Snooping marmosets judge antisocial individuals harshly

Issued on: 03/02/2021 - 

A wild marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) walks on electric wires in 

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil YASUYOSHI CHIBA AFP/File

Washington (AFP)

Like humans, marmosets -- tiny monkeys with Einstein-like ear tufts native to Brazil -- eavesdrop on conversations between others, and prefer to approach individuals they view positively, a study in the journal Science Advances showed Wednesday.

While behavioral research has built up knowledge around the social lives of primates, it has tended to lack reliable ways to determine an individual's "inside perspective," or the inner workings of her or his mind.

Marmosets are an ideal species to study because of their close-knit social structure: they live in highly cooperative groups of around 15 family members, with the entire extended clan responsible for rearing children.

How do they decide who is reliable and who is not?

A team led by Rahel Brugger at the University of Zurich (UZH) presented 21 captive-born adult marmosets with recordings from a hidden speaker of an opposite sex adult making either food-offering calls or aggressive chatter calls in response to begging infants.

As a control, they also played the marmosets calls made by a single individual.

The scientists then pointed infrared cameras at the marmosets' faces to record the nasal temperatures -- looking for drops that indicate the monkeys were alert and engaged.

The tests found the marmosets only responded to combined and not individual calls, indicating they understood when real conversations were occurring.

After playing them the recordings, the team let the marmosets enter a room filled with toys and a mirror.

Marmosets don't recognize their own reflection, and so believed that it represented the monkey who made the recorded call.

The researchers found that overall, the marmosets preferred to approach when the recordings indicated the individual was helpful.

"This study adds to the growing evidence that many animals are not only passive observers of third-party interactions, but that they also interpret them," said the paper's senior author and professor of anthropology at UZH, Judith Burkart.

The team plans to use this temperature-mapping approach for future investigations, such as into the origin of morality.

© 2021 AFP

Open insulin can be stored at up to 37 C: study

Issued on: 03/02/2021 -

Research by Doctors Without Borders and the University of Geneva showed that a vial of insulin could be stored for four weeks after opening at temperatures fluctuating between 25 and 37 degrees Celsius (77 and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) Niklas HALLE'N AFP/File

Geneva (AFP)

Opened insulin can be stored for four weeks in warm conditions without losing efficacy, a study showed Wednesday, giving hope to diabetics in hot countries without access to refrigerators.

The research by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the University of Geneva showed that a vial of insulin could be stored for four weeks after opening at temperatures fluctuating between 25 and 37 degrees Celsius (77 and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The study was published in the PLOS One medical journal.

"The current pharmaceutical protocol requires insulin vials to be stored between 2 C and 8 C until opened, after which most human insulin can be stored at 25 C for four weeks," said Philippa Boulle, a non-communicable diseases advisor at MSF.

"This is obviously an issue in refugee camps in temperatures hotter than this, where families don't have refrigerators."

In some poorer regions of the world with temperatures well above 25 C, diabetics without home refrigerators have to go to hospital for their injections, sometimes several times a day.

For people living with diabetes, access to treatment, including insulin, is critical to their survival.

Diabetes is a chronic, metabolic disease characterised by elevated blood sugar levels, which leads over time to serious damage to the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys and nerves.

The most common is type 2 diabetes, usually in adults, which occurs when the body becomes resistant to insulin or doesn't make enough insulin.

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition in which the pancreas produces little or no insulin by itself.

- Potency matches cold storage -

MSF recorded temperatures in the Dagahaley refugee camp in northern Kenya fluctuating between 25 C at night and 37 C during the day.

Those changes were reproduced in a laboratory over four weeks -- the time it usually takes a diabetic to finish one vial of insulin.

The findings showed that "the stability of insulin stored under these conditions is the same as that of cold-stored insulin, with no impact on efficacy", they said in a joint news release.

"This allows people with diabetes to manage their illness without having to visit a hospital multiple times daily."

The research found that the insulin preparations recorded a potency loss of no more than one percent -- the same as in a control batch kept in cold storage.

"These results can serve as a basis for changing diabetes management practices in low-resource settings, since patients won't have to go to hospital every day for their insulin injections," said Boulle.

She said she hoped the findings would be endorsed by the World Health Organization.

The WHO says that about 422 million people worldwide have diabetes, the majority living in low-and middle-income countries, and 1.6 million deaths are directly attributed to diabetes each year.

The prevalence of diabetes has been steadily increasing in recent decades.

© 2021 AFP

Mexico seeks to halt Paris auction

of pre-Hispanic artefacts

Issued on: 03/02/2021 - 

The disputed items include a stone mask said to be from the Teotihuacan culture. © Screen grab / www.christies.com

Text by:FRANCE 24Follow

Mexican officials said Tuesday the country had lodged a protest with the French government over a planned auction in Paris of 

pre-Hispanic sculptures and other artefacts, challenging the authenticity of several items.

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said it also filed a criminal complaint, arguing that it is illegal to export or sell such pieces.

Christie's of Paris says it will auction 39 artefacts on February 9, including a 1,500-year-old stone mask from the ancient city of Teotihuacan, estimated at up to 550,000 euros, and an equally ancient statue of the fertility goddess Cihuateotl, purportedly from the Totonaco culture.

The director of the Mexican institute, Diego Prieto Hernández, said about 30 of the pieces appear to be genuine, but he accused the auction house of putting some fakes up for bid as well.

“The dispute is not with France or with the French government, but rather with an act of commercialization that should not happen,” Prieto Hernández said.

His institute has asked Mexico's foreign ministry to recover the objects.

Some of the pieces appear to have been in France or other parts of Europe for many years. It was not clear whether their ownership pre-dates the 1972 Mexican law that forbids export or sale.

Either way, Prieto Hernández said, “the Mexican government does not accept, and will never accept, the looting and illegal sale of national heritage.”

In 2019, Mexico failed in efforts to stop another French auction house’s sale of about 120 pre-Hispanic artefacts. The Millon auction house sold many of those pieces for well above their pre-sale estimated prices.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP)

 

Some 28 trillion tonnes of ice have disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994: enough to cover the entire surface of the UK to 100 metres thick. That's the stunning conclusion of a new report by scientists. The consequence could be sea level rises of a metre by the end of the century. To put that into perspective, every centimetre of sea level rise displaces around a million people from low-lying homelands. We speak to Professor Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, who worked on the report.

Paris court finds French state guilty in landmark lawsuit over climate inaction

Issued on: 03/02/2021 - 

In its Wednesday ruling, the Paris court said the French state 

had failed to meet its obligations and ordered it to pay the 

symbolic sum of 1 euro in compensation for "moral prejudice". 

© iStock

Text by:FRANCE 24Follow|

Video by:Mairead DUNDASFollow

A Paris court on Wednesday found the French state guilty of failing to meet its commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions in a landmark ruling hailed by activists as a "historic victory for climate".

A group of NGOs backed by two million citizens had filed a complaint accusing the French state of failing to act to halt climate change, in what has been dubbed the "case of the century".

In its ruling on Wednesday, the Paris administrative court recognised ecological damage linked to climate change and held the French state responsible for failing to fully meet its goals in reducing greenhouse gases.

The court ordered the state to pay the symbolic sum of 1 euro in compensation for "moral prejudice", a common practice in France.

The French case is part of a mounting push from climate campaigners across the world to use courts against governments.

>> French state faces landmark lawsuit over climate inaction

An international accord signed in Paris five years ago aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5 degrees.

But experts say governments are far from meeting their commitments and anger is growing among the younger generation over inaction, symbolised by the campaigns of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.

France missing its targets

French President Emmanuel Macron has been very vocal about his support for climate change action.

He pushed in December for beefing up the European Union’s 2030 targets to reduce greenhouse gases by at least 55% compared with 1990 levels — up from the previous 40% target.

But Oxfam France, Greenpeace France and two other organisations say Macron’s lobbying for global climate action is not backed up by sufficient domestic measures to curb emissions blamed for global warming.

They note that France is missing its national targets set under the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the country delayed most of its efforts until after 2020.

The four NGOs that brought the case called Wednesday's court ruling "a first historic victory for climate” as well as a “victory for truth," saying that until now France has denied the “insufficiency of its climate policies”.

The Paris court gave itself two months to decide on measures to repair the problem and stop things from getting worse.

It decided that awarding money wasn't appropriate in this case, adding that reparations should centre on fixing the failure to respect goals for lowering greenhouse gases.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP)

Poland's Walesa calls for 'system change' in Russia

Issued on: 03/02/2021 

The former president of Poland and Nobel peace prize laureate said jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was a "hero" who could one day win a Nobel himself 

Wojtek RADWANSKI AFP

Gdansk (Poland) (AFP)

Polish freedom icon Lech Walesa on Wednesday called for international cooperation to bring about "system change" in Russia following the jailing of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

A former leader of the Solidarity labour movement that brought a peaceful end to communism in Poland in 1989, Walesa called Navalny a "hero" who could one day win a Nobel Peace Prize.

The 77-year-old former Polish president spoke a day after top Kremlin critic Navalny was handed a prison term, leading his supporters to take to the streets of Moscow in protest.

"He doesn't have a Nobel (peace) prize yet, but he'll deserve one if he continues to take a stand like this," said Walesa, who himself won the award in 1983 for his leadership of Solidarity.

"We need heroes like him, but we also require a different kind of international solidarity to bring about a system change in Russia," Walesa told AFP in an interview in the city of Gdansk where his battle against communism began.

On Tuesday, Navalny received a jail term of two years and eight months for violating the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence on embezzlement charges he claims were a pretext to silence him.

Walesa said if he had a chance to speak to the 44-year-old anti-corruption campaigner he would tell him to follow his communist-era example and fight the system.

"I felt that it wasn't the people who were to blame, but the system which allows for bad behaviour on the part of leaders. And that's something you can see in Russia," Walesa said.

"We shouldn’t be fighting against (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, specific individuals, or the police. Instead, we should be fighting for a new system that would preclude this kind of behaviour," he said.

- Protesting women -

Working as a shipyard electrician in Gdansk, Walesa stunned the communist bloc and the world when he led a 1980 strike by 17,000 shipyard workers.

The communist regime was forced to grudgingly recognise Solidarity as the Soviet bloc's first and only independent trade union after it gained millions of followers across Poland.

Walesa later became Poland's first post-war democratically elected president in 1990.

The latest struggle in Poland has been over reproductive rights, with thousands protesting a government-backed court ruling that imposed a near-total ban on abortion last week.

The verdict means that all abortions in Poland are now banned except in cases of rape and incest, or when the mother's life or health are considered to be at risk.

Speaking of the protesting women, Walesa said: "I support them with all my heart. They are right.

"But for now I don't see any hope for the women's victory. Because a victory would have to involve overthrowing those in power, and those in power won't let themselves be overthrown," he added.

The outspoken critic of the right-wing ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party said he himself did not plan any return to politics.

"Of course I'm a patriot and whenever the nation calls, I'm available. But... I’m now 77-years-old and no longer have the energy that I did back then."

© 2021 AFP

More than 10,000 have been detained at pro-Navalny rallies in Russia, monitor says
Issued on: 03/02/2021 - 
Text by: FRANCE 24

More than 10,000 people have been detained at recent rallies in Russia in support of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, a protest monitor said on Wednesday, adding that many of them have also been subject to mistreatment while in police custody.

Navalny called on Russians to take to the streets after he was detained last month on arrival in Moscow from Germany where he had been recovering from a poisoning with a Soviet-designed nerve agent.

Hundreds more filled the streets of the capital Moscow Tuesday evening, after Navalny, 44, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for violating the terms of a 2014 suspended sentence on embezzlement charges he claims were a pretext to silence him.

At nationwide rallies over the last two weeks, more than 10,000 people were seized by police, the OVD-Info group that monitors opposition protests said in its report released on Wednesday.

Russia’s Union of Journalists, meanwhile, said that more than 100 journalists were either injured or detained at the rallies.

Detainees are held for hours “in horrid and stuffy conditions, without food or the opportunity to use a bathroom,” OVD-Info analyst Grigory Durnovo told Ekho Moskvy radio.

He added that lawyers from the group, which provides free legal aid to detained protesters, were at times not given access to detention centres.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has defended the government’s crackdown on the protesters, saying that “the holding of unauthorised rallies raises concerns and justifies the tough actions of the police”.

Navalny’s prison sentence: ‘Concerns sanctions won’t change Russia’s behaviour’

Later on Wednesday a Russian court sentenced Sergei Smirnov, chief editor of Mediazona, an online news publication often critical of the government, to 25 days in jail over a re-tweet.

Ahead of a January 23 protest in Navalny’s support, Smirnov, 45, re-tweeted a joke that included the time of the protest rally.

An analyst working for OVD-Info, Grigory Durnovo, told AFP that many of the detainees had been subjected to “difficult conditions” in custody and that authorities were purposefully carrying out “harsh detentions”.

Echoing detainee testimonies, Durnovo said Moscow’s detention centres had reached full capacity due to the massive influx of Navalny supporters.

On Tuesday, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, ordered checks of detained men to see if they have avoided military service, which in Russia is compulsory for one year

Navalny’s arrest and the violent police crackdown has been condemned by international rights groups and Western governments, including the United States, Britain and France.

Germany on Wednesday reiterated calls to free Navalny and said that more EU sanctions on Russia “cannot be ruled out”.

The UN Human Rights Office called for the release of protesters detained “for exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression”.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Israel destroys West Bank Bedouin village again

Issued on: 03/02/2021 - 

Israeli bulldozers knocked down tents and portable toilets owned by the Bedouin families in Homsa al-Baqia, a makeshift village near Tubas in the West Bank that Israeli forces had previously demolished in November, an AFP videographer said JAAFAR ASHTIYEH AFP

Homsa al-Baqia (Territoires palestiniens) (AFP)

Israeli forces on Wednesday demolished the "illegal" homes of some 60 Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank's Jordan Valley, an AFP journalist and activists said.

Israeli bulldozers knocked down tents and portable toilets owned by Bedouin families in Homsa al-Baqia, a makeshift village near Tubas in the West Bank that Israeli forces had previously demolished in November, an AFP videographer said.

According to Israeli rights group B'Tselem, 61 people, over half of them children, were left homeless following Wednesday's demolitions.

The European Union's mission in the Palestinian Territories announced it would visit the site on Thursday.

COGAT, the Israeli army branch responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank, said in a statement that the structures had been illegally built in a military training zone and that "the residents had agreed to take down the tents".

However, COGAT said the families changed their minds, and so on Wednesday the "last remaining tents at the site were confiscated".

Moataz Bisharat, a Palestinian activist who works to oppose Israel's occupation of the West Bank, said the action was akin to "carrying out the death sentence on all Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley".

The Jordan Valley falls within the West Bank's "Area C", which is fully controlled by Israel's army.

Under Israeli military law, Palestinians cannot build structures in the area without permits, which are typically refused, and demolitions are common.

Bisharat said the number of Palestinian families in the Homsa al-Baqia area had dropped from more than 186 in 1990 to just 21 today "because of the occupation's (Israel's) measures".

"The goal... is not just to occupy Homsa, but the whole Jordan Valley," he said.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Six Day war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the past has said he intended to annex parts of the West Bank and Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territory, including the Jordan Valley.

Former US president Donald Trump gave that plan the green light in January last year.

But a surprise normalisation accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates later in the year appeared to put annexation on ice.

© 2021 AFP

France announces sharp drop in femicides, but NGOs say it’s too early to rejoice

Issued on: 03/02/2021 -

A woman holds a placard enumerating the names of feminicide victims in France in 2019, during a protest condeming violence against women in Marseille, France, on November 23, 2019. © Clement Mahoudeau, AFP (file photo)

Text by:Tamar SHILOH VIDON

Ninety women were killed by their partners or ex-partners in France in 2020 – a significant drop from the 146 victims of femicide the previous year, according to a French government statement on Tuesday. But French NGOs say it is too early to celebrate a reversal of the trend.

In 2020, 106 domestic crimes were committed in France and 90 of the victims were women, Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti said in a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday. “In 2019, 173 crimes were committed, and 146 women were killed,” he said.

“Of course, every murder, every act of violence is a failure, with tragic consequences that we can only imagine. A failure for our entire society and a failure of the ministry of justice,” he added. “The results are still too modest but they offer a glimmer of hope.”

More than 200,000 women are victims of violence every year and in 2019, it was estimated that a woman was killed by her partner or ex-partner every three days.

>> FRANCE 24 on femicide: Our stories on violence against women

The figure announced for 2020 is the lowest in the 15 years since the French government began counting. But associations fighting violence against women say it is too early to welcome this year’s statistic as any kind of enduring trend.

“The circumstances in 2020 were most exceptional, because of Covid and the lockdown,” said Céline Piques, a spokeswoman for the group Osez le Féminisme (Dare to be Feminist).

“We’ll see if the numbers are confirmed in 2021, but for now it’s too early to point to the exact causes for the drop in the number,” Piques told FRANCE 24.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, women’s defense groups alerted the world to the heightened threat women faced by being locked down with an abusive partner. The pandemic and the restrictions imposed to curb its spread shed a spotlight on the violence abused women and children suffered at home, leading to an increase in reports of these incidents.

Justice Minister Dupond-Moretti said the considerable drop in the number of femicides “is undoubtedly due to the view that the whole of society has come to bear on domestic violence and these heinous crimes, and thanks to the work of nongovernmental organisations”.

“It’s also due to the measures taken by the justice ministry to fight against this violence,” he added, citing the introduction of several measures following the so-called Grenelle des violence conjugales, a conference on domestic violence that involved a series of round tables organised by the French government at the end of 2019 to find solutions.

Some of the measures taken following the Grenelle discussions include the deployment in September of electronic ankle bracelets equipped with geolocalisation technology, which emit an alert whenever a violent partner or ex-partner approaches a victim; the distribution of so-called téléphones grave danger – or emergency mobile phones for women threatened with violence – allowing them to alert the police with the push of a button; and expulsion orders allowing the eviction of a violent spouse from the home.

>> Domestic Violence: Electronic bracelets are a first step, but we have to go further

Putting violence into words

But feminists warn against accepting the government’s declarations on the drop in the number of murders and its causes at face value.

Piques agrees there has been a societal change over the past few years. “Already, the term ‘femicide’ has now been recognised and integrated and we’ve stopped considering marital violence as simple ‘disputes’, ‘scandals’ or ‘crimes of passion’ – we’re hearing less and less of that kind of rhetoric. This is really a cultural battle we’re winning, and it’s really important,” she said.

“For example, Osez Féminisme ran a campaign in 2014 around the term femicide, and everybody laughed at the time. Today, politicians are using this term,” she said. “As a result, people have been reacting differently to violence, especially neighbours and people in the couple’s circle, they are better equipped now to detect violence against women and put it into words.”

Piques also agrees that the measures following the Grenelle discussions are a step in the right direction. but “we see today that in terms of the number of protection orders, or the number of emergency phones, we’re really only at the very beginning of what needs to become a massive deployment”, she said.

For example, France is far behind Spain in implementing measures to protect women. Based on figures from 2019, Spain has issues many more protection orders than France, Piques said. “We don’t yet have the figures [of measures implemented] from 2020. But if we listen to associations such as the FNSF (fédération nationale solidarité femmes, or Women’s national solidarity federation), maybe a few more protection measures have been introduced, but it’s not at all systematic yet and the judiciary has not yet begun deploying protection orders as they do in Spain, where they issue some 30,000 orders a year – as opposed to a few thousand in France.”

Other measures are also slow to be deployed: Only 1,260 emergency phones were distributed to women in danger by the end of 2020 and 17 electronic ankle bracelets – only eight of which are active – were distributed as of mid-January. 

Domestic violence up due to Covid-19

Amid the Covid-19 crisis, there are other factors that have not yet been measured but may have contributed to the drop in the number of femicide cases.

For example, according to UN data released in late September, lockdowns led to increases in complaints or calls to report domestic abuse around the world, with a 30 percent increase in France. Yet the number of femicides dropped.

“We know that a major portion of femicides takes place after a separation or at the moment of separation. And here we see two somewhat contradictory statistics: On one hand, a very steep rise in violence, and on the other, an apparent drop in femicides. So, there’s a paradox that might stem from the fact that many women suffering violence today are unable – with the lockdown, Covid, the economic crisis, also in terms of employment or income – to leave their partners,” Piques explained.

Another issue is how the number of femicides is being counted and by whom.

Féminicides Par Compagnons ou Ex, a feminist collective that monitors reports of femicides in the media, tweeted on Tuesday: “When @E_DupondM minimizes #feminicides and discounts elderly and sick women murdered by their husbands (sick emojis)… Know that we’re never far behind the official figure [in releasing our count], and therefore, we will be talking about this again! 2020 -> 100 femicides by a partner or ex”.

Piques agrees that definitions of femicide vary, raising questions about the government’s figures. “We really need go back to the original definition of femicide, which is murder on the basis of sexism, a definition that is wider than spousal homicide. For example, there are cases of murder in couples that don’t reside together, which aren’t counted; or even cases when a man murders a woman because she refused his advances. Is that a sexist murder or not? These aren’t counted either. So in fact, the definitions do vary widely,” she said.

“We also need to include the murders of prostitutes, which occur every year. That, for me, is a truly sexist murder and another example of femicide that isn’t counted,” she added.

Dupond-Moretti’s announcement on Tuesday was the first of its kind by a justice minister in France since the ministry asked in 2020 that systemic reports be sent to the general prosecutor for each domestic homicide, to offer “a more precise follow-up” of these murder cases “to evaluate the impact of the Grenelle measures”.

“Of course, additional resources are still needed, and we will focus on them,” Dupond-Moretti said Tuesday. Organisations fighting for the protection of women from violence couldn’t agree more.

Newsmax anchor Bob Sellers walks off after MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell goes off on another conspiracy rant

Sarah K. Burris RAW STORY
February 02, 2021


MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell was kicked off of Twitter for spreading conspiracy theories about the election. So, he turned to his company Twitter account to spread the conspiracies. So, Twitter shut down that account too.

Newsmax welcomed him on the air and immediately he began spouting the conspiracies that are drawing expensive defamation lawsuits from the Dominion Voting Systems company.

Anchor Bob Sellers tried cutting in to clarify that they cannot confirm any of Lindell's conspiracy theories, presumably as a preemptive strike against litigation from Dominion. Lindell continued spouting his conspiracy theories, somewhat muted, while Sellers read the statement about Dominion voting machines.

"They're doing this because I'm reviewing all of the evidence on Friday of all the election fraud of all these machines," Lindell spouted. "So I'm sorry if you --"

"Ok, I'm going to ask our producers, can we get outa here, please?" Sellers asked. "I don't want to have to keep going over this."

Lindell began shouting and then the whole panel was shouting over each other.

Sellers simply walked out.