Amy Schumer Opens Oscars by Brutally Roasting Leonardo DiCaprio (thedailybeast.com)

Amy  Schumer, staked her claim early as the night’s “edgiest” host, joking, “This year, the Academy hired three women to host, because it’s cheaper than hiring one man.”

The Guardian view on forgotten wars: we must not neglect conflict’s other victims

Editorial

In Ethiopia, Myanmar, Yemen and Syria, civilians are suffering. The parallels with Ukraine do not end there

Children at a refugee camp on the outskirts of the north-eastern city of Marib, Yemen. 

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers. Escalating strikes claiming the lives of civilians, including children. A growing humanitarian crisis, with vast numbers forced to flee their homes. A flagrant disregard for human life.

These terrible scenes are witnessed not only in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion has transfixed the world, but in other wars across the globe that have largely slipped from the public’s attention – in Myanmar, where the military tries to crush resistance to its seizure of power just over a year ago; in Ethiopia, where the prime minister believed he could win a swift victory against the Tigray region’s leaders, but fighting continues 16 months on; in Yemen, riven by conflict since 2014; in Syria, where the war entered its 12th year this week.

Ukraine’s war was once in the shadows too: the long-running conflict in the Donbas had been largely forgotten until Russian troops began massing at the country’s borders late last year. In each of these cases, the parallels or connections to what is happening there now go beyond suffering, death and mass displacement. For Syrians in the rebel enclave of Idlib, who saw Russia save Bashar al-Assad, its tactics in Ukraine are painfully recognisable: “Fortify your hospitals with cement blocks; the enemy Putin does not distinguish between civilians, wounded people and fighters,” one medic said. Syrian troops are being recruited to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine.

In Ethiopia, too, health workers have been attacked and grotesque violations of the laws of war have become the norm: this week a horrifying video emerged on showing armed men burning a Tigrayan man to death in western Ethiopia. As many as half a million people have died from the violence and hunger caused by the war, researchers said this week.

In Yemen, more than 4 million people have been displaced, and escalating violence made January the deadliest month for civilians since 2018. The World Food Programme warned it was already forced to take food from the hungry to feed the starving, and might soon be unable to feed even the starving. Yet Wednesday’s UN funding conference raised less than a third of the $4.2bn desperately needed.

In Myanmar, military and security forces have committed systematic and widespread abuses, bombarding populated areas with airstrikes and heavy weapons and deliberately targeting civilians. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, on Monday urged the international community to take “concerted, immediate measures” to halt the spiral of violence. Some supporters of the deposed civilian government hope that the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia will help to make the case for further action against Myanmar’s junta. While the EU recently expanded sanctions to a state-owned oil and gas company, the US has been slow to act.

Yet others fear that the conflict in Ukraine will drag away the political attention and resources needed to put the generals under pressure. Meanwhile, aid agencies find the multiple conflicts, the disastrous conditions in Afghanistan and what is described as the worst-ever hunger crisis in South Sudan have left them torn between grim choices.

More humanitarian funding is needed, alongside political will and diplomatic energy. The victims of these other wars deserve the same level of support and solidarity rightly seen for the people of Ukraine. Those already too often overlooked must not be pushed further into the shadows.

 

Todd Gitlin, RIP

He was always fiercely independent and intelligent.

ROBERT C. COTTRELL : PERSONAL REMEMBRANCE | 

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Thorne Dreyer

Todd Gitlin, September 2007. Photo by David Shankbone / Creative Commons.

By Robert C. Cottrell | The Rag Blog | March 24, 2022

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer’s two classic Rag Radio interviews with Todd Gitlin from July 19, 2013, and August 16, 2013. Listen anytime here and here.
• Read Katharine Q. Seelye’s Todd Gitlin obituary in The New York Times, here.

There are undoubtedly those in The Rag Blog community who knew Todd Gitlin far more intimately than I. My direct dealings with him were limited to a small number of occasions. The first involved his response to a query of mine regarding the radical journalist I.F. Stone, about whom I was working on a dissertation. To my delight, Gitlin was one of several luminaries who quickly fired off a lengthy letter to me, then a grad student, in that seemingly long-ago time before emails. He indicated that Izzy, whom he knew, had agreed to deliver a talk on Vietnam to the SDS National Council convening in December 1964. Stone’s address, as Gitlin remembered, proved “eloquent and stirring.” It “therefore, probably played a part in helping generate the enthusiasm for” a scheduled antiwar gathering in Washington, D.C., the next spring, which proved catalytic for the Movement.

Gitlin also recalled being one of several in the early SDS leadership who “devotedly read” I.F. Stone’s Weekly. To Gitlin, Izzy “was always an exemplar of intellectual and political integrity, one of the few of his generation we felt had not been fatally compromised by either Stalinism or inflexible anti-Communism.” Gitlin pointed as well to the great peace advocate A.J. Muste and the pacifist David Dellinger as “the only others of [Izzy’s] generation who played similar parts — respectful, admirable, and critical at the same time.” Others often mention the venerable Norman Thomas, the longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America, as an admirable veteran of the Old Left; Gitlin likely would have too had Thomas come to mind.

Gitlin eloquently spoke before a sizable, enthusiastic crowd about
his days in the Movement.

A few years later, Gitlin, after an exchange of correspondence and phone calls, accepted my invitation to come to the campus where I was teaching, California State University, Chico, in Northern California, to serve as a Distinguished Visiting Professor for a brief stint. Following my too abbreviated introduction, Gitlin eloquently spoke before a sizable, enthusiastic crowd about his days in the Movement, including his tenure as SDS president and fostering of the New Left organization’s ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project) venture. He talked about the state of the American left as of the end of 1980s, following the Reagan presidency.

While in Chico, Gitlin visited my house, which was then considerably smaller, prior to a pair of remodels, and, in the hallway, came across a bookshelf overloaded with volumes about the 1960s. He looked surprised, even perplexed at the numbers of works I had that were devoted to that era; his reaction, in turn, surprised and perplexed me. When I reminded him of my earlier request for information about I.F. Stone, he acted relieved that he had followed through in thoughtfully responding to me as he had.

I admired Gitlin’s activist history and tracked his return to academia, which led, in my estimation, to his two finest works: The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Like the man from the Old Left he so admired, Izzy Stone, Gitlin could be at different points kindly or irascible. He was always fiercely independent and intelligent, sometimes wise as when he wryly commented in 1995, “While the Right has been taking the White House, the Left has been marching on the English department.” He remained devoted to the left, to a democratic left determined to avoid sectarianism, dogmatism, and infantile pursuits. He is already missed, as a number of his friends have movingly acknowledged. He is also missed by those of us who barely knew him, did so only through his writings, or had encountered him all too briefly.

---

[Robert C. Cottrell, professor of history and American studies at Cal State Chico, is the author of All-American Rebels: The American Left from the Wobblies to Today and Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Rise of America’s 1960s counterculture.]

RAG RADIO PODCAST

Listen to our two

classic Rag Radio interviews

with the late Todd Gitlin here and here.

Todd Gitlin (left), American writer, sociologist, and activist -- the third president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) yet also a continuing critic of the New Left and its leading organization -- died on February 5 of this year at the age of 79. In an obituary, The Washington Post said Gitlin “shaped and chronicled the New Left.”

Thorne Dreyer interviewed Gitlin twice. These classic Rag Radio programs were originally broadcast on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, on July 19, 2013, and August 16, 2013. The two shows were rebroadcast on Rag Radio the last two weeks, on March 11 and 18, 2022. Both shows can be heard as podcasts anytime, here and here.

Human, Animal, and Machine in the Seventeenth Century

 Lucinda Cole and Robert Markley

In his 1695 letter to John Dennis on comedy, the playwright William Congreve confesses his dislike for satire that smacks of the “Degeneration of [that] God-like Species” – “man.” Having conceded that he is disturbed by “seeing things, that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature,” Congreve then admits he “could never look long upon a Monkey, without very Mortifying Reflections; tho [he] never heardany thing to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species”(Hodges 1964: 183).

 Congreve’s “mortifying Reflections” stem from his culture's nagging fear that anatomy may be destiny – that the physiological similarities between humans and monkeys may undermine the philosophical and religious principles that grant our “God-like Species” dominion over the rest of creation. Because it unsettles distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent self-awareness, Congreve's monkey calls attention to a crucial set of problems in seventeenth-century thought: the difficulty of trying to distinguish humans from animals, animals from inanimate objects, and humans from machines. As Francis Bacon declared in

Of the Wisdom of the Ancients(1609), “there is no nature which can be regarded as simple”: “Man has something of the brute; the brute has something of the vegetable; the vegetable something of the inanimate body” (Bacon 1860: 13, 96; see Fudge 1999: 94–98). Totry to make sense of the complexity of nature and its hybrid forms was the central project of seventeenth-century science – or what was then termed natural philosophy

https://www.academia.edu/19821130/Human_Animal_and_Machine_in_the_Seventeenth_Century?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

EVERYBODY KNOWS DEBORD WHO KNOWS VANEIGEM

The Radical Subject: An Intellectual Biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934 - Present)

Alastair Hemmens

     306 Pages

1 File ▾

Critical Theory,

Social Movements,

Working Classes,

Surrealism,

Anarchism

This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present). Vaneigem was a member of the Situationist International (SI) between 1961 and 1970. Today the SI is widely recognised as one of the significant avant-garde groups to have contributed to the historical events that shook France in May 1968. Most people will have come to Vaneigem through his Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), (THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE) which he wrote as a member of the SI and was published just months before the largest wildcat strike in French history. Vaneigem is therefore of interest from a cultural history or history of ideas perspective because his work embodies both a political moment and because it emerged out of debates that are still informing contemporary theory. Moreover, Vaneigem is something of an anomaly in that he has always worked outside and against intellectual and political institutions, he comes from a working-class background and he has lived the great majority of his life in the province of Hainaut, the old industrial heartland of Belgium, where he was born. This makes Vaneigem an outsider in a world that has ostensibly been dominated by the Parisian intellectual elite. More often than not Vaneigem has been dismissed, even vilified, by academics interested in the Situationist International. This is all the more surprising given that his Situationist comrade Guy Debord (1931-1994) has become a cause célèbre among the intellectual left since his death, igniting a veritable publishing industry in France and the English-speaking world. The intention of this thesis is not an attempt to earn Vaneigem the dubious acclaim that has feted Guy Debord these past decades. Rather, it endeavours to contextualise, clarify and bring out the complexity of the life and work of Raoul Vaneigem, making him the focus of a critical commentary that will reassess his place in the field.

https://www.academia.edu/8096511/The_Radical_Subject_An_Intellectual_Biography_of_Raoul_Vaneigem_1934_Present_

How the Situationist International became what it was

Anthony Paul Hayes

A thesis 

submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The Australian National University.

April, 2017

Abstract

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI) became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal period of the group is to be found between 1960 and 1963, a period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this definitional shorthand elides the significance of the Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics. The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the significant minority in the group which carried out the break of 1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of the construction of situations’ — and Marx's critique and supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he emerged in the mid-1840s. 

This homology was summarised in the expression of the Situationist project as the 'supersession of art’ (dépassement de l’art ). Secondly, this homology was practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis, which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established between the alienation of the political and artistic avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle'. 

By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these ‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is more often represented).Additionally, I will outline how the SI, through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins, attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’, opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s.

https://www.academia.edu/74612204/How_the_Situationist_International_became_what_it_was?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

AUSTRALIA

Report into the gig economy finds women are earning 37% less than men

Men earn $2.67 per hour more than women on average, but 40% of workers don’t know hourly rate

Women in the gig economy are more likely to participate in historically feminised work such as clerical, sales and marketing support and care work. Photograph: andresr/Getty Images

Benita Kolovos

Sun 27 Mar 2022 

A new report commissioned by the Victorian government has found gender inequality is entrenched in the gig economy, with women earning up to 37% less than men.

The report, produced by a Queensland University of Technology research team and released on Monday, summarises Australian and global studies and found the gig economy can “both reproduce and exacerbate existing gender inequalities in work”.

According to the report, women in gig economy roles in Australia earn between 10% and 37% less than men.


NSW coroner considers inquest into deaths of four food delivery riders in road accidents

For the same work, men earned on average $2.67 per hour more than women, though about 40% of gig economy workers do not know what their hourly rate is.

Women were also significantly more likely to earn less than $40,000 annually off-platform. They are more likely to be homemakers or unpaid carers – or, if employed, to be in work that is part-time, casual, or on a fixed-term contract.

Men in the gig economy are more likely to work in software development and technology, transport and food delivery and skilled trade, while women are more likely to participate in historically feminised work such as clerical and data entry, sales and marketing support, writing and translation and care work.

According to the report, 14% of women nominated the location of their platform work as being “in the home of an individual client”, compared to 5% of men.

Melbourne woman Lorna Berry said she took up ride-share driving in 2016 to supplement her income.

But Berry is the first to admit there are challenges unique to female drivers.

“You sometimes get your ‘Boomer man’, they’ll be the ones trying to tell you how to drive or which way to go. You get asked asked a lot, ‘Do you feel safe? Where’s your partner, what’s he’s doing?’ It’s none of your business,” she said.
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“I’ve had people criticise my driving – but then on the other hand some are really surprised I’m a good driver, it’s kind of a backhanded compliment.”

Women are also more at risk of psychical and sexual assault and exposure to illegal activity.


Gender pay gap narrows but Australian men still twice as likely as women to earn more than $120,000 a year

Berry recalled a man who insisted she drive the back streets of Eltham, north-east of Melbourne, late at night. She drove with a can of deodorant between her legs ready to use.

Another man claimed to be a police officer and repeatedly asked her if she had heard about a taxi driver that had recently been stabbed by a passenger and if she was scared.

“That was pretty unnerving. I reported him to Uber and I just got a generic response back that he had been spoken to and that I won’t be matched with him again. I still don’t know what amounted of it,” Berry said.

The Victorian government established an inquiry into the on-demand workforce in 2018 and has accepted all 20 recommendations either fully or in principle, including developing standards on fair conditions and pay.

“The gig economy can be a winner for workers, but for too many people – including many women – platform work can fail them on the test of fairness. We’re working to improve conditions in Victoria,” industrial relations minister Tim Pallas said.

Grant Shapps urges P&O Ferries to U-turn on sacking of 800 workers

The transport secretary is expected to close loopholes to ensure ferry companies pay the UK minimum wage

The European Causeway moored at the port of Larne on the north-east coast of Northern Ireland after it was detained by British authorities after ‘failures on crew familiarisation, vessel documentation and crew training’. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images


Rupert Jones

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 27 Mar 2022

Grant Shapps is writing to the chief executive of P&O Ferries urging him to announce a U-turn on the decision to sack 800 workers without notice, as unions pledged to “ratchet up the fight” after a weekend of protests.

The transport secretary is expected to present a package of legislation on Wednesday to close loopholes and ensure ferry companies running regular services to and from the British Isles pay their crew the UK minimum wage.

Government officials are understood to be meeting the rival operators Stena Line and DFDS on Monday to discuss the legislation, along with measures to tackle possible Easter travel chaos if services remain disrupted.

Fresh demonstrations against the sackings are planned for this week, with the RMT union turning its attention to P&O Ferries’ supply chain, including the maritime agencies involved with recruiting workers. The union said there would be a protest outside the Glasgow offices of Clyde Marine Recruitment, which describes itself as Europe’s leading supplier of marine personnel, on Monday morning.

Demonstrations took place in Liverpool, Dover and Hull on Saturday as the outcry continued over P&O Ferries’ decision to sack its crews and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.

The firm’s chief executive, Peter Hebblethwaite, admitted last week that it broke the law by dismissing the workers without consultation. He told a Commons hearing on Thursday: “There’s absolutely no doubt we were required to consult with the unions. We chose not to do that.”

It is understood Shapps will write to Hebblethwaite to say there is still time for the firm to reconsider its strategy,and it may as well act because otherwise the government will force its hand.

After calls from MPs and others for emergency action to be taken, the minister has pledged new legislation designed to make sure ferries using UK ports observe the national minimum wage, which is currently £8.91 an hour, rising to £9.50 on 1 April.

Meanwhile, a P&O Ferries source told the PA news agency that it conducted a study last year into options, which calculated it would cost £309m to keep the business going through a consultation period of at least three months, costs that would have seriously undermined the business and possibly dealt a fatal blow.

The RMT’s general secretary, Mick Lynch, has already called for the government to seize P&O’s fleet of ships, and for crew who were sacked without being consulted or given any notice to be reinstated.

Lynch said on Sunday: “There will be more protests, more campaigning and more political pressure this week as we ratchet up the fight and harness the public anger at the jobs carve-up on our ferries.” He claimed there would be “nowhere to run and nowhere to hide” for those involved.

On Sunday P&O Ferries said it would be “unable to run some of our services over the next few days”. As of Sunday afternoon, sailings from Dover to Calais were cancelled up to and including Thursday 31 March, and those between Larne and Cairnryan in Scotland remained suspended. Monday’s service between Rotterdam and Hull has been cancelled.

The government is subjecting all P&O ferries to inspections before allowing them back into service. One ship, the European Causeway, was impounded in Northern Ireland on Friday by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency after being deemed “unfit to sail” after an inspection found “failures on crew familiarisation, vessel documentation and crew training”.

At the moment passengers due to travel on some routes such as Dover to Calais are typically being advised by P&O Ferries that “we will get you away on an alternative carrier” such as DFDS, though it is unclear what will happen if rivals are fully booked, as may be the case over Easter.

Be ready to 'pivot' back to COVID 

restrictions, Anthony Fauci warns leaders

James Morris

·Freelance news writer, Yahoo UK

Sun, March 27, 2022, 

Dr Anthony Fauci (AFP via Getty Images)

Leaders need to be “flexible enough to pivot” back to coronavirus restrictions, America’s chief medical adviser has warned.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who advises US president Joe Biden, told the BBC’s Sunday Morning programme “we need to be prepared for the possibility” of “a more rigid type of restrictions” should another potentially harmful new variant emerge.

His warning comes as COVID cases, driven by the Omicron subvariant, once again surge around the world.

In England, the latest ONS infection survey - considered the gold standard in assessing the prevalence of COVID in the community - has estimated one in 16 people have the virus.

Meanwhile, there has been a sharp uptick in UK hospital admissions in March, though the number - 2,227 - admitted on Monday is still half the admissions - 4,580 - at the peak of the second wave of the pandemic in January last year.

Estimates of COVID infection numbers in the UK, according to the ONS infection survey. (PA)

And Dr Fauci added the surge "doesn’t appear to be associated with any increase in severity in the form of increased hospitalisations" in the context of eased restrictions.

Boris Johnson dropped all of England's COVID restrictions last month, with the Westminster government now using a “living with COVID” approach. More than 600,000 people will be invited for a booster jab next week.

But Dr Fauci, asked about the possible necessity of future restrictions, warned “we should be prepared”.

“I don’t want to use the word ‘lockdown’ as that has a charged element to it, but I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections right now.

“We need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along and then things change.

“And if we do get a variance that does give us an uptick in cases and hospitalisation, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot towards going back - at least temporarily - to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoors.”

Read more: COVID infections seven times higher than government figures this month, ONS data shows

On what next winter will look like, Dr Fauci added: “I think it’s really unpredictable. This virus has fooled us so often. We really don’t know and I think anyone who says they’re going to predict with any certainty what’s going to happen in the winter I think, is a bit of a stretch.”

Meanwhile, reflecting on COVID restrictions, UK education secretary Nadhim Zahawi has admitted the "mistake" of school closures between March and May 2020 and January and March last year.

Zahawi pledged this would “never again” happen following the disruption caused for millions of pupils.

Russian Actress Goes Into Exile In Latvia: Chulpan Khamatova Says “I Am Not A Traitor”


Caroline Frost
Sat, March 26, 2022


Chulpan Khamatova, a leading Russian actress who has also made several international film appearances, has given an interview saying that she has gone into exile in Latvia, following her country’s invasion of Ukraine.

Khamatova recorded an interview that was broadcast earlier this week on YouTube, explaining that she travelled to Riga on holiday several weeks ago with her daughters, but has decided to stay put rather than return to Russia.

“I thought at the start that I would just wait. Then I signed the petition against the war. And then it was made clear to me it would be undesirable for me to go back,” she said, according to RadioFreeEurope’s translation. “I know I am not a traitor. I love my motherland very much.”

Khamatova added that to make her return to Russia possible, she would either have to deny that a war was taking place or apologize for not supporting what President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation.”

“Lie to yourself, lie to the whole world, live not according to the truth,” she said.

Khamatova came to international renown for her role of Lara in the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin! In 2018, she appeared in The White Crow, Ralph Fiennes’ film chronicling the life and professional career of Rudolf Nureyev, and last year’s Cannes Film Festival prize-winning Petrov’s Flu.

She was on the six-person jury headed by Catherine Deneuve at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in 2006. She also leads the Gift of Life children’s cancer charity in Russia and several years previously appeared in a video praising Putin for his support.

Khamatova is the latest of several Russian cultural stars who have come out against the war being waged by their leader. Olga Smirnova was a principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow until last week, when she left Russia for the Netherlands, and immediately took up a role with the Dutch National Ballet.

Smirnova, who has a Ukrainian grandfather and describes herself as “one-quarter Ukrainian” recently denounced Russia’s invasion of the country.

A totally-paralyzed man was able to speak again thanks to a brain implant, a controversial study claims. It says he asked for beer and told his son he loved him.

Marianne Guenot

Fri, March 25, 2022, 

Scientists said the software pictured in this image can read the neural signals of the man with locked-in syndrome.Wyss Center, Geneva

• A study claims to describe how a man with locked-in syndrome could speak with his family again.

• Using a brain implant, the man was able to ask for a beer and tell his son he loves him, it said.

• Experts are split about the study as the authors' track record has been controversial.

Scientists say they have been able to communicate with a man with locked-in syndrome by using a brain implant, a medical first, they claim.

The findings could provide hope for patients in that state. But experts have been cautious to celebrate the study because of the author's controversial track record.

Per the case study, the brain implant was able to read the brain waves of a 34-year-old man who is completely paralyzed and has lost even the ability to move his eyes.

The man with locked-in syndrome is shown in his bed at home. He has not been named and is referred to as K1 in the paper.Wyss Center, Geneva

He was not named in the study, from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering and the University of Tübingen.

It was published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.

Per the study, the man learned how to formulate sentences 107 days into his training.

On day 245, he spelled out: "wili ch tool balbum mal laut hoerenzn," a rough spelling in German which the scientists translated to "I would like to listen to the album by Tool loud," the study said. Tool is a rock band.

On day 247, he spelled: "und jetwzt ein bier"— "and now a beer," per the study, which the study authors say would have to be delivered by a gastrointestinal tube

On day 251, he spelled "ich liebe meinen coolen" followed by his son's name, which translated to "I love my cool son" per the study.

It said the man has degenerative amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and was first diagnosed in August 2015.

He lost the ability to speak and walk by the end of 2015, per the study.

He has been in home care and machines have fed him and controlled his breathing since 2016, per the study.

He had been able to communicate with his wife and child by moving his eyes, the study said, but lost this ability in 2019.

The brain implant is 0.1 inches wide and has 64 needle‐like electrodes that record neural signals.Wyss Center, Geneva

Results mired by controversial track records

This is not the first foray into this field for two of the study authors: Niel Birbaumer, a now-retired neuroscientist, and Ujwal Chaudhary, a bioengineer, per The New York Times.

The authors have previously published research claiming to be able to communicate with patients with locked-in syndrome, but both papers were ultimately retracted — a process by which peer-reviewed journals signal a mistake that makes the paper invalid.

A 2019 investigation conducted by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which funded some of the work, found "several cases of scientific misconduct" from Birbaumer and Chaudhary, including that they "only partially recorded the examinations of their patients on video."

The DFG imposed severe sanctions against Birbaumer, banning him from applying for grants and from serving as an evaluator for five years, per Nature News.

Chaudhary and Birbaumer have stood by their research. "This is finally our redemption," Chaudhary told STAT News.

Birbaumer has taken legal action against the DFG and the result of the lawsuit will be published in coming weeks, per the Times.

A DFG spokesperson told The Times the body expects to win the case and aims to investigate Birbaumer's latest research as well.

Neural data recorded by the implant is shown here.Wyss Center, Geneva

Experts split on the interpretation of the data

Experts who were not involved in the study do not agree on how significant it is.

Femke Nijboer, biomedical researcher of the Dutch University of Twente, said that the finding was "important," per STAT News.

It shows people with locked-in syndrome can manipulate their brain signals to communicate, Nijboer said per STAT News.

"It's a game-changer," said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège said, per the Times. The study could have ethical implications for euthanasia of patients in locked-in states, the Times reported.

But Brendan Allison, a University of California San Diego researcher, said the study "like other work by Birbaumer, should be taken with a massive mountain of salt given his history," per the Times.