Taboo attached to breast cancer kills women in remote areas of Togo
Issued on: 19/10/2021


The World Health Organisation is celebrating the International Day against breast cancer on Tuesday. In remote areas access to health care is a struggle and in West Africa, in the far north of Togo, women with breast cancer are often abandoned by their husbands. FRANCE 24's team on the ground report.

 

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an annual campaign to raise awareness about the impact of breast cancer. On this occasion, Dr Benjamin Anderson, Surgeon, breast cancer Specialist at the World Health Organization, talks to FRANCE 24.

ANOTHER REASON TO USE FACE MASKS
Breathing spreads tuberculosis bacteria, research suggests

T

Tuberculosis is historically the world's number one infectious killer causing some 1.5 million deaths worldwide during an average year 

GIANLUIGI GUERCIA AFP/File


Issued on: 19/10/2021 - 
Paris (AFP)

Breathing is enough to spread the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, research presented at a major conference on Tuesday shows, potentially forcing the medical community to rethink decades of containment strategy focusing on coughing alone.

Using state-of-the-art equipment, at team at the University of Cape Town in South Africa measured the disease-causing Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) in 39 people with TB.

They looked at aerosols released during regular breathing, deep breathing and coughing and found that after five minutes all three produced particles containing the dangerous bacteria.

And while coughing produced three times more Mtb than breathing, the research notes that because people breathe all day long, simply exhaling may contribute more than 90 percent of airborne Mtb.

Tuberculosis is historically the world's number one infectious killer, causing some 1.5 million deaths worldwide during an average year and has been surpassed only recently by Covid-19.

A chronic cough is a hallmark of the disease and so far research has focused on people who show symptoms -- but, like with Covid, people can carry tuberculosis without showing symptoms.

Study lead Ryan Dinkele said that the findings may explain why the current approach of testing and treating only tuberculosis patients who feel sick enough to seek treatment may not go far enough to prevent its spread.

"This leaves room for extensive Mtb transmission prior to treatment seeking," he told AFP.

He said an alternative approach would be to search for people who have tuberculosis without waiting for them to seek treatment.

"However, if transmission is possible in the absence of symptoms this is extremely challenging," he said.

He added that the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, shows that aerosols rather than sputum -- phlegm which has been traditionally targeted to diagnose tuberculosis -- should be used to determine infectiousness.

According to the World Health Organization about a quarter of the world's population is infected with the TB bacteria -- but only five to 15 percent of these fall ill with the disease, most of whom live in low- and middle-income countries.

Dinkele noted that bringing the disease under control would require not only identifying potential early spreaders but also taking measures to improve air safety.

He said meaningful changes in behaviour like increased airflow, filtration and sterilisation in buildings to ensure better protection for uninfected individuals can be costly.

"This leaves poorer countries vulnerable to an inability to implement such changes," he said.

© 2021 AFP

Patents to tackle plastic waste on the rise

As the use of plastic increases, scientists and inventors are looking for ways to get a handle on the problem of plastic waste. Recent patent data points to promising innovations, especially from Europe and the US.

Discarded computers contain many different plastics that can be reused

There are currently thousands of different types of plastic available and the lion's share of new plastic soon ends up as waste. As mountains of the used stuff continue to pile up around the world, people are looking for new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle some of it. But getting rid of even a tiny amount of it will be a gargantuan job, especially with the popularity of hard-to-recycle products and single-use plastic.

In 2019, nearly 370 million tons of plastic were produced globally, according to the PlasticsEurope trade association. Most of it was synthesized from oil or natural gas. That's just another reason why many inventors are now tackling the issue in a multitude of ways like making things easier to recycle or even looking for alternatives to conventional plastics altogether.

Currently, the US and Europe are tied for the number of recycling-related and bioplastic technology patents, according to a study released Tuesday by the European Patent Office (EPO). Combined they account for 60% of global patents between 2010 and 2019 to make the plastic industry more circular.

This may seem like old data, but since patent applications are often filed years before products or processes actually appear for consumers, such information can be a good indicator of things to come. And what the EPO sees is growing innovation in recycling and alternative plastics.

Plastic bags and straws have been the focus of many single-use plastic bans around the world

Where are the ideas coming from?

EPO President Antonio Campinos shares this enthusiasm for a brighter future with less plastic pollution without resorting to outright bans.

"The good news is that innovation can help us to address this challenge by enabling the transition to a fully circular model," he said in a press release accompanying his agency's report.

In Europe in the past decade, Germany was most active in both plastic recycling and bioplastic technology patents, followed by the UK, the Netherlands and Italy. Looking closer, the authors of the EPO report see that absolute numbers are not everything, though.

"Within Europe, France, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium stand out for their specialization in both plastic recycling and bioplastic technologies. Although it posted the highest share of IPFs [international patent families] due to its larger economy, Germany lacked specialization in these fields," noted the report.

IPF is an industry term and means a single invention that has been filed at several patent offices, making it more likely to be something truly innovative and therefore worthwhile to count. Outside of Europe and the US, Japan brought in about 18% of these patents, while South Korea and China are both far behind with only about 5% each.
Plain recycling is no longer plain

At its most fundamental level, the number of patents worldwide dealing with improving basic mechanical recycling has gone up for years. Indeed, it is still the simplest and most common way to turn plastic waste into something new. Since the early 1990s, the number of patents to make things easier to recycle has also increased greatly to make that job easier.


But in the last decade, chemical and biological recycling methods have taken over patent activity. They now account for twice as many patents as traditional mechanical recycling methods. These chemical methods work by breaking the plastic into its chemical elements, which can then be reused. On the downside, these methods are often more energy-intensive.

Another option, though less explored, is biological recycling. As the name suggests, this method uses living organisms to turn plastic into compost.

The report acknowledges Europe's excellence in fundamental research in chemical and biological recycling but complained about a lack of entrepreneurial spirit to get these new ideas to the market. The continent must better exploit what it has by taking these ideas from universities and other research institutes and bringing them to the industry. Up until now, they have been well behind their successful American counterparts.
Don't forget the easy parts

Besides investigating recycling, the report also highlights a big increase in patent applications for alternatives to fossil fuel-based plastics. Manufacturing these alternatives generates fewer carbon emissions and are either biobased or biodegradable. Here the health care, packaging, cosmetic, detergent, electronics and textile sectors were at the forefront of innovation.

Yet with all these innovations, most plastic is nonetheless simply discarded. While in Europe well over 50 million tons of plastic were produced last year, "25 million tons of plastic waste went into landfill and up to 23 million tons of waste could have gone into rivers, lakes and oceans," warned the report.

No matter how fancy the technology gets or how much packaging is reduced, plastic will not go away any time soon. Making things biodegradable or easier to take apart is great progress. But whatever the future holds, the basics of recycling are still important. Simple technology will continue to play a role to better collect, sort, separate and clean plastic in a world flooded with it.

END THE WAR ON DRUGS

Oregon illegal pot grows: More calls to send National Guard


FILE - In this Sept. 30, 2016, file photo, a marijuana bud is seen before harvest at a rural area near Corvallis, Ore. On Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021, the same day that Jackson County declared a state of emergency amid a sharp increase in illegal cannabis farms, police raided a site that had about two tons of processed marijuana and 17,500 pot plants. 

(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky, File)

ANDREW SELSKY
Mon, October 18, 2021

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — On the same day last week that a southern Oregon county declared a state of emergency amid a sharp increase in illegal cannabis farms, police raided a site that had about 2 tons of processed marijuana and 17,500 pot plants.

The raid illustrates that the proliferation of industrial-scale marijuana farms has gotten so bad and so brazen that Jackson County Commissioners asked Gov. Kate Brown to send in the Oregon National Guard “to assist, as able, in the enforcement of laws related to the production of cannabis.” They also directly appealed to Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek for help getting additional funding to tackle the problem.

During last Wednesday's raid in Medford, near the California border, police found a vast outdoor growing operation, plus harvested plants hanging upside down on drying racks and 3,900 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of resinous buds stashed in huge bags and in stacks of plastic storage containers.

The officers took 26 migrant workers into custody, interviewed them and then released them. An arrest warrant was issued for the primary suspect, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office said.

Courtney said he is so concerned about the surge in illegal marijuana farms in Jackson and neighboring Josephine counties that he agrees the Oregon National Guard should be sent in. Many of the illegal growers are armed.

“You can’t solve it just at the local level, and you cannot solve it, I’m afraid, just at the usual state level and have some more state troopers down there,” the Democrat said. “The National Guard, they’re going to have to get deployed down there some way or other.”

Brown, also a Democrat, is holding off on a deployment for now but could reconsider next year, her office said.

The Josephine County commissioners wrote to Courtney in August to describe how migrant workers are being exploited and subjected to “appalling conditions,” while living in tents with no toilets, no running water or bathing facilities, unrefrigerated food and unsanitary cooking facilities.

Jackson and Josephine counties are considered the northern extension of the Emerald Triangle, a fabled marijuana-growing epicenter, of which California’s Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties form the major part.

The increasing calls for National Guard intervention recalls the drug wars of the 1990s, when the citizen-soldiers were used, including in Missouri and California.

In California's Humboldt County back then, some 200 Army soldiers, National Guardsmen and federal agents raided clandestine pot farms in rugged terrain. Residents responded with protests.

Both Oregon and California in recent years legalized the cultivation, processing and sale of marijuana, so long as those involved enter the regulated systems in each state and abide by the rules. While many have done so, with Oregon in particular reaping a bonanza in marijuana taxes, some growers have resisted.

California has also been hit by industrial-scale illegal marijuana growing operations, with eradication left to local authorities, and in federal territory, to federal officers.

In southern Oregon, the problem has gotten worse recently, law enforcement officials say.

Perhaps recognizing that local law enforcement is stretched thin, foreign cartels began setting up hundreds of unlicensed marijuana growing operations last spring, authorities say.

Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel said he believes the cartel masterminds expect to lose a few growing operations, but the sheer number of them means many will remain untouched until the marijuana is sold on the black market outside Oregon.

However, Daniel said Monday he doesn't believe the National Guard is the answer.

“If you want some National Guard troops to help you cut down plants, great, but you've got to realize there’s a lot of investigation that goes into these operations, to get the search warrants," Daniel said. "You’re going to have National Guard people sitting on their hands for a number of days at a time.”

The sheriff said he'd prefer having investigators from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service follow the money trail, and having the Drug Enforcement Administration involved.

“This is a billion-dollar industry or a multibillion-dollar industry," he said. “Where are they?”

The DEA declined to commnent.

In California, the growing operations are increasing beyond the Emerald Triangle. In July, the largest illegal marijuana bust in Los Angeles County history netted 373,000 plants that authorities say would have been worth $1 billion on the street.

The raid in the Antelope Valley of Southern California's high desert resulted in 131 arrests and the seizure of more than 33,000 pounds (14,969 kilograms) of harvested marijuana plants. That represented only a fraction of the region's illicit growing operations, authorities said.

Officials said the wide-ranging problem has grown tremendously during the coronavirus pandemic. Armed cartel members run massive growing operations, some spanning dozens of greenhouses, that are undermining California's legal marijuana market.

Amid a megadrought across the U.S. West, illegal growers are stealing water, depriving legal users including farmers and homeowners of the increasingly precious resource.

In Oregon, the Illinois Valley Soil and Water Conservation District in Josephine County has held town halls about the issue recently.

“The people of the Illinois Valley are experiencing an existential threat for the first time in local history,” said Christopher Hall, the conservation district’s community organizer.

Asked if Brown was considering deploying the Oregon National Guard, her spokeswoman, Elizabeth Merah, said the Oregon Military Department already has a full-time National Guard service member embedded in each of three law enforcement teams in southern Oregon.

She said the situation would be reexamined next year.

“Because the current growing season is drawing to a close, we are not considering deploying additional resources this year,” Merah said in an email. “The governor remains concerned about the situation and will continue to monitor what resources might be needed for the 2022 growing season.”

___

Associated Press writer Juliet Williams in San Francisco contributed to this report.

___

Follow Andrew Selsky on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andrewselsky

The nightmare of India's tallest rubbish mountain


Sun, October 17, 2021

More than 16 million tonnes of rubbish make up Deonar's waste mountain

The "mountains of garbage" dotting India's cities will soon be replaced with waste treatment plants, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised earlier this month. Author Saumya Roy reports from the country's oldest and tallest mountain of rubbish - some 18 storeys high - in the western coastal city of Mumbai.

Every morning, Farha Shaikh stands on top of a more-than-a-century-old rubbish mountain in Mumbai, waiting for garbage trucks to make their way up.

The 19-year-old waste picker has been scavenging through these heaps in the Deonar suburb for as long as she can remember.


From the gloopy trash, she usually picks up plastic bottles, glass and wire to sell in the city's thriving waste markets. But most of all she looks out for broken mobile phones.

Every few weeks, Farha finds a "dead" mobile phone in the trash. She digs into her meagre savings and gets it repaired. Once it flickers to life, she spends her evenings watching films, playing video games, texting and calling friends.

When the phone stops working again days or weeks later, Farha's connection with the world outside snaps again. She is back to working long days, collecting the remains of the city to resell - and looking for another phone to restore.

The rubbish mountain in Mumbai's Deonar is 18 storeys high

More than 16 million tonnes of trash make up Deonar's rubbish mountains - eight of them spread over a 300-acre sprawl - that are said to be India's largest and oldest. Waste is piled as high as 120ft (36.5m). The sea forms the outer edge of the mountains and slums have been built into the sturdy heaps of rubbish.

The decomposing waste releases noxious gases such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide. In 2016, it erupted in fires that burned for months and caused smoke in much of Mumbai. Rubbish fires at landfills contributed 11% of particulate matter, a major cause of air pollution in the city, according to a 2011 study by India's pollution regulator.

The men who make money selling your trash


The activist tackling Mumbai's rubbish mountain

A 2020 study by a Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), found 3,159 such mountains containing 800 million tonnes of rubbish across India.

In Mumbai, a court case has been going on for 26 years to close down the Deonar grounds but the dumping of waste continues.

India's waste mountains have long vexed officials and politicians. On 1 October, Mr Modi announced nearly $13bn (£9.54bn) for a national cleanliness programme that would include setting up a number of sewage treatment plants to gradually replace open air rubbish dumps such as the one in Deonar.

But experts are sceptical. "While it has been done in smaller cities, it is hard to provide a remedy for waste mountains at this scale," says Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, deputy program manager at CSE.

"There is an acknowledgement that this is a problem but we have accepted that if we are to live in big cities like Mumbai or Delhi, these garbage mountains come with it," says Dharmesh Shah, country co-ordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a coalition of groups that advocate for reduced waste.

The rubbish mountains in Deonar caught fire in March 2016

Since 2000, India has passed rules asking municipalities to process waste. But most states report only partial compliance, and there are not enough waste treatment plants.

Mumbai, India's commercial and entertainment capital and home to some 20 million people, has just one such plant. There are now plans for a waste-to-energy plant at Deonar.

Mr Modi said he expects the plan to create new, green jobs. But that worries waste pickers like Farha who have been doing this job all their lives.

It has become much harder for them to access the waste mountains after the fires in 2016. The municipality has increased security to prevent waste pickers from going in and lighting fires - the flames melt the lighter trash, bringing up metal that fetches high prices.

The waste pickers who manage to sneak in are often beaten, detained and sent back. But some bribe the guards or enter before the security patrols begin at daylight. So, little segregation happens at the grounds in Denoar now - instead, a lot of the waste is segregated in the city itself, and what arrives at Deonar has reduced over time.

Farha hasn't had a phone for months. She has to bribe guards at least 50 rupees ($0.67; £0.49) every day to get in and work at the Deonar grounds. To recover this, she even thought of picking through the rubbish that began arriving from the city's Covid hospital wards last year.

But her family asked her not to pick up the "harmful" Covid waste. So, she hangs close, watching pickers wear protective gear in the rain to keep collecting plastic to resell.

The city was sending new trash, and as they had for years, the mountains had to accommodate it and pickers had to collect and resell it.

"Hunger will kill us if not illness," Farha says.

Saumya Roy is a Mumbai-based journalist and author, most recently, of Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belonging (Profile Books/ Hachette India)

An animal-rights charity is suing YouTube, claiming the site doesn't enforce its ban on animal-abuse videos, a report says

Isobel Asher Hamilton
Tue, October 19, 2021,

John McKeen / Getty Images

Animal rights charity Lady Freethinker filed a lawsuit against YouTube, The New York Times reports.

The lawsuit claimed YouTube had failed to keep animal-abuse videos off its platform, per The Times.

Lady Freethinker said that as of September, 70% of videos it had alerted YouTube about remained live.

An animal rights charity hit YouTube with a lawsuit on Monday, claiming the platform had failed in its duty to remove videos of animal abuse, The New York Times reports.

The lawsuit was filed Monday by animal rights charity Lady Freethinker, The Times reported. The founder of Lady Freethinker, Nina Jackel, told The Times the charity had been asking YouTube to tackle animal abuse on its platform for 18 months.

Last year, the charity alerted YouTube to 2,000 videos with a combined 1.2 billion views, but as of September, roughly 70% of the videos remained live, Jackel told The Times.

"We've tried to have a meaningful conversation with them multiple times, and been shut down," Jackel told The Times, adding, "We're knocking on the door, and nobody is answering. So this lawsuit is kind of a last straw."

"We agree that content depicting violence or abuse toward animals has no place on YouTube," a YouTube spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

"While we've always had strict policies prohibiting animal abuse content, earlier this year, we expanded our violent and graphic policy to more clearly prohibit content featuring deliberate physical suffering or harm to animals, including staged animal rescues. As with any significant update, it takes time for our systems to fully ramp up enforcement. Our teams are working hard to quickly remove violative content and just this year alone, we've removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating these policies," the spokesperson added.

Per The Times, a video of a python constricting a puppy, one of a baby monkey being pinched and prodded, and another of a monkey being forced to fight off a snake we all live on YouTube on Monday.

YouTube removed nine out of the 10 animal videos The Times shared with the company, per the report. It did not remove one showing a live rabbit being fed to a python, and declined to explain why the video didn't violate the platform's rules, The Times reported.

The Times reported that Lady Freethinker also sent a letter to the Justice Department saying YouTube had aided violations of the "animal crushing" law, which bans people from creating videos of animals being crushed.

Earlier this year, Lady Freethinker shared an investigation with Insider into videos on YouTube of staged animal rescues, in which animals such as dogs and cats were placed near animals like snakes before being taken away by humans.

Lady Freethinker and Insider found ads for major brands including Facebook, Disney, and Land Rover running next to the videos, and YouTube subsequently updated its policy on animal cruelty to include staged rescues.

Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The century long search for the elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult – but data sure helps



Veronika Dolar, Assistant Professor of Economics, SUNY Old Westbury
Mon, October 18, 2021

The fight over the minimum wage continues. AP Photo/John Raoux

For decades it was conventional wisdom in the field of economics that a higher minimum wage results in fewer jobs.

In part, that’s because it’s based on the law of supply and demand, one of the most well-known ideas in economics. Despite it being called a “law,” it’s actually two theories that suggest if the price of something goes up – wages, for example – demand will fall – in this case, for workers. Meanwhile, their supply will rise. Thus an introduction of a high minimum wage would cause the supply of labor to exceed demand, resulting in unemployment.

But this is just a theory with many built-in assumptions.

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this year’s Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesn’t actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

When I discuss their work in my economics classes, however, I don’t portray it as an example of economists providing a definitive answer to the question of whether minimum wage hikes kill jobs. Instead, I challenge my students to think about all the ways one could answer this question, which clearly cannot be settled based on our beliefs. But rather, the answer requires data – which in economics, can be hard to come by.

Using models to study behavior

Economics studies the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. And so, like other social sciences, economics is fundamentally interested in human behavior.

But humans behave in a wide variety of often hard-to-predict ways, with countless complications. As a result, economists rely on abstraction and theory to create models in hopes of representing and explaining the complex world that they are studying. This emphasis on complicated mathematical models, theory and abstraction has made economics a lot less accessible to the general public than other social sciences, such as psychology or sociology.

Economists also use these models to answer important questions, such as “Does a minimum wage cause unemployment?” In fact, this is one of the most studied questions in all of economics since at least 1912, when Massachusetts became the first state to create a minimum wage. The federal wage floor came in 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And it’s been controversial ever since. Proponents argue that a higher minimum wage helps create jobs, grow the economy, fight poverty and reduce wage inequality.

Critics stress that minimum wages cause unemployment, hurt the economy and actually harm the low-income people that were supposed to be helped.
A tale of two theories

Most students in my introductory microeconomics class can easily show, using the standard supply and demand model, that an increase in the minimum wage above the level that the market sets on its own should drive up unemployment. In fact, this is one of the most commonly used examples in introductory economics textbooks.

However, this result assumes a perfectly competitive labor market in which workers and employers are abundant and employees can change jobs with ease. This is rarely the case in the real world, where a few companies frequently dominate in what are known as monopsonies.

And so others theorized that because monopsonistic companies had the power to set wages artificially low, a higher minimum wage could, perhaps counterintuitively, prompt companies to hire more workers in order to recover some of their lost profitability as a result of the increased labor costs.

How can economists tell which of these two theories may be right? They need data.

David Card won the Nobel Prize for his work on the minimum wage. 

AP Photo/Noah Berger

Data trumps theory

Studying the real world is difficult, and it’s constantly changing, so it is not easy to obtain all the relevant evidence.

Unlike in medicine or other sciences, economists cannot conduct rigidly controlled clinical trials, a method vacinologists used to test the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Due to financial, ethical or practical constraints, we cannot easily split people into treatment or control groups – as is common in psychology. And we cannot randomly assign a higher minimum wage to some and not others and observe what will happen, which is how a biomedical scientist might study the impact of various treatments on human health.

And in studying the minimum wage, we cannot simply look at past times when it was increased and check what happened to unemployment a few weeks or months later. There are many other factors that affect the labor market, such as outsourcing and immigration, and it’s virtually impossible to isolate and pin down one factor such as a minimum wage hike as the cause.

This is where the pioneering work of natural experiments like the ones Card and Krueger have used over the years to study the effects of raising the minimum wage and other policy changes comes in. It began with their 1994 paper, but they’ve replicated the findings with other studies that have deepened the amount of data that shows the original theory about the minimum wage causing job losses is likely wrong.

Their approach isn’t without flaws – mostly technical ones –- and in fact economists still don’t have a clear answer to the question about the minimum wage that I posed earlier in this article. But because of Card, Krueger and their research, the debate over the minimum wage has gotten a lot less theoretical and much more empirical.

Only by studying how humans actually behave can economics hope to make meaningful predictions about how a policy change like increasing the minimum wage is likely to affect the behavior of the economy and the people living in it.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Veronika Dolar, SUNY Old Westbury.

Read more:
Introducing David Card, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics winner who made the minimum wage respectable

Veronika Dolar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy

Gus Garcia-Roberts, Erin Mansfield and Caroline Anders
Mon, October 18, 2021,

·58 min read  LONG READ WELL WORTH IT

Over 300,000 international flights arrived in the U.S. from Jan. 1 through April 30, 2020.

On Feb. 29, 2020, hundreds of people packed into the Pullman Christian Reformed Church, a squat, beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. An attendee began the ceremonies by blasting a shofar, the trumpet made out of a ram’s horn. Somebody played keyboard. And a long line of people waited to speak into a microphone about their memories of Angeli Demus.

The lifelong Chicagoan, who had died a month earlier at age 59, insisted she didn’t want it called a funeral. “Donate, cremate, celebrate,” had been her credo to her family near the end of a gutting battle with lung cancer, and with her eyes donated and her body cremated, all that was left was this party.

Her husband, Earl Demus, billed it as “Angeli’s Joyous Celebration,” and thought that the crowd it gathered spoke to his wife’s beloved nature. “Standing room only,” recounted Demus, who estimated there were more than 450 people there. "I stopped counting after a while.”

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The disconcerting news story that seemed recently to creep into every conversation, particularly after it tanked the stock market the previous week, didn’t make it past the doors of the church. Nobody wore a mask or kept their distance, and for the most part nobody even talked about the novel coronavirus. It had only started to trickle into the United States, as far as anybody knew, and the few cases in Illinois were said to be isolated and controlled.

A top health official had a week earlier assured Chicagoans that “the health risk to the general public from novel coronavirus remains low,” and the outlook from the highest levels of government was that, nationally, the few instances of the virus were disappearing. President Donald Trump had said three days earlier there were 15 cases in the country, and “the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

In a room off to the side of the church, people sipped soft drinks and picked at a spread catered by a neighborhood chef: finger sandwiches, sliders, fruit and cheese, chicken and Angeli’s favorite dessert, cheesecake. This room was where her father, Charles Dungill, spent most of the event.

Everybody called him “Cookie,” a throwback to his days as a drummer in a family band that toured everywhere Black performers were allowed in Jim Crow's America. Cookie shook hands, hugged and chatted with relatives and friends, some of whom had traveled from California, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Nevada. A family friend was fresh off a golfing trip to Arizona and another had recently returned from South Africa.

It was the West Chatham diaspora, a testament to the lasting bonds of the tight-knit Chicago neighborhood in which Cookie and his wife, Barbara, had raised Angeli and her three surviving siblings: brothers Sevil and Kyann, and sister Gina.

A couple of days after the celebration at the church, Sevil stopped by Cookie’s house to check on him. The kids were worried about their dad. They’d noticed little changes in his appearance: a slight droop to his posture, something different in his eyes.

It wasn’t just his daughter’s death with which he was reckoning. Barbara, his wife of 63 years, had died less than a week before Angeli’s celebration, after suffering from multiple ailments, including cancer.

But Sevil found his dad in good enough spirits, having enjoyed the event at Pullman so much that he wanted to plan the same thing for Barbara. Father and son chatted for about three hours, during which Sevil noticed that his dad had a slight hitch in his throat.

Probably post-nasal drip.

The next day after work, Sevil was driving back to his dad’s house, bringing him Barbara’s ashes from the crematorium, when he realized: Now he had a little cough, too.

“You know, just a hee-mmh,” Sevil later recalled.

Domestic airlines completed 2,334,679 flights between Jan. and April 2020.

***

Before the nearly 300,000 deaths, the widespread financial devastation, the isolation from loved ones and the fatigue of a daily disaster with no clear end, there was this: A tickle in a throat in Chicago. A woman’s sudden crash to the floor of her kitchen in the Bay Area. A playwright in Manhattan with three-quarters of a lung left in his chest, sensing doom and fleeing down the coast with his husband.

The virus shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the United States. The world’s most powerful nation, historically among the most successful at stymieing infectious illnesses, had ample lead time during which the deadly pandemic was rampaging through Asia, and then Europe.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, speaks about the COVID-19 outbreak during a White House press conference Feb. 29, 2020, flanked by President Donald Trump, left, and Vice President Mike Pence.

But in an early vacuum of leadership at almost every government level, with the message from the White House that the virus was not anything to worry about, Americans unwittingly spread the lethal virus to loved ones and strangers alike.

The U.S. squandered its early advantage. Roughly one year after the virus first came into existence, the country has suffered a loss of life far worse than any other.

Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University, said COVID-19’s traits made it a formidable opponent for even those large nations most competent at fighting it.

But, she added, in the United States in 2020, the virus found an ideal victim. “The virus could not have emerged at a better time for spread than this year,” Ranney said. “We were in an election year. We had a president who didn't believe in science. We had underfunding of our public health institutions. It was a perfect storm.”

In an effort to better understand how the virus exploited the country's strengths and exposed its weaknesses, USA TODAY interviewed biologists and studied scientific genomic analysis, federal reports concerning super-spreading events, county medical examiner’s data from around the country, and state-level death and infection data.

Reporters used those sources to find and report the stories, many of them previously untold, of Americans in the path of the virus.

What emerges is a portrait of misinformation and confusion leading to a devastating failure to unite against a common threat.

Piecemeal policies offered a dangerously hollow illusion of control and safety. Scientists, intermittently ignored and villainized, were powerless. As citizens protested and rioted in response to racist police tactics, others detected a more subtle form of prejudice in apathy toward a virus that disproportionately sickened Black and Brown Americans. Early ignorance about the spread metastasized into partisan conspiracy-mongering and threats, leading to that most American phenomenon: a health official with a bulletproof vest.

The novel coronavirus didn’t start in the United States, but we have made it our own.

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It may not have started here, but the novel coronavirus became a US tragedy (yahoo.com)

Welp, Now We Have Robo-Dogs With Sniper Rifles


Kyle Mizokami
Sun, October 17, 2021

Photo credit: Sword International

A new autonomous weapon system combines a quadruped robot with a sniper rifle.

SPUR is armed with a ten-shot rifle and a 30-power zoom.

The weapon can only fire at a human operator's command, but it does remind us of a certain Black Mirror episode.

Science fiction has seeped into science reality this week, as a robotics company showed off its sniper rifle-equipped robo-dog at the Association of the U.S. Army's annual convention in Washington, D.C.

Sure, the quadruped robot might resemble a good boy, but it's packing a built-in sniper rifle capable of engaging targets from three-quarters of a mile away. The service could operate this robotic weapon system remotely. Importantly, it would only engage targets with permission from a human being.

This robo-dog, known as "Vision 60," comes from Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, a startup focused on legged robots. Previously, we've spotted Vision 60 robots in U.S. military service during a 2020 U.S. Air Force exercise at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. There, the machines helped to establish a security cordon. Air bases—which often require runways that are thousands of feet long—can be difficult to patrol effectively, and the robo-dogs make it easier to rely on fewer humans for the job.

This new, armed version of the Vision 60 is equipped with the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR). It's a ten-shot rifle chambered in a 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor—a new, medium-caliber, high-velocity, long-range precision round. The Creedmoor is known in shooting circles for having a relatively flat ballistic trajectory, making it more of a "hit-what-you-see" round at longer ranges than older cartridges like the .308 Winchester. The robot's human controller is in charge of SPUR; a 30X electro-optical thermal scope assists in the weapon's target acquisition and aiming.

Photo credit: Airman 1st Class Shannon Moorehead

The Vision 60 looks a lot like Spot, the internet-famous robo-dog from Waltham, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics. Both quadruped robots were involved in the September 2020 exercise at Nellis Air Force Base. The similarities don't stop there, either: Both can climb staircases, navigate complicated terrain, and right themselves if they fall over. Vision 60 and Spot each have a maximum payload of 31 pounds. The two robots have the same top speed of 5.24 feet per second, but Ghost Robotics claims Vision 60 will eventually gain the ability to sprint at 9.84 feet per second, or 6.71 miles-per-hour.

Vision 60 is capable of remote-controlled or autonomous operation. In remote-controlled mode, a human operator would select a target and then open fire. However, current U.S. military policy on autonomous systems prohibits automatic target engagement. So, an autonomous weapon system like Vision 60 could line up its sniper rifle against a target (and compute a firing solution), but it cannot open fire. Only a human can do that.

That's a huge relief to anyone who has seen the Black Mirror episode "Metalhead." In the episode, killer robo-dogs pursue humans with ruthless efficiency, tirelessly pursuing them across a bleak apocalyptic landscape. So rest assured that if a robo-dog does start to chase you, it won't be able to employ weapons on its own. For now, anyway.

  

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Robot cats mobilised to solve Japan's waiter shortage


Danielle Demetriou
Mon, October 18, 2021

Skylark has been testing the robot waiters at family restaurants in Tokyo

Japan's largest family restaurant chain plans to deploy robot waiters with cat ears across the country to counter chronic staff shortages and lower the risk of spreading coronavirus.

Skylark Holdings, said they would roll out more than 2,000 Chinese-made 'BellaBots', wheeled robot waiters with tiered trays, an array of facial expressions and 3D obstacle-detecting sensors.

The move aims to reduce the work burden on staff during peak hours, amid a growing shortage of restaurant staff, fuelled by both the pandemic as well as Japan’s rapidly aging population.

The black and white machines, with a digital display for a face, will be able to carry food for up to four people, before removing their dishes when they have finished eating, according to leading financial newspaper Nikkei Asia.

It follows the launch of a trial programme at Skylark’s restaurants in August, which found that robots halved the number of steps taken by human waiters during peak hours.

Covid has brought many complications to Japan's restaurant industry

The global restaurant industry has been deeply impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, with months of lock-down closures and shortened opening hours fuelling chronic staff shortages.

The initiative also taps into a growing demand for contactless service in the current pandemic climate, with the emergence of a growing number of innovations in restaurants, from smartphone payments to digital menus.

Skylark’s new fleet of robo-waiters will be phased into the workforce at thousands of restaurants over the coming year, including its famed chain of Syabuyo hot pot restaurants.

Skylark, which operates 3,000 restaurants across Japan, is one of a string of Japanese companies embracing robotics, as a means to counter staff shortages and create a contactless environment.

Saizeriya, which operates 1,5000 low-cost Italian-style restaurants in Japan, has been testing robotic waiters since spring last year, while popular fast food chain Mos Burger is also trialling robots.

Meanwhile, Softbank Robotics announced a partnership last month with China’s Keenon Robotics, in a joint venture aimed at installing robot waiters in restaurants across Japan and Singapore.

Japan’s robotics industry has boomed during the pandemic, as consumers and businesses explore ways to minimise human contact across the spectrum, from medical firms and logistics to the hospitality industry.

The nation’s surge in robotic innovations has gone hand in hand with a chronic worker shortage in Japan, with the service industry hit particularly hard since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Testimony to this is the decline in the number of Japan’s tourism and restaurant sector workers – dropping from 4.05 million workers in February last year to 3.82 million in June this year, according to government data.

The pandemic is worsening an already sensitive labour situation in Japan, due to its famously fast-aging population and dwindling birthrate, combined with a long-standing reluctance to bring in overseas workers to fill vacant positions.

On the plus side, Japan’s explorations into robotics innovations in the workplace were already advanced ahead of the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis due to its demographic challenges. Since the pandemic, a number of Japanese robotics companies have recalibrated their focus from aging workforces to a wider range of social uses.

Among them is Mira Robotics, which initially developed the “ugo”, a remote-controlled avatar robot, to help boost Japan’s shrinking workforce, before switching its focus to becoming a tool to fight the pandemic.

While the ugo was initially created to perform a range of roles, such as security patrol or equipment inspections, after the pandemic, the company created a hand attachment for the robot, which uses ultraviolet light to kill viruses on door handles.