REST IN POWER

Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62

Common Dreams
February 22, 2021


Sister Dianna Ortiz (Screen Grab)

Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.


"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth. I am still waiting."
—Sister Dianna Ortiz

Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.

Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."

It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.

The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.

"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."

By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.

"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.

"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"
—Ortiz

Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.

On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:

I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.
We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.

Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.

"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:

I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.

Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.

Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.

"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."

Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."

Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."

"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."

Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."
—Ortiz

In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. 

Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.

Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.

Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.

In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.

Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.

The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.

The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.

"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."

Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.

Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.

Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."

Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.

"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."
—Ortiz

"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."

"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."

Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."

"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."

Clarence Thomas dissent in GOP election challenge raises new questions about his wife: 'Investigate Ginni'

Travis Gettys
February 22, 2021

Clarence and Ginni Thomas (Facebook)

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent after the high court refused to hear a Republican challenge to a Pennsylvania state court decision that extended the deadline to receive mail-in ballots in last November's election -- which once again raised questions about his wife's activism ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The Supreme Court declined Monday to take up cases challenging the Pennsylvania state court, and Trump and supporters like Ginni Thomas have challenged state laws to claim President Joe Biden's win was illegitimate.

Ginni Thomas had publicly endorsed the "Stop The Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., that turned into a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol, and her husband wrote a dissent that seems destined to justify attempts by Republican state legislatures to limit mail-in voting in future elections.

"That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future," Thomas wrote

"These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable."

The dissent set off alarm bells for many social media users.

Alma Levant Hayden: First Black woman in the FDA

Photography courtesy of NIH History Office/Wikimedia
Photo editing by Stephen Kelly


History shows many Black women scientists have been at the forefront of research, some holding positions in esteemed medical organizations. However, their accomplishments often go unrecognized. In this Special Feature, we highlight the life and achievements of the first Black woman chemist in the FDA: Alma Levant Hayden.

Many scientists have garnered worldwide acclaim for their groundbreaking discoveries and accomplishments throughout the world of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

These individuals have been celebrated for their significant scientific contributions throughout history — many of which have saved countless lives.

However, despite their equally monumental achievements, Black scientists have been largely overlooked in the annals of scientific history.

One of these innovative researchers was Alma Levant Hayden (1927–1967). Known as one of the first Black women to hold a position at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she was not only a pioneer in the field of chemistry but also an integral part of a discovery that exposed potentially dangerous false claims about a widely publicized cancer drug.

In this Special Feature, we look at the life and career of Alma Levant Hayden, her monumental contributions to science, and why she may not have attained the acclaim she deserved.

Early life and accomplishments

Alma Levant Hayden was born in Greenville, SC, on March 30, 1927, and began her chemistry career by graduating with honors from South Carolina State College.

She then obtained a master’s degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her expertise was in spectrophotometry, a type of electromagnetic spectroscopy that measures light wavelength absorption.

In the 1950s, Hayden joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and thus became one of the first female Black scientists to hold such a position in Washington.

She then went on to be one of the first Black women scientists to join the FDA. In 1963, Hayden came to lead the spectrophotometer research branch of the FDA’s Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

She was an accomplished scientist with research published in several journals. For example, using chromatography techniques, Hayden and her colleagues conducted a study on determining individual adrenocortical steroids in urine in 1956.

In 1962, she was involved in research surrounding the identification and determination of adrenocortical steroids, barbiturates, and sulfonamides from paper chromatograms.

Uncovering the Krebiozen scam

Hayden’s most known contribution to American science involves Krebiozen, a substance allegedly discovered in the 1940s by Yugoslavian physician Dr. Stevan Durovic.

Widely publicized as a cure for cancer, this white powdery compound allegedly came from the distilled blood serum of horses and was named Krebiozen after the Greek phrase for “that which regulates growth.”

Dr. Durovic began treating people with Krebiozen, claiming that the drug eliminated tumors and reduced pain. Dr. Andrew C. Ivy and Dr. William F. P. Phillips were also involved in the drug’s distribution and fraudulent claims.

With growing doubt about this unknown substance’s cancer-curing benefits and safety, the FDA sought to test a sample of the drug in their laboratory.

On September 3, 1963, Hayden and her colleagues were assigned the task to determine what the “miracle” drug was and whether it had anti-cancer attributes as claimed.

Using a small sample of the white compound, Hayden tested it with an infrared spectrometer, crossmatching it with known chemicals to reveal its identity.

What she found was astonishing. The miracle cancer drug was nothing more than creatine, an amino acid derivative already found in the human body.

An article from 1966 comments on the case, further explaining the findings:

“By the fall of 1963, FDA had reached its scientific conclusions. The Krebiozen powder, the agency announced, had been identified by several chemical tests as creatine. The contents of Krebiozen ampules were identified as mineral oil, with minute amounts of two other substances, amyl alcohol and 1-methylhydantoin, found in ampules shipped in 1963. FDA’s chemical analysis was soon supported by the findings of the National Cancer Institute that Krebiozen ‘does not possess any anticancer activity in man.'”

As a result of her discovery, officials issued dozens of indictments against several key players in this false cancer treatment scandal.

Another article — this time from November 27, 1984, and published in Time Magazine — outlined the details:

“After […] years of medical claims and counterclaims, of whodunit-style charges and countercharges, the loud controversy over the alleged anti-cancer drug Krebiozen seemed headed at last toward orderly disposition. A federal grand jury in Chicago handed up an 85-page indictment listing 49 counts against Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, 71, three associates, and a corporation. The charges ranged from mail fraud and conspiracy to mislabeling and making false statements to government agencies about the drug.”

Despite the importance of Hayden’s discovery, historical documentation on the Krebiozen scandal does not mention her name.

Deeply rooted inequities

Commenters have pointed out that, in the mid-twentieth century, FDA researchers only occasionally testified in court cases. Furthermore, although Black scientists did hold official positions in the agency, the FDA did not recommend that they appear in court to relay data.

In the book Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972, Cornell historian Margaret W. Rossiter notes that FDA officials at the time tended to subscribe to antiBlack views, believing that “a [Black] person might prejudice the case in court, in certain sections of the country.”

In the U.S., statistical data reveal inequities in the fields of science and technology, which continue well into the twenty-first century.

According to a comment article published in the journal Nature, between 2015–2018, data collected by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE) show that Black chemists are still denied access to academic jobs.

Journal authors also note that in the top 50 schools in the U.S., Black students represent 7.9% of bachelor’s degree recipients, 4.5% of Ph.D. recipients, 3.2% of postdoctoral researchers in universities, and 1.6% of chemistry professors.

The authors say: “In particular, Black women and early-career Black researchers suffer the devastating effects of institutionalized racism, with very little opportunity for training and promotion. In many cases, they are made to feel that they do not belong and are regularly subjected to various forms of discrimination, resulting in them leaving academia.”

An example from Europe suggests the existence of widespread global inequities. The Chemistry Europe Fellows Program was founded in 2015 to identify chemists for outstanding research and support as authors, advisers, and services to their national chemical societies.

The organization include 16 chemical societies from 15 countries and have not yet recognized any Black chemists.


Promoting equality in STEM

Equity across STEM is an urgent need, and several organizations have been formed in the U.S. to bring reform to the scientific community.

The OXIDE are one such organization working toward rectifying inequitable policies found in some academic chemistry departments. They also select diversity leaders within chemistry departments based on accomplishments in their field.

The National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) are another organization supporting and promoting equitable education and professional development of Black students and professionals.

NOBCChE say it is a “nonprofit professional organization dedicated to assisting Black and other minority students and professionals in fully realizing their potential in academic, professional, and entrepreneurial pursuits in chemistry, chemical engineering, and allied fields.”

The goal of these and similar organizations is to prioritize the changes needed to foster the academic and career aspirations of Black students in the science fields.

Hayden’s life continues to inspire others

Besides Hayden’s professional life and accomplishments, her personal life was equally fulfilling. She was married to NIH chemist Alonzo Hayden and had two children, Michael and Andrea.

On August 2, 1967, Hayden died of cancer.

Despite the racial inequities she endured, her work will be forever engrained in the hearts and minds of chemists worldwide.

Her pioneering spirit is also a shining example of unwavering determination and dedication that continues to inspire scientists of all racial and ethnic 



Written by Kimberly Drake on February 19, 2021 — 

Fact checked by Malgorzata Pachol



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The flu pandemic of 1918 and early conspiracy theories

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm, but it is not unique. Past pandemics have likewise been accompanied by conspiracy theories and waves of mistrust in science. In this Curiosities of Medical History feature, we look at some of the wildest theories to emerge during the flu pandemic of 1918.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch file photo/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a first in world history. There have been many before it, including the infamous Black Death, which historians believe started in 1334, and which may have lasted for centuries.

More recently, the world was turned upside down by the 1889 flu pandemic and the 1918 flu pandemic, sometimes referred to as the “Spanish flu.”

The latter resulted from infection with an H1N1 virus that had a genetic structure reminiscent of viruses of avian origin, though its actual source remains unknown.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the 1918 pandemic, which started to peter out the following year, caused around 40 million deaths globally.

As the flu started spreading throughout the world, local governments and newspapers struggled to keep up with the devastation. On October 6, 1918, a Greek newspaper reported an announcement from the government, warning that:


“The disease germs enter the body through the mouth and generally from the respiratory system. […] The disease spreads by coughs and [is] transmitted by air. Therefore, it is recommended the avoidance of [mental] stress and overwork. […] All schools must be close[d], and meticulous maintenance of cleanliness of lingerie and hands is proposed. In particular, it is highly recommended to avoid close contact with every person who displays flu symptoms.”

This notice echoes those issued by governments today, and much of the public health advice was similar to present-day guidance; washing the hands frequently and wearing face masks were top criteria for public safety.

And in 1918, much like now, dangerous misconceptions and conspiracy theories regarding the origin of the virus soon emerged.

In this feature, we look at some of the most striking “fake news” from 1918 and explore why conspiracy theories were popular then and remain a widespread issue, despite having harmful effects.


The controversy around aspirin

Today, the Big Pharma conspiracy theory holds that in order to promote and sell pharmaceutical products, companies intentionally spread disease. This conspiracy theory has resurfaced in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, though it is hardly a 21st-century phenomenon.

During the pandemic of 1918, one myth propagated in the United States and the United Kingdom was that the pandemic was linked to the use of aspirin produced by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer.

The mistrust of products of German origin is not as strange as it may seem, given that the start of the pandemic coincided with the end of World War I, in which the U.S. and Germany had fought as enemies.

The myth caused enough of a stir to prompt the American branch of Bayer to reassure potential buyers in the U.S. One advert, published on October 18, 1918, stated that “The manufacture of Bayer-Tablets and Capsules of Aspirin is completely under American control.”

Ironically, some later studies have suggested that aspirin may indeed have worsened some symptoms of the flu responsible for the pandemic, but not due to tampering.

A study paper published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2009 suggests that aspirin may have worsened the symptoms of the illness because doctors were prescribing dosages that were too high.

The paper’s author, Dr. Karen Starko, notes that at the time, doctors were routinely prescribing dosages of 8.0–31.2 grams of aspirin per day, unaware that this can cause hyperventilation and pulmonary edema in some people.

“Just before the 1918 death spike, aspirin was recommended in regimens now known to be potentially toxic and to cause pulmonary edema and may therefore have contributed to overall pandemic mortality and several of its mysteries,” Dr. Starko writes.


Claims of biological warfare

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, one widespread rumor claims that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the disease, was created in a laboratory and nefariously spread throughout the world.

The most prominent of these rumors holds that the virus was created in and leaked from a lab in China — though research indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is, in fact, of natural origin.

This is not a far cry from myths and spurious claims about the origin of the influenza virus that emerged and spread in 1918.

One such rumor, found in the pages of a Brazilian newspaper, suggested that the influenza virus was spread around the world by German submarines.

Similar stories claimed that German boats coming ashore on the East Coast of the U.S. had released the infectious agent into the atmosphere.

According to an account in Gina Kolata’s book Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It, a woman claimed to have seen a toxic cloud spreading over Boston as a camouflaged German ship drew close to the harbor.

Kolata writes:

“The plague came in on a camouflaged German ship that had crept into Boston Harbor under cover of darkness and released the germs that seeded the city. […] There was an eyewitness, an old woman who said she saw a greasy-looking cloud that floated over the harbor and wafted over the docks.”

Kolata goes on to describe other rumors that Germans had snuck into the city carrying vials of germs and proceeded to release them in theaters and at rallies.


A perpetually ‘foreign’ plague

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, some referred to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China” or “Wuhan” virus. This naming has racist and xenophobic connotations, suggesting that a specific country or population is responsible for the emergence and spread of a pathogen.

The misnomers soon attracted an international outcry, with human rights advocates citing related surges in racism throughout the world.

However, the phenomenon of naming a pandemic or epidemic after a specific country is by no means new. The 1918 flu is often called “the Spanish flu,” though it did not originate in Spain. In fact, its origins are still unclear. So how did it get this name?

According to a research paper published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2008, the name “probably [emerged] because of the misinformation surrounding the news about the origin of the epidemic.” The authors go on to explain:

“It is usually accepted that, because Spain was a neutral country in World War I, freedom of the press in Spain was greater than that in the allied countries and in Germany. The U.S. and European press, likely for political reasons, did not acknowledge or transmit timely and accurate news about the high number of casualties among their military and civilian population that were attributable to the ongoing influenza epidemic.”

While “the Spanish flu” remains the best-known moniker for the cause of the 1918 pandemic, the illness took on other names, depending on the country.

In Spain, it was sometimes referred to as “the French flu,” possibly because Spanish seasonal workers traveled to and from France by train, prompting Spanish authorities to believe that they had “imported” the virus from France.

Another name for the flu in Spain was “the Naples Soldier,” referring to a musical performance popular at the time, suggesting that the virus stuck as easily as the melody.

In Brazil, meanwhile, it was “the German flu,” in Poland it was “the Bolshevik disease,” and in Senegal it was “the Brazilian flu.” In short, each country nicknamed the virus after a political opponent.

Why did these misconceptions catch on?

In the past, as now, myths and conspiracy theories surrounding the origins of disease spread like wildfire.

As the authors of a 2017 study in Current Directions in Psychological Science observe, conspiracy theories give people quick, easily acceptable explanations for issues that otherwise have no simple answers or solutions.

The researchers found that people who believe in conspiracy theories do so for three reasons:

epistemic motives — the need for ready-made causal explanations of certain problems or phenomena in order to regain a sense of certainty
existential motives — the need to regain control over one’s situation or environment
social motives — “the desire to belong and to maintain a positive image” of oneself and the society that one inhabits or wishes to inhabit

Our senses of certainty, control, and belonging can easily become jeopardized in crisis situations, such as a pandemic.

Both the influenza virus behind the 1918 pandemic and the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 have maintained an aura of mystery: Scientists and governments do not and did not provide quick, easy solutions for stopping the spread.

The means available to prevent infection — wearing face masks in public, minimizing social contact — feel precarious and often alienating, sometimes seriously harming mental health and altering daily life.

Naturally, widespread anxiety in times of crisis prompts people to look for answers and solutions everywhere — and conspiracy theories seem to provide them.

Yet, time and time again, experts have shown that buying into conspiracy theories does more harm than good, damaging public health and social well-being.

Past public health crises such as the 1918 pandemic can teach us important lessons about crisis management — as long as we learn from our mistakes.

Pandemic leaves Europeans more likely to believe conspiracy theories – study

Jon Henley Europe correspondent

A year of the coronavirus pandemic has left many Europeans markedly more fed up, more pessimistic, more critical of the way their government is handling the crisis – and worryingly prone to believe conspiracy theories, according to a major study.

The survey of nearly 8,000 people across France, Germany, Italy and Britain by the French Cevipof political research centre (pdf) showed widespread levels of belief in coronavirus and vaccine-related conspiracy theories across all four countries surveyed – with mistrust highest in France.

More than 36% of French respondents, 32% in Italy and Germany and 31% in Britain agreed that health ministries were working with pharma companies to cover up vaccine risks, while 42% in France, 41% in the UK, 40% in Italy and 39% in Germany felt governments were exploiting the crisis to “control and monitor” citizens.

© Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images Just 49% of respondents in France said they were likely to be, or had already been, inoculated against Covid-19.

The survey also confirmed a familiar contrast in levels of social and political confidence between southern and northern Europe.

The four countries’ experiences of the pandemic are not the same: Italy, hit hard last spring, is starting cautiously to reopen; Germany and the UK, both with second waves deadlier than the first, cannot yet do so; France is hoping to avoid a third lockdown.

But asked what word best described their state of mind, 41% of French respondents chose “weary”, against 28% last February. In Italy, included for the first time, the figure was 40%. In Britain it rose to 31% from 19%, and in Germany to 15% from 7%.

Similarly, the proportion of people saying the word “gloomy” best described their mood was up 12 percentage points in France at 34% and stood at 24% in Italy. It also rose in Germany, doubling to 14%, and less sharply in the UK, up to 16%.

“People everywhere are very, very preoccupied by this crisis,” said Bruno Cautrès, a Cevipof analyst. “But the morose, anxious outlook of the French emerges very clearly from these figures. There is a thick French filter of mistrust.”

Asked if they agreed with their government’s handling of the crisis, 56% of Germans answered “wholly” or “partly”, compared with 74% last April. In the UK, approval fell from from 69% to 48%, and in France from 39% to 37%. In Italy it was 52%.

“These figures represent a mixture of temporary and structural factors,” said Gilles Ivaldi, a Cevipof researcher. “Regardless of the government’s objective performance in handling the pandemic, trust in politics generally is lower in Italy but, most clearly, in France, and that is reflected in people’s judgments.”

Asked how they felt about politics in general, 39% of French respondents opted for “mistrust”, against 30% of Britons, 27% of Italians and 24% of Germans. Nearly 25% of French and 31% of Italian respondents chose an even stronger epithet – “disgust” – against 8% in Germany and 11% in the UK. The survey was carried out by pollster Opinionway between 20 January and 11 February.

Differing attitudes towards government and institutions were also reflected in concerns about the economic consequences of Covid-19, the survey showed, with levels of worry high in all four countries – but greatest in France and Italy.

Almost 90% of those questioned in Italy and 84% of those questioned in France said they were very or fairly worried about the post-pandemic economic situation in their country, compared with 80% of those in the UK and 72% in Germany.

Vaccine acceptance showed a similar divide, with the French again the most wary: just 49% of respondents in France said they were likely to be, or had already been, inoculated against Covid-19, against 80% in the UK, 76% in Italy and 66% in Germany.

Across the four countries, the most common reason (58%) given for not wanting to have the jab was fear of possible side-effects, while 54% said not enough was known about the vaccines or the virus and 25% that they did not think the vaccines would be effective. One-sixth (16%) said they mistrusted vaccines in general.

CANADA VS USA

Biden administration must settle unwinnable WTO cases over steel and aluminum tariffs

Marc L. Busch, Opinion Contributor

 The European Union (EU) sees it as the dispute that could spell the "end of a rules-based multilateral trading system."

 Boeing-Airbus?

 No, the EU is talking about its case against U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, one of seven being argued at the World Trade Organization (WTO). 

Given delays due to COVID-19, the WTO recently announced it doesn't expect to rule in these cases, or in the cases the U.S. filed in response, until the latter half of 2021. 

The Biden administration should use the extra time to negotiate out of this mess.

 In the seven cases on the defense, the U.S. loses no matter how the WTO rules. 

In the five cases on the offense, the fight isn't worth the candle.

© Getty Images Biden administration must settle unwinnable WTO cases over steel and aluminum tariffs

Back in 2017, the Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent tariffs on aluminum, citing national security under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Nine countries challenged these tariffs at the WTO, and retaliated with tariffs of their own. This led the U.S. to bring WTO cases against seven of these countries for illegally retaliating. Canada and Mexico struck deals with the U.S. as part of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), cutting the total number of cases from 16 to 12. Currently, the United States is the defendant in seven cases and the complainant in five.

The way Europe sees it, the U.S. used Section 232 as a safeguard measure, but not in the way the WTO prescribes. The EU says the tariffs are thus illegal, and can't be justified under the WTO's "national security" exception. In this view, Europe's retaliatory tariffs make sense as the equivalent of the compensation the U.S. would have otherwise owed, had it fessed up to using a safeguard in the first place.

The U.S. disagrees. It argues that its national security tariffs are not safeguards, and that they are justified under the WTO's "national security" exception if the U.S. says they are. In this view, the U.S. does not owe compensation, meaning the EU's retaliatory tariffs, like those put in place by China, India, Russia and Turkey, are illegal.

Europe is surely right about the national security exception. The U.S. has been testing out its theory as a third party in WTO cases against Russia and Saudi Arabia, but it hasn't gained any traction. In fact, the rulings in both cases make it clear that the U.S. can't win.

The bigger picture, though, is that the U.S. shouldn't want to win. That's because a victory would motivate others to broadly define national security to include things like bilateral trade imbalances. If claims of this sort are also not reviewable by the WTO, or even subject to a "good faith" test, as the U.S. said in Q&A with the panel, then markets would shut down overnight to American exports. In sum, the worst thing that could happen to the U.S. would be to win, not lose, the seven Section 232 cases.

The flipside is that it's also wrong for the EU and the four other countries to take it upon themselves to decide the Section 232 tariffs were really safeguards and take compensation at a level of their choosing. The U.S. makes several references to EU unilateralism but doesn't raise a legal claim to back it up, perhaps because this narrative might have raised defensive liabilities in this and China's Section 301 litigation. The EU should be pressed harder on its unilateralism in negotiations.

More broadly, a Biden trade "reset" will have to start with the EU. Like other U.S. allies, the EU was stunned by Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, and his threats to employ Section 232 on their exports of autos. Biden needs to address the future of Section 232 to calm allies, and appease members of congress who have been busy drafting legislation to rein it in.

The EU "ask" will be WTO reform. It wants the Appellate Body working again. It wants to partner with the U.S. at the WTO to address concerns about China. Ending the 12 cases triggered by Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs would help signal U.S. resolve to see through WTO reform.

Bad cases make bad case law, and worse. COVID delays at the WTO have handed Biden a little more time to resolve 12 bad cases that the U.S. can't win, no matter what the rulings are.

Marc L. Busch is the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and host of the podcast TradeCraft.

#SPIRITANIMAL

There's a rare yellow penguin on South Georgia island, and biologists can't quite explain it

Black-and-white tuxedos may be the conventional dress code in the penguin world, but one dashing individual is breaking the status quo with an à la mode yellow coat.

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© Provided by Live Science A wildlife photographer captured images of a rare yellow penguin.

A wildlife photographer captured images of the rare penguin on a remote island in South Georgia in December 2019 and only recently released the photos. A king penguin "walked up straight to our direction in the middle of a chaos full of sea elephants and Antarctic fur seals, and thousands of other king penguins," the photographer from Belgium, Yves Adams wrote on an Instagram post. "How lucky could I be!"

At the time, Adams was leading a two-month photography expedition through the South Atlantic and had stopped on a South Georgia beach. While unpacking safety equipment, he saw a fluttering of penguins swimming toward the shore — one individual immediately caught his eye.

Related: Photos of flightless birds: all 18 penguin species

"I'd never seen or heard of a yellow penguin before. There were 120,000 birds on that beach, and this was the only yellow one there," Adams told Kennedy News and Media. "We all went crazy when we realized. We dropped all the safety equipment and grabbed our cameras."

King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus), just like the closely related emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri), typically adorn a black-and-white coat with a yellowish-gold dash of color on their collar. The yellow pigments are "unique to penguins," though not all species have them, according to the Australian Antarctic Program.

This particular penguin seems to have retained its yellow feathers but lost its dark ones, which are typically colored by a blackish brown pigment known as melanin.

Penguins with unusual plumage are relatively rare, and sometimes it can be difficult to identify the cause behind the rare colors just by looking at the penguins, according to the Australian Antarctic Program. Some unusual coloring can be due to injury, diet or disease, but many instances are due to mutations in the bird's genes. Such mutations can cause, for example, "melanistic" penguins whose typically white parts are black and "albinistic" penguins that don't have any melanin and thus are white.

Adams told Kennedy News that the yellow bird has a genetic condition known as leucism in which only some of the melanin is lost.

Dee Boersma, a conservation biologist and professor at the University of Washington who was not a part of the expedition, agreed. "This penguin is lacking some pigment so it is [leucistic]," Boersma told Live Science in an email. "True albinos have lost all pigment." (Boersma said the bird has a brown head and so must have retained some of the pigment.)

Still, others disagree.

"I wouldn't call the bird leucistic," because the penguin seems to lack all melanin, said Kevin McGraw, an integrative behavioral ecologist at Arizona State University, who also wasn't part of the expedition.

"It does look albino from the perspective that it lacks all melanin" in its plumage, feet and eyes, McGraw said. Still, "we'd need feather samples for biochemical testing if we aimed to unequivocally document," whether melanin is present, he said.

Animals can be albino but still have non-melanin pigment, he added.

The penguin has lost the carotenoid or yellow-orange-red pigment in its beak and the melanin pigment in its feathers, while retaining the yellow pigment in its feathers. So the genetic and cellular machinery for some pigments were knocked out whereas others were not. "I'm not aware of many other images or birds like this," McGraw said. "I've been fascinated by this photo."

Such oddly colored birds are rare — and likely for a reason.

Penguins use body and plumage color for a variety of functions, including mate selection, camouflage or protection from the sun, McGraw said. "It's conceivable that such color aberrations could impact both survival and reproduction."

The team was lucky that the yellow penguin landed close enough that they were able to "get this show of a lifetime," Adams said. "Our view wasn't blocked by a sea of massive animals. Normally, it's almost impossible to move on this beach because of them all."

Originally published on Live Science.

Starlink may be answer for Lake of Bay's notorious internet woes


With high speed affordable internet within sight of their home for years, a Lake of Bays couple gave up waiting for it to be extended and signed up for Starlink. Robert Harley and Kimberly Redwood have lived on Whitehouse Bay for 15 years, 10 minutes from Baysville. Like many other rural communities in Muskoka, it's known for its broadband connectivity issues. Last Thursday, they placed an order with the new Starlink internet service, developed by Elon Musk's company SpaceX. The service provides internet connections through small satellites working with ground transceivers. This February, it became available for preorders in select areas across Canada. The nearest fibre optic cable to Harley and Redwood stops within 500 metres of their home on White House and South Portage roads. They said they've been waiting years for a better internet service to arrive in their area. Currently, they use a cellphone plan to access the internet through a modem. Harley pays $79.95 a month for 350 GB of internet, however added overage charges often set them back another $75-100 a month, he said.


"The internet isn't bad, the speed is OK, the quality is OK. The problem is the price," Harley said.

Harley heard about Starlink in late 2020 and decided to sign up for the "beta testing" list. When preorders opened up at the beginning of February, he immediately placed his order. The satellite is now on its way to their house, though they don't know when it will arrive.

The dish rotates to follow the position of global satellites and self-heats to prevent snow or debris from collecting on it. The equipment, including the satellite dish, cost Harley $800 with shipping charges and taxes. His household will pay $129 plus taxes per month for the service charge, which includes access to unlimited broadband. Users have to place it at the highest point possible, so Harley paid extra for a roof mount.

"I figure it pays for itself in the first six months," Harley said. He said Starlink could prove to be a viable option for people in rural Lake of Bays, like him and his wife, who've been waiting to access fibre optic broadband for over a decade. Stuart Morley, executive director of the Parry Sound Muskoka Community Network, recently installed Starlink at his home. He said Starlink, although not affordable for all, could "make a huge dent" in closing the broadband gap, compared to fibre optic internet. "Other options like rolling fibre optic take a long time, years and years, and it's very expensive," Morley said. "At some point ... it's just not worth it." As for what the couple are expecting of this much-hyped "21st-century" technology, Harley said he's not holding his breath but is willing to take the gamble. "If it's 75 per cent of what they say [it is], it'll be equal to what I've got," he said. "That goes a long way to make me happy."With files from Sarah Law.

Zahraa Hmood is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering the municipalities of Muskoka Lakes, Lake of Bays and Georgian Bay. Her reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.

Zahraa Hmood, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, muskokaregi

Investors are increasingly shunning mining companies that violate human rights

Shin Imai, Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada 

and Sarah Colgrove, Adjunct Law Professor, Ryerson University 

Investors in Canadian mining company Tahoe Resources paid a price when Tahoe failed to disclose the extent of community and Indigenous opposition to its Escobal mine in Guatemala a few years back.

Its stock was flying high at $27 a share, but it fell after a string of lawsuits and violent conflicts — including security guards shooting protesters in the back. The mine was eventually suspended by a Guatemalan court, and Tahoe was sold to Pan American Silver for about $5 a share.

People who invested in Vancouver-based Tahoe were undoubtedly attracted to its ownership of one of the world’s largest silver deposits, and assured by its claims that “communities love us.” They only learned about the extent of community opposition to the mine when civil society organizations publicized complaints that they had filed with the British Columbia Securities Commission.

The securities commission itself appears to have ignored those complaints — though investors did not. Despite investor behaviour, however, a new report on the future of securities regulations suggests that Ontario still believes social conflicts aren’t relevant to investors.

The social risks of investment

In January 2021, the Ontario government’s Capital Markets Modernization Taskforce made a number of recommendations for improving the province’s investment environment. It acknowledged an “increased global momentum towards enhanced disclosure of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors that impact a company’s financial performance,” and recommended mandatory “climate change-related disclosure.” This is good news.

Unfortunately, the task force suggested a reporting standard that does not address human rights or Indigenous concerns. It fails to account for S in ESG — the social risks and impacts of investing.

In contrast, the United Nations Guiding Principles Reporting Framework — an internationally recognized reporting standard that was recommended to Ontario’s task force — would require companies to disclose human rights issues.

Such disclosure seems to matter to investors. The Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP) — a volunteer-driven, community-based legal clinic — made six complaints to Canadian security regulators about human right abuses and failures to consult Indigenous communities and tracked the outcomes. Details can be found in the empirical research report prepared for the Ontario task force.

JCAP’s research offers two central findings. First, human rights violations and failures to consult Indigenous communities affect share prices. When they were publicized, JCAP’s complaints were typically followed by a drop in share prices ranging from 11 to 22 per cent

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© (Authors) Tahoe Resources falling share prices.

The second insight is that investors regard conflict with local communities as a risk to their investment, and one that legally should be disclosed. In the case of Tahoe Resources, several pension funds divested from the company specifically because of human rights concerns. Smaller shareholders began class-action lawsuits based on the company’s failure to disclose material information about social conflicts.

The six complaints filed by JCAP make up a small sample, but the impact of social conflicts on share prices is confirmed by a much larger academic study of 354 assassinations of civil society activists related primarily to mining projects over 20 years. It found that “investors, in aggregate, react negatively to assassination events,” and that there is a cumulative median loss in market capitalization of more than US$100 million in the 10 days following an assassination.
Keeping conflict in the shadows

For investors to make informed decisions, they need information. Unfortunately, another JCAP report shows that Canadian companies under-report social conflict to investors.

Read more: Slavery charges against Canadian mining company settled on the sly

That report tracked conflicts associated with Canadian mining companies in Latin America over a 15-year period, and compares public and community reports with disclosures by those companies. It identified 44 deaths associated with opposition to mining companies, 30 of which were targeted, and 403 injuries, 363 of which occurred during confrontations or protests. Only 24.2 per cent of those deaths and 12.3 per cent of those injuries were reported to investors under Canadian securities law.

This finding of under-reporting is consistent with an analysis conducted by the Shift Project that looked into the disclosures of 18 top Canadian mining companies. It found the majority were “failing to communicate a comprehensive narrative around human rights, cherry-picking instead.”

The Shift Project is chaired by John Ruggie, a human rights professor at Harvard University who led the development of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

A growing body of research suggests that investors care about human rights impacts and consultation with Indigenous communities, and consider them important to the value of their investments. At the same time, companies seem to prefer not to report on such issues. This is where securities law comes in.

A few years ago, the idea of using law to mandate corporate disclosure of climate-change risks seemed unworkable, but today, Ontario’s own task force recommends it. The time has come for the social element of ESG to be recognized as well, through the mandatory disclosure of human rights risks.

Human rights violations by mining companies are hardly a concern only for investors. The biggest risks are to the communities that contain the mines, the Indigenous populations that have to deal with the fallout from the conduct of mining companies, the environment — and all of us.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Shin Imai, Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School (Shin Imai is a director of the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP) and has filed complaints against mining companies for failure to disclose material information. JCAP is a clinic based at Osgoode Hall Law School and Thompson Rivers Law School)

Sarah Colgrove is an adjunct professor at Ryerson University, a lawyer, and a volunteer with the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project.