What is monkeypox and should UK residents be worried?

With seven cases identified in Britain, experts are looking for the source of the infections and how it is being spread

Dr Susan Hopkins says UKHSA is ‘rapidly investigating the source … because the evidence suggests there may be transmission in the community’. 

Photograph: Hannah McKay/AFP/Getty Images


Nicola Davis 

Science correspondent
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 17 May 2022 

With the number of cases of monkeypox in the UK rising to seven, what is the situation and is it cause for concern?

What is monkeypox?

Monkeypox is a viral infection typically found in central and western Africa. A handful of cases have previously been diagnosed in the UK, with the first recorded in 2018 in an individual thought to have contracted the virus in Nigeria.

There are two forms of monkeypox, a milder west African strain and a more severe central African, or Congo strain. It is thought the recently diagnosed individuals have the west African strain.
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According to the UK Health Security Agency, early symptoms of monkeypox include fever, headache, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes and chills, as well as other features such as exhaustion.

“A rash can develop, often beginning on the face, then spreading to other parts of the body, including the genitals,” the UKHSA says. “The rash changes and goes through different stages, and can look like chickenpox or syphilis, before finally forming a scab, which later falls off.”

Most patients recover from monkeypox in a few weeks.

How is it spread?

Monkeypox does not spread easily between humans, and requires close contact. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is thought that human-to-human transmission primarily occurs through large respiratory droplets.

“Respiratory droplets generally cannot travel more than a few feet, so prolonged face-to-face contact is required,” the CDC says. “Other human-to-human methods of transmission include direct contact with body fluids or lesion material, and indirect contact with lesion material, such as through contaminated clothing or linens.”

How many new cases are there in the UK?

The first recent case in the UK was reported on 7 May, with the patient having recently travelled to Nigeria. A week later a further two patients were reported to be receiving treatment for monkeypox in London. They lived in the same household and their infections are thought to be unconnected to the previous case.

On Monday another four cases of monkeypox were reported, three in London and one in the north-east of England. These four cases do not appear to be linked to any of the previous ones, and all those involved are thought to have been infected in London. All four of these cases are in men who self-identify as gay, bisexual, or men who have sex with men.

The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that it was now coordinating with UK and other European health officials.

Does this mean monkeypox is sexually transmitted?

Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, says the latest cases may be the first time transmission of monkeypox though sexual contact has been documented, but this has not been confirmed, and in any case it is probably close contact that matters.

“There is no evidence that it is a sexually transmitted virus, such as HIV,” Head says. “It’s more that here the close contact during sexual or intimate activity, including prolonged skin-to-skin contact, may be the key factor during transmission.”

The UKHSA is advising gay and bisexual men, as well as other communities of men who have sex with men, to look out for unusual rashes or lesions on any part of their body, in particular their genitalia. “Anyone with concerns that they could be infected with monkeypox is advised to make contact with clinics ahead of their visit,” the UKHSA says.

How concerned should we be?

At present, the answer seems to be not very. Experts have suggested it is unlikely there will be a large outbreak, although it is important contacts of those infected are identified.

Dr Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser at UKHSA, calls the situation “rare and unusual” but adds: “UKHSA is rapidly investigating the source of these infections because the evidence suggests that there may be transmission of the monkeypox virus in the community, spread by close contact.”

JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY ANTI VAX POSTER 1953

Private Notebooks 1914-1916 by Ludwig Wittgenstein review – sex and logic


Translated into English for the first time, these diaries provide a glimpse into the innermost thoughts of a great philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: ‘Remember how great the blessing of work is!’ 

Photograph: Pictorial Press/Alamy


Anil Gomes
Wed 18 May 2022 

Ludwig Wittgenstein joined the army the day after his native Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia in August 1914. He had been serving for almost three months when he received word that his brother Paul, a concert pianist, had lost his right arm in battle. “Again and again,” he wrote in his notebook, “I have to think of poor Paul, who has so suddenly been deprived of his vocation! How terrible! What philosophical outlook would it take to overcome such a thing? Can it even happen except through suicide!”

Wittgenstein was an unusual philosopher. He became obsessed with the foundations of logic while an engineering student and presented himself to Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, ready to solve all its problems. His intent was to provide an account of logic that was free from paradox and his solution came in the form of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, sent to Russell from the Italian prisoner-of-war camp in which Wittgenstein was held at the end of the first world war.

The Tractatus is written as a series of numbered propositions, closer in form to modernist poetry than philosophical treatise. Its central ideas can be traced back to the notebooks Wittgenstein kept during the early years of the conflict. The right-hand side of each spread was used to set out his evolving thoughts on logic and language. The left-hand side was saved for his personal notes, written in a simple code in which the letters of the alphabet were reversed (Z = A, and so on).

The Journey of Humanity review – ambitious bid to explain society’s economic development

It is these private remarks that are published in English here for the first time, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff. They range from complaints about the other soldiers – “a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!” – to the number of times he masturbates (“Yesterday, for the first time in 3 weeks”). He recounts his depression – “like a stone it presses on my chest. Every duty turns into an unbearable burden” – and his living conditions. These are accompanied by constant updates on how his work is going. And by “work”, he always means philosophy. “Remember how great the blessing of work is!” he writes. This work is the focus; the war, a backdrop.

Wittgenstein’s solution to the problems of logic was largely in place by 1916. And had his contribution to philosophy ended there, the Tractatus might be unknown beyond that particular sub-field. But the book ends with a series of puzzling remarks on ethics, value and the meaning of life – remarks that Wittgenstein thought central to his project but which both confused and frustrated his first readers. It is here that the Notebooks tantalise. For in the material on the left-hand pages Wittgenstein first begins to reflect on the inner self, on God’s presence in the world, on what is required for life to make sense. It can sometimes seem irrelevant to the discussion of logic taking place on the right-hand side. “Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things,” he writes, “but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.”

He has the obsessive focus of a philosophical genius – one who thinks constantly about his work, even under enemy fire

And then in 1916, facing death on the frontline, the connection is forged. Paradox in logic arises when you try to say those things that can only be shown. But that applies equally to God, the self and meaning. As he writes on a left-hand page, “What cannot be said, cannot be said”. The purview of ethics, like the purview of logic, lies outside the realm of what can be stated in language. And thus we get to the seventh and final statement of the Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

For those who know the Tractatus, there is some interest in seeing how concerns that start life among the personal remarks slowly drift over to the facing page. For those who do not care about these details, there is interest in seeing first-hand the obsessive focus of a philosophical genius – one who thinks constantly about his work, even under enemy fire. When he writes of “laying siege”, it is to philosophical problems; when he wants to “spill [his] blood before this fortress”, it is in the context of logic.

Even the masturbation is hard to separate from the philosophy: it happens when work is going well. For Wittgenstein, it seems, masturbation and philosophy are both expressions of living in the face of death.

Perloff sees allusion to sexual affairs in some of Wittgenstein’s taciturn remarks. He records evening visits to the baths in Kraków and notes, somewhat matter-of-factly at the start of a new year, that “my moral standing is now much lower than it was at Easter”. More affecting is his unambiguous love and desire for his Cambridge friend David Pinsent. “A letter from David!! I kissed it. Answered right away.” Pinsent didn’t survive the war. He was a test pilot in Farnborough and died in an accident in May 1918. The Tractatus – one of the most significant works in 20th-century philosophy – is dedicated to his memory.

Private Notebooks 1914-1916 is published by WW Norton 

Mexican farmers demand redress for illegal mining and violence on their land

Owners of community land bought shares to join annual meeting of Fresnillo, a Mexican FTSE 100 company

Javi Martinez, from London Mining Network, left, Sergio Camacho, lawyer for El Bajío and Bartolo Pacheco, from El Bajío, protest at the annual meeting in London of Fresnillo. 

Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

Haroon Siddique 

Legal affairs correspondent

The Guardian

Tue 17 May 2022 18.56 BST

Mexican farmers have travelled to London to demand that a FTSE 100 company compensates them for illegal mining on their land and explain violence against anti-mining activists.

Penmont mining, a subsidiary of Fresnillo, was ordered by an agrarian court in Mexico in 2013 to pay members of El Bajío community, co-owners of common land in Sonora, north-west Mexico, for the gold extracted and to restore the land to its original state.

Having bought shares in Fresnillo, three El Bajío representatives, as well as activists from London Mining Network and London Mexico Solidarity, entered the company’s annual meeting to ask the chairman why it had not complied with the court order and about the kidnapping, disappearance and murder of anti-mining activists.

Fresnillo told the Guardian it had complied with the court order by vacating the land and that it had no connection to any violence.

Jesús Thomas, one of the co-owners, said after the meeting: “We have spent eight years trying to get justice for our people. There are tonnes of cyanide in the soil, a lot of animals are dead. I made it clear to them [in the meeting] that they are in the wrong. They never said anything in reply, they don’t have any answer.

“At least the owners of the company now have the right information to decide whether they are going to do the right thing.”

In 2018, two members of El Bajío community – Raúl Ibarra de la Paz and his wife, Noemí López – were killed and disappeared respectively. Last year the president of the community, José de Jesús Robledo Cruz, and his wife, María de Jesús Gómez Vega, were killed and a list of the names of 13 other members who have fought against mining was found next to their bodies. Penmont has previously suggested criminal gangs were to blame for the violence.

Fresnillio, which in 2008 became the first Mexican company to list on the London Stock Exchange, made gross profit of $936.9m (£788m) last year, according to its annual report.

El Bajío says that between 2010 and 2013 the company extracted 236,709 ounces of gold and removed 10,833,527 tonnes of earth, making profits of about $436m.

A spokesperson for Fresnillo said: “Our purpose is to contribute to the wellbeing of people through the sustainable mining of silver and gold. Core to this is how we engage with our local communities and we are proud to have an extensive series of community programmes across our business based on decades of trust and cooperation.

“We comply with all laws, in all our markets, at all times and obviously reject immediately any suggestion we are in any way responsible for the tragic deaths of community members. Fresnillo employees themselves have been victim of continued inter-community violence. More specifically, Fresnillo has complied fully with the court order and as a result, vacated 1,824 hectares of land, resulting in the suspension of operations at Soledad-Dipolos since 2013.”

Canada: trial of white men who killed two Indigenous hunters in 2020 begins

Roger Bilodeau and his son Anthony Bilodeau believed that Jacob Sansom and Maurice Cardinal were thieves, court hears

Jacob Sansom (L) and his uncle Maurice Cardinal were shot dead on a rural road in eastern Alberta, Canada in March 2020. Composite: Nobleford & District Emergency Services/Facebook

Leyland Cecco 

in Toronto

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 17 May 2022 

Two white Canadian men followed and then shot dead two Indigenous hunters because they believed they were thieves, prosecutors have told a court at the start of a murder trial in Alberta.

Roger Bilodeau, 58, and his son Anthony Bilodeau, 33, have both pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder over the deaths of Jacob Sansom and his uncle, Maurice Cardinal in March 2020.

The bodies of Sansom, 39, and Cardinal, 57, were found early on 28 March beside Sansom’s pickup truck on a country road near Glendon, a farming town 160 miles north-east of Edmonton.

Sansom had recently lost his job as a mechanic and worked as a volunteer firefighter. Cardinal was a keen hunter and outdoorsman. Both were Métis – a distinct group that traces lineage to both Indigenous nations and European settlers – and had permission to hunt the area out of season.

The killing of the men, who were returning from a successful moose hunting trip to help provide food for family members, shocked the region.

Prosecutors told an Edmonton jury on Monday that the two Bilodeaus followed the two hunters, assuming the men were thieves. Roger Bilodeau believed the hunters’ truck resembled a vehicle that had been on his property earlier that day.

As he followed the truck, Bilodeau called his son and asked him to follow behind and to bring a gun, said the Crown.

Roger Bilodeau and the hunters stopped their trucks along a country road near Glendon.

Anthony Bilodeau arrived moments later and prosecutors say he shot Sansom, then Cardinal. A postmortem concluded that Sansom was shot once in the chest and Cardinal was shot three times in his shoulder.

The Bilodeaus then drove away without notifying police or paramedics. The bodies of the two men – Sansom lying in the middle of the road and Cardinal in a ditch – were discovered early the next morning by a motorist.

“These were in no way justified killings,” said prosecutor Jordan Kerr, adding that the younger Bilodeau “freely made the decision to arm himself” and pursue the two men. Roger Bilodeau “clearly anticipated having a confrontation” and so “recruited” his son into bringing a weapon, Kerr said.

But a lawyer for the Bilodeaus say the men acted in self defence amid concerns over property crime in the area.

Lawyer Shawn Gerstel told the jury that the encounter on the rural road that night quickly escalated and that Sansom had smashed a window of Roger’s truck and punched him multiple times.

“[Roger] asked for a gun for protection because he didn’t know who he was dealing with,” said Gerstel. The defence said the collar of Roger’s shirt was torn half off and Sansom’s blood was found on three areas of Bilodeau’s shirt.

RACIST TROPE OF THE DRUNK INDIAN

The defence also alleges the hunters were drunk and a medical examiner is expected to testify that Sansom’s blood alcohol level was almost triple the legal driving limit. Cardinal’s blood alcohol limit was nearly double the legal the limit for driving, the defence says.

On Monday, Sansom’s brother James told the court that Jacob was trained as a martial artist and had the ability to de-escalate tense situations.

The trial continues.

THE SO CALLED FEAR OF THE STRANGER ON PRIVATE PROPERTY IS OFTEN USED AS A JUSTIFICATION IN CASES LIKE THIS INVOLVING FIRST NATIONS HUNTERS AND WHITE FARMERS 

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/05/property-is-theft-private-property.html

Accidental discovery that scallops love ‘disco’ lights leads to new fishing technique

Scientists hail breakthrough that could maximise catches while reducing damage caused by fishing

The marine scientist Dr Rob Enever and his team at Devon-based Fishtek Marine designed small underwater ‘potlights’ to help protect fish stocks by replacing the need to use fish to bait crab and lobster pots.

 Photograph: Simon Hird/Fishtek Marine


Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by

About this content

Anna Turns
Wed 18 May 2022

An unusual technique for catching scallops that was stumbled upon accidentally by scientists could potentially reduce some of the damage caused to our seabeds by fishing.

The marine scientist Dr Rob Enever and his team at Fishtek Marine, a fisheries consultancy based in Devon, designed small underwater “potlights” to help protect fish stocks by replacing the need to use fish to bait crab and lobster pots.

The lights were supposed to attract crabs into the pots. But quite unexpectedly, scallops, which can have up to 200 eyes, were more attracted to the LED lights. “It’s like a scallop disco – illuminate the trap and they come in. It’s astonishing that no one else has discovered this before. It’s quite an exciting find,” said Enever.

Scallops jump into pots with ‘disco’ lights in potential new fishing strategy – video

“This has the potential to open up a whole new inshore fishery and that’s a global first.”

Commercially, scallops are the most valuable fishery in England and the fourth most valuable in the UK, according to the latest government sea fisheries statistics. Most are caught by dredging, which at an industrial-scale is damaging to marine habitats. However, using scuba divers to hand-pick them is labour intensive, time-consuming and therefore more expensive.

Enever hopes scallop potting could create a low-input, low-impact fishery that supplements the income of crab and lobster fishers with this high-value catch.
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In 2019, Enever, who specialises in reducing the impacts of fishing on the marine environment using technology, trialled the potlights with the Newlyn-based fisher Jon Ashworth off the Cornish coast. Although Ashworth did not notice any difference in crab or lobster catches, he found huge numbers of European king scallops in his pots.

The lights were supposed to attract crabs into the pots but unexpectedly scallops were more attracted to the LED lights. 

Photograph: Simon Hird/Fishtek Marine

“Pretty much every pot that we hauled had scallops in them and yet every haul without lights had no scallops. It was conclusive, there and then,” said Ashworth. “To have proof that lights can be used to catch scallops has got to have some awesome implications looking forward.”

In further experiments, a total of 1,886 pots were hauled – 985 experimental pots with lights caught 518 scallops; 901 control pots without lights caught only two. Overall, 99.6% of scallops were caught in pots with lights. This research, funded by Defra and Natural England, is outlined in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Fisheries Research this week.

In experiments, of 1,886 pots hauled, 985 pots with lights caught 518 scallops while 901 pots without lights caught only two. 

Photograph: Simon Hird/Fishtek Marine

Dr Bryce Stewart, a marine ecologist and fisheries biologist at the University of York, has studied scallops for more than 20 years and co-authored the paper with Evener

“This is one of the most exciting things I have come across in my whole career – it’s such a surprise,” said Stewart, who describes scallop eyes as ‘pretty weird’. Scallops can have up to 200 eyes on their mantle, along the inner edges of their shell openings.

“Most animals, including us, have lenses but scallops don’t. They have mirrors at the back of their eyes and they also have two retinas, one which senses darker things, one that senses lighter things, so they can possibly use that contrast to sense movement. Perhaps they prefer illuminated areas because they provide safety from predators or because it’s easier to find the plankton they eat.”



Powered by two rechargeable AA batteries, each small potlight is secured inside the pot and is expected to last between five and 10 years. The trap design has been modified with a ramp for easier access into the modified pot and Enever continues to refine the potlight technology – tank experiments indicate that scallops are more attracted to blue light than white light, for example. If the team can design a light system aimed specifically to catch scallops, that could open up the possibilities of doing this at scale, according to Stewart.

“Scallops are famous for their good vision,” said Dr Vicky Sleight, a marine biologist at the University of Aberdeen. “Scallop eyes have a surprisingly high degree of visual clarity and their attraction to artificial light is intriguing. Follow-up laboratory experiments are required to understand why they are attracted into pots, and if it’s a reliable and reproducible behaviour at a range of different types of scallop sites, then it’s certainly an exciting prospect to grow a more sustainable scallop fishery.”

The Fishtek team are repeating these experiments in four more UK locations, from Lyme Bay to the Orkney Islands, using different trap designs in various conditions and depths.

“Our goal is to get as close to a commercially viable fishery as we can,” added Enever. “I genuinely think we can do that, it’s got mileage.”

US supreme court abortion reversal would be global ‘catastrophe’ for women

If Roe v Wade is overturned, it will encourage anti-choice groups – particularly in the developing world, activists warn

GLOBAL PENTACOSTALISM

A pro-choice activist in Alberta, Canada, protests in solidarity with women in the US after the supreme court’s opinion was leaked. 

Photograph: Artur Widak/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock


Global development is supported by

About this content

Lizzy Davies

Wed 18 May 2022 07.00 BST

The probable demise of abortion as a federal right in the US will be a “catastrophe” for women in low and middle-income countries, with an emboldened anti-choice movement likely to raise renewed pressure on hard-won gains, doctors and activists have warned.

The leak this month of the US supreme court’s draft majority opinion, which argued that the 1973 ruling effectively legalising abortion had been “egregiously wrong from the start”, stunned and enraged many in America.

But those shock waves did not stop at the borders of the US, as pro-choice figures around the world – many in countries with restrictive abortion laws and high levels of social stigma around reproductive rights – warned that Justice Samuel Alito’s words would “send a really clear message” of inspiration to anti-choice groups.

“I’m sure the pro-life or anti-choice movement in [Uganda] must be hoping and praying that the Roe v Wade legislation be overturned. I’m sure if that succeeds, it will be the biggest achievement the anti-choice movement [has] registered. I’m sure they will use it significantly to counter the work and the gains we thought we had registered,” said Kenneth Buyinza, a Kampala-based doctor.

Abortion in Uganda is legal in certain circumstances but highly restricted and dogged by stigma and misinformation. A ministry of health report in 2010 attributed about 8% of the country’s maternal deaths to unsafe abortion.

It is far from the only country in sub-Saharan Africa to see a strong link between stubbornly high levels of maternal mortality and unsafe abortions carried out by unlicensed practitioners, often in unsanitary conditions and without the proper equipment.

In such countries, the potential for the US move to encourage anti-choice politicians, judges and activists and further hold back abortion rights could not be more worrying.

“If Roe v Wade is reversed it would be a victory for anti-choice groups who finance the opposition in Africa and a catastrophe for us. It could influence policymakers and mean that in Africa we will keep seeing women dying. Whatever we have gained could be lost,” said Abebe Shibru, Ethiopia country director for MSI Reproductive Choices.

Another region where Alito’s words have caused alarm is Central America, where three countries have total bans on abortion: El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. In another, Guatemala, lawmakers recently increased prison sentences for women found to have had an abortion, legal only if the mother’s life is at risk.
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Eugenia López Uribe, regional director for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, warned the US move would inspire anti-choice policymakers in countries such as Guatemala.

“They can see that if they change the laws and they go against women’s rights, they can do it without any consequence,” she said. “The sign they are giving now is that women’s rights can be on the table for negotiations. So this is very worrisome.”

An unplanned pregnancy information poster in Kampala, Uganda. Campaigners fear a chilling effect on African governments’ funding for family planning services. Photograph: Bsip Sa/Alamy

Sarah Shaw, head of advocacy at MSI, said the potential for legislative backsliding was clear. “A lot of the countries in which we work that have less restrictive abortion laws are probably a little bit ahead of where the country is socially. So they are very, very fragile. So it’s not going to take much to undermine them, overturn them,” she said.

In recent years US funding has been essential to the anti-choice movement globally, and Shaw said she feared the overturning of Roe would prompt a surge in the flow of money. In countries where corruption is rife and political systems are vulnerable to “dark money” lobbying, the impact could be sizeable.

The other major concern was that in countries heavily dependent on US aid for public health programmes the move could have a “chilling effect” on African governments’ commitment to abortion provision and other reproductive rights, making them “think twice about what they spend money on”, said Shaw.


Killed by abortion laws: five women whose stories we must never forget

“If there’s a chilling on prioritisation and funding for services that are already massively deprioritised and massively underfunded it’s going to be catastrophic,” she added.

Buyinza, who also works at the Uganda family planning consortium, said he worried the move could affect “fundraising and resource allocations to maternal and child health interventions”. He added that in Uganda – perhaps as in the US – anti-choice forces would be unlikely to stop at abortion, broadening their attacks on other areas such as LGBT+ rights.

“[By] taking this kind of action, [the US] is actually holding the flag very high now for countries that are still struggling with human rights issues, like, for instance, Uganda, but many other countries. There is no doubt that having this legislation overturned is going to have a significant bearing, [and] most likely it is going to be negative,” he said.

In his draft opinion laying out why Roe should fall, Alito concluded that the right to abortion was “not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions”. Such reasoning was deeply problematic, warned Buyinza.

“Someone might be looking at abortion rights in isolation, but … there are so many things that are not … rooted in Ugandan and African ‘traditions and history’. And that goes beyond just abortion rights,” he added.

Facebook fails to stop Spanish language anti-abortion disinformation, study says

A group examined nine profiles reaching more than 2.79 million people peddling inaccurate information without consequence

The report comes as the US supreme court is expected to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters


Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 18 May 2022

Anti-abortion Facebook pages with millions of followers are spreading disinformation about abortion to Spanish speakers with little to no intervention from the social media platform, according to a new report from Naral Pro-Choice America.


‘Think Before You Link’: app launched to help social media users detect fake profiles

The abortion rights group examined nine Facebook pages that reach more than 2.79 million people for the first-of-its-kind report, part of its efforts to show how disinformation is disseminated by opponents of abortion. Researchers found that several of the pages “repeatedly spread medically inaccurate information about abortion without any action from Facebook”, highlighting what experts have described as a crisis of Spanish-language misinformation that’s slipping through the cracks.

The report comes as reproductive rights are in peril in the US with the supreme court expected to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, which guaranteed the right to abortion in the US.

“It has never been more critical for people to have access to medically accurate information about abortion – no matter the language they speak. What’s clear here is that anti-choice extremists are capitalizing on social media companies’ failure to moderate Spanish-language disinformation,” Mini Timmaraju, the Naral Pro-Choice America president, said in a statement.

Research from the group found that articles in Spanish focused on US abortion policy that received the most engagement on social media “overwhelmingly lean anti-choice” and come from outlets with religious affiliations.

Many of the Spanish-language Facebook pages examined by Naral researchers spread disinformation about the safety of abortion, claiming that it leads to increased risk of breast cancer, anxiety, infertility, depression and suicide. Some posts have been viewed thousands of times without intervention from Facebook.

The content spreads the same disinformation about abortion as English-language anti-abortion groups, which also push medically inaccurate information about abortion and demonizes abortion providers, the report says.

Catholicism plays a key role in much of the Spanish-language content, which suggests that support for abortion care conflicts with religious identity. The Spanish-speaking anti-abortion movement relies on stereotypes, said Gabriela Rico, the lead researcher for the report, such as that Latinx people widely oppose abortion and are all Catholic.

“This is not only a false, racist assumption, but a way for the anti-choice movement to erase the majority of Latinx people who support reproductive freedom – often because of, not in spite of, their faith,” Rico, a Naral research manger, said.

A recent Navigator Research poll found that 65% of Hispanic Americans support Congress passing a law to guarantee the right to an abortion in the US.

The spread of abortion disinformation is part of Facebook’s broader failure to moderate Spanish-language content, experts say. A study last year found that only 30% of misinformation in Spanish is flagged with warning labels, compared to 70% in English. Lawmakers have called on the company to do more to address what they deemed a “disinformation crisis”. In a response to lawmakers, Facebook focused on the resources the company has put into limiting misinformation, stating that it has “35,000 people working on these challenges”.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Naral’s findings.

Multiple social media platforms have failed to stop disinformation about abortion in Spanish and English, but Facebook’s moderation decisions have been “particularly problematic”, the report said.

The failure to remove abortion disinformation has “direct implications for the 72% of Latinx people in the United States who use its platform”, the report states.

“Latinx communities are targeted with anti-choice disinformation constantly – I have seen this not only in my work on this report, but in my own family and community,” Rico said. “Spanish-speaking people deserve to receive accurate information about reproductive freedom, not to be lied to and used as pawns in a political game.”

With Roe in doubt, some fear tech surveillance of pregnancy



PHILADELPHIA (AP) — When Chandler Jones realized she was pregnant during her junior year of college, she turned to a trusted source for information and advice.

Her cellphone.

“I couldn’t imagine before the internet, trying to navigate this,” said Jones, 26, who graduated Tuesday from the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I didn’t know if hospitals did abortions. I knew Planned Parenthood did abortions, but there were none near me. So I kind of just Googled.”

But with each search, Jones was being surreptitiously followed — by the phone apps and browsers that track us as we click away, capturing even our most sensitive health data.

Online searches. Period apps. Fitness trackers. Advice helplines. GPS. The often obscure companies collecting our health history and geolocation data may know more about us than we know ourselves.

For now, the information is mostly used to sell us things, like baby products targeted to pregnant women. But in a post-Roe world — if the Supreme Court upends the 1973 decision that legalized abortion, as a draft opinion suggests it may in the coming weeks — the data would become more valuable, and women more vulnerable.


Privacy experts fear that pregnancies could be surveilled and the data shared with police or sold to vigilantes.

“The value of these tools for law enforcement is for how they really get to peek into the soul,” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation. “It gives (them) the mental chatter inside our heads.”

___

HIPAA, HOTLINES, HEALTH HISTORIES

The digital trail only becomes clearer when we leave home, as location apps, security cameras, license plate readers and facial recognition software track our movements. The development of these tech tools has raced far ahead of the laws and regulations that might govern them.

And it's not just women who should be concerned. The same tactics used to surveil pregnancies can be used by life insurance companies to set premiums, banks to approve loans and employers to weigh hiring decisions, experts said.

Or it could — and sometimes does — send women who experience miscarriages cheery ads on their would-be child’s birthday.

It's all possible because HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, protects medical files at your doctor’s office but not the information that third-party apps and tech companies collect about you. Nor does HIPAA cover the health histories collected by non-medical “crisis pregnancy centers, ” which are run by anti-abortion groups. That means the information can be shared with, or sold to, almost anyone.

Jones contacted one such facility early in her Google search, before figuring out they did not offer abortions.

“The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal data have never been more clear. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said last week.

For myriad reasons, both political and philosophical, data privacy laws in the U.S. have lagged far behind those adopted in Europe in 2018.

Until this month, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation that led one data broker to remove family planning centers from the customer “pattern” data it sells. The files included approximate patient addresses (down to the census block, derived from where their cellphones “sleep” at night), income brackets, time spent at the clinic, and the top places people stopped before and after their visits.

While the data did not identify patients by name, experts say that can often be pieced together, or de-anonymized, with a little sleuthing.

In Arkansas, a new law will require women seeking an abortion to first call a state hotline and hear about abortion alternatives. The hotline, set to debut next year, will cost the state nearly $5 million a year to operate. Critics fear it will be another way to track pregnant women, either by name or through an identifier number. Other states are considering similar legislation.

The widespread surveillance capabilities alarm privacy experts who fear what’s to come if Roe v. Wade is overturned. The Supreme Court is expected to issue its opinion by early July.

“A lot of people, where abortion is criminalized — because they have nowhere to go — are going to go online, and every step that they take (could) ... be surveilled,” Conti-Cook said.

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PUNISH WOMEN, DOCTORS OR FRIENDS?

Women of color like Jones, along with poor women and immigrants, could face the most dire consequences if Roe falls since they typically have less power and money to cover their tracks. They also tend to have more abortions, proportionally, perhaps because they have less access to health care, birth control and, in conservative states, schools with good sex education programs.

The leaked draft suggests the Supreme Court could be ready to let states ban or severely restrict abortion through civil or criminal penalties. More than half are poised to do so. Abortion foes have largely promised not to punish women themselves, but instead target their providers or people who help them access services.

“The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman,” Republican state Rep. Jim Olsen of Oklahoma said last month of a new law that makes performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

But abortion advocates say that remains to be seen.

“When abortion is criminalized, pregnancy outcomes are investigated,” said Tara Murtha, the communications director at the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, who recently co-authored a report on digital surveillance in the abortion sphere.

She wonders where the scrutiny would end. Prosecutors have already taken aim at women who use drugs during pregnancy, an issue Justice Clarence Thomas raised during the Supreme Court arguments in the case in December.

“Any adverse pregnancy outcome can turn the person who was pregnant into a suspect," Murtha said.

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STATE LIMITS, TECH STEPS, PERSONAL TIPS

A few states are starting to push back, setting limits on tech tools as the fight over consumer privacy intensifies.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, through a legal settlement, stopped a Boston-based ad company from steering anti-abortion smartphone ads to women inside clinics there that offer abortion services, deeming it harassment. The firm had even proposed using the same “geofencing” tactics to send anti-abortion messages to high school students.

In Michigan, voters amended the state Constitution to prohibit police from searching someone's data without a warrant. And in California, home to Silicon Valley, voters passed a sweeping digital privacy law that lets people see their data profiles and ask to have them deleted. The law took effect in 2020.

The concerns are mounting, and have forced Apple, Google and other tech giants to begin taking steps to rein in the sale of consumer data. That includes Apple’s launch last year of its App Tracking Transparency feature, which lets iPhone and iPad users block apps from tracking them.

Abortion rights activists, meanwhile, suggest women in conservative states leave their cellphones, smartwatches and other wearable devices at home when they seek reproductive health care, or at least turn off the location services. They should also closely examine the privacy policies of menstrual trackers and other health apps they use.

“There are things that people can do that can help mitigate their risk. Most people will not do them because they don’t know about it or it’s inconvenient,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “There are very, very few people who have the savvy to do everything.”

Digital privacy was the last thing on Jones’s mind when she found herself pregnant. She was in crisis. She and her partner had ambitious career goals. After several days of searching, she found an appointment for an abortion in nearby Delaware. Fortunately, he had a car.

“When I was going through this, it was just survival mode,” said Jones, who took part in a march Saturday in downtown Baltimore to support abortion rights.

Besides, she said, she's grown up in the Internet age, a world in which "all of my information is being sold constantly.”

But news of the leaked Supreme Court draft sparked discussions at her law school this month about privacy, including digital privacy in the era of Big Data.

“Literally, because I have my cell phone in my pocket, if I go to a CVS, they know I went to a CVS,” the soon-to-be lawyer said. “I think the privacy right is such a deeper issue in America (and one) that is being violated all the time.”

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This story corrects the title of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who is a senator, not representative.

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Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale

Maryclaire Dale, The Associated Press

Republican Senate candidates promote ‘replacement’ theory

By STEVE PEOPLES

FILE - Republican Senate candidate JD Vance speaks at a rally at the Delaware County Fairgrounds, April 23, 2022, in Delaware, Ohio. Former President Donald Trump's late-stage endorsement of JD Vance in Ohio's GOP Senate primary catapulted the “Hillbilly Elegy” author to victory in last week's election, reinforcing the deep loyalty the former president holds among the most loyal Republican voters.

 (AP Photo/Joe Maiorana, File)


NEW YORK (AP) — Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America.

In some cases, the comments have gone largely overlooked given the hard-line immigration rhetoric that has become commonplace among conservatives during the Trump era. But a weekend mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that may have been inspired by the racist theory is drawing new attention to the GOP’s growing embrace of white nationalist creed.

Three weeks ago in Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with millions of immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.” A few days later in Missouri, Senate hopeful Eric Schmitt, the state attorney general, said Democrats were “fundamentally trying to change this country through illegal immigration.” And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”

Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”

Some of the Republican campaigns denied that their statements amounted to replacement theory, but among the experts, there is little question.

Five experts on hate speech who reviewed the Republican candidates’ comments confirmed that they promote the baseless racist theory, even though the Republicans don’t mention race directly.

“Comments like these demonstrate two essential features of great replacement conspiracy theory. They predict racial doomsday, saying that it is all part of an orchestrated master plan. It’s only the language that has been softened,” said American University professor Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. “The basic story they tell is the same one we see in white supremacist chats across the internet: An enemy is orchestrating doom for white Americans by plotting to fill the country with nonwhites.”

Indeed, a mainstream interpretation of replacement theory in the U.S. baselessly suggests Democrats are encouraging immigration from Latin America so more like-minded potential voters replace “traditional” Americans, says Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.

Such a message has become a central component of the modern-day conservative movement’s appeal to voters. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly warned of an immigrant invasion on the southern border, and he was slow to condemn white supremacy throughout his presidency.

Shortly after taking office, Trump shared a social media post from someone with the username WhiteGenocideTM.

Replacement theory is being investigated as a motivating factor in the Buffalo supermarket shooting, which killed 10 Black people and left three other people injured.

President Joe Biden condemned replacement theory directly — and those who spread it, although he did not name names — after meeting with victims’ families Tuesday in Buffalo.

“Hate, that through the media, and politics, the internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced — that’s the word, ‘replaced’ — by the others, by people who don’t look like them,” Biden charged.

“I call on all Americans to reject the lie,” the Democratic president continued. “And I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit.”

Rep. Liz Cheney, who was ousted from House Republican leadership for her outspoken criticism of Trump, blamed her own party on Monday for enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism.”

“History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Cheney tweeted. GOP “leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was asked three times Tuesday, in different ways, about replacement theory -- if leaders have to speak out about it or believe it themselves -- and declined to fully respond.

“Well, certainly the episode of this horrible episode in Buffalo is a result of a completely deranged young man who ought to suffer severe as possible penalty under the law,” he said.

Asked about Biden’s call to reject the lie, McConnell shifted responsibility more broadly: “Racism of any sort is abhorrent in America and ought to be stood up to everybody, both Republicans, Democrats, all Americans.”

In a poll released last week, The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that about 1 in 3 Americans believes an effort is underway to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gain.

Fox News’ most popular personality, Tucker Carlson, has been one of the theory’s biggest proponents. A study of five years’ worth of Carlson’s show by The New York Times found 400 instances in which he talked about Democratic politicians and others seeking to force demographic change through immigration.

But so far, at least, less attention has been focused on Republican candidates preparing to face voters in the coming weeks and months who have, in some cases, promoted the theory again and again.

In interviews with conservative national television and radio over the last year, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has called replacement theory “the Democrat grand plan.”

“I’ve got to believe they want to change the makeup of the electorate,” he told a Minneapolis-area conservative radio host last month.

Johnson condemned the “horrific” Buffalo attack on social media, while campaign spokesperson Alexa Henning called it a “lie” that he supports replacement theory.

“The senator has spoken extensively on the inhumanity of the Biden administration’s open border policies, not some racist ‘theory,’” she said.

In Missouri, at least two Republicans vying for the Republican Senate nomination have made similar statements more recently.

While touring the U.S.-Mexico border last month, former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens said that immigrants crossing over illegally were “flooding into all of the 50 states, and that includes Missouri.”

“What’s also very clear is that Joe Biden’s policies are an assault on the entire idea of America,” Greitens said. “He’s wiping out the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, and he’s doing it on purpose.”

A week later, Schmitt, Greitens’ Republican rival, claimed that tens of millions of immigrants were crossing into the U.S. illegally because of Biden’s policies. He said Democrats were intentionally encouraging illegal immigration for their own benefit.

“They are fundamentally trying to change this country through their illegal immigration policy,” Schmitt told conservative commentator Glenn Beck.

On Tuesday, Schmitt criticized reporting that he had promoted replacement theory as “woke ‘journalism.’”

“I’ll never stop fighting for border security or calling out the Democrats’ radical agenda. We’ve got a country to save,” he tweeted.

Greitens ignored questions about replacement theory but called the mass shooting in Buffalo “truly horrific” in a written statement.

In Arizona, Masters has warned throughout his campaign of a Democratic plot to transform the U.S. electorate.

“Obviously, the Democrats, they hope to just change the demographics of our country,” Masters told the Patriot Edition podcast late last month. “They hope to import an entirely new electorate. Then they call you a racist and a bigot.”

In Ohio, Vance has already secured a place on the November ballot. He won Trump’s endorsement after embracing many of the former president’s hardline views, including those related to immigration.

Vance told Breitbart News last month that Democrats are trying to give 15 million immigrants in the country illegally the right to vote. “They are trying to transform the electorate of this country,” he said.

He made similar comments days later at a town hall in Portsmouth, Ohio.

Shortly after Biden was inaugurated, congressional Democrats proposed legislation that would include an eight-year pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally, but the proposal has stalled and has little chance of clearing Congress.

“Now of course,” Vance said, “you’re accused of being a racist to even point this out. We get to decide, the people get to decide how we do or do not transform the country.”

The Vance campaign declined to comment.

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AP writers Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa contributed.

Orbán and US right to bond at CPAC in Hungary over ‘Great Replacement’ ideology

American far right has long embraced Hungary’s prime minister, who speaks of Europe’s ‘suicidal’ immigration policies

Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán complains about migrants to Europe from ‘other civilizations’,

 Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA


Flora Garamvolgyi and Julian Borger
Wed 18 May 2022

Hungary’s nationalist leader, Viktor Orbán, will be the star speaker at an extraordinary session of America’s Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) to be held in Hungary this week, in an effort to cement bonds between the radical right on both sides of the Atlantic under the banner of the “great replacement” ideology.

In a speech on Monday, Orbán made explicit reference to the ideology, which claims there is a liberal plot to dilute the white populations of the US and European countries through immigration. Increasingly widespread among US Republicans, the creed was cited by the killer who opened fire on Saturday in a supermarket in a predominantly black area of Buffalo, New York.



What is ‘great replacement’ theory and how did its racist lies spread in the US?


Speaking in Buffalo on Tuesday, Joe Biden called it a “perverse ideology” and “a lie”.

“I call on all Americans to reject the lie. I condemn those who spread the lie for power, political gain and for profit,” Biden said. “We’ve now seen too many times the deadly and destructive violence this ideology unleashes.”

Orbán argued this week that the western world was “committing suicide” through immigration.

“I see the great European population exchange as a suicidal attempt to replace the lack of European, Christian children with adults from other civilizations – migrants,” Orbán declared in a speech to mark the start of his fourth term in office. Echoing another popular theme on the American right, he argued that another form of cultural suicide was “gender madness”, a reference to the spread of LGBTQ+ rights in the west.

The prime minister’s choice of vocabulary was not accidental, Hungarian political analysts said, but was rather designed to underline the common ties between his Fidesz party, his self-described “illiberal” form of government, and the American visitors arriving in Budapest for the first ever Cpac meeting in Europe.

“I think it is logical that he was signaling to US conservatives because of the upcoming Cpac,” said Zoltán Lakner, a political analyst, and editor-in-chief of the Jelen news outlet. “He is trying to define himself as a global political actor, and at this point, he has kind of achieved that goal.”

​​One of the speakers of the event, Balazs Orbán, the prime minister’s political director, told the Guardian that “there are political forces in every country that see the world the same way” as Hungary does, but he said the US right wing have showed exceptional encouragement.

“American conservatives are very supportive of us because they can see that we have huge domestic support and because they see Hungary as a conservative safe space,” Balazs Orbán said.

Alongside prominent Fidesz figures will be an array of other European hard-right leaders, including the former head of the UK Independence party, Nigel Farage, Herbert Kickl, head of Austrian Freedom party, and Santiago Abascal, president of Spain’s Vox party.

The US contingent will include several Republican members of Congress, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the chairman of the American Conservative Union, Matt Schlapp. Most influential of all, the Fox News talkshow host, Tucker Carlson, will be attending.

Carlson has arguably done more than anyone to popularise the “great replacement theory” in the US, promoting it in 400 of his shows, according to an analysis by the New York Times.


How Tucker Carlson and the far right embraced Hungary’s authoritarian leader

Carlson has developed particular ties with Orbán, originally through his father, Richard, whose political consultancy, Policy Impact Strategic Communications, is a registered lobbyist for the Hungarian leader. Last year, Carlson broadcast a week’s episodes of his show from Hungary, with a soft interview with Orbán himself, putting both the prime minister and his government in a positive light, and glossing over EU complaints that Orbán has curbed independent media and judicial autonomy, enriched his associates from the public purse and reshaped election laws to his benefit.

Earlier this year, Carlson produced another pro-Orbán programme called Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, highlighting another ideological bond: the portrayal of George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist, as a malign Jewish financier pulling the strings on immigration and other liberal policies.

“At this point, [American conservatives] are studying the Hungarian model and are looking at Hungary as a place where conservative policies can achieve their goals,” Boris Kálnoky, head of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (which was granted about $1.7bn by Orbán last year), told the Guardian. “Orbán is someone who attracts attention. And these visits by Tucker Carlson, who has a huge influence in this community, certainly put the spotlight on Hungary.”

Richard Kraemer, a American Republican and analyst at the European Values Centre for Security Policy (EVCSP) in Prague, said he was concerned about the security implications of CPAC’s decision to hold its conference in Budapest which, after diplomatic expulsions in the rest of Europe following the Ukraine invasion, is widely seen as the most important outpost for Russian intelligence on the continent.


Hungary: where editors tell reporters to disregard facts before their eyes

“If you walk into this environment, you’re looking at – by at least one count –about a thousand security agency-related Russians that are in Hungary right now. And to put that in perspective, they have 170 diplomats in Washington,” said Kraemer, who co-authored a new EVCSP report this week that describes Orbán’s Hungary as “a Russia and China proxy weakening Europe”.

“The are all these kinds of avenues whereby they’re able to put agents of influence in there and in front of Americans, who are basically low-hanging fruit that have decided to get even closer to the ground by showing up in Budapest,” Kraemer added. “What’s particularly disconcerting to me about this is that CPAC has basically decided that the cultural wars being fought right now by American conservatives are more important than America’s national security.”