Leader of cult-like Jewish sect that fled Canada is convicted of nighttime kidnap of child bride

They used burner phones, an encrypted phone app, disguises, aliases, false passports, and a secret pact to execute their plan

Author of the article: Adrian Humphreys
Publishing date: Nov 12, 2021 

Mayer Rosner in 2013.

 PHOTO BY DAVE CHIDLEY FOR NATIONAL POST

Two members of an extremist sect, including the group’s spokesman when they lived in Canada, were convicted in New York of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation.

Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner were found guilty of masterminding the kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother from their mother, who had fled the Lev Tahor compound in Guatemala, to return the girl to her adult “husband.”

Rosner, 45, was the genial but guarded spokesman for the Lev Tahor when 200 members of their sect left their homes in Quebec and settled on the outskirts of Chatham, Ont., east of Windsor.

“Everything is written upstairs,” Rosner said, pointing skyward, in an exclusive interview with National Post in 2013 , when he was asked about the group’s battles with child protection workers.

A U.S. jury found this harrowing plot was crafted closer to earth.

The Lev Tahor were founded in Israel in the 1980s by Helbrans’ father, Shlomo Helbrans, who built a cult-like sect on fringe beliefs and practices with an austere lifestyle and manner of dress, even by the usual standards of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, leading the Israeli media to call them the “Jewish Taliban.”

The Lev Tahor opposes the existence of the state of Israel, believing Jews must live in exile until the Messiah comes. Rosner said this is why his group is hounded from place to place.

They have always been trying to destroy our community

“This is something the Zionist government hates,” Rosner said in 2013. “They have always been trying to destroy our community.”

After leaving Israel, and later the United States, Shlomo settled with his acolytes in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Que., 100 kilometres northwest of Montreal, in 2001, where he was granted refugee status on the grounds of persecution in Israel.

The group fled from Canada in 2014 ahead of child welfare investigations and settled in Guatemala. There, Shlomo’s 39-year-old son, Nachman Helbrans, took over as supreme leader after his father drowned in 2017.

Rosner was described by U.S. authorities as Helbrans’ “top lieutenant” and right-hand man in the Lev Tahor’s authoritarian regime.

Under the new leadership, the sect’s practices became even more extreme, authorities said, particularly with child marriages. The practice met with resistance by some.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

She fled a 'Jewish Taliban' sect with her children. Then kidnappers tracked them down

Controversial sect dismisses child neglect allegations as ultra-orthodox Jews settle into new homes in Ontario

The two child victims of the kidnappings and their mother are relatives of Helbrans, and he arranged for the young girl to be religiously married at the age of 13 to a 19-year-old member of the sect, who was Rosner’s son.

They were not legally married, but a sexual relationship started immediately, court heard, as was the directive from Helbrans to start procreating as soon as possible.

The girl’s mother, a U.S. citizen, fled with her children in October 2018. A Brooklyn court granted her sole custody.

Shortly after, the Lev Tahor came for the children.

They were stolen in the night from the mother’s New York State home in 2019 and smuggled across the U.S. border to Mexico.

Although the group adopts a distinctly traditionalist lifestyle, the kidnapping plot was a modern enterprise.

They used burner phones, an encrypted phone app, disguises, aliases, false passports, and a secret pact to execute their plan. It fell apart after a three-week international manhunt by police, who found the children in a hotel in Mexico.

“Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner brazenly kidnapped two children from their mother in the middle of the night to return a 14-year-old girl to an illegal sexual relationship with an adult man,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said after the four-week trial ended this week.

Even after the children were returned to their mother, members of the Lev Tahor tried twice more to kidnap them, authorities said

.

Mayer Rosner at his home in Chatham, Ont., 

after the Lev Tahor group moved from Quebec in 2013.

PHOTO BY DAVE CHIDLEY FOR NATIONAL POST

Child kidnapping charges do not make members of the Lev Tahor pariahs in their community. Instead, it is a mark of leadership.

Shlomo Helbrans himself was convicted in New York in 1994 of kidnapping a 13-year-old boy who he was tutoring for bar mitzvah. Rosner told the Post when he was in Ontario that his rabbi was only protecting the boy, who had run away from his parents, but the court saw it differently.

It was Shlomo’s conviction that led to his deportation to Israel followed by his move to Canada.

The community drew little attention in Quebec until 2011 when authorities stopped two teenaged girls arriving from Israel to join them; their uncle in Israel obtained a court order to have the girls returned, over fears they would be forced to marry.

It raised an alarm for Canadian authorities.

Quebec’s youth protection services investigated the group and sought to remove 14 children from the community.

Child welfare workers said the children suffered from poor dental health, skin problems and poor hygiene, and no adherence to the province’s school curriculum. There were rumours of beatings and child marriages.

Before Quebec authorities could act, the families boarded three buses in the night and headed west, settling in an out-of-the-way complex of identical one-story rental cottages on the outskirts of Chatham, 80 kilometres east of Windsor.

At that time Rosner denied his community beats their children or forces marriages on young girls.

“They say we have forced marriage. We don’t. But, like many orthodox religious communities, we have organized marriages,” Rosner said. A marriage broker pitches couples to parents and if both sets of parents approve, the children meet. If either of them objects to the union the marriage is halted, he said.

“Our boys are not allowed to pick up girls on the street. We allow marriage at the age of 16. Some people object to that; everyone has their own choice.”

At the time of the Post’s visit with the Lev Tahor, Rosner had nine children of his own, five of them girls. The boys, like all boys in the Lev Tahor, were in school studying religious texts while the girls were cooking, cleaning, listening to their father or quietly playing.

Rosner and Helbrans were convicted of conspiring to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiring to travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, international parental kidnapping, and other charges.

The convictions could lead to a life sentence. There is a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

U.S. to open talks with Japan on import steel, aluminum tariffs

Tokyo wants Trump-era levies abolished

The U.S. import tariffs on Japanese steel and aluminum products were imposed by then-President Donald Trump. © Reuters

TOMORROWS NEWS TODAY
November 13, 2021

 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States said on Friday it will open talks with Japan that could lead to an easing of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, a longstanding irritant in trade relations between the two allies.

The U.S. Commerce Department and the United States Trade Representative's Office said the talks were aimed at addressing "global steel and aluminum excess capacity", restoring market-oriented conditions and preserving critical industries.

The discussions with Japan follow an agreement by the United States and the European Union to end a dispute over steel and aluminum tariffs, and hammer out a global arrangement to combat "dirty" production and overcapacity in the industry.

The future agreement, which is open to other countries, will pose a challenge for China, which produces over half of the world's steel and which the EU and United States accuse of creating overcapacity that harms their own industries.

Last year, the Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity estimated the gap between global steelmaking capacity and global demand at an excess of nearly 600 million tons, a sum that will continue to grow given new capacity already planned or under way.

Japan last week asked the United States to abolish the "Section 232" tariffs imposed by former U.S. President Donald Trump's administration in 2018.

Friday's announcement comes before separate visits to Japan by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai beginning next week.

The United States said the two countries will seek to address concerns over the Section 232 tariffs "and the sufficiency of actions that address steel and aluminum excess capacity with the aim of taking mutually beneficial and effective actions to restore market-oriented conditions."

"It's about time," said Myron Brilliant, head of the international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "The tariff exclusion process needs to take place with Japan and Korea and the UK. We're strongly encouraged by any signals that the administration is pursuing that."

Tai is also due to visit South Korea this month, but sources said they did not expect a similar announcement there.

The U.S.-EU deal ended a festering dispute over the Trump-era U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and averted a spike in EU retaliatory tariffs.

The agreement maintains Section 232 tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% aluminum, while allowing "limited volumes" of EU-produced metals into the United States duty-free.

It requires EU steel and aluminum to be entirely produced in the bloc - a standard known as "melted and poured" - to qualify for duty-free status. The provision is aimed at preventing metals from China and non-EU countries from being minimally processed in Europe before export to the United States.

Under the deal, Europe agreed to drop retaliatory tariffs against U.S. products, a move Raimondo said would reduce costs for steel-consuming U.S. manufacturers.

The Japanese steel industry is concerned that the U.S.-EU agreement will result in a comprehensive relaxation of measures for certain countries and regions, Eiji Hashimoto, chairman of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation, said last week.

WHO chief calls booster distribution 'scandal' as poorer countries wait for doses

BY JUSTINE COLEMAN - 11/12/21 



The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) called the distribution of booster COVID-19 vaccines a “scandal that must stop now” on Friday as poorer countries continue to wait for initial doses.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus slammed countries with the “highest vaccine coverage” at a WHO briefing for collecting extra vaccine doses and prioritizing giving their citizens third and fourth doses over getting at-risk populations in other nations vaccinated.

“This is a scandal that must stop now,” he said.

In fact, he cited data that six times more booster doses are administered globally than initial doses in low-income countries.

“It makes no sense to give boosters to healthy adults, or to vaccinate children, when health workers, older people and other high-risk groups around the world are still waiting for their first dose,” he added, noting that immunocompromised people are an exception.

Tedros also pointed out that countries need other coronavirus precautions in addition to vaccines, saying, “No country can simply vaccinate its way out of the pandemic.”

The WHO has consistently pushed back against the necessity of booster shots as countries like the U.S. have pressed forward and opened third and fourth doses to growing numbers of people.

In the U.S., certain mRNA vaccine recipients and all Johnson & Johnson recipients have been approved to get boosters at least six months and at least two months after their most recent shot, respectively.

Children aged 5 to 11 also became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine earlier this month, and the Biden administration has said the U.S. has enough doses for all 28 million in that age group to get vaccinated.

In the meantime, other countries are struggling to get high-risk populations their first shots. In order to reach the WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the population of every country by the end of 2021, the world needs another 550 million doses, Tedros said.

Progress has been made though the COVAX program, co-led by Gavi, WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, which has sent nearly 500 million doses to 144 countries and territories.

As of Thursday, at least 40 percent of the overall global population is considered fully vaccinated — but that number includes only 2.4 percent in low-income countries, according to the ONE campaign.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Wednesday that the U.S. is working with COVAX to send out the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines to those living in conflict zones. The U.S. has committed more than 1 billion doses as donations.

But at the same time, pressure is mounting on the administration to approve booster shots for the remaining American adult population as breakthrough cases have become more prevalent amid the highly transmissible delta variant.

Still, studies have repeatedly shown the risk of hospitalization and death is much lower among those who received the initial vaccine than among the unvaccinated. Recent research suggests boosters further increase this protection.

 

Animals need infrastructure, too

$350 million of Biden’s INVEST in America Act isn’t for people. It’s for wildlife that needs help crossing the road.

By Ben Goldfarb  Nov 12, 2021

Share this story

• 
  
  
• All sharing options

A bear crosses a wildlife bridge in Banff National Park. AP Clevenger, courtesy of ARC Solutions

This story is part of a group of stories called

The biodiversity crisis, explained

Fifty miles east of Seattle, a bridge crosses a steep stretch of Interstate 90 known as Snoqualmie Pass. This is no ordinary bridge, meant for automobiles or pedestrians. Covered in topsoil, boulders, and seedlings, it is intended to convey wild animals from one side of the highway to the other — and it’s working.

Since 2018, when the bridge opened and the first animal, a coyote, scampered over the six lanes below, the structure has carried creatures as large as elk and as small as toads. And it should attract even more users as the seedlings grow into trees and animals acclimate to its presence.

“As we get more shade, it’s going to be different,” Patty Garvey-Darda, a Forest Service wildlife biologist, told Vox during a recent visit to Snoqualmie Pass. “Hopefully someday we’ll see the exact same species up here as we see in the forest.”

The Snoqualmie Pass bridge is one example in a broader category of infrastructure, known as wildlife crossings, that help animals circumvent busy roads like I-90. Crossings come in an array of shapes and sizes, from sweeping overpasses for grizzly bears to inconspicuous tunnels for salamanders. A body of research demonstrates that crossings can reconnect fragmented wildlife populations, while protecting human drivers and animals alike from dangerous vehicle crashes. “This structure is paying for itself because of the accidents we haven’t had,” said Garvey-Darda, as trucks roared by 35 feet below.

The construction of such crossings has never been more urgent. Roadkill rates have risen over the past half-century; today, around 12 percent of North American wild mammals die on roads. And new satellite-tracking and genetic technologies have revealed subtler harms. Busy interstates prevent herds of elk and mule deer from migrating to low-elevation meadows in winter, occasionally causing them to starve. In California, freeways have thwarted mountain lions from mating, leaving the cats so inbred that they’ve fallen into an “extinction vortex.” Wildlife crossings allow animals to find food and each other across sundered landscapes, and help them access new habitats as climate change scrambles their range

But despite crossings’ benefits, they remain scarce in the US. Around 1,000 wildlife crossings currently dot America’s 4 million mile road network. (For comparison, the Netherlands’ road system is only 2 percent as large but boasts over 600 crossings.) The reason for their rarity? Money. The Snoqualmie Pass bridge cost $6.2 million, and even humble turtle tunnels can run up multimillion-dollar price tags. This kind of expense explains why wildlife crossings were once a punching bag for some conservative politicians, who decried animal passages as government waste.

Now that’s beginning to change. Earlier this month, the House passed the INVEST in America Act, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden is expected to soon sign into law. The bipartisan package earmarks billions of dollars in funding for highway maintenance, broadband internet, and airport upgrades — as well as $350 million for animal-friendly infrastructure like bridges, underpasses, and roadside fences. Although that provision is a tiny slice of the bill, it’s easily the largest investment in wildlife crossings in national history.

RELATED

Biden’s $27 billion bet on forests

These innovations are not only wildly effective at preventing roadkill, they’re also an underappreciated way to protect people. Hundreds of Americans die annually in car crashes with animals, and tens of thousands more are injured. “Whether it’s human safety or habitat connectivity or fiscal responsibility, there’s something in this bill for you,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and promotes crossings. “This has become a staunchly bipartisan issue.”

When the US interstate highway system was constructed more than half a century ago, ecosystems were damaged in ways we’re only now beginning to fully understand. Wildlife crossings and other animal-friendly infrastructure help mend that damage, and accommodate the creatures whose lives our highways have disrupted. Even within a bitterly divided Congress, it’s a rare area of consensus. One of the few things uniting some fiscal conservatives with climate-concerned Democrats is a literal bridge.

How wildlife crossings went mainstream

Roads have few equals as a destroyer of animal life. Vehicles claim more wild terrestrial animals — perhaps more than a million per day in the US alone — than any other form of direct human-caused mortality, like hunting, oil spills, or wildfires. And it’s not just common critters like squirrels that get flattened (though we should worry about their welfare, too). At least 21 species are imperiled by cars in the US, and one recent study found that collisions may soon wipe out globally threatened creatures like maned wolves, brown hyenas, and leopards. We are, quite literally, driving some of the world’s rarest animals to extinction.

For more than half a century, countries have attempted to solve this problem using wildlife crossings. France constructed the world’s first crossings, known as passages à faune, in the 1950s, followed by Germany and the Netherlands. During the 1970s and ’80s, a handful of American states, including Wyoming, Florida, and New Jersey, built their own crossings. Many showed promise: After a 100-foot passage was installed beneath I-70 in Colorado, for instance, hundreds of mule deer trotted through each summer.

A new section of the German Autobahn 14 and a wildlife overpass between the Colbitz and Tangerhütte junctions. Ronny Hartmann/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Yet crossings were slow to catch on in the US, for several reasons. Few states rigorously collected data on animal collisions, masking the problem’s severity. Some early structures were poorly designed or monitored, casting doubt on their efficacy. And even when agencies did document successful crossings, tight budgets rarely had room for more. “The unfortunate thing to date is that the most effective solution is also the most expensive,” wrote one California official in 1980.

Over time, though, collisions became impossible to ignore. As human populations grew, traffic spiked in rural areas. Meanwhile, elk, bear, moose, and especially deer were bouncing back after centuries of exploitation. When speeding cars struck these hefty mammals, the crashes could be catastrophic for both parties. In 1995, researchers estimated that deer collisions caused 29,000 injuries and around 200 human deaths every year in the US. Animal crashes had become a public safety crisis.

In 2005, Congress ordered the Department of Transportation to study the situation. Its report, published three years later, put some firm figures on the issue. The authors tallied all the expenses of a crash — the hospital bills, the vehicle damage, the value of the animal itself, and so on — and found that the average deer strike dinged society more than $6,000. Moose and elk were even pricier. All told, animal crashes were estimated to cost America over $8 billion a year.

Against that backdrop, wildlife crossings were no longer viewed as frivolous expenditures, but vital public safety measures. In Wyoming, underpasses on Highway 30, paired with roadside fencing that guided animals toward them, cut mule deer collisions within a critical migration corridor by more than 80 percent, offsetting construction costs in just five years. In Arizona, underpasses and fences prevented enough elk crashes to do the same.

Prongorn antelope approach a wildlife overpass across route 191 at Trapper’s Point near Pinedale, Wyoming. William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images

New technology advanced the cause, too. Motion-activated cameras snapped high-quality photographs of animals moving through crossings, winning over skeptics, says Patricia Cramer, an ecologist who has studied crossings in Florida, Utah, and other states. “We could finally show the engineers that structures work,” she said. “Suddenly, they believed us.”

Money for animal infrastructure has been hard to come by — until now

As wildlife crossings proved their worth, transportation agencies took a new interest. Highway acts in 2012 and 2015 expressly allowed states to spend federal dollars on wildlife infrastructure. New overpasses and underpasses popped up, particularly in western states like Wyoming and Montana, where deer and elk followed predictable migration routes that highways happened to bisect. Their approval ratings soared, too: One poll found that more than 90 percent of voters in Nevada — hardly a state that habitually embraces government interventions — were in favor of more crossings.

But crossings remained underfunded. Wildlife projects drew from the same pots as basic transportation needs, like lane repaving and highway repairs. Pitted against America’s crumbling infrastructure, animals got short shrift. (This was especially true for small species that didn’t endanger drivers — it’s likely no one has ever totaled their truck by slipping on a salamander, for example.) In 2013, when researchers asked nearly 500 officials why crossings weren’t more common, two-thirds chalked it up to money.

In the face of chronic fiscal shortfalls, some states got creative. Colorado allocated lottery revenue. Wyoming sold specialty license plates. In California, where engineers will soon break ground on a massive bridge for mountain lions, the conservation group National Wildlife Federation solicited private donations. (Leonardo DiCaprio was an early contributor.) But these revenue streams were piecemeal and unreliable, and many otherwise worthy crossings never got built.

In 2013, road ecologists, led by ARC Solutions and a group called the Western Transportation Institute, began to discuss securing more permanent funds. Conservationists and scientists wrote policy papers, met with congressional aides, and hammered out the basic framework for wildlife-crossing legislation. As the proposal developed, it gained supporters. Animal welfare groups like the Humane Society backed crossings to reduce wildlife deaths and suffering. Conservation organizations like the Wildlands Network touted crossings as a way of stitching up fragmented ecosystems. Even pro-hunting organizations trumpeted the restoration of healthy deer and elk herds as a selling point.

“WE USE THE LINGO ‘WIN-WIN’ A LOT, BUT IN THIS CASE THIS WAS TRULY A WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN” —SUSAN HOLMES

“We use the lingo ‘win-win’ a lot, but in this case this was truly a win-win-win-win,” said Susan Holmes, federal policy director for the Wildlands Network. “Almost everyone could see the value in this.”

With backing from hunters and highway safety advocates alike, animal-friendly infrastructure racked up unlikely congressional support. In a 2019 hearing on crossings, Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming and a former surgeon, said that he’s taken care of patients injured in collisions with wildlife. “It happens every year,” he said. Although Barrasso has a history of impeding climate-friendly initiatives — and a 7 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — he included a wildlife crossing program in the highway bill that he sponsored later that year. (That version of the bill never passed.) Crossings also garnered support from Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator who chairs the chamber’s Environment and Public Works Committee — perhaps because Capito’s home state of West Virginia leads the country in deer crashes.

The years of lobbying paid off this month, when the $350 million wildlife-crossing provision made it into the final infrastructure bill — the largest federal public works program since President Dwight D. Eisenhower kick-started the interstate system in the 1950s. (Thirteen GOP House members and 19 senators voted for the bill; despite Barrasso’s affinity for crossings, he wasn’t one of them.) The funding will be disbursed through a five-year competitive grant program, through which states, Native tribes, and other entities will submit proposals for new crossings within their jurisdictions. Now animals will have a separate pool of money from which officials will be able to draw.

“This is finally approaching a scale that’s needed nationwide,” said Rob Ament, road ecology program manager at the Western Transportation Institute. “We can’t treat every mile of highway, but we can take care of a lot of the areas that are seriously affecting wildlife populations.”

The future of wildlife crossings is mobile

The new funding comes at a crucial moment. As the climate warms, it’s imperative that animals are able to move freely around landscapes. Think of moose shifting their ranges northward to escape infestations of hungry ticks, or bears fleeing wildfires intensified by drought. Crossing structures allow these creatures to navigate roads in search of novel habitat.

Then again, crossings only go so far: An elk migration corridor might drift northward over decades, but a bridge or tunnel can’t follow. At least, not yet — but that, too, may change.

According to the INVEST Act, the wildlife crossing program will prioritize structures that incorporate “innovative technologies” and “advanced design techniques.” Among those techniques, says Callahan, might be the use of fiber-reinforced polymer, or FRP, a plastic that’s lighter and stronger than regular concrete, and should soon be cheaper as well. The Western Transportation Institute and the California Department of Transportation are currently designing America’s first FRP wildlife bridge, and experts say that future iterations could someday be modular and mobile, capable of being disassembled and relocated in response to changing animal movement patterns. “That would be a game changer,” Callahan said.

Eastbound Interstate 90 traffic passes beneath a wildlife bridge under construction on Snoqualmie Pass, Washington. Elaine Thompson/AP

As exciting as all that may be, it’s important to remember that the new funding for wildlife crossings is merely a good start. While $350 million may sound substantial, it is, as Cramer puts it, “decimal dust” compared to national transportation budgets. It’s also a fraction of what’s ultimately needed: According to one recent report, it would cost $175 million to deal with roadkill hot spots in California alone. What’s more, wildlife crossings can’t do much about traffic noise, salt pollution, stormwater runoff, or many of the other byproducts of roads — some of which will, ironically, be exacerbated by the infrastructure bill, which allots millions to highway expansion projects. And all the crossings in the world won’t help unless we get better at protecting the habitats that animals must move between.

“We can build a bridge,” said Matt Skroch, project director for public lands and rivers conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, “but let’s not build a bridge to nowhere.”

Correction, November 12, 10:40 am: A previous version of summary text for this story misstated the amount of INVEST in America Act funding that is related to wildlife crossings. It is $350 million.

One-third of Iowa deer test positive for SARS-CoV-2, scientists see a new stream of mutations

Free-living animals can act as a reservoir for the virus, allowing it to multiply and mutate into variants with increased transmissibility and virulence, before spilling back into the human population

Author of the article: Devika Desai
Publishing date: Nov 12, 2021 

Nearly one-third of Iowa deer are infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus, 

which causes COVID-19 in humans, a study has found. 

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES


With COVID-19 caseloads on the decline and vaccines rolling out around the world, nations have begun preparations for the next phase of the pandemic — learning to live with the virus.t

However, we may not be fully in the clear, scientists say after a study found the first evidence of animals transmitting the virus in the wild, with troubling implications for the spread of the disease and emergence of new variants.

Released on November 6, the preprint study found that one-third of the white tail deer population in Iowa over the past nine months has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans — indicating that not only can deer catch the virus from humans but can also transmit it within their population in overwhelming numbers.

The study has not yet been peer-reviewed or published.

The transmission, it added, most likely resulted from “multiple zooanthroponotic spillover events” and “deer-to-deer transmission”, arising from herds in close proximity to humans.

The analysis was prompted by a recent report that found 40 per cent of free-living white-tailed deer in the U.S. contained antibodies against the virus.

Researchers were still “astonished” by the high viral loads detected in the animals, said Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, clinical professor of virology at Penn State and the coauthor of the study.

“What was certainly surprising is the level of positivity we saw,” he said. “The amount of virus we detected in each of the animals was quite astonishing. We weren’t expecting that.”

Kuchipudi couldn’t say whether the deer displayed symptoms of the virus, instead pointing to the results of an earlier analysis conducted by Kansas State University researchers on adults and fawns, in which they injected the virus into healthy deer. While those animals didn’t appear to be affected by the virus, Kuchipudi acknowledged that environmental factors affecting health, access to resources could alter those results in the wild.

“We don’t know (if) the deer will actually express or exhibit any symptoms in the natural settings,” he said. “But based on the experimental set, infections, we know that they do not show any clinical symptoms.”

Can humans catch the virus from the infected deer?

The study, Kuchipudi acknowledged, comes with its ‘limitations’ and it could not say whether people living near herds or hunting the deer could catch the virus from the animals.

But it’s entirely possible, he said, pointing to studies done on infected mink populations that showed the virus “spilling back” into human populations in contact with the infected animals.

“Based on what we know about viruses when they spill into animals … the possibility of spilling back into humans cannot be ruled out,” he said.

Which could make learning to live with the virus more complicated than originally hoped. For one, it’s entirely possible that Iowa deer aren’t the only animals getting infected with the virus.

An analysis conducted in Ohio also found a similar level of infectivity among white-tailed deer. Previous studies in general have found that several animal species could be potentially susceptible to the virus, including cats, dogs, pumas, gorillas and snow leopards in zoos, and farmed mink.

A week ago, hyenas at the Denver zoo recently tested positive , marking the first confirmed cases in those animals.

The biggest concerns lay in what we don’t know about the virus transmission among wild animals, Kuchipudi said. Left uncontrolled, the virus could jump from one host to another and in the process, undergo mutations long enough to create new variants, some of which “could undermine the existing vaccines.”

“Now the chances of virus mutation has become twice as complicated because now it is also happening, at least in one animal species …. and perhaps in other animals that we do not know yet,” he said.

Many wild animal species, the study explained, already harbour a number of endemic coronaviruses, presenting all the more opportunities for a residing SARS-CoV-2 virus to ‘recombine and acquire or evolve increased fitness traits such as increased virulence, transmissibility, pathogenicity, and immune evasion.”

In other words — a virus that can freely circulate among animals is much harder to eradicate among humans.

Which means governments and infectious disease experts are now tasked with a new challenge two years into the pandemic — assessing just how widespread the virus is and the risk that arises from that. “What other animals (in the vicinity) could be getting infected,” Kuchipudi asked.

The evidence for virus spread within the free-living animal population also highlights the importance of the ‘One Health’ approach, a concept that advocates the need to consider animal, human and environmental health when fighting emerging infectious diseases. “In order to protect human health, we must also protect animal and environmental health,” Kuchipudi said. “But this should be done in a concerted effort rather than silos that do not talk to each other.”

Rare Antarctic penguin travels an incredible 3,000 km to New Zealand

An Adélie penguin named Pingu was found on the shores of New Zealand — far away from its natural habitat in Antarctica.

© Provided by National Post An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of 

Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica

 in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

National Post 4 hrs ago

After accidentally travelling 3,000 kilometres away from his home, Pingu has become only the third Adélie penguin to have been found on New Zealand’s coasts, the first two making their visits in 1962 and 1993.

“First I thought it (was) a soft toy, suddenly the penguin moved his head, so I realized it was real,” Harry Singh, the resident who found him, told BBC News .

Singh and his wife were walking on the beach at Birdlings Flat, a settlement south of the city of Christchurch, when they came across Pingu.

Singh remembers the penguin looking exhausted, and said it did not move for an hour. The bird also looks lost and alone in footage shared on Singh’s Facebook page .

“We did not want it to end up in a dog’s or cat’s stomach,” Singh said.

VIDEO Antarctic penguin releases into wild after travelling 3,000 km to New Zealand

So, they called penguin rescuers .

Singh got a hold of Thomas Stracke from the Christchurch Penguin Rehabilitation, who has been rehabilitating penguins on New Zealand’s South Island for about 10 years.

“Apart from being a bit starving and severely dehydrated, he was actually not too bad, so we gave him some fluids and some fish smoothie,” Stracke told The Guardian .

© Allanah Purdie, Department of Conservation New Zealand/Handout via REUTERS An Adelie penguin is seen at the coast of Banks Peninsula after travelling from his natural habitat of Antarctica, in New Zealand Nov. 12, 2021.

Otago University zoology professor, Philip Seddon, said Pingu was potentially a younger bird that became entangled in a current that swept him into New Zealand waters.

“I think if we started getting annual arrivals of Adélie penguins, we’d go; ‘Actually, something’s changed in the ocean that we need to understand’,” Seddon told The Guardian. “All species of penguin are like marine sentinels … when they’re doing badly, they’re giving us an early signal – canaries in coal mines – an early signal that things are not good.”

While Adélie penguin populations appear to be stable at the moment — increasing in some areas while decreasing in others — Seddon told The Guardian that changes in penguin behaviour could be an early warning sign that the marine ecosystem was in trouble.

“More studies will give us more understanding where penguins go, what they do, what the population trends are like — they’re going to tell us something about the health of that marine ecosystem in general,” he said.

Pingu was eventually released onto a safe beach on the Banks Peninsula south of Christchurch in hopes of helping him to complete his journey home.

Tony Cliff

Rosa Luxemburg

---

Rosa Luxemburg’s place in history

Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had – her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life.

Above all else, Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist. And among the great revolutionary socialist leaders and teachers she has a special historical place of her own.

When reformism degraded the socialist movements by aspiring purely for the “welfare state”, by tinkering with capitalism, it became of first importance to make a revolutionary criticism of this handmaiden of capitalism. It is true that other Marxist teachers besides Rosa Luxemburg – Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and others – conducted a revolutionary fight against reformism. But they had a limited front to fight against. In their country, Russia, the roots of this weed were so weak and thin that a mere tug was sufficient to uproot it. Where Siberia or the gallows stared every socialist or democrat in the face, who in principle could oppose the use of violence by the labour movement? Who in Tsarist Russia would have dreamed of a parliamentary road to socialism? Who could advocate a policy of coalition government, for with whom could coalitions be made? Where trade unions scarcely existed, who could think of considering them the panacea of the labour movement? Lenin, Trotsky and the other Russian Bolshevik leaders did not need to counter the arguments of reformism with a painstaking and exact analysis. All they needed was a broom to sweep it away to the dungheap of history.

In Central and Western Europe conservative reformism had much deeper roots, a much more embracing influence on the thoughts and moods of the workers. The arguments of the reformists had to be answered by superior ones, and here Rosa Luxemburg excelled. In these countries her scalpel is a much more useful weapon than Lenin’s sledgehammer.

In Tsarist Russia the mass of the workers were not organised in parties or trade unions. There there was not such a threat of powerful empires being built by a bureaucracy rising from the working class as in the well-organised workers’ movement of Germany; and it was natural that Rosa Luxemburg had a much earlier and clearer view of the role of the labour bureaucracy than Lenin or Trotsky. She understood long before they did that the only power that could break through bureaucratic chains is the initiative of the workers. Her writings on this subject can serve as an inspiration to workers in the advanced industrial countries, and are a more valuable contribution to the struggle to liberate the workers from the pernicious ideology of bourgeois reformism than those of any other Marxist.

In Russia, where the Bolsheviks were always a large and important part of the organised socialists, even if they were not always the majority, as their name signifies, the question of the attitude of a small Marxist minority to a mass, conservatively-led organisation never really rose as a problem. It remained for Rosa Luxemburg largely to develop the right approach to this vital question. Her guiding principle was: stay with the masses throughout their travail and try to help them. She therefore opposed abstention from the main stream of the labour movement, no matter what the level of its development. Her fight against sectarianism is extremely important for the labour movement of the West, especially at present, when welfare-stateism is such an all-pervading sentiment. The British labour movement, in particular, having suffered from the sectarianism of Hyndman and the SDF, later the BSP and SLP, then the Communist Party (especially in its “third period”) and now further sects, can gain inspiration from Rosa Luxemburg for a principled fight against reformism which does not degenerate into flight from it. She taught that a revolutionary should not swim with the stream of reformism, nor sit outside it and look in the opposite direction, but swim against it.

Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisations – that they should be built, from below up, on a consistently democratic basis – fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902-04 which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by the Stalinists the world over.

She understood more clearly than anyone that the structure of the revolutionary party, and the mutual relation between the party and the class, would have a big influence, not only on the struggle against capitalism and for workers’ power, but also on the fate of this power itself. She stated prophetically that without the widest workers’ democracy “officials behind their desks” would replace the workers’ hold on political power. “Socialism”, she said, “cannot be decreed or introduced by edict.”

Rosa Luxemburg’s blend of revolutionary spirit and clear understanding of the nature of the labour movement in Western and Central Europe is in some way connected with her particular background of birth in the Tsarist Empire, long residence in Germany, and full activity in both the Polish and German labour movements. Anyone of smaller stature would have been assimilated into one of the two environments, but not Rosa Luxemburg. To Germany she brought the “Russian” spirit, the spirit of revolutionary action. To Poland and Russia she brought the “Western” spirit of workers’ self-reliance, democracy and self-emancipation.

Her The Accumulation of Capital is an invaluable contribution to Marxism. In dealing with the mutual relations between the industrially advanced countries and the backward agrarian ones she brought out the most important idea that imperialism, while stabilising capitalism over a long period, at the same time threatens to bury humanity under its ruins.

Being vital, energetic and non-fatalistic in her approach to history, which she conceived of as the fruit of human activity, and at the same time laying bare the deep contradictions of capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg did not consider that the victory of socialism was inevitable. Capitalism, she thought, could be either the ante-chamber to socialism or the brink of barbarism. We who live in the shadow of the H-bomb must comprehend this warning and use it as a spur to action.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the German labour movement, with decades of peace behind it, sank under the illusion that this situation was everlasting. We who are in the throes of discussion about controlled disarmament, United Nations, Summit Meetings, could do no better than learn from Rosa Luxemburg’s clear analysis of the unbreakable tie between war and capitalism, and her insistence that the fight for peace is inseparable from the fight for socialism.

A passion for truth made Rosa Luxemburg recoil from any dogmatic thought. In a period when Stalinism has largely turned Marxism into a dogma, spreading desolation in the field of ideas, Rosa Luxemburg’s writings are invigorating and life-giving. Nothing was more intolerable to her than bowing down to “infallible authorities”. As a real disciple of Marx she was able to think and act independently of her master. Though grasping the spirit of his teaching, she did not lose her critical faculties in a simple repetition of his words, whether these fitted the changed situation or not, whether they were right or wrong. Rosa Luxemburg’s independence of thought is the greatest inspiration to socialists everywhere and always. In consequence, no one would have denounced more forcefully than she herself any effort to canonise her, to turn her into an “infallible authority”, a leader of a school of thought or action. She loved the conflict of ideas as a means of coming nearer to the truth.

During a period when so many who consider themselves Marxists sap Marxism of its deep humanistic content, no one can do more to release us from the chains of lifeless mechanistic materialism than Rosa Luxemburg. For Marx communism (or socialism) was “real humanism”, “a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle”. [96] Rosa Luxemburg was the embodiment of these humanistic passions. Sympathy with the lowly and oppressed was a central motive of her life. Her deep emotion and feeling for the suffering of people and all living things expressed themselves in everything she did or wrote, whether in her letters from prison or in the deepest writings of her theoretical research.

Rosa Luxemburg, however, well knew that where human tragedy is on an epic scale tears won’t help. Her motto, like that of Spinoza, might have been, “Do not cry, do not laugh, but understand”, even though she herself had her full share of tears and laughter. Her method was to reveal the trends of development in social life in order to help the working class to use its potentialities in the best possible way in conjunction with objective development. She appealed to man’s reason rather than to emotion.

Deep human sympathy and an earnest desire for truth, unbounded courage and a magnificent brain united in Rosa Luxemburg to make her a great revolutionary socialist. As her closest friend, Clara Zetkin, wrote in her obituary:

In Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both heart and brain, a truly creative passion which burned ceaselessly. The great task and the overpowering ambition of this astonishing woman was to prepare the way for social revolution, to clear the path of history for Socialism. To experience the revolution, to fight its battles – that was the highest happiness for her. With a will, determination, selflessness and devotion for which words are too weak, she consecrated her whole life and her whole being to Socialism. She gave herself completely to the cause of Socialism, not only in her tragic death, but throughout her whole life, daily and hourly, through the struggles of many years ... She was the sharp sword, the living flame of revolution.

 

Note

96. K. Marx, Capital, vol.I, p.649

First published as a pamphlet in 1959 (International Socialism, No.2/3).
Reprinted 1968, 1969 and 1980) (note on editions).
Reprinted in Tony Cliff, International Struggle and the Marxist Tradition, Selected Works Vol.1, Bookmarks, London 2001, pp.59-116.
Transcribed by Artroom, East End Offset (TU), London.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Proofread by Anoma Cartwright (march 2008).

Tony Cliff: Rosa Luxemburg (1959) (connexions.org)