenophobia

Racist responses have also been seen in other countries with Chinese diaspora communities. In Australia, Queensland MP Duncan Pegg warned residents of false health bulletins circulating online that stoked fear of communities with high proportions Asian residents.

But Go also said that the reactions in Canada – which includes some of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world – expose a current of everyday racism which is always present.

“Two or three months from now, the coronavirus will likely be gone. But this is not just a public health issue. This is an issue of racism in Canada. “The best thing to come from this – the best impact – would be people collectively learning that we can do better.”

‘No Chinese allowed’: Racism and fear are now spreading along with the coronavirus

Published: Jan 29, 2020 4:37 p.m. ET

‘This week, my ethnicity has made me feel like I was part of a threatening and diseased mass,’ Sam Phan, a master’s student at the University of Manchester, said this week

Getty Images 

A man stands in a nearly empty street during the Chinese

 New Year holiday this week in Beijing, China.

By QUENTINFOTTRELL PERSONAL FINANCE EDITOR

As Chinese health officials and citizens struggle to contain the coronavirus, people in countries including South Korea, Malaysia, the U.K. and Canada are reporting the spread of anti-Chinese racism.

The highly contagious, pneumonia-causing illness that infects the respiratory tract is now responsible for 132 deaths in China as of Wednesday and more than 6,000 infections, up from 1,975 last Saturday, Chinese health officials and local media said.

Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang said 5 million people had left the city before travel restrictions were imposed ahead of the Chinese New Year. Ma Xiaowei, the director of China’s National Health Commission, said that the virus had an incubation period of 10 to 14 days.

The focus on Wuhan, the Central Chinese city where the virus is believed to have been first diagnosed in December, and rumors about whether it began in a food market there, have led to reports of racism against Chinese people and the sharing of xenophobic memes online.

Sam Phan, a master’s student at the University of Manchester, wrote in the Guardian: “This week, my ethnicity has made me feel like I was part of a threatening and diseased mass. To see me as someone who carries the virus just because of my race is, well, just racist.”

“As an east Asian I can’t help but feel more and more uncomfortable,” added Phan, a British citizen. “On the bus to work last week, as I sat down, the man next to me immediately scrambled to gather his stuff and stood up to avoid sitting next to me.”

As of 6 pm on Tuesday, the entrance to a seafood restaurant in downtown Seoul bore a sign that read, in red Chinese characters, “No Chinese allowed.” That same day, union of food delivery workers asked to be excused from making deliveries to areas with a large Chinese population pic.twitter.com/tSE0Z7wwhk— Klaus (@Kakapolka) January 29, 2020

After five people were arrested in Malaysia for spreading fake news about the virus online, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said, “The government will take action on those spreading fake news to instill fear among Malaysians and incite hatred among the races.”

“Even though we believe in freedom of press, that does not mean the press should agitate people and cause people to be antagonistic towards each other,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post. “We will take action against those people.”

Photos of store and restaurant windows in South Korea and Japan shared on Twitter TWTR, +0.63% reportedly have signs that say “No Chinese allowed.” Social-media users report that similar fear and misinformation spread during the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003.

A video of Chinese vlogger Wang Mengyun eating bat soup went viral along with thousands of comments — and, according to Mengyun, hate mail. But the video was recorded three years earlier in Palau, Micronesia, a Pacific island nation, not in China.

On Twitter, Canadian-based journalist Andrew Kurjata wrote, “Perhaps revealing some naiveté, I’m surprised at the level of vitriol towards Chinese people I’m seeing in the comments sections of stories about the Wuhan coronavirus. And I mean towards the people, not the government.”

Recommended: This is how the illness has spread across the world so rapidly

An online petition signed by parents in one school district in Ontario, Canada, asked the school board to request parents whose children or whose families have recently returned from China “to stay at home and keep isolated for a minimum of 17 days for the purpose of self-quarantine.”

China has taken major steps to help prevent the spread of the virus. Officials in Wuhan, a city of 11 million residents that is widely regarded as the epicenter of the illness, last week closed the area’s outgoing airport and railway stations and suspended all public transport.

Chinese officials have since expanded that travel ban to 16 surrounding cities with a combined population of more than 50 million people, including Huanggang, a neighboring city to Wuhan with 7.5 million people, effectively putting those cities on lockdown.

The city’s marathon, which was scheduled for Feb. 9 and typically attracts 70,000 participants, was also canceled. Most of the coronavirus fatalities were older patients, although a 36-year-old Hubei man died earlier this week, the Associated Press reported. Several major theme parks have also been shuttered.

Phan, writing in the Guardian, said “it’s important it is to see us in all our diversity, as individual human beings, and to challenge stereotypes. The coronavirus is a human tragedy, so let’s not allow fear to breed hatred, intolerance and racism,” he wrote.

Virus Crisis Exposes Cracks in China's Facade of Unity

Li Yuan, The New York Times•January 28, 2020

Paramedics transport a man believed to be Hong Kong's first Wuhan

 coronavirus patient to a hospital on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2019. 

(Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)

From the outside, China’s Communist Party appears powerful and effective. It has tightened its control over Chinese politics and culture, the economy and everyday life, projecting the image of a gradually unifying society.

The coronavirus outbreak has blown up that facade.

Staff members at the prestigious Union Hospital in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, have joined others around China in begging online for medical supplies. Videos show patients in Wuhan beseeching medical staff for treatment. Residents of Wuhan and its province, Hubei, are being chased off planes and ousted from hotels and villages.

Online critics are comparing current leaders unfavorably with past ones, even though the older generation had its own tarnished record on responding to emergencies. Some people have urged local party officials to kill themselves.

As cracks show in China’s veneer of stability, even some with ties to the party leadership are calling for those in power to shine light on divisions rather than papering them over. The crisis has shown that China remains riddled with vulnerabilities that no amount of censorship or strong-arming can hide.

“The local government’s tolerance level of different online voices is way too low,” wrote Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times newspaper, a nationalist, party-controlled outlet that fiercely defends Beijing from its critics, in a social media post.

Government agencies have weakened the checks-and-balances function of the Chinese news media, Hu wrote, citing the example of eight early whistleblowers who were summoned for talks by the Wuhan police.

The coronavirus outbreak has already killed over 100 people and infected more than 4,000 in China, mostly in Wuhan and elsewhere in Hubei. For online critics of the government’s responses, which at times have been slow or seemingly random, the crisis has prompted a rethinking of the grand trade-off with the party, in which the people have surrendered individual rights for the promise of stability and prosperity.

“The current system looks so vibrant yet it’s shattered completely by a governance crisis,” one user wrote on social media site Weibo.

“We gave up our rights in exchange for protection,” the user wrote. “But what kind of protection is it? Where will our long-lasting political apathy lead us?”

The post was shared over 7,000 times and liked 27,000 times before censors deleted it.

Westerners can be easily awed by how quickly and forcefully the Chinese government can mobilize resources and build infrastructure. Even some international public health experts have said they were impressed with the speed and scale of China’s lockdown on more than a dozen cities, which has affected 56 million people. The Chinese propaganda machine has highlighted such abilities as two new Wuhan coronavirus hospitals are built from scratch, to be completed in days.

This single-minded pursuit of efficiency masks deep problems. Propaganda videos and flashy new buildings don’t show the toll that this relentless drive can take on people, society or the environment.

Many Chinese people are willing to go along. Partly, the state has taught them to think that way. But many are satisfied with the status quo because they believe that the party has kept their interests in mind.

The epidemic now threatens to change some of that thinking.

Officials in Wuhan initially played down the threat and censored information as the disease spread throughout the country and even internationally. The city and the province then abruptly imposed a lockdown on travel, even though millions had already left for China’s Lunar New Year holiday.

Local residents complained that restrictions later imposed on traffic made it difficult for people to get to work and seek medical assistance, perhaps hindering prevention efforts rather than helping them.

Wuhan’s medical system was so overwhelmed that videos of overworked medical workers having breakdowns and desperate patients pleading for help circulated widely online.

The situation was so dire that Zhang Ouya, a senior reporter at the state-run Hubei Daily, wrote that “Hubei must immediately replace its commanders” on his verified Weibo account. The post was soon deleted, but a screenshot circulated widely. In an official document leaked online, the newspaper apologized to Wuhan officials and promised that its staff would post only positive content.

For many people in China, the most unexpected revelation came when local hospitals ran out of supplies and had to ask for donations on social media, going around the Chinese bureaucracy. As the crisis expanded, even hospitals in Beijing and other provinces resorted to public appeals for face masks and protective medical gowns.

“I’ve always thought we have the most refined state-run system, which can pool and deploy resources at a moment’s notice,” wrote a Weibo user called Meng Chang, a former journalist in Beijing. But the reality was disappointing, he wrote: “Where is the omnipotent system?”

National leaders, meanwhile, look out of touch. As the outbreak became a national crisis, the front page of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, last week extolled the leadership but didn't mention Wuhan. “There’re no people in the People’s Daily,” one of my WeChat connections, an economist, messaged me.

China Central Television, the state broadcaster, featured a banquet held by the leadership to celebrate the country’s successes. On Friday night, the eve of the Lunar New Year, CCTV’s annual holiday broadcast worked in six minutes of praise for Wuhan’s medical workers between the skits and songs. Wuhan’s people went unmentioned.

“I was very sad when watching the Spring Festival gala last night,” a woman named Jiujiu told the podcast Gushi FM. “Wuhan has come to this, yet the whole nation still seemed full of great joy.”

Some within China’s institutions appear to be trying to fix the problems.

While Weibo has censored many posts about the epidemic, it appears to be leaving loopholes for its users to vent. Wang Gaofei, Weibo’s chief executive, posted research by scientists at the University of Washington that showed a correlation between greater news coverage and a reduction in infections.

But in a country where history is often rewritten to serve the party’s interests, the lessons of the past can be forgotten. Discussion of SARS, the outbreak that killed hundreds 17 years ago, has been muted. Even as many Chinese people quietly complain about current leaders, they wax nostalgic about the role that former President Hu Jintao played in the SARS epidemic, apparently forgetting that Beijing tried to cover up that outbreak for three months.

A video of a CCTV interview with Beijing’s mayor at the time, Wang Qishan, who is now China’s vice president, was viewed over 4 million times in two hours before it was deleted. The comments were full of praises for his candid and confident answers and yearning for a strong leader like him.

“It’s not that this nation has a bad memory,” wrote one person who pointed out the irony. “It’s because those in power don’t like that you remember.”

The police in various parts of China have fined or detained over 40 people in the past few days for spreading “rumors,” many of which claimed that there were confirmed cases of the virus locally, according to a tally by a WeChat account based on media reports.

Wang Heyan, an investigative reporter for the magazine Caixin who has written about corruption cases involving top Chinese leaders, lamented on her WeChat timeline that she and her colleagues couldn’t get any medical workers to talk to them in Wuhan. Even after she promised them anonymity, Wang said, the workers feared reprisals.

“If all medical workers aren’t willing to take a little risk to speak the truth and the media can’t report the truth, in the end everyone, including the doctors, will be victims,” she wrote.

A reporter from Beijing News also complained on social media that even though he was in the epicenter of the epidemic, he couldn’t write a single word about what he had learned.

Many Chinese still have strong belief in the power of the central government. After Premier Li Keqiang visited Wuhan on Monday, a week after the epidemic became a full-blown crisis, a retiree told my colleague Chris Buckley, “In China, if a leader visits, that shows that all the resources of the government can be mobilized.”

Li Haipeng, a former journalist, predicted as early as last week that eventually the state would come to Wuhan’s rescue.

“The state will be interpreted, proved and trusted as the only savior,” he wrote on Weibo. “All our stories are the same: They start with the failure of the state and end with its victory.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

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Historians unveil rare photos of Sobibor death camp

Yannick PASQUET, AFP•January 28, 2020


A staff member of the Topography of Terror archive points at a historical photograph allegedly showing convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk at the Sobibor camp (AFP Photo/Tobias SCHWARZ) 1 / 2

Berlin (AFP) - Hundreds of newly discovered photographs, including some taken at the Sobibor death camp, represent a "quantum leap" in research into Nazi crimes against humanity, historians at the Berlin museum Topography of Terror said Tuesday.

Historians said the "exceptional collection" provided unprecedented insights into the Sobibor camp in German Nazi-occupied Poland, about which little is known even 75 years after the end of World War II.

The trove, consisting of 361 black-and-white photos and several written documents, also includes photos believed to show convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk, who denied ever being at Sobibor.

The photos were discovered by a descendant of SS officer Johann Niemann and handed over to Martin Cueppers, a historian at the University of Stuttgart, in 2015 who studied the material.



"This collection represents a quantum leap in our visual knowledge of the Holocaust in occupied Poland," Cueppers said at a press conference at the Topography of Terror, an archive and museum at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.

Around 1.8 million Jews died at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor in Poland as part of "Operation Reinhard", yet knowledge about the latter camp has been scarce.

Where previously there had been only two surviving photos from Sobibor, the Niemann collection threw up a further 49 snapshots, said Stefan Haenschen from the Stanislaw Hantz organisation which runs tours at the camp.

Haenschen said the photos offered a chance to "widen public awareness" of a Nazi crime which was "still under-represented".

- Demjanjuk case -

There are two photos in the collection which Cueppers said "probably" showed John Demjanjuk at Sobibor.

The historians were cautious however, saying that they could not be totally certain the photos showed the convicted Nazi guard.

Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was convicted of being an accessory to the murder of nearly 30,000 Jews at Sobibor by a German court in 2011. He died while his appeal was pending.

Born in Ukraine in 1920, Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States after war.

In 1986, he stood trial in Jerusalem accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," an infamous Ukrainian guard at another death camp, Treblinka.

An initial death sentence was overturned by the Israeli supreme court in 1993.

But after evidence emerged that he served as a guard at other Nazi camps, Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 for lying about his war record on immigration forms.

Extradited to Germany in 2009, he was later sentenced to five years in prison in a landmark case for the German justice system.

The court ruled that as a guard at the camp, he was automatically implicated in killings carried out there at the time.

The case set a new legal precedent and prompted several further convictions of Nazi officers, including that of the "bookkeeper of Auschwitz" Oscar Groening, on the basis they served as cogs in the Nazi killing machine.

In 2019, Demjanjuk was the subject of the Netflix documentary "The Devil Next Door".

Nazi camp commander’s photos thought to show war crimes convict John Demjanjuk


By Kerstin Sopke and Geir Moulson, Associated Press
,PA Media: World News•January 28, 2020

Historians have presented a collection of photos kept by the deputy commander of the Nazis’ death camp that they say appears to include images of John Demjanjuk, the retired US car worker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a Sobibor guard.

The collection unveiled on Tuesday at Berlin’s Topography Of Terror museum comprises 361 photos as well as written documents illustrating Johann Niemann’s career. Niemann was the deputy commander of Sobibor from September 1942 until he was killed on Oct. 14, 1943 in an uprising by Jewish inmates.

Unlike in many other cases, the photos were not destroyed after the Second World War in fear of legal proceedings, and they remained in the possession of Niemann’s family.

The collection is being handed over to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Experts say the collection enhances historians’ knowledge of what Sobibor looked like.

So far, they knew of only two photos taken of the camp while it existed.

The Niemann collection adds another 49.


Historican Martin Cueppers points at a man thought to be John Demjanjuk (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Anne Lepper, whose grandparents were murdered on arrival at Sobibor from the Netherlands in 1943, said it was “very courageous” of Niemann’s descendants to release the photos.

She said it was “a breathtaking experience” to see the images after frequently having seen the site.

The collection may also shed more light on Demjanjuk, who was convicted in 2011 as an accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Sobibor guard.

Demjanjuk always denied the accusations and died in 2012 before his appeal against the ruling by a Munich court could be heard, making the verdict not legally binding.

Two photos in the collection may depict a young Iwan Demjanjuk, as he was known before anglicising his name to John, among other former prisoners of war who were trained at an SS camp and were deployed at Sobibor, according to historians.

If they do, they would be the first to prove that he was at the camp.

Martin Cueppers, a Holocaust historian at the University of Stuttgart, said researchers concluded that Demjanjuk is “probably” depicted at least in one case in conjunction with the criminal police office in Germany’s Baden-Wuerttemberg state, whose biometric department agreed to examine the historical photos.

But Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr, said of the newly unveiled photos that “it’s a baseless theory to claim they prove anything at all regarding my father”.

The collection as a whole is “of significant historical value” regarding the Holocaust and Sobibor, he said in a statement.

But “the photos are not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined”.


Historians: Sobibor death camp photos may feature Demjanjuk

KERSTIN SOPKE and GEIR MOULSON,Associated Press•January 28, 2020



This spring 1943 photo provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shows a group of auxiliary guards at the Nazi death camp Sobibor in German-occupied Poland. A Holocaust historian said researchers concluded that John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio auto worker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a Sobibor guard, is presumably depicted in this photo. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum via AP)
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BERLIN (AP) — Historians have presented a collection of photos kept by the deputy commander of the Nazis' Sobibor death camp that they say appears to include images of John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio auto worker who was tried in Germany for his alleged time as a Sobibor guard.

The collection unveiled Tuesday at Berlin's Topography of Terror museum comprises 361 photos as well as written documents illustrating Johann Niemann's career. Niemann was the deputy commander of Sobibor from September 1942 until he was killed on Oct. 14, 1943, in an uprising by Jewish inmates.

Unlike in many other cases, the photos were not destroyed after World War II in fear of legal proceedings, and they remained in the possession of Niemann's family. The collection is being handed over to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Experts say the collection enhances historians' knowledge of what Sobibor looked like. So far, they knew of only two photos taken of the camp while it existed. The Niemann collection adds another 49.

Anne Lepper, whose grandparents were murdered on arrival at Sobibor from the Netherlands in 1943, said it was “very courageous” of Niemann's descendants to release the photos. She said it was “a breathtaking experience” to see the images after frequently having seen the site.



The collection may also shed more light on Demjanjuk, who was convicted in 2011 as an accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Sobibor guard. Demjanjuk always denied the accusations and died in 2012 before his appeal against the ruling by a Munich court could be heard, making the verdict not legally binding

Two photos in the collection may depict a young Iwan Demjanjuk, as he was known before anglicizing his name to John, among other former prisoners of war who were trained at an SS camp and were deployed at Sobibor, according to historians. If they do, they would be the first to prove that he was at the camp.

Martin Cueppers, a Holocaust historian at the University of Stuttgart, said researchers concluded that Demjanjuk is “probably” depicted in at least one case in conjunction with the criminal police office in Germany's Baden-Wuerttemberg state, whose biometric department agreed to examine the historical photos.

But Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said of the newly unveiled photos that “it’s a baseless theory to claim they prove anything at all regarding my father.”

The collection as a whole is “of significant historical value" regarding the Holocaust and Sobibor, he said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press. But “the photos are not proof of my father being in Sobibor and may even exculpate him once forensically examined.”

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was a Soviet Red Army soldier captured by the Germans in Crimea in 1942. He was accused of agreeing to serve as a "Wachmann," or guard, the lowest rank of the "Hilfswillige," former POWs who were subordinate to German SS men, and training in a camp known as Trawniki.

The Munich court said the evidence showed he was a part of the Nazis' "machinery of destruction" and served in Sobibor from March 27, 1943, until mid-September that year.

Integral to the prosecution's case was an SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.

Though court experts said the card appears genuine, Demjanjuk's defense attorneys argued it was a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The prosecution also produced evidence including transfer lists indicating a guard named Demjanjuk with the same Trawniki number was sent to serve in Sobibor and elsewhere, but there was never photographic proof he was there.

Between March 1942 and October 1943, about 167,000 people were killed at Sobibor, almost all Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Following the 1943 uprising, the Nazi guards shot the remaining prisoners and razed the camp in occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk always maintained he was a victim of the Nazis, first wounded as a Soviet soldier and then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions before joining the Vlasov Army, a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the war's final months.

If the newly surfaced photographs turn out not to picture Demjanjuk, it wouldn't be the first time his identity has been mistaken.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel after he was accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. After Treblinka survivors identified him as their tormentor, he was convicted and sentenced to death — but then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.

___

David Rising in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz


Max Zahn Reporter,Yahoo Finance•January 29, 20202,588 Comments


President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.”

“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”

In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.

“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”

In this Jan. 22, 2020, file photo, President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.

“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”

The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.

“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
 

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz gestures during the World Congress of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Mexico City, Mexico, June 19, 2017. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.

“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.

Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.

“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.

'Bilking taxpayers': Warren demands $22 million owed by student loan servicer Navient

Aarthi Swaminathan Finance Writer,Yahoo Finance•January 29, 2020

It’s not just American student loan borrowers who owe money to the federal government. It’s a top loan servicer, too.

Navient, one of the biggest U.S. student loan lenders, has owed the federal government $22.3 million for over a decade and still hasn’t paid it back.

In a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, shared exclusively with Yahoo Finance, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) urged her to make haste on collecting that amount from Navient.

“After massively overcharging the federal government in a years-long scandal … Navient has inexplicably continued to escape accountability for bilking taxpayers for years and still has not repaid this money,” wrote Warren. “Further delays or excuses are unacceptable: it is time for you to hold Navient accountable and finally collect the $22.3 million the company owes to taxpayers.”
 

Elizabeth Warren speaks at a rally in Brooklyn, New York in January 2020.

 (Photo credit: Joel Sheakoski / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)

‘This matter now sits on your desk’

Navient’s payment is more than a decade overdue.

In 2009, an investigation by the Education Department found that Navient, then known as Sallie Mae, had overcharged the federal government by $22.3 million by abusing a program meant for smaller lenders.

The company had improperly claimed special allowance payments on loans that were not meant for them (i.e. overbilling the federal government) and was asked by ED’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to return the money to the department.

ED’s Federal Student Aid office issued a final determination in 2013, when it also demanded Navient pay back that amount, but Navient never paid.

Warren wrote a similar letter to the Obama administration in 2016, leading nowhere. And since taking helm of the Education Department under President Trump, DeVos has been criticized for being too close to loan servicers like Navient and being too lax on regulation with student loan policies, including limiting the CFPB’s access to information on student loans and amending the borrower defense rule to make it more difficult to seek relief.

Warren urged DeVos to act in the interest of the American taxpayer.

“This matter now sits on your desk waiting for you to act… you have a responsibility to the American people to ensure the company pays back the money it improperly collected,” she stated. “Letting Navient off the hook for its debts, particularly as you relentlessly hound defrauded student borrowers, would be a blatant demonstration of your willingness to side with loan companies that fail students and taxpayers over students and taxpayers …

I urge you to take action to finally end this saga and collect the $22.3 million that Navient owes the American people.”

Yahoo Finance has reached out the Department of Education and Navient for comment and has yet to receive a response.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos delivers remarks about administration efforts to increase school safety at The National Parent-Teacher Association Legislative Conference in Arlington, VA, March 13, 2018. (Photo: REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein)

Navient remains defiant

Regarding Navient’s debts to the federal government, the company’s president and CEO Jack Remondi previously reached out to DeVos and appealed for her to ignore Warren’s previous letter, which asserted the same fact.

In the “fact-check” portion of his letter, he stated that the $22.3 million outstanding fee was “[f]alse and misleading.”

He added: “This matter is unrelated to servicing and deals with a subsidiary financing issued in 1993 and retired more than 10 years ago. These practices were consistent with ED guidance and regulations. The company continues to stand behind those billing practices as proper ... Navient has been following the permitted appeals process and awaits a final determination.”

In its most recent 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company acknowledged the OIG audit but added that it has appealed the judge’s decision to the Secretary, adding: “We continue to believe that our SAP billing practices were proper ... The Company established a reserve for this matter in 2014 and does not believe, at this time, that an adverse ruling would have a material effect on the Company as a whole.”

KIEV, UKRAINE - 2019/01/07: In this photo illustration, the Navient Corporation

 logo seen displayed on a smartphone. 

(Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Navient allegedly steered borrowers into forbearance

This isn’t the first time Navient has come under fire.

Navient was also sued in 2017 by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency Warren helped create, over allegations that it systematically encouraged student loan borrowers into forbearance and failed customers “at every stage of repayment.”

In a batch of court documents that were unsealed last year, it was revealed:

“Our battle cry remains ‘forbear them, forbear them, make them relinquish the ball,’” a Navient executive stated in the 2010 memo. “Said another way, we are very liberal with the use of forbearance once it is determined that a borrower cannot pay cash or utilize other entitlement programs.”

That case is still ongoing.

—

Aarthi is a writer for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

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Temperatures at a Florida-Size Glacier in Antarctica Alarm Scientists

Shola Lawal,The New York Times•January 29, 2020

A photo provided by NASA shows the Thwaites Glacier, which helps to 

keep the much larger West Antarctic Ice Shelf stable.

 (NASA/OIB/Jeremy Harbeck via The New York Times)

Scientists in Antarctica have recorded, for the first time, unusually warm water beneath a glacier the size of Florida that is already melting and contributing to a rise in sea levels.

The researchers, working on the Thwaites Glacier, recorded water temperatures at the base of the ice of more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above the normal freezing point. Critically, the measurements were taken at the glacier’s grounding line, the area where it transitions from resting wholly on bedrock to spreading out on the sea as ice shelves.

It is unclear how fast the glacier is deteriorating: Studies have forecast its total collapse in a century and also in a few decades. The presence of warm water in the grounding line may support estimates at the faster range.

That is significant because the Thwaites, along with the Pine Island Glacier and a number of smaller glaciers, acts as a brake on part of the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Together, the two bigger glaciers are currently holding back ice that, if melted, would raise the world’s oceans by more than a meter, or about four feet, over centuries, an amount that would put many coastal cities underwater.

“Warm waters in this part of the world, as remote as they may seem, should serve as a warning to all of us about the potential dire changes to the planet brought about by climate change,” said David Holland, a lead researcher on the expedition and director of New York University’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Glaciologists have previously raised alarm over the presence of warm water melting the Thwaites from below. This is the first time, though, that warm waters have been measured at the glacier’s grounding line.

To observe activity beneath the glacier, Holland’s team drilled a hole from the surface to the bottom and then deployed equipment that measures water temperature and ocean turbulence, or the mixing of freshwater from the glacier and salty ocean water. Warm waters beneath the Thwaites are actively melting it, the team found.

Drilling the hole — about 30 centimeters wide and 600 meters deep, or roughly one foot by 1,970 feet — and collecting the data took about 96 hours in subzero weather. The results of the study are expected to be published in March. The expedition was part of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a series of research projects aimed at understanding the glacier.

“It certainly has a big impact on our U.S. coast and in many areas,” said Twila Moon, a researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not part of the expedition.

While scientists may not yet be able to definitively predict how soon glaciers like the Thwaites will melt, human-caused climate change is a key factor. The biggest predictor of “how much ice we will lose and how quickly we will lose it,” Moon said, “is human action.”


© 2020 The New York Times Company

Mount Vesuvius blast turned ancient victim’s brain to glass

MILAN (AP) — The eruption of Mount Vesuvius turned an incinerated victim’s brain material into glass, the first time scientists have verified the phenomenon from a volcanic blast, officials at the Herculaneum archaeology site said Thursday.

Archaeologists rarely recover human brain tissue, and when they do it is normally smooth and soapy in consistency, according to an article detailing the discovery in the New England Journal of Medicine. The eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 instantly killed the inhabitants of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum, burying an area 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the volcano in ash in just a few hours.

The remains of a man lying on a wooden bed were discovered at Herculaneum, closer to Vesuvius than Pompeii, in the 1960s. He is believed to have been the custodian of a place of worship, the Collegium Augustalium.

A team led by Pier Paolo Petrone, a forensic anthropologist at the Federico II University in Naples, determined that the victim’s brain matter had been vitrified, a process by which tissue is burned at a high heat and turned into glass, according to the study published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The fragments presented as shards of shiny black material spotted within remnants of the victim’s skull.

A study of the charred wood nearby indicates a maximum temperature of 520 degrees Celsius (968 degrees Fahrenheit).

″’This suggests that extreme radiant heat was able to ignite body fat and vaporize soft tissue,’’ the study said.

The resulting solidified spongy mass found in the victim’s chest bones is also unique among other archaeological sites and can be compared with victims of more recent historic events like the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, the article said.

The flash of extreme heat was followed by a rapid drop in temperatures, which vitrified the brain material, the authors said.

‘’This is the first time ever that vitrified human brain remains have been discovered resulting from heat produced by an eruption,’’ Herculaneum officials said.

First space-baked cookies took 2 hours in experimental oven
By MARCIA DUNNJanuary 22, 2020

In this photo made available by U.S. astronaut Christina Koch via Twitter on Dec. 26, 2019, she and Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano pose for a photo with a cookie baked on the International Space Station. The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. (NASA via AP, File)


CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space.

While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes.

And how do they taste? No one knows.

Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients.

The makers of the oven expected a difference in baking time in space, but not that big.

“There’s still a lot to look into to figure out really what’s driving that difference, but definitely a cool result,” Mary Murphy, a manager for Texas-based Nanoracks, said this week. “Overall, I think it’s a pretty awesome first experiment.”

Located near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Nanoracks designed and built the small electric test oven that was launched to the space station last November. Five frozen raw cookies were already up there.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven.

The first cookie — in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) — ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so.

The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success.

“So this time, I do see some browning,” Parmitano radioed. “I can’t tell you whether it’s cooked all the way or not, but it certainly doesn’t look like cookie dough any more.”

Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success.

Additional testing is required to determine whether the three returned cookies are safe to eat.

As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.

That’s the beauty of baking in space, according to former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. He now teaches at Columbia University and is a paid spokesman for DoubleTree by Hilton. The hotel chain provided the cookie dough, the same kind used for cookies offered to hotel guests. It’s offering one of the space-baked cookies to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum for display.


“The reminder of home, the connection with home, I think, can’t be overstated,” Massimino said. “From my personal experience ... food is pretty important for not just nutrition but also for morale in keeping people connected to their home and their Earth.”

Eating something other than dehydrated or prepackaged food will be particularly important as astronauts head back to the moon and on to Mars.

Nanoracks and Zero G Kitchen, a New York City startup that collaborated with the experiment, are considering more experiments for the orbiting oven and possibly more space appliances. What’s in orbit now are essentially food warmers.

There’s an added bonus of having freshly baked cookies in space.

“We made space cookies and milk for Santa this year,” NASA astronaut Christina Koch tweeted.

FIL5E  In this July 29, 2019, file photo, a monarch butterfly rests on a plant at Abbott's Mill Nature Center in Milford, Del. The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California's coast remained critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020, showed. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed.

California’s monarch butterflies critically low for 2nd year

By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZJanuary 23, 2020

The count of the orange-and-black insects by the Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey. That’s not much different than last year’s tally, when an all-time low 27,000 monarchs were counted.

“We had hoped that the western monarch population would have rebounded at least modestly, but unfortunately it has not,” said Emma Pelton, a monarch conservation expert with the Xerces Society.

By comparison, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in forested groves along the California coast in the 1980s. Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in the Western United States due to the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.

Researchers also have noted the effect of climate change. Along with farming, climate change is one of the main drivers of the monarch’s threatened extinction, disrupting an annual 3,000-mile (4828-kilometer) migration synched to springtime and the blossoming of wildflowers.

Western monarch butterflies head south to California each winter, returning to the same sites and even the same trees where they cluster to keep warm. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March.

On the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, another monarch butterfly population travels from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of miles to spend the winter in central Mexico. Mexican officials said last year the butterfly population wintering there was rebounding but they have not yet released this year’s count.

A 2017 study by Washington State University researchers found the species likely will go extinct in the next few decades if nothing is done to save it.

The monarch is now under government consideration for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The decision on whether the butterfly will be listed as threatened is expected by December.

While helping the western butterflies could seem daunting, Pelton said the fact that the population didn’t shrink any further is encouraging.

Pelton said people can help by planting early-blooming flowers and milkweed to fuel migrating monarchs on their paths to other states.

The Xerces Society is working with the state of California to protect the butterflies’ wintering sites and develop new sites in state parks.

“There are still thousands of monarchs (wintering) along the coast, so we can take heart that it’s not too late to act,” Pelton said. 

Ancient voice: Scientists recreate sound of Egyptian mummy

January 23, 2020

BERLIN (AP) — Researchers say they’ve mimicked the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy by recreating much of its vocal tract using medical scanners, 3D printing and an electronic larynx.

In a paper published Thursday by the journal Scientific Reports, the authors say the technique allowed them to produce a single sound - somewhere between the vowels in ‘bed’ and ‘bad.’

The eerie tone is unlikely to be a precise reflection of the speech of Egyptian priest Nesyamun, whose mummified body the researchers worked with, because the tongue has lost much of its bulk over three millennia.

“We have made a faithful sound for his tract in its current position, but we would not expect an exact speech match given his tongue state,” said co-author David M. Howard of London’s Royal Holloway college.

The model alone also isn’t enough to synthesize whole words or sentences, the authors said, noting that this would require the ability to calculate the audio output from the vocal tract as its shape is being changed.

“But this is something that is being worked on, so it will be possible one day,” said Howard.

Rudolf Hagen, an ear, nose and throat expert at the University Hospital in Wuerzburg, Germany, who specializes in thorax reconstruction and wasn’t involved in the study, expressed skepticism. Even cutting-edge medicine struggles to give living people without a thorax a “normal” voice, he said.

  

With this voice we can change that, and make the encounter more multidimensional.”“There is nothing more personal than someone’s voice, so we think that hearing a voice from so long ago will be an unforgettable experience, making heritage places like Karnak, Nesyamun’s temple, come alive,” he said.

Co-author John Schofield, an archaeologist at the University of York, said the technique could be used to help people interpret historical heritage.“When visitors encounter the past, it is usually a visual encounter,” said Schofield. “