It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, November 26, 2021
CUTTING OFF NOSE TO SPITE FACE
Canadian regulator rejects Enbridge plan to sell oil pipeline space under contract
By Rod Nickel
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - The Canada Energy Regulator on Friday rejected Enbridge Inc's plan to sell nearly all space on its Mainline oil pipeline under long-term contracts, rather than rationing it on a monthly basis.
The regulator (CER) said in a written ruling that the change would have dramatically changed how shippers gain access to the 70-year-old Mainline, benefiting some with contracts while hurting others who lack them.
"Overall, Western Canadian oil producers could suffer too many negative consequences," the CER said.
A new proposed framework for setting tolls to move oil would also "excessively favor" those with contracts, the regulator said.
Enbridge planned to sell 90% of space under long-term contracts on the 3 million barrel per day Mainline, Canada's longest oil pipeline system, which moves oil from Western Canada to refineries in Eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest.
Enbridge applied for the change in 2019 when demand for the Mainline greatly exceeded its capacity. That congestion has since eased.
Enbridge did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A party can appeal the decision to the Federal Court of Appeal within 30 days, if it demonstrates that the CER erred, said CER spokesperson Ruth Anne Beck.
Fourteen shippers, representing 75% of the Mainline's volume and primarily companies with refineries, expressed support for Enbridge, including Canadian producers Cenovus Energy and Imperial Oil. U.S. refiners BP Plc and Marathon Oil Corp were also Enbridge's supporters.
Canada's biggest oil producer, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, was among the plan's opponents.
Contracts would have allowed Enbridge to secure more of Western Canada's long-term oil production even as rival Trans Mountain completes its mostly contracted pipeline expansion late next year. TC Energy Corp cancelled its Keystone XL project this year, freeing up more potential shipper demand for the Mainline.
The current toll system will remain in place on an interim basis.
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg and Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
‘I stand with the Wet’suwet’en and all the Indigenous land and water protectors’
A longtime Indigenous rights activist wants Wet’suwet’en land and water defenders to know they’re “not alone,” that their power is “in the Spirit,” and that it’s time for Canadians to start “upholding their share of democracy.”
Ellen Gabriel is a Onkwehón:we rights activist from the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) community of Kanesatake. She lived on the front lines of her people’s resistance to the construction of a golf course and townhouses on Kanienkehaka lands in 1990. The 78-day standoff became known as “the resistance at Kanesatake,” also known as ‘The Oka Crisis’ as images of Mohawk and First Nation warriors facing off against the Canadian military became memorialized in the country.
Gabriel, who has continued her activism over the last three decades, was the spokesperson for her community at the time. She lived through the brutalization and criminalization of her people at the hands of state-sanctioned police and military officers, patterns she sees repeated in Wet’suwet’en territory today, she tells IndigiNews.
Wet’suwet’en land and water defenders and supporters have been blocking access to Coastal Gaslink project sites and work camps as part of the latest in an ongoing conflict between members of the nation and the company that has spanned over a decade.
The construction would be devastating to Wet’suwet’en homelands and waters and any green lights given on behalf of the nation were signed outside of traditional governance practices by elected officials whose authority comes from the disputed Indian Act and holds no authority off of the reservation, defenders say.
Members of the nation served Coastal Gaslink — a subsidiary of Calgary-based energy company TransCanada which is attempting to build a 670-kilometre natural gas pipeline through Wet’suwet’en land — with a notice of eviction on Nov. 14, “but of the estimated 500 individuals housed at Coastal GasLink’s two remote work camps, only a handful left,” according to reporting by the Narwhal.
Days later, RCMP officers began arresting defenders and supporters, enforcing an injunction obtained by the company. Community members — including hereditary chiefs, matriarchs and clan spokespeople — and journalists have since been arrested as heavily armed RCMP officers continue to enforce the disputed injunction.
Defenders continue to demand that they are the only authority over their traditional territories, through a governance system that was recognized and upheld in the Supreme Court of Canada ‘Delgamuukw v. British Columbia.’
Indigenous supporters, including Mohawk land defenders, have joined those on the front lines protecting the yintah (Wet’suwet’en traditional territory), as solidarity marches take place across the country.
IndigiNews spoke with Gabriel about recent events. Here’s what she had to say:
Gilpin: What have you been seeing and thinking about the ongoing resistance in Wet’suwet’en territory?
Gabriel: I see police brutality. I see the unnecessary use of force. It's really indicative that Canada has not changed since its inception and since its monarchs decided to brutalize Indigenous Peoples. Nothing has changed in the century since contact. We’re forced into their courts with their laws and their criteria. And even if we have a small win, it's really never implemented.
I think that what’s going on is the same thing that was going on 500 years ago, which is you have mercenaries that work on behalf of the corporations to make the rich richer, Indigenous Peoples are disposable and there is no political will to actually view us and view our rights as human rights. I think that it's just deplorable.
I stand with the Wet’suwet’en and all the Indigenous land and water protectors, no matter where they are on Turtle Island. I think we have not really progressed. I think the people themselves, like the Canadian people themselves may have changed, but their government, this colonial relationship that we have, it really has not changed. They've just been able to find some of our own people to continue oppressing their own. It’s divide and conquer. Canada cares more about its reputation than doing the right thing.
Gilpin: What do you think needs to happen now?
Gabriel: I think that the police should be charged with a crime against humanity for doing the dirty work of Coastal Gaslink and the government of Canada and B.C. It's really horrible that no matter what we do, in very peaceful measures, they still push us to the brink where we have to defend ourselves. And I think that's inexcusable in this day and age.
What we really need to do is start getting Canadians to get up off their hands and work alongside us. Because the word reconciliation is a shallow word right now. It's very hollow, frankly, because there is no reconciliation right now. It doesn't matter how many times Justin Trudeau, Marc Miller, or Carolyn Bennett, cries it — reconciliation is not happening, because reconciliation goes far beyond just monetary compensation for the genocide that was inflicted upon and is still being inflicted upon Indigenous Peoples.
We want our land back so that we can restore and revitalize our languages, our cultures, our songs, because we are people of the land and that’s what's important and we're still fighting for our land. We cannot fight the bullets and the tanks and these paramilitary forces that do the bidding of corporations.
We need to tell Canada that they promised something and again, they broke it. And then we tell that to the world, because one of the things that I learned in 1990 was that the government is more concerned about its reputation than actually doing the right thing.
Gilpin: You have voiced your support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a tool for upholding Indigenous Peoples’ human and inherent rights. How would this international declaration come into use in the situation taking place in Wet’suwet’en territory and what other tools do you see as necessary in this time?
Gabriel: I think any tool that we can use against the colonial powers is a tool that we should be using. It's just words on paper. You can't just say, well, you have to respect it. We have to show that our Indigenous laws compliment these new laws. Indigenous people worked on this.
But I don't think it's the solution. I think there are other solutions that are there. And, you know, if we continually have to make those human rights complaints and continually have to demonstrate to the world that Canada is an authoritarian government, then those are the tools that we need to use. But I think that the strongest tool we have is our own mind and being able to process what's going on, and express it to the people who don't know what we're feeling and the suffering that we're going through.
We’re always crying out for unity. I think the people who are on the front lines are the ones who are unified. As our Elders say, it’s not about power, it's about upholding obligations to our own Indigenous laws. The UN declaration — that's for the state to really uphold and for us to use and to remind them that they have promised in their own way, when they respected and legislated it, that they have obligations and that they should take that seriously.
It's a repetition of things that we saw here. For us, our whole community was surrounded and as was Kahnawake. They learned how to continue to brutalize us. They were not interested in lessons learned, they were interested in how to continue to oppress us, which is what they're doing.
It's about them getting away again with a genocidal act and there seems to be no solution within the laws and politician’s will, so it's really up to the ordinary citizen. You claim to live in a democracy, you claim you want reconciliation, well this is what you have to do. It should not be shouldered alone by Indigenous Peoples, because the government doesn't care about us.
Gilpin: Climate change is an undeniable fact, and one you recently tweeted about saying, “It’s odd that people cry about the effects of the climate crisis, but do not draw the conclusion that Indigenous Peoples have been warning about this for decades.” Can you expand on that?
Gabriel: Well, you know, it's interesting, because all the Elders, the people whose shoulders we stand on as activists ... they were not listened to when they warned about things. They said that you can't treat the earth like this and expect no consequences.
People continually think that it's up to states like the government of Canada to stop greenhouse gases. To not support Indigenous Peoples who have been fighting for the protection of the lands and the waters is hypocritical. They can't make that connection and realize that what we've been doing is not just for our benefit.
Gilpin: What else would you like to share?
Gabriel: My final words are to the Wet'suwet'en water and land defenders: You're not alone. We felt alone during the first few weeks of the crisis and for most of it. We had lots of people praying and doing ceremony for us. And I think that they just need to know that people are there for them, doing those ceremonies and burning tobacco and thinking of them, that they are not alone and that their strength is in the Spirit.
The Spirit of our ancestors is watching us, watching over us, to protect us. And I think that's what they need to know — that they are loved and that people care about them. Editor's note: On Nov. 26, we issued two corrections to this story. We changed "images of Indigenous warriors facing off with heavily armed RCMP officers" to "images of Mohawk and First Nation warriors facing off against the Canadian military." We also removed the statement that "youth" were among those arrested because IndigiNews was not able to confirm that the person we assumed was a youth self-identifies as such.
Emilee Gilpin, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Discourse
Vying with vultures: Widespread poverty has some Hondurans living off rubbish Marlon Escoto has spent 45 years picking through rubbish at a municipal dump in Honduras to try to find things to sell and earn a living
(AFP/Luis ACOSTA)More Moises AVILA Fri, November 26, 2021,
Marlon Escoto has been rummaging through rubbish since he was 14, trying to chase off vultures while picking out pieces of plastic and fragments of metal to sell.
Ravaged by drug trafficking, violent gangs, corruption, political instability and hurricanes, Honduras sees more than half its 10 million people -- 59 percent -- scraping by in poverty.
"I look after my children from here... from the rubbish," Escoto, 59, told AFP as he stood in a sprawling dump on a hill overlooking the capital city Tegucigalpa.
He will not be leaving it anytime soon.
Escoto's wife is in hospital and he needs to pay for her treatment. But he says his earnings from scavenging barely put food on the table.
On this particular day Escoto is one of perhaps 100 people picking through the mountains of garbage at the municipal dump.
Honduras will hold presidential elections on Sunday, and Escoto does not know who to vote for.
Left-wing candidate Xiomara Castro, a former first lady who leads in several opinion polls, will be trying to break the decades-long, alternating grip on power of the ruling National Party and the Liberal Party.
"Everyone has the right to vote because we're citizens," Escoto said. "But none of the parties have helped me. I paid for everything in my house."
Handouts, though, are common in Honduras, and they seem to spike as elections near.
A month ago, the government started distributing vouchers worth 7,000 lempiras -- about $290 -- per family to alleviate poverty. The minimum wage is around $400 a month, although most people work in the underground, off the books economy.
Queues of people formed to receive their vouchers as the opposition accused the government of buying votes.
"We have to see what the effects of the money dance will be," said Eugenio Sosa, an analyst and professor at the National University.
Liberal Party candidate Yani Rosenthal has also promised vouchers -- worth $60 a month to each adult -- if elected, without saying how he would fund it.
"Here we collect plastic bottles, cardboard, glass bottles, paper," said Marco Antonio Cruz, 69, another recycler working at the dump. "They haven't given us much, just enough for a plate of food."
Magdalena Cerritos, 72, and her four children all work at the municipal dump close to Honduras's capital, but she holds no grudges against the governing party (AFP/Luis ACOSTA)
- 'Vultures circle above' -
As soon as the sun rises, trucks turn up at the dump -- known locally as the "crematorium" -- to unload more mountains of rubbish.
Vultures circle above before swooping down to compete with humans for scraps of food.
The recyclers have municipal permits to scavenge. Some even consider their permit a gift from the mayor, Nasry Asfura, the presidential candidate for the ruling National Party.
Many work alone, others as part of a cooperative.
The stench stings nostrils and seeps into clothing.
An aerial shot of people looking through rubbish for pieces of plastic or metal to sell at a municipal dump on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa (AFP/Luis ACOSTA)
Recyclers pick animal entrails off plastic bottles with no sign of disgust. They joke that even Covid-19 would not enter the dump.
The pandemic was largely responsible for pushing unemployment here from 5.7 percent in 2019 to 10.9 percent in 2020, according to a study by the Autonomous University.
"I brought up my children here," said Magdalena Cerritos, 72. "I have four children that work here," since there is "no work" elsewhere.
Even after 40 years picking through rubbish at the "crematorium," Cerritos, ever hopeful, plans to stick with National Party candidate Asfura, whose nickname is Papi a la Orden (Papi at your service).
"I'm a Nationalist, and I'll go for Papi," she said. "I think Papi could do well."
mav/bc/bbk/dw
Hondurans weary of corruption look for change in election
Free Party presidential candidate Xiomara Castro acknowledges supporters accompanied by her running mate Salvador Nasralla, right, during a closing campaign rally, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021. Honduras will hold presidential election on Nov. 28. (AP Photo/Delmer Martinez)
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — For many Hondurans, Sunday’s election will be about stripping power from a party whose successive administrations are widely seen as having deepened corruption and driven tens of thousands to flee the country, many toward the United States.
Expelling President Juan Orlando Hernández’s National Party after 12 years is more important to them than who takes power when it’s gone. The animosity toward Hernández is such that for several years, migrants walking out of Honduras have chanted “Get out J.O.H.!” referring to his initials.
Complaints against Hernández and his party are multiple. An already difficult life has gotten even harder for many. Honduras was hit by two devastating hurricanes in 2020. The pandemic raised unemployment to 10.9% last year, according to the National Statistics Institute. The economy shrank by 9%, according to the World Bank. And street gangs rule swaths of territory through terror.
Hernández has also become a national embarrassment. U.S. federal prosecutors in New York have accused him of running a narco state and fueling his own political rise with drug money. Hernández has denied it all and has not been formally charged, but that could change once he leaves office.
And many believe Hernández isn’t legitimately their president. A friendly court sidestepped the constitutional ban on reelection and Hernández won a 2017 contest filled with irregularities that nonetheless was quickly recognized by the Trump administration.
So the National Party’s candidate in Sunday’s election, Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry Asfura, has faced significant headwinds as Hernández’s chosen successor.
Honduran prosecutors also accuse him of diverting more than $1 million in public funds to personal use, but the Supreme Court has put the case on hold until a sort comptroller court investigates.
Try as he might, Asfura hasn’t been able to shake Hernández’s stigma. At a recent rally in Tegucigalpa, Asfura pleaded, “I am different.”
The National Party’s strength is its ability to distribute benefits and mobilize voters, including some 200,000 government employees, and Asfura is still in the race. Whichever of the 14 candidates gets the most votes Sunday wins; there is no runoff.
Polls give Xiomara Castro the best chance of beating Asfura. This is Castro’s third try. She lost to Hernández in his first run and then dropped out in 2017 when she joined the coalition backing television personality Salvador Nasralla, who this year dropped out to back her.
The 62-year-old candidate of the leftist Liberty and Refoundation party is the wife of former President Jose Manuel Zelaya, who had aggravated both the U.S. and Honduran establishments by building close ties with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He was ousted by the military in a coup in 2009. Officials justified his ouster by alleging he planned to violate the same constitutional ban on reelection that Hernández later ignored.
He too has faced corruption allegations. When a Honduran drug trafficker was sentenced to life in prison in the United States in 2019, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said he had paid millions in bribes to government officials, including $2 million to Zelaya, an accusation Zelaya denied. Castro’s campaign has focused on the need to remove the existing power structure, and tying Asfura to Hernández at every opportunity.
“They call Honduras a narco state because of this mafia that governs us and because of which they also say we’re the most corrupt country in Latin America,” Castro said at a recent campaign event. “This is the moment to say enough of the misery, the poverty and the exclusion that our country experiences now.”
For years, the U.S. relationship with Honduras has been governed by Honduras’ willingness to cooperate in the war on drugs as a key transshipment point for cocaine headed north and in helping to stem migration?. But U.S. prosecutors have shown that while the government was assisting in interdiction, its politicians were benefitting from drug proceeds and helping protect other shipments, most notably in the case of former lawmaker Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, the president’s brother, who was sentenced to life in prison in the United States.
The Biden administration has continued to struggle with Central American migrants arriving at the Southwest border, many of them from Honduras. Vice President Kamala Harris has said corruption in the region as one of the key problems driving that movement.
According to the Vanderbilt University’s Americas’ Barometer Pulse of Democracy 2021 report released this month, more than half of the those polled in the nation of 9.3 million expressed a desire to live or work abroad — 30 percentage points higher than in 2004.
In addition to president, Hondurans will elect a new congress and their representatives for the Central American Parliament.
Luis Vásquez, a 43-year-old systems technician in Tegucigalpa, said he was underwhelmed by all of the candidates.
“There isn’t an option of proposals that we can trust; it’s just more of the same,” he said. But he was sure his vote would not go to the National Party, “because of the high level of corruption it has shown.”
__
Sherman reported from Mexico City.
'Human zoos' were vectors for racism, a Belgian exhibition shows 'Human zoos' were vectors for racism, a Belgian exhibition showsPlaster heads from 1911 moulded from "real Congolese" for the musuem's "Human Zoo"" exhibit showing how racist stereotypes were propagated (AFP/Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD)More Matthieu DEMEESTERE Fri, November 26, 2021
In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, recreated African villages were set up across Europe as amusement parks that served to extol the supposed cultural superiority of colonising empires.
They were also powerful vectors for racist stereotyping, as a Belgian museum show under way illustrates. "Human Zoo: The age of colonial exhibitions" at the Africa Museum outside Brussels until March next year has resonance, because its buildings are on the site where Belgium's King Leopold II in 1897 reconstructed three "Congolese villages" on royal grounds.
At the time, the Belgian Congo -- today the Democratic Republic of Congo -- was Leopold's private property and 267 men and women were taken from it by force to be put on show in Brussels' World Fair, made to sit in front of the dwellings. Seven of them died, from cold or sickness.
That episode features in the museum's exhibition, which displays 500 items and documents showing what indigenous peoples suffered under various colonial powers.
The old ethnographic displays were designed to "show the other as primitive" and to "manufacture the 'savage'" to "reinforce the superiority of whites," the organisers explained.
Measurements of skulls -- craniometry -- were used to support theories of "inferior races".
The curators of the show estimate that the "industry" of putting human beings on display lured in around 1.5 billion people between the 16th century and 1960 to gawk. - 'Freak show' roots -
The reconstructed villages and the human "specimens" displayed in them owed part of their existence to "freak shows" where individuals with physical abnormalities -- gigantism, dwarfism, or women with beards among others -- were presented as spectacle by circus owner P.T. Barnum among others.
In Europe, the "human zoos" reached their peak popularity from the 1880s after new colonial conquests. Imported exotic decors gave a curious public the impression of visiting real African villages.
While Germany and France had already hosted their own "villages", Belgium got its first in 1885, near Antwerp, with 12 Africans.
Twelve years later their number grew 20 times bigger, and the colonial section of the World Fair in Brussels' satellite town of Tervuren attracted a million visitors.
Over and over again, "the same message was repeated thousands of times, and the public ended up truly thinking that the African was a cannibal, inferior, dirty, lazy," one of the curators, Maarten Couttenier, told AFP.
"And these stereotypes still exist today -- proof that the colonial propaganda worked."
In the final part of the exhibition, the issue of how this racist denigration persists in everyday language challenges visitors with cliched phrases written in big letters on a white wall.
"I love black people!" -- "Oh, you did better than I expected" -- "The apartment's already rented".
For Salome Ysebaert, who conceptualised the museum's exhibition, such comments appear inoffensive and banal, but in reality are "microaggressions" revealing that racism is still lurking in minds, more than 60 years after the last "human zoo" in Brussels closed, in 1958.
mad/rmb/
Bank of England museum to host slavery exhibition
Louis Ashworth Thu, November 25, 2021 The portraits of Sir James Bateman (L), Sir Robert Clayton (C) and Sir Gilbert Heathcote (R) were quietly removed from public view over summer - Bank of England
The Bank of England’s museum will host an exhibition about slavery, Andrew Bailey said, as he rejected suggestions that the central bank had “gone ‘woke’”.
The display at the Bank’s Threadneedle Street headquarters will include portraits of former governors and directors linked to the slave trade that were taken down during the summer, the Governor said.
The museum has been closed since Covid struck but is set to reopen soon.
“We’re actually going to open up with an exhibition, a display in the museum, on the history of slavery,” Mr Bailey told students at the Cambridge Union.
He added: “Quite a bit of the material that we’ve moved is going to reappear in the public part [of the Bank].”
The Bank said in August it had removed oil paintings and busts of seven former leading figures at Threadneedle Street after establishing their links to the transatlantic slave trade.
Mr Bailey said the Bank of England had no direct links to the slave trade, but added: “Clearly some of my predecessors were involved in it.”
Explaining the decision to remove the portraits, he said: “If you’re a member of staff in the Bank of England from an ethnic background … should you be required to sit in a room looking at a painting of somebody who owned slaves?
“Honestly, we can debate this at great length. I think it’s better to do it in the public part of the Bank where we can explain it.”
Mr Bailey added: “It’s not because as some of the newspapers say we’ve sort of gone ‘woke’, whatever that word actually means. Let's not make people sit in rooms and feel difficult because they're looking at these images.”
A report commissioned by the Bank and released in July found that ethic minority workers faced “material disparities” at Threadneedle Street and were being held back by unconscious bias and microaggressions.
“It concerns me that a country would choose it as its national currency,” he said.
“What would worry me most of all is, do the citizens of El Salvador understand the nature and volatility of the currency they have?”
Mr Bailey’s comments come after the central American nation announced plans for a $1 billion bond issuance, with the funds raised to be split between buying the cryptocurrency and building a new city near an active volcano.
The International Monetary Fund warned earlier this week that El Salvador should not use Bitcoin due to the instability of its price. The world’s biggest digital coin is known for its wild price fluctuations, having swung from under $20,000 to almost $70,000 in the past year.
Led by its president Nayib Bukele, an outspoken supporter of Bitcoin, El Salvador officially adopted the cryptocurrency as legal tender in early September, meaning it must be accepted as payment for goods and services.
However, the move has been plagued by problems with El Salvadorans reporting issues with the government’s bitcoin “wallet”.
Mr Bailey also offered a sceptical assessment of economic developments in Turkey, where the lira has plunged as its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan fiddles the dials of monetary policy.
“As far as I can tell, it's a policy stance, which says the best way to tackle inflation is to cut interest rates,” he said. “And that's an unusual combination… I don't comment on other people's policies much. But I’ll just say it's an unusual combination in economics, certainly.”
A new Rutgers study has found that people who bought firearms during the COVID-19 pandemic and national surge in firearm sales tend to be more sensitive to threats and have less emotional and impulse control than firearm owners who did not make a purchase during this time
In the study, which was published in the journal Science and Social Medicine, the researchers surveyed 3,500 adults in the United States, 32 percent of whom owned a firearm. While firearm owners in general still reported less emotional control and impulse control than those who did not own firearms, they were less sensitive to threats and fear.
"We focused on those who purchased firearms during a time of substantial stress with the COVID-19 pandemic, a contentious election and a large racial justice movement following the death of George Floyd," said co-author Taylor R. Rodriguez, a member of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center, based at Rutgers. "People who are sensitive to threats such as these and who have difficulties with impulse control are buying firearms at a greater rate during this unprecedented time."
The study also indicates that those who plan to purchase firearms in the next year are also prone to poor impulse and emotional control, which may drive decisions like firearm purchasing.
"Even though we know that firearm access increases the risk for a host of dangerous outcomes, it may be that purchasing firearms provided these individuals with a sense of safety and control," Rodriguez said.
The Rutgers research highlights the need to examine the personality traits of those who purchase firearms in order to get a better understanding of these surges in firearm sales.
"We are living through stressful, uncertain times, and individuals who tend to be on the lookout for threats and who make rash decisions may be coping with that by purchasing firearms," says co-author Joye C. Anestis, an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health. "Research on firearm ownership has historically overlooked personality as a factor in understanding who purchases firearms and why. Our findings highlight the need to change that practice.People who purchased guns during buying surge more likely to have suicidal thoughts
More information:Joye C. Anestis et al, Dispositional characteristics in firearm ownership and purchasing behavior during the 2020 purchasing surge,Social Science & Medicine(2021).DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114408
In a new study, we found that the overall U.S. gun violence rate rose by 30% during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the year before. In 28 states, the rates were substantially higher between March 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, compared to the pre-pandemic period from Feb. 1, 2019, through Feb. 29, 2020. There were 51,063 incidents of gun violence events resulting in injury or death in the United States in the first 13 months of the pandemic compared to 38,919 incidents in the same time span pre-pandemic.
Early in the pandemic, gun sales in the United States surged, with more than 20% of these purchases by first-time buyers. And access to firearms is a well-established risk factor for gun-related suicide and homicide. This sharp increase in firearm purchases raises serious concerns, since the combination of increased stress, social disruption and isolation during the pandemic created a perfect storm of conditions that could contribute to increased gun violence.
These trends were also concerning since the increased rates of gun violence could strain the health care infrastructure that was overtaxed due to an unprecedented influx of COVID-19 patients.
We are a team of scientistsand physicians with expertise in preventive health care and modeling diseases of public health concern.
We used a publicly available database of gun violence events and divided those events by the number of people living in each state. We also added other factors such as age, race and ethnicity, and we recorded the status of each state's stay-at-home orders and the number of COVID-19 cases. We found that gun violence rates increased substantially in 28 states, or 56% of all states, scattered throughout the U.S., without any clear pattern. The increase in gun violence was highest in Minnesota, with a 120% increase.
Due to ongoing police investigations, we were advised to not separate out counts of suicides and homicides before investigations are completed. To get a fuller picture, it will be important for future studies to assess comparisons of suicide and homicide rates during this same period.
Certain events, like major earthquakes, are known as “black swan events”— rare, but highly consequential when they do happen. Researchers developed a new way to help analyze the risk of such events. Credit: Shutterstock.com
Quick—if you had to guess, what would you think is most likely to end all life on Earth: a meteor strike, climate change or a solar flare? (Choose carefully.)
A new statistical method could help accurately analyze the risk of very worst (or best) case scenarios. Scientists have announced a new way to tease out information about events that are rare, but highly consequential—such as pandemics and insurance payouts.
The discovery helps statisticians use math to figure out the shape of the underlying distribution of a set of data. This can help everyone from investors to government officials make informed decisions—and is especially helpful when the data is sparse, as for major earthquakes.
"Though they are by definition rare, such events do occur and they matter; we hope this is a useful set of tools to understand and calculate these risks better," said mathematical biologist Joel Cohen, a co-author of a new study published Nov. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A visiting scholar with the University of Chicago's statistics department, Cohen is a professor at the Rockefeller University and at the Earth Institute of Columbia University.
Varying the questions
Statistics is the science of using limited data to learn about the world—and the future. Its questions range from "When is the best time of year to spray pesticides on a field of crops?" to "How likely is it that a global pandemic will shut down large swaths of public life?"
At a century old, the statistical theory of rare-but-extreme events is a relatively new field, and scientists are still cataloging the best ways to crunch different kinds of data. Calculation methods can significantly affect conclusions, so researchers have to tune their approaches to the data carefully.
Two powerful tools in statistics are the average and the variance. You're probably familiar with the average; if one student scores 80 on a test and one student scores 82, their average score is 81. Variance, on the other hand, measures how widely spread out those scores are: You'd get the same average if one student scored 62 and the other scored 100, but the classroom implications would be very different.
In most situations, both the average and the variance are finite numbers, like the situation above. But things get stranger when you look at events that are very rare, but enormously consequential when they do happen. In most years, there isn't a gigantic burst of activity from the sun's surface big enough to fry all of Earth's electronics—but if that happened this year, the results could be catastrophic. Similarly, although the vast majority of tech startups fizzle out, a Google or a Facebook occasionally comes along.
"There's a category where large events happen very rarely, but often enough to drive the average and/or the variance towards infinity," said Cohen.
These situations, where the average and variance approach infinity as more and more data is collected, require their own special tools. And understanding the risk of these types of events (known in statistical parlance as events with "heavy-tailed distribution") is important for many people. Government officials need to know how much effort and money they should invest in disaster preparation, and investors want to know how to maximize returns.
Cohen and his colleagues looked at a mathematical method recently used to calculate risk, which splits the variance in the middle and calculates the variance below the average, and above the average, which can give you more information about downside risks and upside risks. For example, a tech company may be much more likely to fail (that is, to wind up below the average) than to succeed (wind up above the average), which an investor might like to know as she's considering whether to invest. But the method had not been examined for distributions of low-probability, very high-impact events with infinite mean and variance.
Running tests, the scientists found that standard ways to work with these numbers, called semi-variances, don't yield much information. But they found other ways that did work. For example, they could extract useful information by calculating the ratio of the log of the average to the log of the semi-variance. "Without the logs, you get less useful information," Cohen said. "But with the logs, the limiting behavior for large samples of data gives you information about the shape of the underlying distribution, which is very useful." Such information can help inform decision-making.
The researchers hope this lays the foundation for new and better exploration of risks.
"We think there are practical applications for financial mathematics, for agricultural economics, and potentially even epidemics, but since it's so new, we're not even sure what the most useful areas might be," Cohen said. "We just opened up this world. It's just at the beginning."Financial crashes, pandemics, Texas snow: How math could predict 'black swan' events
More information:Mark Brown et al, Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling for semivariances and higher moments of heavy-tailed data,Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(2021).DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2108031118
Contrary to popular belief, no great migration in pandemic
by Mike Schneider
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
Contrary to popular belief, there has been no great migration in the U.S. during the pandemic.
New figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that the proportion of people who moved over the past year fell to its lowest level in the 73 years that it has been tracked, in contradiction to popular anecdotes that people left cities en masse to escape COVID-19 restrictions or in search of more bucolic lifestyles.
"Millennials living in New York City do not make up the world," joked Thomas Cooke, a demographic consultant in Connecticut. "My millennial daughter's friends living in Williamsburg, dozens of them came home. It felt like the world had suddenly moved, but in reality, this is not surprising at all."
In 2021, more than 27 million people, or 8.4% of U.S. residents, reported having moved in the past year, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
By comparison, 9.3% of U.S. residents moved from 2019 to 2020. Three decades ago, that figure was 17%.
Besides giving rise to shelter-in-place restrictions, the COVID-19 pandemic may have forced people to postpone life-cycle events such as marriages or having babies that often lead to moves. But the decline is part of a decadeslong migration decline in the U.S., said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.
"These numbers show a lot of people didn't move or moved at a slower rate," Frey said. "But it's a longer-term trend."
That's not to say that nobody moved. The one uptick in mobility patterns last year took place in longer-distance moves, from state to state, compared to moves within a state or county. Those 4.3 million residents who moved to another state may have done so because of the pandemic, Frey said.
Demographic expert Andrew Beveridge used change-of-address data to show that while people moved out of New York, particularly in well-heeled neighborhoods, at the height of the pandemic, those neighborhoods recouped their numbers just months later. Regarding the nation as a whole, Beveridge said he's not surprised migration declined.
"The same thing happened during the financial crisis. Nobody moved. Nobody got married. Nobody had kids," said Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College and the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. "All demographic change sort of just screeches to a halt."
Other factors contributing to Americans staying put have been an aging population, since older people are less likely to move than younger ones; the ability to telecommute for work, which allowed some workers to change jobs without having to move; and rising home prices and rents that kept some would-be movers in place, demographers said.
"I think the boom in remote work because of COVID coupled with the economic shock is the big reason," said Mary Craigle, bureau chief for Montana's Research and Information Services.
Mobility in the U.S. has been on a downward slide since 1985 when 20% of U.S. residents moved. That was an era when Baby Boomers were young adults, beginning careers, getting married and starting families. In comparison, millennials, who today are in the same age range as their Baby Boomer cohorts were in the mid-1980s, are stuck in place due to high housing costs and underemployment, according to an analysis Frey did last year.
Advancements in telecommunications and transportation have contributed to the decadeslong decline in U.S. mobility. Nowadays, people can get an education, work and visit family and friends remotely. In the last half of the last century, the highway system allowed people to work 50 miles (80 kilometers) from their homes without having to move closer for work, said Cooke, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut.
Rising economic insecurity over the decades also has made U.S. residents less mobile since "when there's insecurity, people value what they already have," he said.
The slowdown in American mobility is part of a recent stagnation in population dynamics in the U.S. The 2020 census shows that the U.S. grew by only 7.4% over the previous decade, the slowest rate since between 1930 and 1940. Earlier this week, the Census Bureau revealed that the population center of the U.S. moved only 11.8 miles (19 kilometers), the smallest shift in 100 years.
New research from Trinity College Dublin has shown, for the first time, that the economic strain experience by families during Ireland's great recession between 2009 and 2014 had a detrimental impact on young people's performance in state exams at the age of 15. The research, conducted by Richard Layte, Professor of Sociology at Trinity, has recently been published in the journal European Sociological Review.
Social scientists have for some time examined the association between parental education and income and the educational achievement of their children. However, there is less evidence on exactly how social disadvantage and adverse environments shape educational outcomes.
Using Ireland's recession between 2009 and 2014 as a 'natural experiment' and drawing on data from the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study the research showed that a family's experience of economic strain can significantly reduce child attainment in state exams at the age 15.
The research was based on interviews with the families and teachers of 4,955 young people aged 13 in 2007 and follow up interviews four years later. This period coincided with the onset of the recession in Ireland and deep cuts in public services, social protection and salaries. The recession impacted on the majority of families in Ireland including those with higher income and occupational circumstances. The study showed that increased economic strain experienced by young people during the great recession when they were aged between nine and 13 decreased performance in state examinations by approximately one point for every unit increase in economic strain.
This, according to Professor Layte, has the potential to have a long-term impact on the educational development of the young person if it causes a move to less academic tracks for the senior cycle examinations or changes the young person's perception of their own abilities, lessening their effort in school. The Irish educational system, the paper notes, does not easily facilitate those who wish to return and improve their exam results.
The study involved an assessment of performance at the age of 15 in the Junior Certificate exam along with a measurement of families' exposure to economic recession. It also took into account the experience of parental depression, the child's emotional and behavioral health and the level of parental investment in education.
The study, according to the author, also adds to mounting evidence that psycho-social factors are at least as important if not more important than effects of parental investments in their children in explaining the effects of recession and economic strain.
Richard Layte, Professor of Sociology, said: "We used the great recession in Ireland as a 'natural experiment' to help us understand why low income and economic strain are often associated with worse behavior and development in school and worse educational outcomes overall such as worse junior and leaving cert grades and fewer transitions to third level."
"Growing Up in Ireland, the Irish Longitudinal Study of Children, allows us to follow children from infancy so we can look at how their environment influences them. The great recession produced a situation where well educated, middle class families also experienced economic strain and we could see what effect this had on the parents and their children."
"By matching people in terms of their likelihood of experiencing recession but who nonetheless varied in terms of their actual experience of recession we were able to show that recession itself lowered their exam performance. Moreover, we could also show that it was not the withdrawal of access to books, grinds or educational experiences that did this, but instead the effect of economic strain on the mental health of parents and the spill over from this onto their child."
The paper, titled "Does Family Economic Strain Reduce Child Educational Achievement? A Longitudinal Assessment Using the Great Recession in Ireland," was published in the European Sociological Review.Recession damages mental health of families, says new study
More information:Richard Layte, Does Family Economic Strain Reduce Child Educational Achievement? A Longitudinal Assessment Using the Great Recession in Ireland,European Sociological Review(2021).DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcab049
Nearly quarter-century after most of the world signed a convention outlawing the use of antipersonnel landmines, the number of people being killed or maimed by these insidious and lethal weapons remains high—and rising. The Landmine Monitor for 2021, released on November 10, reported 7,073 casualties in 2020, including 2,492 people killed and 4,561 wounded.
This is a significant increase on the 5,554 people killed and wounded in 2019. Syria was the worst affected country, reporting 2,729 casualties. The report says that the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) by insurgents, many of which were deliberately aimed against the civilian population. Other countries with more than 100 recorded casualties in 2020 were Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Iraq, Mali, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Yemen,
One of the worst things about this is that many of these people will have died or been maimed by a mine that was laid years, perhaps even decades, previously, but which have not yet been detected and neutralized.
Our research at the University of Sheffield has, for the past decade, been looking at quantifying how the soil around landmines changes how deadly they are. According to the Landmine Monitor report, about 5,000 square kilometers are known to need clearing of mines. By my calculation, at the current rate of clearance this will take about 34 years and cost around £14 billion.
Indiscriminate war crimes
Historically, military forces deployed anti-personnel mines (those designed to explode in the presence, proximity or contact of a person) to create defensive barriers or to deny access to specific regions or facilities. Military use requires regions to be marked as minefields—not marking out mine-infested regions is regarded as a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Once conflicts are over, these mines are left behind, which has a devastating effect on the local population for decades to come.
Landmines are indiscriminate in their destructive power, being triggered by soldiers and children alike (more than half the casualties in the 2021 report were children). This, combined with the fact that they can lie unexploded for decades before then killing or maiming innocent people, led to the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, known informally as the Ottawa Convention.
While 164 states have signed up to the treaty—including the UK—many of the world's major military powers still have not, notably Russia, China, and, thanks to the Trump administration's U-turn, the U.S.. Other non-signatories include many of those countries with active mine fields, including Syria, Egypt and Myanmar.
The difficulties in rehabilitating mined areas are not to be underestimated, taking both time and money to complete—which is why many mine-strewn areas take such a long time to clear. A common misconception is that if the production of anti-personnel mines ceased and stockpiles destroyed that the problem would start to diminish.
IEDs—the next generation
Sadly, in areas such as Afghanistan, where the highest number of casualties have been recorded over the past 20 years, the threat is not from standard landmines but from homemade buried IEDs. Unmarked, with a range of different triggering techniques from pressure plates to triggers placed under innocuous objects such as rocks, it is easy to see why children are disproportionately injured and killed due to their inquisitive nature.
Improvised mines are used by anti-government elements as a "weapon of choice." The flexibility in deployment and triggering mechanisms of these improvised mines make the clearance of areas even more dangerous, especially in areas that are still in a state of political unrest—where the demining personnel can themselves become the target of attacks.
One often-overlooked aspect is the lasting effect on local communities. In areas such as Syria, occupying forces in retreat actively target both the local facilities and homes of those displaced. This has the effect of prolonging the trauma of the conflict for populations returning after the supposed end of a conflict.
The type of homemade device is also always evolving, making it more difficult—and dangerous—to train demining staff. While mines were once used purely as a military tactic to deny hostile military forces access to a strategically important area, now they are often used to impose the values of retreating forces. Islamic State is one terrorist group that uses mines to target community education facilities like schools and swimming pools, adding to the oppression of local people.
Making a difference
The United Nations Development Programme with the help of charities such as the Halo Trust work with local volunteers to clear these areas once the occupying forces have left. It's a process which requires specialist equipment, training and time. A key part of the process is learning to live around active minefields.
Governments and charities provide training to local children on how to keep themselves safe while the minefields are awaiting clearance. This can greatly reduce the casualties in post-conflict areas.
The Landmine Monitor report doesn't just focus on minefields and casualties, but also on the work of charities and governments in clearing afflicted areas. In 2020, 146km² of land was cleared of mines, with more than 135,000 antipersonnel mines destroyed. That's potentially 135,000 lives protected.
So while the timescales involved seem long, the impact for those living and working in mined areas cannot be underestimated. Hopefully, we will be able to see a mine-free world within our lifetimes.
