It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, May 19, 2022
How inflation could help us save money — and the planet
‘It is the times of shock that force us out of our comfort zone,’ says Tanja Hester
May 19, 2022
By Alessandra Malito Inflation might push Americans to make different spending decisions,
for the better of their wallets and the planet.
GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
Inflation has many Americans worrying — a jump in prices of groceries and gas means paying more for fewer items, and possibly constraining any savings for the future. But it could also be a chance to rethink everyday spending, and possibly even help the environment.
There’s a link between consumer spending and climate change. Much of what Americans purchase must be manufactured, placing more emphasis on resources, energy and fuel. This record inflation, currently standing at more than 8%, could be a time to revisit everyday spending and change behaviors, for the benefit of consumers’ budgets and the world, said Tanja Hester, author of “Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn and Save as a Force for Change.”
In her book, Hester, who is also a MarketWatch contributor, shows the link between spending and big-picture global issues, including climate change, inequality and capitalism. Hester is also an early retiree, leaving the workforce at age 38 after switching from a lifestyle of splurging to saving. Her first book, “Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way,” explores financial independence and early retirement.
“For the people who are under 60 currently and hopefully have a lot of years left on the planet, we have to think of the world we want to be retired in,” Hester said.
Hester spoke with MarketWatch about the relationship between consumerism and inflation and how people could change their behaviors to save their money and help the planet at the same time. This interview was edited for clarity and length.
MarketWatch: Americans are worried about inflation and what it may mean for their everyday expenses. What is causing this problem, and what are a few ways you see it impacting their cash flow?
Tanja Hester: People are thinking of the supply side shortages and how that’s affecting prices or availability of things. We saw early on in the pandemic people hoarding toilet paper or other people trying to buy them and found the shelves were empty, so you would call that supply side shocks and that has driven a small part of this. But the vast majority of inflation is driven by two factors — one, just to put it bluntly, corporate greed. We see corporations raising prices solely because they can, not because their prices have gone up. We know agribusiness giants that control the meat supply by and large are jacking up prices even though they’re not paying suppliers more or workers more. Only 8% of hikes in prices are reflective of workers getting paid more. So there’s the corporate profit side, and the other side is overconsumption by consumers. Unlike other times when we had hardships, most people still have enough money to spend right now. Up until a few weeks ago we had a strong stock market so those profits funded people’s ability to spend, and workers got raises or switched jobs and got more pay. That ended this year, but until this year, government programs were putting more money in people’s pockets to help them spend. So people were able to spend and that means they can drive higher and higher demand for goods, then prices go up. It’s a vicious cycle at this point.
In terms of what people can do — if they haven’t, look at what they can trim back and where they can do some rearranging in household spending. From an inflation and climate change perspective, it is expensive to eat a lot of meat. It is also really carbon intensive to produce and comes with a big emission toll that affects the climate. So if you want to shift more meals to meatless — I’m not saying going vegetarian or vegan — you can reduce consumption of animal products, reduce household spending and do something positive for the climate. It can also be trying to delay other purchases. It is a terrible time to buy electronics, and a terrible time to buy a car. They are just wildly expensive. So if you can put off a purchase like that, it’s good for your budget, the planet and the exploited labor that goes into that thing. We know after the pandemic people feel very stuck, they want to travel, but airfare is expensive. If you can do something closer to home, that can reduce the climate toll of your actions and reduce how much you’re spending on travel.
MW: In your book, you talk about a connection between consumer spending and climate change — can you elaborate on that a bit for us?
General view of the Walney Extension offshore wind farm operated by Orsted off the coast of Blackpool
Wed, May 18, 2022
OSLO (Reuters) - A new set of factors beyond bidding price is gaining traction in global tenders to award licences for offshore wind farms and will determine the winners and losers in a highly competitive industry, a new report by energy research firm Wood Mackenzie shows.
"The focus is now shifting to multiple criteria to determine tender and lease auction outcomes, and the criteria in individual markets will differ," Chris Seiple, vice chairman for Energy Transition at Wood Mackenzie said in a statement on Wednesday.
Cost competitiveness will always remain a central element of winning in offshore wind, but this has reached its limits as project returns are dropping amid the entry of new market players, rising lease payments and lower subsidy payments.
Instead, competitors will also have to consider local content, or the value a project can bring to a local, regional or national economy, as well as systems integration, ecological mitigation and sustainability in future bids, necessitating a strategic shift and greater cooperation, according to Wood Mackenzie's head of offshore wind research Soren Lassen.
"I think that it's the companies that are able to set up the right partnerships when bidding that will benefit the most, but I don't think it's one company that is going to be better than everyone else across all tenders and lease auctions," Lassen told Reuters.
There should be plenty of opportunities, with offshore wind poised to become one of the key technologies powering the decarbonisation of the global economy, Wood Mackenzie said.
By 2030, 24 countries will have large-scale offshore wind farms, up from nine at present, total installed capacity will rise to 330 gigawatt (GW) compared with 34 GW in 2020, and cumulative global capex spend in the offshore wind sector will hit $1 trillion by 2031, Wood Mackenzie forecast.
(Reporting by Nora Buli; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
Armenian protesters paralyse metro in growing unrest
FILE PHOTO: Activists hold an anti-government protest in Yerevan
Wed, May 18, 2022
(Reuters) - Protesters briefly shut down the metro network in Armenia's capital on Wednesday, the metro operator said, part of growing anti-government unrest in recent weeks against possible concessions over territory disputed with neighbour Azerbaijan.
Footage from social media showed protesters standing in the doors of metro carriages, blocking trains from moving. The activists were demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and chanting anti-government slogans, TASS news agency reported.
"Citizens carried out protest action in Yeritasardakan metro station, disrupting metro traffic", the metro in capital Yerevan said, adding that the doors to all subway stations had been closed in response.
In a statement published about an hour later, the metro said that traffic had been restored.
Over 350 people were detained across the city on Wednesday, RIA news agency reported, citing the police. A police spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how many people had been arrested and why.
Protests have simmered for weeks since Pashinyan said the international community wanted Armenia to "lower the bar" on its claims to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but was populated and fully controlled by ethnic Armenians until they lost to Azerbaijan in a six-week war in 2020. A Russia-brokered peace deal that ended the war led to a significant loss of territory for Armenia.
Armenia is currently a close ally of Russia, which has a military base in the northwest of the country and sent peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh under the accord that ended the fighting in 2020.
(Reporting by Caleb Davis in Gdansk; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
Ukraine war puts Indian diamond polishers out of work Indian workers examine diamonds at a cutting and polishing workshop in Ahmedabad
(AFP/SAM PANTHAKY) Nivrita GANGULY Thu, May 19, 2022,
India's huge diamond-polishing industry has furloughed around 250,000 of its roughly two million workers because of sanctions on Russia hitting supplies, a trade union said Thursday.
The South Asian nation cuts and polishes 90 percent of the world's diamonds, with Russian diamond miners such as Alrosa traditionally accounting for 30-40 percent of India's imported rough gems.
"This problem has started ever since the Russia-Ukraine war began," Ramesh Zilariya, president of the Diamond Workers' Union Gujarat, told AFP.
"Western countries like the United States and Europe have stopped accepting Russian diamonds that have been polished in India," he said.
Workers were furloughed this month in the western state of Gujarat, the main hub of the industry, Zilariya added, as companies struggle with cash flow and supply disruptions.
Traders say Russian supply has fallen short since Western sanctions forced Moscow out of the SWIFT cross-border payments system, plunging the supply chain into uncertainty.
"Supply is still disrupted and payments are mostly on hold," Sripal Dholakia, director at the All India Gem and Jewellery Domestic Council, told AFP.
Dholakia said imports from Russia are "not adequate" at present, and Indian traders are facing higher bank charges while making direct payments in rupees or rubles.
An industry pitch to the Indian government to make future payments via India's Unified Payments Interface system has gone unanswered.
India exported cut and polished diamonds worth $24 billion in the year ended March 31, data from the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council showed.
Top export destinations included the United States, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.
Many Western buyers are now refusing to accept diamonds sourced in Russia for fear of violating sanctions.
"They have started asking for a bill which specifies that the goods we are supplying are not Russian," a Mumbai-based jeweller told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Prices too have turned volatile.
"Fifteen to 20 percent instability is a big thing for us because we work on a margin of two to five percent... It becomes difficult," the jeweller said.
The Gujarat diamond union has asked the state government to provide financial aid and re-skilling training to out-of-work polishers to help tide over the crisis.
"(We) asked the government to support workers in the diamond industry because this issue is not going to be resolved in one month," Zilariya said.
"This issue will go on for at least five, six or seven months."
India has called for a cessation of violence but has stopped short of condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The two countries have historically had close ties, with Moscow supplying most of New Delhi's arms.
ng/stu/axn
WORKERS REVOLT Apple Delays Plan to Have Staff in Office Three Days a Week
Mark Gurman Tue, May 17, 2022
(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc. delayed a plan to require workers to come back to the office three days a week, citing a resurgence in Covid-19 cases, marking the latest setback in its efforts to return to normal.
The company informed employees Tuesday that it’s delaying the requirement, which had been slated to go into effect on May 23, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. However, the company is still expecting workers to come to the office two days per week. The company said the requirement is being delayed for “the time being” and didn’t provide a new date.
Apple was set to require employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays beginning next week -- a policy that had been controversial among some staff. Already, employees have been coming in two days a week as part of a ramp-up effort that began in April. For now, that mandate isn’t changing.
The company also told staff that they must again wear masks in common areas -- at least in Silicon Valley offices. Separately, retail employees were informed Tuesday that about 100 US stores will again require mask wearing by staff members as well. Apple had dropped that requirement in March when cases eased.
A spokesman for the Cupertino, California-based tech giant declined to comment.
While the delay is related to Covid-19’s recent rebound, some Apple employees have complained about the return-to-work plan, saying that it limits productivity. They’ve said that commute time takes away hours that could be put toward their work. Employees have also complained that the office return ignored the lack of a vaccine for young children.
Apple Executive Who Left Over Return-to-Office Policy Joins Google AI Unit
Apple Executive Who Left Over Return-to-Office Policy Joins Google AI Unit
Mark Gurman Tue, May 17, 2022,
(Bloomberg) -- An Apple Inc. executive who left over the company’s stringent return-to-office policy is joining Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Ian Goodfellow, who oversaw machine learning and artificial intelligence at Apple, left the iPhone maker in recent weeks, citing the lack of flexibility in its work policies. The company had been planning to require corporate employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting this month. That deadline was put on hold Tuesday, though.
Goodfellow’s jump to Google is a coup for the DeepMind division, which is bringing him on as an individual contributor, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the hiring isn’t yet public. Goodfellow is known as one of the foremost machine learning researchers, and the move is a reunion of sorts. He worked as a senior researcher at Google until 2019.
DeepMind declined to comment on the hire. Alphabet’s return-to-office policy is generally looser than Apple’s. Though the search-engine giant is also asking employees to come back to the office, it’s approving exemptions for most employees seeking to work from home. Goodfellow hasn’t yet started the new job.
Goodfellow was a director of machine learning within Apple’s Special Projects Group and supervised engineers working on autonomous technology. The director level is one of the most senior at Apple. The company has about 1,000 directors of a total of 170,000 employees -- a figure that includes retail workers.
Goodfellow is the most senior employee known to leave over the company’s return-to-office policy, but more departures are expected as the rules go into effect. For now, though, Apple’s desire to have its employees in offices three days a week is up in the air. The rule, adopted in April, had been slated to go into effect May 23. On Tuesday, Apple told employees that the deadline was delayed for “the time being,” but workers are still expected in the office two days per week.
For months, some Apple employees have complained about the return-to-office drumbeat, saying they’re more productive at home and that remote work saves time and energy that would be spent commuting. Apple was primarily a remote-work company since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
“Everything happened with us working from home all day, and now we have to go back to the office, sit in traffic for two hours and hire people to take care of kids at home,” a different former Apple employee told Bloomberg last month. That worker also left, in part, because of the stringent return-to-the-office push.
When Goodfellow departed Apple, he cited the policy in an internal note to staff. The executive is credited with creating GANs, or generative adversarial networks. The networks allow computers to create images or data sets with remarkable accuracy, making research much more effective. They’ve been used in fields as far-flung as video games and astronomy, but most people may be familiar with their use in “deepfake” photos or videos.
DeepMind, widely considered a leading AI research hub, is famous for its software that conquered the game Go. The lab’s research has been used to improve some Google services, like YouTube bandwidth, and has recently moved more into health-care and biology applications, spinning out a new company working on drug discovery.P.
UFOs pose real danger, says Pentagon, but aliens aren’t to blame — probably
Leo Shane III Tue, May 17, 2022,
Defense Department officials on Tuesday confirmed that unidentified flying objects are real and pose a potential serious threat to the country.
That’s because military officials believe that nearly all of the unexplained events could be explained with more research and observation. To do that, they need military members to be more open to reporting the mystery objects without fear of being laughed off as science fiction conspiracy theorists.
“We are attempting to explain what may be natural phenomenon, or sensory phenomenon, or legitimate counterintelligence threats to places where we have [military] bases or platforms,” said Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.
“Hopefully, if we get more information out there, we’ll start to lessen the impact of some of those spurious reports.”
During the hearing — the first public hearing on UFOs before Congress in more than 50 years — military officials acknowledged that sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomena” have jumped significantly over the last two decades.
Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, said the reports are “frequent and continuing,” especially around military bases and training areas.
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, right, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray speak with a UFO on a screen, during a hearing of the House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing
A Defense Department intelligence report last year detailed 144 UFO encounters between 2004 and 2020. Bray said there have been 11 “near misses” with military aircraft from the unknown objects.
Pentagon leaders are establishing a new office focused on the UAPs, “to facilitate the identification of previously unknown or unidentified airborne objects in a methodically logical and standardized manner,” Moultrie said.
Officials said most of those events likely have mundane explanations — things like commercial drones and “airborne clutter” — that cannot be proven because of a lack of data on the incidents.
In many cases, the reports come from pilots flying by objects at high speed, spotting something amiss for only a second or less. But Bray said at least some could pose significant threats, either from foreign adversaries or accidental collisions.
Less likely (though, officials acknowledged, not completely debunked) is the possibility of alien life watching humans from the skies above.
“We have no material, we have detected no emanations within the UAP Task Force that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin,” Bray said.
Both lawmakers and the defense witnesses said public hearings like Tuesday’s are important to calm conspiracy theories about the military hiding proof of alien life. Public discussions are also key to encouraging the collection of more information on sightings so there can be a rigorous scientific analysis of every incident, officials said.
Several committee members pressed the defense officials for any additional evidence of extraterrestrial encounters. They also acknowledged that the Pentagon’s explanations are unlikely to stop public speculation about possible alien encounters being covered up by military leaders.
Indeed, after the public session, the committee held a closed, classified briefing continuing discussion on the topic, a move they conceded was both problematic and necessary to protect sensitive military information.
Moultrie, who confessed to being a big science fiction fan during his testimony, said the Defense Department is open to all potential explanations for the UFOs.
But rather than looking to outer space for answers, officials are looking anywhere they can for better data.
“We are all curious and we seek to understand the unknown,” Moultrie said. “And as a lifelong intelligence professional, I’m impatient. I want the immediate explanations for this as much as anyone else.
“However, understanding can take significant time and effort.”
Congress dives into UFOs, but no signs of extraterrestrials
NOMAAN MERCHANT Tue, May 17, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress held its first hearing in half a century Tuesday on unidentified flying objects. And no, there is still no government confirmation of extraterrestrial life.
Testifying before a House Intelligence subcommittee, Pentagon officials did not disclose additional information from their ongoing investigation of hundreds of unexplained sightings in the sky. But they said they had picked a director for a new task force to coordinate data collection efforts on what the government has officially labeled “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said the Pentagon was also trying to destigmatize the issue and encourage pilots and other military personnel to report anything unusual they see.
“We want to know what's out there as much as you want to know what's out there,” Moultrie told lawmakers, adding that he was a fan of science fiction himself. “We get the questions not just from you. We get it from family and we get them night and day.”
Lawmakers from both parties say UFOs are a national security concern. Sightings of what appear to be aircraft flying without discernible means of propulsion have been reported near military bases and coastlines, raising the prospect that witnesses have spotted undiscovered or secret Chinese or Russian technology.
But the sightings are usually fleeting. Some appear for no more than an instant on camera — and then sometimes end up distorted by the camera lens. The U.S. government is believed to hold additional technical information on the sightings that it has not disclosed publicly.
An interim report released by intelligence officials last year counted 144 sightings of aircraft or other devices apparently flying at mysterious speeds or trajectories. In all but one of the sightings investigated, there was too little information for investigators to even broadly characterize the nature of the incident.
A top Pentagon official on Tuesday briefly demonstrated the challenge. Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, stood next to a television to show a short video taken from an F-18 military plane. The video shows a blue sky with passing clouds. In a single frame — which it took several minutes for staff in the room to queue up — there is an image of one balloon-like shape.
“As you can see, finding UAP is harder than you may think," Bray said, using the acronym for “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Rep. André Carson, an Indiana Democrat who chaired the hearing, called on investigators to show they “are willing to follow the facts where they lead.”
Rep. Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican, noted that the investigations were not “about finding alien spacecraft but about delivering dominant intelligence."
“The inability to understand objects in our sensitive operating areas is tantamount to intelligence failure that we certainly want to avoid,” he said.
Pentagon now reports about 400 UFO encounters: 'We want to know what's out there'
LUIS MARTINEZ Tue, May 17, 2022
Top Pentagon officials told a House panel on Tuesday that there are now close to 400 reports from military personnel of possible encounters with UFOs -- a significant increase from the 144 tracked in a major report released last year by the U.S. intelligence community.
A Navy official also said at Tuesday's hearing that investigators are "reasonably confident" the floating pyramid-shaped objects captured on one leaked, widely seen military video were likely drones.
That footage, which the military confirmed last year was authentic, had helped spur interest in purported UFOs, also referred to as "unidentified aerial phenomena" or UAPs.
Indiana Rep. André Carson, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, called Tuesday's hearing, the first in more than 50 years focused on the aerial incidents.
UAPs, Carson said, "are a potential national security threat and they need to be treated that way."
"For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis," he added. "Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did."
PHOTO: Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, left, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, speak during a hearing on Capitol Hill, May 17, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Brandon/AP)
The number of UAP reports has risen to "approximately 400," a significant increase from the 144 between 2004 and 2021 that were tracked in last year's report, according to Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence. Bray told the House panel that the spike was due to a reduction in the stigma associated with stepping forward to report such incidents in the wake of the 2021 report.
"We've seen an increasing number of unauthorized and or unidentified aircraft or objects and military control training areas and training ranges and other designated airspace," Bray said. "Reports of sightings are frequent and continuous."
But Bray believes many of the newly disclosed accounts are actually "historic reports that are narrative-based" from prior incidents that people are only now coming forward with, which leads him to believe there will be fewer new accounts in the future.
Last year's intelligence report could only explain one of the documented 144 encounters and did not contain the words "alien" or "extraterrestrial." The report stated then that the UAP incidents would require further study.
At Tuesday's hearing, Bray echoed last year's conclusion that most of the phenomena were likely physical objects and noted that "the UAP task force doesn't have any wreckage that ... isn't consistent with being a terrestrial origin."
Even so, Bray said, questions remain.
"I can't point to something that definitively was not man-made, but I can point to a number of examples which remain unresolved," Bray said, citing video of a 2004 incident in which a Navy pilot recorded an unusual, Tic Tac-like object over the water.
"We want to know what's out there as much as you want to know what's out there," said Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon's top intelligence official, who also testified at the hearing.
Moultrie said the Pentagon is establishing an office to speed up "the identification of previously unknown or unidentified airborne objects in a methodical, logical and standardized manner."
"We also understand that there has been a cultural stigma surrounding UAP," Moultrie said. "Our goal is to eliminate the stigma by fully incorporating our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data gathering process."
"Our goal is to strike that delicate balance: one that enables us to maintain the public's trust while preserving those capabilities that are vital to the support of our service personnel," he said.
Bray said "Navy and Air Force crews now have step-by-step procedures for reporting on a UAP on their kneeboard in the cockpit" and that these efforts have led to more reporting.
The increasingly mainstream interest in UFOs and UAPs has been sparked in recent years by leaks of once-classified videos and the Navy's release of footage from their pilots' own encounters.
At Tuesday's hearing, the defense officials played three clips to help explain how brief the aerial incidents could be, making it very difficult to determine what was seen in the videos.
In one of the more notable cases, the officials detailed how "considerable effort" went into determining a theory for what was observed.
Bray played footage taken in July 2019 off the California coast from the deck of the destroyer USS Russell that seemed to show several pyramid-shaped objects hovering above the ship.
Bray acknowledged that investigators did not initially have an explanation for what was seen in the green night scope video -- until they were able to contrast it with a more recent video of an incident that occurred off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
Officials who looked at that video found a similar pyramid shape. They concluded the phenomena were likely from drones that had been seen on sensors from another Navy asset.
"We're now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area," Bray explained. "The triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera."
"This is a great example of how it takes considerable effort to understand what we're seeing in the examples that we are able to collect," he added.
Ahead of the hearing, Jeremy Corbell, a documentary filmmaker and UFO enthusiast who made public that "pyramid" video last year, said he was happy to see increasing awareness and government action.
"What is so great is that this is a direct response to public will," Corbell told ABC News. "It is direct response to public pressure. It is representative government representing the citizens and their interest."
"I am encouraged by the public desire to know and find out the truth of what UFOs represent to humankind," Corbell said then. "It's the biggest story of our time. And finally we're beginning to have the conversation without ridicule and stigma that has so injured the search for scientific truth on this topic."
Moultrie, the Pentagon official, said at Tuesday's hearing that he wasn't immune to a bit of the zeal himself as a science fiction fan.
"I have gone to conventions -- I'll say it on the record. Got to break the ice somehow," he told the panel in one lighthearted line of questioning, adding, "We have our we have our inquisitiveness. We have our questions."
ABC News' Matthew Seyler contributed to this report.
FULL HEARING VIDEO
Tues. May 17 when the US House of Representatives hold a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena.
Read the CNET article: Congress to Hold First Public Hearing on UFOs in 50 years: How to Watch https://cnet.co/38q3fhu
UFOs spotted 400 times by US military, Pentagon reveals
Nick Allen Tue, May 17, 2022 Scott Bray, the deputy director of US Naval Intelligence, testified on UFO sightings in a special Congress hearing on Tuesday - JOEY ROULETTE
The US military has had 11 close encounters with UFOs, a top Pentagon intelligence official has told Congress.
That figure has more than doubled in the last year as reduced stigma led to a flood of reports from military personnel about historic events.
Senior Pentagon officials said no evidence of extraterrestrial origins had been discovered so far, but they vowed to “go wherever the data takes us” in an “all hands on deck” approach.
Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, told the hearing there were sightings he “can’t explain” due to the “flight characteristics” or radar readings from the objects. Senior Pentagon officials told the hearing they vowed to take an 'all hands on deck' approach towards the sightings - JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
He showed a video of one such incident, in which a fleeting, shiny, spherical object zipped past the cockpit of an F-18 jet.
Mr Bray said: “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.”
Asked if there had been any collisions between “US assets” and UFOs, he said: “We have not had a collision, we’ve had at least 11 near misses though.”
He said Pentagon investigators had managed to explain one of the most famous UFO sightings ever.
In July 2019, green pyramid-shaped objects were spotted over the destroyer USS Russell, off California, and 18 seconds of footage was leaked, becoming a fascination for UFO hunters.
Mr Bray said: “We are [now] reasonably confident these relate to unmanned aerial systems [drones] in the area.”
He said the triangle shapes resulted from “light passing through night vision goggles and then being recorded by a single-lens reflex camera. [It was] some type of drone.”
Green pyramid-shaped objects were spotted over the destroyer USS Russell in 2019 Studies had shown that drones, recorded on video in that way, would appear as green triangles, he said.
He added: “Reports of sightings are frequent and continuing. Recently, I received a call from a senior [Naval] aviator with over 2,000 flight hours. He called me personally from the flight line to talk about what he had just experienced.”
Last year, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence who oversees President Joe Biden’s daily intelligence briefing, released a highly anticipated report into UFOs. It examined 144 events since 2004, some reported by US military pilots, but could only explain one.
The Pentagon has since established a new UFO squad called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronisation Group. It has authority to check with secret US military test programmes as it investigates UFO sightings, the hearing was told.
The unit is also working with Nasa, and experts have been drafted in from the Space Force, along with physicists, meteorologists, and even metallurgists. Defence officials accused of cover up
Mr Bray said they have so far detected “no material, no emanations, that would suggest anything extraterrestrial in origin”.
UFOs are officially called unidentified aerial phenomena [UAPs] by the Pentagon.
Mr Bray said there had been no communication with a UAP, and no extraterrestrial wreckage had been recovered.
André Carson, the Democrat chairman of the Congressional committee, suggested defence officials could be “sweeping things under the carpet” and focusing on “low-hanging fruit with easy explanations”.
But Ronald Moultrie, Mr Biden’s undersecretary of defence for intelligence and security, denied the Pentagon was “covering up,” citing his own passion for science fiction.
Mr Moultrie said: “I enjoy the challenge of what may be out there. Yes, I have followed science fiction. I have gone to conventions, I have done that, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t necessarily dress up.
“We have our inquisitiveness, we have our questions. We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there. We get the questions, not just from you, we get it from family, and we get them night and day.”
After Congress' first hearing on UFOs in 50 years, some scientists want to be let in on the investigation Paola Rosa-Aquino Tue, May 17, 2022 Researchers hope to leverage instruments like Chile's Vera Rubin Observatory, pictured in September 2019, to study unidentified aerial phenomena.Wil O'Mullane/Wikimedia Commons Congress held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, better known as UFOs, for the first time in 50 years.
Some researchers say scientific instruments — not just the intelligence community — should study these objects.
A growing number of private research groups are focused on detecting unidentified flying objects.
Congress held an open congressional hearing on Tuesday on unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — better known as unidentified flying objects — for the first time in five decades.
The hearing, held before a US House Intelligence subcommittee, included testimony from defense officials following a nine-page report released last year, which investigated more than 140 instances of strange sightings by fighter aircraft instruments and pilots. Officials were only able to explain one of the incidents — a large, deflated balloon.
Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana and chairman of the subcommittee, said at the start of the hearing that UAPs "are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way."
Unexplained objects have fascinated and puzzled people for decades, but studying them has often been dismissed as pseudoscience or tabloid fodder. As these mystery sightings reenter the mainstream, however, some researchers say they need to be investigated by scientists, not just the intelligence community, in order to find answers. Beyond tin foil hats
Last year's report confirmed the existence of unexplained aerial phenomenon, but prompted more questions than answers, Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a non-profit that promotes space exploration, told Insider.
Some science experts theorize that these mystery objects could be anything from drones to weather-related phenomena to artifacts to sensor glitches — or even the handiwork of aliens. But the report did not include enough data to conclusively make that determination.
Since UAPs have long inspired conspiracy theories, researchers like Haqq-Misra believe the government should give scientists more access to data and allow inquiries to happen in the open, rather than behind closed doors.
Tuesday's public hearing was followed by a closed session, which scientists like Haqq-Misra expect will have the information they really want: "We really need transparency and new data if we want to solve this problem," he said.
The report included first-person accounts, which have the potential for human error. Haqq-Misra said UAPs should be studied with satellites, fast-tracking cameras, or audio sensors at locations where the unusual signals have been spotted: "What we need is to collect data in a systematic way — stare at this whole sky in many locations for long periods of time, and with many different instruments, and see how many things, if any, show up that you can't identify."
For decades, it's also been a taboo subject for scientists and dismissed as pseudoscience. Government officials even rebranded UFOs as unidentified aerial phenomena, in part, to avoid the stigma attached to claims of alien visitors. Researchers hope a scientific pursuit for answers, and more transparency, could help overcome that stigma, according to Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
"There is a process to understand unknown phenomena," Kopparapu told Insider. "We should not jump to conclusions one way or another, about either dismissal or jumping to some exotic explanation."
From the fringes to serious science
Pilots EJ Smith, Kenneth Arnold, and Ralph E. Stevens look at a photo of an unidentified flying object, which they sighted while en route to Seattle, Washington, in 1947.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Kopparapu said that there are a growing number of privately funded research groups focused on the systematic study of unidentified aerial phenomena, such as Harvard's Galileo Project and UAPx, a research non-profit. (The Galileo Project is helmed by Avi Loeb, a prominent and controversial astronomy professor, who has beencriticized for including outspoken UFO proponents, without science backgrounds, on the project.)
"I think this is a great opportunity for scientists to show the public how a scientific investigation can be done of something that is unknown," Kopparapu told Insider.
NASA does not actively search for UAPs, according to the agency's website. "If we learn of UAPs, it would open up the door to new science questions to explore," according to NASA. "Atmospheric scientists, aerospace experts, and other scientists could all contribute to understanding the nature of the phenomenon. Exploring the unknown in space is at the heart of who we are."
In the meantime, the Galileo Project is designing software to screen data coming from large telescopes for interstellar objects, and developing a network of sky cameras searching for signs of alien life. This spring, the team plans to install the first of hundreds of cameras — which capture both infrared and visible light — and audio sensors on the roof of Harvard College Observatory, to record everything that moves through the sky, 24 hours a day.
"We are moving away from a time where we were just thinking about them as some sort of tabloid news," Kopparapu said, adding, "These objects exist. And if we want to understand them, we need to use the same technologies and scientific instruments that we use to study our everyday world around us."
Sightings of unexplained objects in the sky have long captured human imagination and raised questions about national security and even potential alien life. But these questions will remain unanswered if they're not subjected to rigorous scientific inquiry, researchers say.
"I think it's significant that branches of the military are acknowledging that there's a thing that's supposed to be in their jurisdiction that they don't understand," Haqq-Misra told Insider. "If they're willing to do that, I think then it really, truly is a puzzle and we've got to figure out what this is."
Kopparapu seemed to agree: "Science should be the forefront in understanding this unknown phenomena," he said, adding, "I hope there is more interest from scientists and I'm eager to see what's going to happen in the next couple of weeks with all this news."
Pentagon Unveils Shocking New UFO Footage in Congressional Hearing
Kyle Mizokami
POP MECH Wed, May 18, 2022 Photo credit: Kevin Dietsch - Getty Images
Members of Congress quizzed government officials tasked with investigating sightings of unidentified flying objects for more than an hour yesterday.
The hearing, held by the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, was the first on the subject of UFOs since 1968. Questions included whether or not the government had crashed UFOs in its possession and whether or not the Pentagon was investigating reports of flying saucers interfering with nuclear weapons.
Although the C3 Subcommittee may seem like a strange host for a hearing on UFOs, the questions primarily focused on sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) on military training ranges, and whether they represented a safety or security threat to U.S. military personnel. The reasoning is that if UAPs have a man-made origin, they could be intelligence operations against U.S. military forces conducting training.
Two Pentagon officials, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, answered questions on the Pentagon’s recent UAP efforts.
The 2022 defense budget mandated that the Department of Defense create an agency to track UAP sightings. That agency, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), was tasked with, “scientific, operational, and technical analysis of data gathered by field investigations…to better understand and explain unidentified aerial phenomena.”
“Tuesday's hearing was a step forward,” Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, tells Popular Mechanics, “For far too long, this subject was unfairly stigmatized, and witnesses were disbelieved or ridiculed. That discouraged pilots and radar operators from speaking out, but a few brave ones did, and what happened on Tuesday is a testament to their courage and a vindication of their experiences.”
Photo credit: Mario Tama - Getty Images
Bray explained during the hearing that UAP incidents likely resolve into five main categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or industry developmental programs (secret aircraft), foreign adversary systems (drones), or an “other” bin that allows for “difficult cases and for the possibility of surprise and scientific discoveries.”
The “other” bin could allow for foreign adversaries that have developed breakthrough technologies, but the other obvious implication is that it could also allow for extraterrestrials and extraterrestrial technology. Both officials however stated they would not speculate on some of the more unusual sightings gathered by AOIMSG. Bray said that, like everyone, he wanted immediate explanations but that “understanding can take significant time and effort.” This, he suggested, is why the Office of Naval Intelligence embarked on a “data driven, facts-based approach.”
At one point in the hearing, Moultrie talked about being “open to all hypotheses.” Pope sees this as a positive sign. “It's a fascinating indication that the extraterrestrial hypothesis apparently hasn't been ruled out,” he says. “That should give believers some hope—and should give everyone else pause for thought.”
Rep. Adam Schiff reiterated a point made in the Pentagon’s June 2021 UAP report: Of the 144 UAP incidents between 2004 and 2021, 80 percent were recorded on multiple instruments. So-called “multi-sensor data” includes smartphones, video cameras, infrared cameras, and radar. Eighteen of the 144 incidents appeared to demonstrate “unusual flight characteristics that appeared to demonstrate advanced technology.”
Schiff asked if any of the 18 sightings appearing to demonstrate strange tech involved craft that emitted radiofrequency energy—possibly nodding to a 2004 incident when U.S. Navy pilots believed they were encountering anti-radar jamming from UAPs. Bray said some of the objects that did emit radiofrequency energy were not behaving “oddly otherwise,” which suggests that some of the radio wave-emitting UAPs could have been some form of man-made drone.
In response to another question, Bray admitted he was not aware of an adversary that could move an object “without a discernible means of propulsion,” but later said sensor artifacts could accidentally hide evidence of conventional propulsion. For example, a blurry pixel and a lack of detail might obscure a jet engine nozzle or a propeller. He also said some of the objects appeared to have “signature management,” which might include masking an object’s infrared or radar signatures in a similar manner to stealth aircraft such as the B-2 Spirit stealth fighter and the F-22 Raptor fighter.
The Pentagon officials exhibited two clips of video evidence. The first, apparently captured from a smartphone, shows a small spherical object that whisks past the cockpit of a U.S. Navy strike fighter in the blink of an eye. “I do not have an explanation for what this particular object is,” Bray said.
Bray and Moultrie then showed another video, taken off the West Coast in 2018, of what appears to be a flashing triangle, similar to a "swarm" of other objects reported by multiple U.S. Navy assets off a different coast.
“We are now reasonably confident these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area,” Bray stated. The UAP’s triangular appearance, he explained, was the result of light “passing through the night vision goggles and then passing through the SLR camera,” and that the actual flying objects were not triangular in nature.
Rep. Mike Gallagher asked if the UAP Task Force was aware of the so-called “Malmstrom Incident,” in which ten nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base were “de-alerted” and rendered inoperable, allegedly by a nearby UFO. The officials replied they had heard of incidents like it but that this particular incident was not in the AOIMSG database.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi asked if there had been any communication with the objects (initiated by either side) or if any weapons had ever been discharged at the UAPs. Bray replied that no communication had been established and that no weapons have been fired at the objects. Next, Krishnamoorthi asked if the government had come across any “wreckage.” According to Bray, the Pentagon does not possess any object of terrestrial origin that cannot be explained.
The questions, Pope tells Popular Mechanics, did not include any actual assessments of what is going on: “A key question that wasn't asked is this: If specific high-profile cases like the USS Nimitz 'Tic Tac' incident in 2004 remain unexplained, what's the best current assessment in the DOD and the intelligence community?”
Photo credit: Barney Wayne - Getty Images
“In any high-profile intelligence analysis, I would expect there to be a best current assessment. But we haven't heard what it is, and the DOD won't even comment on its existence,” Pope says. “It would also be interesting to hear the most popular competing theories—classified US technology, adversary drones, and extraterrestrials—ranked, using words of estimative probability.”
One of the most revealing exchanges between Bray, Moultrie, and members of Congress took place when Rep. Krishnamoorthi asked if “our encounters with UAPs have altered the development of our offensive, defensive capabilities or even our sensor capabilities.”
Bray's answer was a mysterious and tantalizing. “We’ll save that for the closed session,” he replied.
It may be a while before we find out much more information. Closed sessions are hearings closed to the public, restricted to members of Congress and their staff only, where classified and other secret information is discussed.
Ultimately, the hearing did not reveal much. To the contrary, it spurred a number of important questions about the unidentified aerial phenomenon we've recently encountered.
The real Tokyo Vice: how a Westerner took on the yakuza and lived
Alex Diggins Tue, May 17, 2022 Journalist Jake Adelstein in Tokyo, 2009 - Reuters
Some books carry cautions lest they offend sensitive readers. Jake Adelstein’s came with an actual trigger warning. “Any publisher handling this book should have experience dealing with the yakuza,” ran one publisher's internal report on his memoir Tokyo Vice. “Serious security measures should be taken.”
It wasn’t an idle threat. A few years before, Adelstein – a crime reporter for Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s national newspaper – had gotten wind of a racket involving Goto Tadamasa, the head of Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest and most violent of Tokyo’s mafia families. Goto discovered Adelstein was on his case and dispatched his henchman to rattle the reporter: kill the story, or we’ll kill you.
Adelstein didn’t drop it. But he heeded the warning enough to employ an ex-yakuza boss as his bodyguard and driver for five years. “I always took it seriously,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Japan. “His [the driver’s] salary always got paid on time, even if it meant I was eating ramen at the end of the month!”
The first Japanese publisher he approached declined to take on Tokyo Vice. But it eventually appeared in 2009. An account of the 12 years Adelstein spent on the crime beat for the Yomiuri, it’s hard-boiled gem, taking in murder, suicide, self-immolation and – this being Japan – oodles of freaky, snap-on-your-rubber-gauntlets sex.
But it’s also a moving coming-of-age tale. Adelstein arrived in Tokyo in the late 1980s as a gawky Midwestern college student, but through dedication – and a dash of self-mythologising – reinvented himself as a hard-charging investigative journalist, the first Westerner to pass Yomiuri’s ferocious entrance exams. His reporting, too, is a glimpse into a vanished era of journalism: pavements are pounded, sources strong-armed and contacts cultivated amidst the smoke-and-sake funk of late night dive bars. It looked a lot more fun before Twitter.
Now his memoir has been adapted by HBO. Scripted by the Tony-award-winning playwright JT Rogers, with Ansel Elgort playing Adelstein, it is masterfully done. The cinematography renders Tokyo a neon-drenched maze, while the Elgort captures Adelstein’s charismatic cockiness and vulnerability in this strange, seedy world. In tone, it feels like a lost Michael Mann flick. (Mann, in fact, directed the first episode.)
But it’s hard to overstate the unlikeliness of the real-life Adelstein. In conversation, he has an ebullient, Adam Sandlerish energy, spilling stories with the ease of a seasoned bar-propper. He grew up in McBaine, a tiny town outside Columbia, Missouri – “they used to say: ‘You never lose your girlfriend, you just lose your turn’” – and a fight in high school put him on to karate and, from there, an interest in Zen Buddhism.
At college, he went on an exchange programme to study literature at Tokyo’s Sofia University – and never came back. In Tokyo, he taught English to a Zen Buddhist priest, living in a garret above the temple. And he helped pay the rent by translating kung-fu films into English and – another hazy vista in his extensive hinterland – giving Swedish massages to bored housewives. Most of all though, Tokyo whispered reinvention.
“I thought, ‘Nobody knows me here, no-one knows my history of f***-ups’,” he remembers. “In my first year of college, I fell down a staircase and I was in a coma for a day. After that, my childhood memories were pretty scattered – so I couldn’t remember my childhood, and I was speaking a language which was completely alien. It was a very refreshing experience.”
After college, he applied to join the Yomiuri, Japan’s most prestigious newspaper with a circulation of 12 million – at the time, the world’s largest title. To get in, he had to pass their gruelling four-hour Japanese language exams and a steeplechase of interview panels. The questions were unusual; at his final interview, one of the editors asked Adelstein, who is Jewish, whether he could work on the Sabbath and eat sushi. Oh, and whether Jews controlled the world economy. “I don’t think it was anti-Semitism, so much as ignorance,” he explains. “The Japanese love conspiracy theories. But I made a joke of it, and it worked out okay.” Adelstein with Satoru Takegaki, the retired boss of the Yamaguchi-gumi - Jake Adelstein
Still, the Yomiuri was a culture shock. As a rookie reporter, Adelstein had to adapt to the paper’s feudal corporate hierarchy, churning out busywork – typing up birth announcements, sports reports and scrap-booking – to keep up with its 12 daily editions. “We were tired all the time,” he remembers. “We didn’t feel like journalists, we felt like slaves. We weren’t even treated like real people. If someone wanted to get your attention they would just shout ‘first year’ and gesture at you.”
Salaryman life had more outlandish rituals too. Berserker drinking sessions were the norm, and junior staff were expected to wait on their seniors. Adelstein even tells me how he knocked his boss flat at his first Bōnenkai, a no-holds-barred end of year party. “He had a good kick,” he chuckles. “But, you know, Japan is a very masculine culture and people get drunk and do stupid things.”
It was around this time that Adelstein first met a yakuza. He remembers: “We went to his office in the red light district. It looked like a real estate agency in this very nondescript block. I was struck by how eloquent he was. He looked like a business man, wearing a very nice suit with these tattoos just poking out from his sleeves. I got to ask lots of questions about the yakuza, and he continued to be a good source for years.”
Adelstein’s interactions with the yakuza and the cops were governed by giri, an honour-bound system of back-scratching that kept favours – and information – circulating around Tokyo’s underworld. A yakuza might inform on a rival gang to gain advantage over them; a cop might let slip about a potential raid to keep a friendly reporter on side. But burning sources, and exposing the delicate choreography of criminality, law enforcement and the media, was an excommunicable offence.
What strikes you reading Tokyo Vice is the poised theatricality of the yakuza. In the 1990s, when Adelstein was entangled with them, they were in their full pomp, with more than 90,000 members, split between 22 officially recognised groups. They had glitzy headquarters and branded business cards. Their wealth underpinned Japan’s booming financial and real estate sectors; films, fanzines and tabloids glamorised their lifestyles and charitable largesse. And, at least on the face of it, they were bound by a strict code of conduct – no harassment of civilians, no dealing drugs – which was published on the walls of their headquarters. For the yakuza foot soldiers, discipline was brutal: a severed pinkie finger as punishment for insubordination. Ansel Elgort (left) as Adelstein in Tokyo Vice - HBO
Evolving from trade unions in the post-war chaos of the 1940s, the yakuza held a precarious position in Japanese society. The public feared and looked down on these tattooed mobsters, whilst avidly following their exploits. And the authorities tolerated their presence – yakuza killings of rival gang members were rarely investigated, and the police would inform them of upcoming raids so “evidence” could be neatly boxed up and ready for the press call.
“The Japanese have a schizophrenic attitude to them,” Adelstein notes. “They would like to believe there’s these people outside the system who are working for the greater good. But essentially most of them are sociopaths.”
This sense of outsiderdom helped Adelstein gain their trust. “Nearly half of them are Korean-Japanese – they’re like the Jews of Japan!” he says with a laugh.
That is, until he dug too deep on one investigation. In 2004, following evidence that a high-profile loan shark had laundered millions of dollars in Las Vegas casinos, he uncovered an odd trial: yakuza bosses had been travelling to the US, under the radar of the FBI, to have liver transplants. (In the hard-boozing world of the yakuza, a knackered liver is a badge of honour.)
One of these bosses was Goto Tadamasa. After Adelstein published his story on this connection, Goto was kicked out of the Yamaguchi-gumi. Linked to the murder of a real-estate agent, he fled to Cambodia and became a Buddhist priest – a surprisingly common second career for ex-yakuza in a country where the statute of limitations for crimes is only five years.
As well as threatening Adelstein, Goto published his own account of the affair. Adelstein asked him to retract passages about him, but stopped when Adelstein's lawyer – the famed prosecutor Igari Toshiro – was found dead in the Philippines. Toshiro and Adelstein’s work, though, helped galvanise Japan’s parliament to pass rigorous anti-yakuza laws. Goto is now back in Japan, and is trying to produce an English-language account of his biography.
Yet Adelstein no longer believes he is a threat. His ex-yakuza bodyguard died of a heart attack during the pandemic. And he hasn’t hired another one. “Most yakuza are in their fifties now,” says Adelstein. “It’s a dead-end job, and it’s very hard to leave. There is no future for them. They’ll never again have the same power.”
In fact, the unique atmosphere of Tokyo Vice has largely been scrubbed clean. Tokyo’s red-light districts have been gentrified, and the yakuza’s hold on the city has been cracked. Tokyo Vice feels valedictory – there’s an undertow of melancholy, mourning even, to Adelstein’s prose. He burned his youth, health and, eventually his marriage, for the job. And in 2011, he himself was diagnosed with liver cancer. (He made a full recovery.)
He quit the Yomiuri in 2006. The last straw was a particularly nasty human trafficking case. Afterwards, he worked for the US State Department trying to combat the trade and published three other books alongside Tokyo Vice. Reading his own words now, feels like “printed PTSD,” he reflects. “There’s a lot of youthful idealism in there. But also a huge amount of pain and loss. It’s a terrifying thing to know someone wants you dead. People I’ve known have gone missing, colleagues have been beaten so badly they could barely walk.”
Perhaps most painfully, though, Tokyo Vice recounts how Adelstein’s close friend and mentor, Hamaya, died by suicide. One of the paper’s few female senior reporters, she was demoted after she annoyed editors for championing the rights of the mentally-ill. It was a blow she couldn’t weather. Her loss still weighs on Adelstein. Living now, he writes in the book, involves always “thinking about the friends that you suspect you might be able to save”.
There have been more recent difficulties. Since the adaptation was released in the US, some articles have questioned Tokyo Vice’s credibility. One interviewee quoted in The Hollywood Reporter said: “I don’t think half the stuff in the book happened.” In response, Adelstein dumped a series of documents purportedly verifying its claims on Twitter. And he’s bullish about the criticism when I speak to him.
Adelstein was the first non-Japanese reporter to work for Yomiuri Shinbun - Jake Adelstein
“I really wish they had taken the time to do the research,” he says. “It wouldn’t be hard to verify it – it’s all here. I’ve got a whole folder here [hefting a weighty black ring-binder into shot] which proves it. Most of it is in Japanese, but the lack of really basic research baffles me.”
Come what may, he hasn’t slowed down. As a freelance reporter, he has published exposes into Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the links between former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and organised crime. He wrote about the LDP's cover-ups of Japan’s ageing nuclear infrastructure, and its contribution to the 2011 Fukushima reactor disaster, as well as how yakuza money was integral to Japan’s bid for the Olympics. “You have to remember Abe’s grandpappy was a yakuza,” he explains. “I seriously think the LDP has done more damage to this country than the yakuza.”
A follow-up to Tokyo Vice is due out next year. And he is working on a podcast series about missing people. Would he ever consider retiring? “Sometimes, I think I might give it up and lead a life as a humble Zen Buddhist priest,” he laughs. “But I believe in life, we only encounter the injustices we’re meant to correct. You can only fight lies with truth.”
He pauses, then grins. “It doesn’t feel like work – it feels like a calling.”
Tokyo Vice is on Starz Play now. It will be broadcast on the BBC later this year
Monkeypox in the U.S. a ‘public health urgency,’ CDC epidemiologist says, as global cases mount among ‘sexual networks’
Melina Mara—The Washington Post/Getty Images
Erin Prater Thu, May 19, 2022
The first identified monkeypox case of the year in the U.S.—found in a Massachusetts man who recently traveled to Canada—constitutes a "public health urgency," but not yet an emergency, a U.S. Cnters for Disease Control epidemiologist told Fortune.
"A lot of people are working hard around the clock, supporting state health departments—not just in this case, but in preparation for other cases that may occur," Andrea McCollum, an epidemiologist with the CDC's Poxvirus and Rabies Branch, told Fortune late Wednesday.
Monkeypox is a rare disease related to smallpox and cowpox, first identified in 1958 among colonies of monkeys kept for research, according to the CDC. Typically found in Africa, the virus causes fever, muscle aches, and lesions that progress through various stages before scabbing. It's thought to be fatal in about 10% of cases.
Health officials are monitoring six people in the U.S., all of whom sat next to a person who eventually developed the virus on a May 3-4 flight from Nigeria to London, the CDC told Fortune on Wednesday in an emailed statement.
Additional cases have recently been reported in the U.K., Britain, Portugal, and Spain. British health officials are concerned that "multiple chains" of transmission may be occurring in the country, given the lack of travel history and the geographic dispersion of the country's emerging patients.
"What we're seeing in Europe is a pretty substantial localized transmission among certain communities," McCollum says, adding that the U.S., so far, has not seen the same phenomenon, with no additional suspected or confirmed cases as of Wednesday evening.
"Here, we have one single case, and the state health department is working hard to run down potential contacts and potentially offer a vaccine," McCollum says, referring to the smallpox vaccine, used to prevent infections of monkeypox, which is also a orthopoxvirus. A new STD?
Some European officials worry that the continent is seeing a new mode of spread due to atypical diseases clusters, the Associated Press reported Wednesday, as many identified cases have been among men who have sex with other men. But data to support the theory is currently lacking, McCollum says.
"There is really no data on [monkeypox] presence in semen and vaginal fluids—the sexual transmission angle is really hard to tease apart," McCollum says. Because respiratory droplets and close contact are known modes of transmission, McCollum adds, it's hard to differentiate potential sexual transmission from close-contact transmission that may occur during sex.
Many global case reports "are occurring within sexual networks," said Dr. Inger Damon, a poxvirus expert and director of the CDC's Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, in a Wednesday news release from the agency.
"However, healthcare providers should be alert to any rash that has features typical of monkeypox. We’re asking the public to contact their healthcare provider if they have a new rash and are concerned about monkeypox," Damon said.
Some recent monkeypox patients have had genital lesions that "may be hard to distinguish from syphilis, herpes simplex virus infection, chancroid," and other more common STDs, according to the CDC.
While sexual transmission of monkeypox has never been documented, the disease has experienced "epidemiological changes in recent years," including changes in the age of those affected and location of infections, according to a Wedneday health security update sent by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. 'Less severe than smallpox ever was'
While concerning, monkeypox is "not highly transmissible" and "not likely to cause large outbreaks," says Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scientist and health security expert with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
There's a likelihood that more cases will be identified in the U.S., but "we know how to contain it, vaccinate against it," Toner said. "It has a long incubation period, which means plenty of time to implement quarantine and isolation."
Those at highest risk are household contacts of those infected, and "even amongst those, at least what we know from the outbreaks in Africa, the attack rate within a household is under 10%. It's not highly transmissible within households," Toner said.
Monkeypox is milder than smallpox, and COVID-19 prevention measures like masking will inhibit transmission, said Dr. Alexandra Brugler Yonts, an infectious disease specialist at Children's National in Washington, D.C., who assisted in the FDA's review of smallpox vaccine Jynneos, also used to treat monkeypox.
"Monkeypox is thankfully less severe than smallpox ever was, with a lower mortality rate," she said.
And there's more good news: Common household disinfectants can kill the monkeypox virus on surfaces, according to the CDC.
Vaccines galore in the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile
A number of treatments for monkeypox exist, even if none are specific to the virus.
Smallpox vaccine Jynneos is approved to treat monkeypox in adults because of evidence that animal-transmitted pox viruses like monkeypox and rabbitpox "typically cross-react and provide protection against other pox viruses," Brugler Yonts said. Other smallpox vaccines were used to prevent monkeypox transmission in outbreaks before the development of Jynneos, though they weren't approved for such a purpose, she added.
Antivirals are available too, she said, including tecovirimat, also known as TPOXX, an oral antiviral approved for smallpox in adults and children. In the European Union it's approved for the treatment of monkeypox and cowpox "and would likely be allowed to be given off label in the case of a monkeypox case in the U.S.," Yonts said.
There's also cidofovir, an antiviral used for other viruses, like adenovirus, with demonstrated success against monkeypox that could also be used in humans, she added.
Such vaccines and antivirals are included in the Strategic National Stockpile in the U.S., Yonts said. And as of 2001 there were enough smallpox vaccines in the stockpile for the entire U.S. population, according to Toner.
In short, says Toner: "It is of no risk to the general public, and there are plenty of other things to worry about."
