Medieval Church Ruins Found With 'Witch Marks' Removed For a High-Speed Rail

BRANDON SPECKTOR, LIVE SCIENCE
23 OCTOBER 2020

Learning no lessons from horror films of yore, Britain has plans for a high-speed rail project that will lay tracks over the ruins of a medieval church. And, apparently, the project has run into some trouble with witches and dark spirits.


According to archaeologists working at Stoke Mandeville, a village that lies in the path of the proposed railway, an early excavation of the site's 700-year-old church revealed stone beams etched with strange circular patterns known as "witch marks."

These markings, which look like the spokes of a wheel with a hole drilled into the center, were created to "ward off evil spirits by entrapping them in an endless line or maze," project officials wrote in a statement.

Michael Court, lead archaeologist at HS2 Ltd (the company behind the rail project), said the unusual markings offer a "fascinating insight into the past" at a site that has long been lost to history.

 

Other 'witch mark' found among the ruins of St Mary. (HS2 Ltd)

The church in question, named St. Mary's, was erected around 1070 as a private chapel for the lord of Stoke Mandeville in what is now Buckinghamshire, England, according to the statement. The church building was expanded in the 1340s to accommodate local villagers, then ultimately demolished in the 1860s when a new church popped up closer to town.

Yet during the first excavation of the site, the HS2 team found many sections of the medieval building to be in surprisingly good condition, with walls surviving to a height of almost 5 feet (1.5 meters) and floors intact.


The witch marks were carved into two different stones, one sitting at ground level and the other higher up. Given the location of the ground-level stone, the radial pattern wasn't likely used as a sundial, something that is typically found near the southern doors of medieval churches, the archaeologists said.

Similar witch markings have turned up at medieval sites across the U.K., including a set discovered last year at Creswell Crags, a limestone gorge and cave complex that has been inhabited on and off since the last ice age.

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CG rendering of what St Mary's looked like 700 years ago. (HS2 Ltd)

The markings are typically etched into stones near doorways, windows, and fireplaces to keep spirits away.

The markings did not save St. Mary's from its ultimate destruction. But with the scrawled stones still intact, modern witches keen on trying the new high-speed train may need to reroute their travels away from Stoke Mandeville.

24-Million-Year-Old Nursery For Baby Megasharks Discovered in South Carolina

LAURA GEGGEL, LIVE SCIENCE
20 OCTOBER 2020

About 24 million years ago, baby shark ancestors of the giant beast called megalodon needed a place to grow big before heading into the open ocean, so they swam around a coastal spot replete with easy-to-catch prey - a nursery in what is now South Carolina, according to new research.

Until now, scientists knew of just two fossil shark nurseries: a 10 million-year-old megalodon nursery in Panama and a 5 million-year great white shark nursery in Chile.

In addition to being the third such nursery, the new discovery is also the first nursery on record for Carcharocles angustidens, a megatoothed shark that lived during the Oligocene epoch (34 million to 23 million years ago), said co-researcher Robert Boessenecker, a research fellow at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina.

When Boessenecker and his colleague examined one of the shark teeth from the nursery site, they found another surprise; it came from the largest C. angustidens on record, according to an equation that calculates a shark's body length based on its tooth size. The new estimate changes the understanding of how big these ancient carnivores could get.

Previously, the record holder was from a C. angustidens tooth found in New Zealand, which put the now-extinct shark at a maximum length of 27.8 feet (8.47 meters).

"Our recalculated maximum length for C. angustidens is 8.85 meters [29 feet]," said co-researcher Addison Miller, who graduated with a bachelor of science in geology from the College of Charleston in May. "This came out to be slightly larger than the New Zealand specimen."

In comparison, the modern great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) can reach lengths of 20 feet (6 m), but most are smaller, Live Science previously reported.


The research on the shark teeth found in the nursery, which is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented online October 13 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual conference, which was virtual this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research "appears to be an ongoing work," but the claim that this may be a paleo-shark nursery is exciting, said Kenshu Shimada, a professor of paleobiology at DePaul University who wasn't involved with the research, but who learned about the project at the conference, told Live Science.

If supported with more evidence, this finding "would indicate that the behavior and adaptive strategy of using nursery areas had already evolved by the Oligocene about 24 million years ago for the megatooth shark lineage."

Sarah Boessenecker helped collect some of the fossils. (Robert Boessnecker)

Collecting shark teeth

The researchers discovered the shark teeth primarily in one rock unit: the fossil-rich Chandler Bridge Formation in the town of Summerville, South Carolina. In total, the researchers examined 87 C. angustidens teeth from this and the neighboring Ashley Formation dating to the late Oligocene.

Because these particular parts of the fossil formation weren't picked over by amateur fossil collectors, the shark teeth collected from these formations are thought to be accurate representations of the sharks that lived there. This is important, because "everybody and their mother goes out and digs up shark teeth and sells them here" in South Carolina, and people usually snag the largest teeth they can find, Boessenecker said.

This can cause headaches for paleontologists, who may find sites with lots of small shark teeth (one indication of a shark nursery) that's not a true representation of the sharks that lived there, because all of the large shark teeth have already been carted away.

To investigate, Miller analyzed the teeth from the two formations. With the new maximum length for C. angustidens, she was able to calculate the approximate body size categories for infant sharks, juveniles and adults. Then, using tooth-to-body-length equations (there is a different equation for each tooth, depending on its position in the mouth), she determined the sharks' corresponding body sizes.

Carcharocles angustidens teeth discovered in South Carolina. (Addison Miller)

In all, Miller found that of the 87 teeth, three (3 percent) were infants, 77 ( 89 percent) were juveniles and seven (8 percent) were adults.

"Our total body length mean was 4.8 meters [15.7 feet], meaning that this was looking more and more like a C. angustidens nursery," Miller told Live Science in an email.

South Carolina's Oligocene waters were also home to easily accessible prey for C. angustidens, including billfish, tuna, mackerel, cheloniid sea turtles, leatherback sea turtles, dolphins, baleen whales, sea cows, and other sharks and rays, Boessenecker said.

In addition, this place was likely a shallow area that would have offered natural protection to young sharks that weren't ready for life in the deep sea, he said.

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

Scientists Just Discovered a Mysterious Organ Lurking in The Centre of The Human Head


(Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek/YouTube

PETER DOCKRILL
20 OCTOBER 2020

Medical researchers have made a surprise anatomical discovery, finding what looks to be a mysterious set of salivary glands hidden inside the human head – which somehow have been missed by scientists (AND DOCTORS) for centuries up until now.

This "unknown entity" was identified by accident by doctors in the Netherlands, who were examining prostate cancer patients with an advanced type of scan called PSMA PET/CT. When paired with injections of radioactive glucose, this diagnostic tool highlights tumours in the body.

In this case, however, it showed up something else entirely, nestled in the rear of the nasopharynx, and quite the long-time lurker.

(Valstar et al., Radiotherapy and Oncology, 2020)

The tubarial glands structure, indicated by blue arrows, alongside other major salivary glands in orange.

"People have three sets of large salivary glands, but not there," explains radiation oncologist Wouter Vogel from the Netherlands Cancer Institute.

"As far as we knew, the only salivary or mucous glands in the nasopharynx are microscopically small, and up to 1,000 are evenly spread out throughout the mucosa. So, imagine our surprise when we found these."

Salivary glands are what produce the saliva essential for our digestive system to function, with the bulk of the fluid produced by the three major salivary glands, known as the parotid, submandibular, and sublingual glands.

There are approximately 1,000 minor salivary glands too, situated throughout the oral cavity and the aerodigestive tract, but these are generally too small to be seen without a microscope.

The new discovery made by Vogel's team is much larger, showing what appears to be a previously overlooked pair of glands – ostensibly the fourth set of major salivary glands – located behind the nose and above the palate, close to the centre of the human head.

"The two new areas that lit up turned out to have other characteristics of salivary glands as well," says first author of the study, oral surgeon Matthijs Valstar from the University of Amsterdam.

"We call them tubarial glands, referring to their anatomical location [above the torus tubarius]."

These tubarial glands were seen to exist in the PSMA PET/CT scans of all the 100 patients examined in the study, and physical investigations of two cadavers – one male and one female – also showed the mysterious bilateral structure, revealing macroscopically visible draining duct openings towards the nasopharyngeal wall.

"To our knowledge, this structure did not fit prior anatomical descriptions," the researchers explain in their paper.


"It was hypothesised that it could contain a large number of seromucous acini, with a physiological role for nasopharynx/oropharynx lubrication and swallowing."

As for how the glands haven't previously been identified, the researchers suggest the structures are found at a poorly accessible anatomical location under the skull base, making them hard to make out endoscopically. It's possible duct openings could have been noticed, they say, but might not have been noticed for what they are, being part of a larger gland system.

The tubarial glands. (The Netherlands Cancer Institute)

Additionally, it's only the newer PSMA-PET/CT imaging techniques that would be able to detect the structure as a salivary gland, going beyond the visualisation capabilities of technologies like ultrasound, CT, and MRI scans.

While the team concedes that additional research on a larger, more diverse cohort will be needed to validate their findings, they say the discovery gives us another target to avoid during radiation treatments for patients with cancer, as salivary glands are highly susceptible to damage from the therapy.

Preliminary data – based on a retrospective analysis of 723 patients who underwent radiation treatment – seem to support the conclusion radiation delivered to the tubarial glands region results in greater complications for patients afterwards: a result that not only could benefit future oncology, but also seems to strengthen the case that these mysterious, overlooked structures really are salivary glands.

"It seems like they may be onto something," pathologist Valerie Fitzhugh from Rutgers University, who wasn't involved with the study, told The New York Times.

"If it's real, it could change the way we look at disease in this region."

The findings are reported in Radiotherapy and Oncology.

Forbes Estimates China Paid Trump At Least $5.4 Million Since He Took Office, Via Mysterious Trump Tower Lease


Dan Alexander Forbes Staff Policy
Senior editor at Forbes, covering Donald Trump's business

Donald Trump maintained a stake in Trump Tower when he became president, and with it, a financial connection to the Chinese government.

President Donald Trump, who declared “I don’t make money from China” in Thursday night’s presidential debate, has in fact collected millions of dollars from government-owned entities in China since he took office. Forbes estimates that at least $5.4 million has flowed into the president’s business from a lease agreement involving a state-owned bank in Trump Tower.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China signed a lease for space in 2008, years before the president took office, paying about $1.9 million in annual rent. Trump is well-aware of the deal. “I’ll show you the Industrial Bank of China,” he told three Forbes journalists touring Trump Tower in 2015. “I have the best tenants in the world in this building.”

Trump moved from the skyscraper to the White House in 2017, but he held onto ownership of the retail and office space in the building, through his 100% interest in an entity called Trump Tower Commercial LLC. That put him in an unusual position, given that government-owned entities in China hold at least 70% of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. Suddenly, a routine real estate deal became a conduit for a foreign superpower to pay the president of the United States.


The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China maintained an office space inside President Trump's Fifth Avenue skyscraper. ROBERT ALEXANDER/GETTY IMAGES

The arrangement posed legal concerns, since the U.S. Constitution prohibits federal officials from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state” without Congressional approval. Ethics experts, who have often focused on the president’s hotel in Washington, D.C., argued that the president would be in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause from the moment he took office.


On January 11, 2017, Trump and his team held a press conference inside Trump Tower, not far from the office of the Chinese bank. Trump’s lawyer, Sheri Dillon, claimed that routine business transactions are not violations of the so-called Emoluments Clause. But she also said the president planned to donate all foreign government profits at his hotel to the U.S. Treasury. The next month, first son Eric Trump, who had just taken over day-to-day operations of his father’s business, told Forbes the donations would come from “all the properties.”

Perhaps Eric Trump meant all hotel properties, because it sure doesn’t seem like the Trump Organization handed over all their profits from the deal with the Chinese. The Trump Organization reportedly donated a total of $343,000 to the U.S. Treasury in 2017 and 2018, Trump’s first two years as president. Yet, a document connected to Trump Tower suggests that over those same two years, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China was set to pay about $3.9 million in rent. Operating profit margins inside the building are an estimated 42%, which would suggest that the deal yielded $1.6 million of earnings over those two years. Even if you only count roughly 70% of that money as coming from the Chinese government, it still adds up to $1.2 million—or more than three times what the Trump Organization reportedly gave to the Treasury.


President Trump debates Joe Biden in the closing days of the 2020 election. JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

The lease was set to expire on October 31, 2019, according to a debt prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2018, the state-owned bank agreed to a new lease in a different office building nearby, suggesting it might leave Trump Tower. But then, the bank decided to stay in the president’s building anyway. “They are keeping a couple of floors,” Eric Trump confirmed onstage at a business conference in October 2019.

The new arrangement is somewhat murky. Contacted Friday morning, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization initially said that the bank had “consolidated with their other offices in New York.” When told that Forbes might publish that statement, the spokesperson then seemed to confirm that the Chinese bank was in fact maintaining space in the building: “They’ve exited the vast majority of their space in Trump Tower.” The website for the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China still lists an address inside Trump Tower.

Trump has other financial connections to China. The New York Times revealed Tuesday that the U.S. president has a bank account in China. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, received 41 Chinese trademarks from the time she was appointed a White House adviser in March 2017 to April 2019, according to an analysis of documents. The review also showed that the trademarks Ivanka applied for after her father’s inauguration got approved about 40% faster than those she sought out beforehand.



Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out some of my other work here. 
Dan Alexander
I am a senior editor at Forbes, as well as the author of White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business, released Sept. 22, 2020. I write about money in politics, with an emphasis on the businesses of Donald Trump and the people around him.

US Government’s Antitrust Suit Targeting Google Comes Amid An Uneven Track Record Against Big Tech

Michael Bobelian Contributor
Policy
Author of Battle for the Marble Palace

After months of speculation, the Department of Justice and eleven state Attorneys General launched an antitrust suit on Tuesday, accusing Google of stifling competition in the search and advertising sectors through exclusive arrangements with its business partners. “Competition in this industry is vitally important,” Attorney General William Barr said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit, “which is why today’s challenge against Google… is a monumental case.”

Both Republicans and Democrats have railed against the nation’s tech giants in recent years, with Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump—who reside on polar opposites of the political spectrum—both calling for government agencies to bring antitrust cases against the industry.

Though these rants haven’t quite reached the feverish pitch of Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting assault on Standard Oil and the other industrial giants of the Gilded Age, they do harken back two decades to a time when critics cast Microsoft, and its CEO Bill Gates, as villains suffocating the burgeoning Internet sector.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) was mindful of its past standoffs with America’s tech titans in the statement it released announcing the lawsuit. “As with its historic antitrust actions against AT&T in 1974 and Microsoft in 1998,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen explained in the statement, “the Department is again enforcing the Sherman Act.”


The problem for the DOJ is that the government’s track record in this arena over the past quarter century has been uneven at best. Despite all the hoopla surrounding the announcement of the lawsuit on Tuesday, unless this case proceeds in unexpected ways, nothing points to a different outcome this time around.


The U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua via Getty) XINHUA NEWS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

Previous Government Efforts Haven’t Stopped Big Tech’s Growing Market Power

Despite a series of consent decrees, proscriptions of mergers and acquisitions, and in one instance, the prosecution of a conspiracy to raise the prices of e-books involving Apple, the government’s primary antitrust enforcers—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the DOJ—haven’t been able to slow down the tech sector’s march towards market concentration or disabled the industry’s biggest players from stifling competition.

As a result, oligopolies control nearly ever segment of the industry. Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android dominate the smartphone market. The top three computer manufacturers have seen their market share rise in the past decade. By selling everything from common household items to niche products like the Gremlin Chia pet, Amazon accounts for more than a third of all Internet sales in the United States.

Successful antitrust enforcement has been short lived

Despite suffering their biggest defeat in 2004 when, after a lengthy trial, a federal judge approved Oracle’s purchase of PeopleSoft over the Justice Department’s objections, these agencies have seen their greatest success in blocking potential mergers.

In 2008, the Justice Department blocked an advertising arrangement between Google and Yahoo, which at the time had a far larger presence in the online search and advertising market. Three years later, regulators blocked a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile and in 2015, Comcast and Time Warner scuttled their deal in the face of antitrust scrutiny.

These were short lived victories, however. Though the names were reshuffled, consolidation in the tech sector continued unabated, allowing a handful of companies to dominate key markets. Prohibited from joining AT&T, T-Mobile later combined with Sprint, reducing the number of national cell phone carriers to three. Though Comcast’s marriage with Time Warner fell apart, it eventually acquired NBC Universal. Time Warner also found a new suitor when AT&T absorbed it in 2018. Fearing it might be left out, Verizon acquired Yahoo at about the same time.

The social media market played out in a similar fashion. Instead of outperforming its competitors, Facebook simply purchased them, procuring Instagram and WhatsApp to form a social media juggernaut. Together, these entities host three of the nation’s top five social media platforms and with Mark Zuckerberg holding the majority of voting shares, it allows him to dictate how millions of Americans interact with one another online. Even John D. Rockefeller, perhaps the most notorious of the Robber Barons targeted by the trust-busting Roosevelt more than a century ago, never attained this kind of influence over public discourse.


Google's offices in downtown Manhattan. Accusing the company of using anti-competitive tactics to ... [+] GETTY IMAGES

Other than blocking an occasional merger, the FTC and DOJ have largely resorted to consent decrees in their bid to prevent a small cluster of companies from abusing their market dominance. These decrees, which are settlements with companies that aim to reduce anti-competitive behavior, have also fallen short of slowing down the growing market power of the tech titans. In 2010, Intel agreed to reduce its anticompetitive conduct in a deal with the FTC yet it remains one of only two major chip makers in the world. It only began to lose market share to its chief rival, AMD, nine years after its consent decree with the FTC.

Google also faced similar scrutiny nearly a decade ago only to escape unscathed. Since coming to an agreement with the FTC back in 2013, Google’s share of the American online search market has grown, climbing to nearly 90% over the past seven years. It also managed to transfer this dominance from the PC market to cell phones and other mobile devices: almost 95% of the Internet searches conducted on these devices used Google in 2020.

Perhaps no case exemplifies the difficulty of relying on antitrust enforcement to tame the tech sector more than Microsoft. After two years of litigation highlighted by Bill Gates’s testy deposition at the hands of David Boies, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson called for the company’s break-up in 2000.

The government’s euphoria of winning the most consequential antitrust case in a generation didn’t last long. An appellate court overturning Jackson’s order a year later struck the first blow. Then the Bush administration decided to moderate the Justice Department’s demands despite calls from several states that had joined the litigation to press on. The denouement of the lawsuit ended in a whimper: a consent decree prohibited Microsoft from forcing computer makers to exclusively work with its software and required it to share its source code with other software companies so that they could develop applications for Windows, then the dominant operating system.

After the anticipation caused by Judge Jackson’s break-up order, the settlement was both anticlimactic, and to many, like AOL Time Warner, one of Microsoft’s leading rivals at the time, “completely ineffective.” Einer Elhauge, an antitrust professor at Harvard Law School, characterized it at the time as “largely meaningless enforcement,” a sentiment echoed by ten of the eighteen state Attorneys General who refused to sign on to the deal and continued to pursue Microsoft in the courts.

Then again, perhaps the enforcement action did generate some benefits even if it allowed Microsoft to maintain its market dominance. Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, has since argued that by curbing Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, the settlement paved the way for the emergence of upstarts—most notably, Google. Even though it seems like a longshot, it would be ironic if the beneficiary of the last historic antitrust suit was now tamed by the very laws that gave it a lifeline.

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Michael Bobelian
I write about the Supreme Court, white-collar crime, and politics. I am the author of Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court.

DOJ Antitrust Case Against Google Draws Allusions to Landmark Microsoft and Standard Oil Cases



On October 20, 2020, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and 11 state attorneys general filed an antitrust complaint against Google, alleging Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully maintaining monopolies in markets for internet search services and search advertising. This begins the long-awaited enforcement salvo anticipated by those closely following the recent federal, state and congressional antitrust investigations of big tech. The DOJ’s Google case is certainly the most significant antitrust case against an alleged tech monopoly since the DOJ’s win in its case against Microsoft more than two decades ago. The Google case is putting antitrust at the top of news feeds, with many already calling it the modern tech equivalent of the landmark antitrust case against Standard Oil during the heyday of the trustbuster era – framing data as the new oil, with Google as “the gatekeeper for the internet.”

The complaint alleges that Google enters into exclusionary agreements with distributors (such as device manufacturers, wireless carriers, and web browser developers) to maintain Google as their devices’ preinstalled, default search engine. In many cases, the complaint alleges, these agreements prohibit the distributors from dealing with Google’s search engine competitors. Under some agreements, Google search apps are undeletable from Android devices and had to be prominently featured on the device’s home screen.

The complaint alleges that Google induces distributors to enter into these alleged exclusionary agreements by sharing its search advertising revenue and conditioning access to the Google Play app store, an essential product for most mobile distributors, on these agreements preferencing Google search. According to the complaint, the distributors entering into these agreements account for 60% of the search market. Google’s Chrome browser, along with its other owned-and-operated products, delivers Google an additional 20% of the search market.

The complaint not only describes Google’s alleged exclusionary conduct, but explains how Google purportedly obtained monopoly power. In 2007, Google released the code of its Android operating system as open source code, meaning anyone could use it for free and could modify the operating system, a process known as “forking.” This induced device manufacturers and carriers of mobile phones to use Android. But according to the complaint, Google perverted the open source system by providing a proprietary layer of applications, known as Google Mobile Services, that were highly valued by users and not available unless the device manufacturer entered into a Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (“MADA”). The MADAs prohibited forking and required favoring Google search. To entice device manufacturers into MADAs, the complaint alleges, Google offered the Android device manufacturers a share of search revenue.

The agreements are reminiscent of the arrangements that Microsoft imposed on original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”) in order to favor Microsoft’s browser. Microsoft required the OEMs to preinstall Microsoft’s browser along with the Windows operating system. Although users could download a competing browser and make that the default browser, the DOJ argued, users would rarely do that, and given the outcome of that case, the court obviously agreed. The DOJ makes the same argument here: While users could replace Google search with another search application, few actually do.

According to the complaint, Google’s exclusionary practices resulted in anticompetitive harm to both advertisers and users. For advertisers, the complaint alleges that Google’s monopoly power allows it to manipulate advertising supply and artificially inflate rates. Consumers were allegedly harmed by Google’s policies regarding use of their data. But for Google’s exclusionary conduct, search competitors would have offered search options with greater privacy protections.

Not all exclusionary conduct is unlawful under Section 2 of the Sherman Act. To determine whether the conduct is unlawful, courts consider whether the anticompetitive effects of the conduct outweigh the procompetitive effects. In terms of procompetitive effects, the internet search market is unique in how directly a search engine’s scale affects the quality of its service. Google’s search algorithm constantly improves upon itself by learning from user behavior to predict which search results and ads will be most responsive to future queries. Assuming that Google’s exclusionary conduct contributed to Google’s scale, that conduct then contributed to Google’s ability to offer more relevant search results and more effective advertising. The DOJ will have to show that the anticompetitive effects outweigh these procompetitive effects if it is to prevail in its Sherman Act claim. Part of the government’s challenge will be to demonstrate how a 100-year-old statute, written with Standard Oil and U.S. Steel in mind, applies to the extremely dissimilar business models of big tech.

French startup Ynsect to build world's biggest bug farm

By Reuters Staff

DOLE, France (Reuters) - Growing global demand for food is putting a squeeze on available land and one French startup says it has the answer: indoor insect farming.

Ynsect raised $224 million from investors including Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition this month to build a second insect farm in Amiens in northern France.

The company breeds mealworms that produce proteins for livestock, pet food and fertilisers, and will use the funds to build what it says will be the world’s largest insect farm.

Due to open in early 2022, it will produce 100,000 tonnes of insect products such as flour and oil annually and conserve land use while creating 500 jobs.

The 40-metre-tall plant spread over 40,000 square metres, will be “the highest vertical farm in the world and the first carbon-negative vertical farm in the world,” Ynsect CEO and co-founder Antoine Hubert told Reuters.

He spoke at the company’s first factory, which it opened in Dole, eastern France in 2016, where conveyor belts carried trays with millions of squirming mealworms.

“It’s important to develop insect sectors today because the world needs more proteins, more food, more feed to feed the animals that will make eventually meat and fish...But beyond this, obviously, human food is a market,” Hubert said.

British boss of pharma group Indivior is sentenced to six months in a US jail over opioid scandal

By DAILY MAIL CITY & FINANCE REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 23 October 2020

The British former boss of drugs group Indivior has been sentenced to six months in a US jail.

Shaun Thaxter, 53, pleaded guilty in July to a criminal charge related to how the firm marketed best-selling opioid addiction treatment, suboxone. He will also pay £460,000 in fines and forfeitures.

The case was brought by the US government, which accused Indivior of fraudulently marketing the drug.

Jailed: Shaun Thaxter pleaded guilty in July to a criminal charge related to how the firm marketed best-selling opioid addiction treatment, suboxone

It is one of the few corporate prosecutions related to an epidemic blamed for hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths.

Prosecutors claim Indivior made misleading safety claims about the film form of its flagship drug – which could be placed under the tongue and dissolved – to win endorsement from doctors and protect its share of the lucrative market.

Suboxone is used by recovering addicts to ease withdrawal symptoms. But it is a powerful and addictive opioid.

Thaxter led Indivior from 2009 until July 2020, when he left abruptly with a £2.3million exit package and admitted the charge the next day.

He was said to be the person in charge of efforts to get suboxone added to the medicines that could be prescribed under the state of Massachusetts' Medicaid programme in 2012.

Indivior argued the film was safer than tablets because it was less likely to be abused and harder for children to accidentally use but it 'lacked any scientific evidence' to support this, prosecutors said.

The claims led to the drug being prescribed to some patients who had children under six years old. Thaxter's lawyer emphasised that he had no idea that the alleged false claims had been made.


But prosecutors said he 'oversaw and encouraged' the marketing efforts.

Daniel Bubar, first assistant US attorney of the Western District of Virginia, said: 'He was in a position to ensure that doctors, patients, and insurers were dealt with honestly.

Instead, Thaxter failed to prevent efforts to build profits through misleading safety claims, which led to millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.'

Indivior denies all wrongdoing and said Thaxter's sentencing is not related to the company. In July it agreed to pay £470million over the scandal.

Consumer goods giant Reckitt Benckiser, which used to own Indivior until 2014, has not admitted wrongdoing, but paid £1.1billion to settle claims.

WHO's Tedros says countries on "dangerous track" in pandemic

By Reuters Staff


FILE PHOTO: World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a news conference in Geneva Switzerland July 3, 2020. Fabrice Coffrini/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

GENEVA (Reuters) - The world is now at a critical juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic and some countries are on a dangerous path, facing the prospect of health services collapsing under the strain, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.

“We are at a critical juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the Northern hemisphere,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference. “The next few months are going to be very tough and some countries are on a dangerous track.”

“We urge leaders to take immediate action, to prevent further unnecessary deaths, essential health services from collapsing and schools shutting again. As I said it in February and I’m repeating it today: This is not a drill.”

Tedros said too many countries were now seeing an exponential increase in infections, “and that is now leading to hospitals and intensive care units running close or above capacity -- and we’re still only in October”.

He said countries should take action to limit the spread of the virus quickly. Improving testing, tracing of contacts of those infected and isolation of those at risk of spreading the virus would enable countries to avoid mandatory lockdowns.


Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Kevin Liffey

Turning point in Thailand: Queen's brush with protest



By Matthew Tostevin, Patpicha Tanakasempipat, Chayut Setboonsarng, Panu Wongcha-um


BANGKOK (Reuters) - A defining moment in Thailand’s growing protest movement started with the unannounced arrival of a champagne-coloured Rolls Royce stretch limousine on a Bangkok street.

The royal motorcade carrying Thailand's Queen Suthida and Prince Dipangkorn drives past a group of anti-government demonstrators in front of Government House, on the 47th anniversary of the 1973 student uprising, in Bangkok, Thailand October 14, 2020. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

When Queen Suthida’s motorcade slowed as it encountered a few dozen protesters jeering outside Bangkok’s Government House on Oct. 14, royalists denounced it as unforgivable harassment in a kingdom whose constitution demands reverence for the monarchy.

The government, led by a former army chief who was the initial target of months of protests, responded swiftly.

It banned protests and made dozens of arrests. But that spurred more demonstrations – and much greater criticism of a monarchy that protesters say has helped to enable decades of military domination.

At a time when King Maha Vajiralongkorn has faced unprecedented scrutiny, many Thais have questioned why the queen was on that road at that time, and have challenged the severity of the reaction - which also included three arrests on little-used charges that could carry the death penalty.

The opposition Move Forward party said on Thursday it planned a parliamentary motion “to study the mistakes made over the motorcade”, complaining this had led to severe action being taken, specifically citing the use of Article 110 charges of violence or attempted violence against the queen.

“It shows a failure in the setting of the royal motorcade route,” said party spokesman Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn.

Other people noted the route was not the shortest between the Dusit Palace, where the king and queen reside, and the temple where Suthida was going.

They also asked why the motorcade had moved so slowly, even at points where there was no evident obstruction. Royal vehicles usually move much faster.

(GRAPHIC: Turning point in Thailand - )


Some Thais have raised questions whether the encounter was used to justify a crackdown. Reuters has no evidence to confirm this.


The Palace declined comment, as it has since the start of three months of protests that at first called for the removal of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former army chief, but then broke a decades-old taboo by demanding royal reform.

Government spokesman Anucha Burapachaisri told Reuters that securing royal motorcade routes was the police’s responsibility.

“The emergency declaration was necessary to prevent other incidents and conflicts,” he said, rejecting protesters’ accusations that it was a provocation to justify harsh measures.

Police did not respond to repeated Reuters requests for comment.

RECONSTRUCTION

Reuters has reviewed nine videos supplied by the people who shot them and taken from different angles in addition to other video on social media, well over 100 still pictures with accompanying metadata and interviewed eight eyewitnesses to reconstruct how events unfolded.

There are gaps. Reuters was unable to establish the full route of the motorcade before and after the incident, why it was taken, why there had been no advance notice of the route or why the royal convoy travelled much more slowly than usual.

The incident started when Queen Suthida reached the protesters at around 5:22 pm on Oct. 14.

Suthida was on a rare visit from Europe, where she and the king had spent nearly the entire year before arriving in Bangkok on Oct. 10.

Dressed in a light blue silk dress with a gold sash, she was travelling on royal duties with the king’s 15-year-old son, and potential heir, Dipangkorn Rasmijoti, who wore his white dress uniform, replete with gold braid.

The protesters were outside Prayuth’s office at Government House. Prayuth seized power in a 2014 coup and protesters accuse him of engineering an election last year to keep his hold - an accusation he denies.


Most of tens of thousands of protesters were behind police blockades nearly a kilometre away, but a few dozen had made it to the gates and were milling around, outnumbered by police, who were lined up 20 abreast on the road.

Usually, police close roads in advance for royal motorcades, but this time it was only the appearance of the lead car and motorcycle outriders that heralded what was coming - minutes before it did.

“There was no announcement,” said Pravit Rojanaphruk, a reporter from Khaosod English, who was interviewing protesters at the time. Video footage supports the assertion the usual warning was not given.

Protesters scrambled as motorcycle outriders arrived. Recognising a royal car, arms shot up to give the three-finger pro-democracy salute taken from “The Hunger Games.” Others raised phones to take pictures.

A chant developed of “Our taxes,” a reference to accusations of royal profligacy. Some chanted “Nation, Religion, People” - adapting the traditional pillars of Thai society: “Nation, Religion, Monarchy.”

The queen’s limousine slowed to a stop as police pushed back protesters at both sides. It took nearly a minute, as some were dragged off. Pictures show them clinging to the legs of police officers as they tumble down near the Chamai Maru-chet bridge.

Protesters were held behind several lines of police. At some points, they appeared to get within metres of the car, though always behind police and none appeared to be trying to reach it.

The queen, who holds the rank of general and is a deputy commander of the Royal Security Command, can be seen smiling and waving to people.

“Some pictures made it look like we harassed them, when it was them that drove right into our gathering,” said one protester who gave her name only as Vitita.

A royalist group, the Center for the Protection of the Monarchy, said its members helped police keep control.

“We risked 20 lives to prevent the mob that surrounded the royal motorcade with all our strength and shouted ‘Long live the King’ to muffle the mob,” the group said in a statement.


Some yellow-shirted royalists can be seen with police in the video, but Reuters could not confirm the group’s claims.

About 280 metres on from the bridge, another group of protesters stood behind police and royalists.

Video shows someone throwing what appears to be a bottle from deep in the crowd. It is unclear if it hit the car as police jogged on either side. Moving at about 7 km (4 miles) an hour, the convoy passed the last protesters at around 5.27 p.m.

That evening, the daily royal news programme showed the queen arriving at the Wat Ratcha Orasaram Ratchaworawihan temple at 5.51 p.m. presenting saffron robes to monks. Later, she was shown handing out awards to kneeling subjects.

But three sources, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity, said the Palace was angered by the fracas - that was something unheard of in decades.

EMERGENCY MEASURES

Just after 4 a.m. the next day, state television announced emergency measures citing illegal public assemblies and said people had “acted to affect the royal motorcade and committed severe actions that affected national security.”

All political meetings of five or more people were banned. So was news that could affect national security.

Within minutes of the announcement riot police rushed protesters outside the prime minister’s office. At least 20 people were arrested - including lawyer Arnon Nampa, the first person to have openly called for royal reform on Aug. 3. Arnon could not be reached for comment as he remained in prison.

The response from protesters on social media was immediate. The top trending hashtag on Twitter in Thailand, used more than 1.1 million times, translates as #KingSlandersPeople - as people said they thought the incident was being used unfairly to justify harsh measures against protesters.

ARRESTS

At least 81 arrests have been made since the emergency decree, police said. Protests happened daily, some drawing tens of thousands of people, before emergency measures were lifted on Oct. 22.

On Oct. 16, two activists were arrested on charges of violence against the queen, which can carry a death sentence if the queen’s life is thought to have been endangered.

Both Bunkueanun ‘Francis’ Paothong and Ekachai Hongkangwan can be seen in videos taken at the scene just before the queen’s car arrived and among protesters pushed back by police.

Now out on bail, Bunkueanun, 20, told Reuters: “Everything went very quickly in a matter of minutes. Protesters started to push in to form a wall. Then the police moved at us to clear the road.”

He said when he realised a royal motorcade was coming, he used a small megaphone to tell people to stand clear. He said he flashed the salute, but then pulled back from the crowd as he suddenly felt unwell. “I could not breathe properly and I almost fainted.”

In a video posted on Facebook by Ekachai, 45, before his arrest, he can be heard saying: “It’s a royal motorcade. Show three fingers.” But the video did not show him attempt to get closer to the car.

Sareewat Sriyoha, a lawyer for Ekachai, quoted the activist as saying that protesters had not seen the motorcade when large numbers of police pushed them back. They had thought police were trying to prevent their planned protest at Government House.

He said that once Ekachai realised what was going on, he had shouted to police: “Oh, its a royal motorcade, why didn’t you tell us so we wouldn’t block it.”

Sareewat said Ekachai told him that he stood back once he knew it was a royal motorcade. Ekachai previously served two years in jail on a royal insult conviction for selling copies of a foreign documentary about the royal family.

Both Bunkueanun and Ekachai denied the charges under Article 110, which outlaws violence or attempted violence “against the queen or her liberty” and is even tougher than royal insult laws.

A third activist, Suranat Paenprasert, was arrested on Oct. 21 on the same charges. He has so far been denied bail. His lawyer, Poonsuk Poonsukcharoen, said he was accused of persuading other protesters to block the motorcade, but that none of them had realised what was going on.

“No one knew that there was a royal motorcade coming,” she said. “Those blocking the road were mainly the police officers.”


Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore

Thai king's praise for loyalist stirs passions amid protests

By Jiraporn Kuhakan, Orathai Sriring
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s praise for a “very brave” man who held up a royal portrait at an anti-establishment rally has won acclaim from monarchists but scorn from demonstrators in a nation convulsed by three months of protests.

Thailand's King Maha Vajiralongkorn and Queen Suthida greet their royalists as they leave a religious ceremony to commemorate the death of King Chulalongkorn, known as King Rama V, at The Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand October 23, 2020. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha

The king has made no public comment on the protests seeking the resignation of the prime minister and also increasingly targeting royal powers.

But on Friday, as he greeted thousands of people who had come to the Grand Palace to express devotion, he lauded a man introduced by Queen Suthida as the person who raised a picture of his late father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, at a protest last week.

“Very brave, very brave, very good, thank you,” the king said in a video circulated widely on social media.

The man, Thitiwat Tanagaroon, told Reuters he had waited from 2 p.m. until 9 p.m. to see the king, which was the highlight of his life.

“The king tapped his hand on my shoulder very hard when he said thank you ... I will put the shirt I wore in a frame,” restaurant manager Thitiwat, 49, said by phone.

Support for the monarchy was not political because the institution was above the fray, he said. “The king cares about all people, no matter how rich or poor.”

The incident drew a big response across Thailand.

‘VERY TOUCHED’





Leader of the royalist Thai Pakdee (Loyal Thai) group, Warong Dechgitvigrom, said it demonstrated the monarchy’s closeness to the people. “We are very touched,” he posted on social media.

But demonstrators said the king’s comment had clarified his opposition to them, with the #23OctEyesOpened hashtag tweeted over half a million times.

“Very brave, very brave, very good for such a clear expression,” commented sarcastically one protest leader Tattep Ruangprapaikitseree, who has put less emphasis than others on the need for royal reform.

“The king has not been above political problems but always sits at the heart of the problems,” commented another protest leader, Piyarat Chongthep.


The Royal Palace and government spokesman declined to comment.

Protesters seek the removal of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former junta leader they accuse of engineering an election last year to keep power. He denies the accusation.

The protests also seek changes to the constitution and to reduce the powers of the monarchy, which they say has helped enable decades of military domination.

Under Thailand’s constitution, the monarchy is “enthroned in a position of revered worship” but in principle it does not engage in politics - a point the king underlined during elections last year.

James Buchanan, a lecturer at Bangkok’s Mahidol University International College, said the king’s comments marked his clearest intervention so far in Thailand’s crisis. “I interpret it as signalling that the king acknowledges the challenge to his authority by the protests, but will not back down,” he said.


Additional reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat and Panu Wongcha-Um; Writing by Matthew Tostevin; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne

Pandemic speeds labour shift from humans to robots, WEF survey finds

FILE PHOTO: A robot delivers a birthday cake at Robotazia restaurant as the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak continues in Milton Keynes, Britain, October 2, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Boyers/File Photo

ZURICH (Reuters) - Robots will destroy 85 million jobs at mid-sized to large businesses over the next five years as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates changes in the workplace likely to exaggerate inequalities, a World Economic Forum (WEF) study has found.

Surveys of nearly 300 global companies found four out of five business executives were accelerating plans to digitise work and deploy new technologies, undoing employment gains made since the financial crisis of 2007-8.

“COVID-19 has accelerated the arrival of the future of work,” WEF Managing Director Saadia Zahidi said.


For workers set to remain in their roles in the next five years, nearly half would need to learn new skills, and by 2025, employers will divide work between humans and machines equally, the study found.

Overall, job creation is slowing and job destruction is accelerating as companies around the world use technology rather than people for data entry, accounting and administration duties.

The good news is that more than 97 million jobs will emerge across the care economy, in tech industries like artificial intelligence (AI), and in content creation, the Geneva-based WEF said.


“The tasks where humans are set to retain their comparative advantage include managing, advising, decision-making, reasoning, communicating and interacting,” it said.

Demand would rise for workers who can fill green economy jobs, cutting-edge data and AI functions, and new roles in engineering, cloud computing and product development.

Around 43% of businesses surveyed were set to reduce their workforce due to technology integration, 41% planned to expand their use of contractors, and 34% envisioned expanding their workforce due to technology integration, the survey found.


Reporting by Michael Shields; editing by Barbara Lewis