TRANSHUMANISM

THE UNTOLD TRUTH OF THE WORLD'S FIRST HUMAN CYBORG

BY PARIS L./JUNE 23, 2022 

Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan, a scientist with a lifelong interest in robotics and artificial intelligence, may have been destined to become the world's first cyborg. Since he was 16 years old, he dreamt up of ways of enhancing human capabilities, and 10 years later, he published a book about the future of robots, "The Robotics Revolution." Scott-Morgan was on his way to achieving his dream. He had numerous surgeries just to optimize a cyborg lifestyle and by 2019, he became what he called Peter 2.0. His face was scanned three-dimensionally in order to create an avatar that would replicate his own facial expressions, and while he wore it on a screen on his chest, he hoped that one day the avatar would be projected onto his face, completely replacing Peter 1.0, per Input Magazine.

But the disease that enabled Scott-Morgan to embark on his cyborg journey was the same disease that ultimately ended his life. In June 2022, he died after a five-year battle with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), per the New York Post. His efforts to become a cyborg in order to survive with a disability leaves behind a monumental legacy in both artificial intelligence research and assistive technology. Read on for a few little-known facts about the world's first human cyborg.

HE WAS THE FIRST IN GREAT BRITAIN TO RECEIVE A PHD IN ROBOTICS

Peter Scott-Morgan was better-equipped than most people to become a cyborg; he was, after all, the first to receive a doctorate in robotics from a British university. He received it from the Royal Imperial College in London. Then, in 1984, he published "The Robotics Revolution," an authoritative book on robotics, when he was only 26, per Calcalist. With his MND diagnosis in 2017, Scott-Morgan seemed primed for the situation. He immediately began planning how he could transition into part-robot with various surgeries and technological innovations. Despite his circumstances and the bleak prognosis communicated by his doctors, Scott-Morgan was determined to make the most of his situation and use it to embody a lifelong vision, according to Input Magazine.

While announcing the end of "Peter 1.0" on his website, Scott-Morgan said his final procedure would make him not just a cyborg, but "the most advanced human cybernetic organism ever created in 13.8 billion years." He reassured his fans that he wasn't dying but "transforming," via The Herald. Soon, he was able to communicate with others without his voice through eye-tracking technology. Cameras followed his gaze as he visually typed words on a screen, and the results played back in a digitized version of his voice, per The Guardian.

HE AND HIS HUSBAND WERE AMONG THE FIRST GAY COUPLES TO MARRY IN ENGLAND

In 2014, England and Wales formally recognized gay marriages. However, since 2005, gay couples have been allowed to enter civil unions. Although activists consider the 2014 law to be the official achievement in marriage equality, it was the 2005 law that finally allowed gay couples the same rights and privileges as heterosexual couples, per Reuters. And it was then that Peter and Francis Scott-Morgan wedded after a 27-year relationship. They were among the first gay couples in Great Britain to marry, and their wedding had the Mayor of Torbay, England. in attendance. Peter and Francis had already hyphenated their last names 15 years prior. Their union was a historical event, and Peter told the BBC News that only a decade before he and Francis met, British law would have allowed them to be imprisoned.

The couple met in 1979 at a gay hotel, where Francis was the clerk. They lived together in London while Peter earned his doctorate, and moved to the United States where he found a job. The adversity they faced as a gay couple provided them with the inspiration and strength for Peter's cyborg transformation. In an interview with The Guardian, Francis compared society's pessimism toward gay couples to doctors' somber expectations toward Peter's life expectancy: if the couple could carve out a living as a gay couple in a hostile environment, they could also adapt to Peter's cyborg transition.

HE WAS GIVEN TWO YEARS TO LIVE

It was in November 2017 that Peter Scott-Morgan received the diagnosis that would change the few remaining years of his life: he had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or as it is known in the UK, Motor Neurone Disease (MND). It's a degenerative disease that inflicts the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, causing them to lose control of muscle movement, per Input Magazine. It results in paralysis throughout the body, and one-third of victims die within a year. One-half of victims die within the second year, according to The Guardian. Although the brain itself is spared, death is usually caused by respiratory failure.

Scott-Morgan's first symptoms occurred when he emerged from a bath while on a trip to the Arctic Circle. He realized he couldn't shake the water from his feet. A few years after his diagnosis, Scott-Morgan depended on a group of caregivers to help him get ready in the morning. His routine, which began at seven in the morning, involved physiotherapy and cleaning and maintenance of his cyborg tech, including a screen he used to communicate that was attached to his chest, per The Guardian.

HE HAD ALREADY BEEN INTERESTED IN EXTENDING HIS LIFE WITH AI

Peter Scott-Morgan's MND diagnosis would be enough to emotionally break any normal person, but he was anything but. While still in consultation with the doctor breaking the news, and just as he pondered how to inform his husband, Scott-Morgan was already planning his future. A roboticist and AI-enthusiast, Scott-Morgan was more prepared than most people to adapt to this new normal. In his 1984 book "The Robotics Revolution," Scott-Morgan argued that as artificial intelligence evolved, humans could begin replacing their anatomical parts with what he called "permanent mechanisms." As The Guardian explained, he called this idealized specimen an "enhanced human."

Scott-Morgan also credited "Star Trek" and "Doctor Who," whose science-fiction elements inspired him to believe he could accomplish anything with the right technology (via This Morning). He called the TV shows his earliest source in science education. Additionally, when he was only 16, he fantasized and wrote essays about adjoining his human brain with a robotic one in order to enhance his intelligence, per Input Magazine.

THE KEY TO HIS SURVIVAL WAS TO RE-ENGINEER HIS LUNGS

Peter Scott-Morgan realized that in order to optimize his chances for survival, he needed to do something about his lungs. MND itself isn't fatal, but it prevents the muscles in the lungs from working, which results in most MND deaths. But Peter merely saw it as an engineering problem. In an interview with This Morning, Francis Scott-Morgan explained, with Peter in attendance, that Peter's surgical operations prevented his lungs from failing. As a result, the surgeries should've given Peter a normal life expectancy.

That wasn't the only pioneering and risky surgery Scott-Morgan received. He also restructured his stomach in a procedure that required special permits from British health authorities. Scott-Morgan called the three surgeries a "triple-ostomy;" one tube was inserted to transfer food to his stomach, and two tubes were inserted to drain out feces and urine. If successful, the tubing would allow Scott-Morgan to discharge his waste without help from caregivers and allow him to absorb more nutrients. Essentially, the surgeries allowed him to stay ahead of his disease. Doctors were hesitant to perform the procedure on otherwise healthy organs, and Scott-Morgan ended up firing his first doctor in order to move forward. Its success led the surgery to being selected as the 2019 Oxford Medical Case Report, according to Input Magazine.

HIS OPERATION INCLUDED A REMOVAL OF HIS VOICE BOX

Peter Scott-Morgan's last operation before his complete cyborg transformation was a laryngectomy — a removal of his voice-box. The procedure prevented a potential flooding of his lungs with saliva. It marked the end of "Peter 1.0," according to Scott-Morgan. He was in intensive care for 24 days and now depended on a ventilator to help him breathe. Ironically, the laryngectomy occurred in the same month doctors told him he was projected to die, and he believed the procedure would afford him more decades to live, per The Herald.

But Scott-Morgan didn't want to lose his voice completely. Before losing the ability to speak, Scott-Morgan visited a Scottish sound laboratory to record his voice and preserve its various intonations and inflections. They were then synthesized into a digital voice he could use once he was a cyborg, per Calcalist. It was important for Scott-Morgan that he retained the character and humanity of his original voice in order to convey emotion, as reported by the New York Post. His digital voice was even programmed to sing "Pure Imagination," even though the original Peter 1.0 couldn't sing. Hearing the song made him and his family emotional, as it presented the limitless opportunities that the technology could bring — including a future in which he could speak various languages (via The Guardian).

HE CONSIDERED HIMSELF TO BE A HUMAN GUINEA PIG

With the new technology he used to pioneer a revolutionary way of living and being human, Peter Scott-Morgan knew he was a human guinea pig. The surgeries he received to essentially re-plumb his stomach needed special permission from UK health authorities, per Calcalist. Not just that — he struggled to find doctors who were willing to perform them. But because he refused to succumb to MND, he was willing to offer up his own body to science. It wasn't just a matter of survival, either. As a true scientist, he was interested in knowing how far technology could go to bring science fiction into reality, according to his interview with Input Magazine.

But his body had its limits and ultimately couldn't keep up with his lifelong vision. A self-driving wheelchair that would've given him better mobility than anything currently on the market never came to fruition because his health began to fail (via Calcalist). On Twitter, Scott-Morgan informed his followers in April that he had gone silent on the social media site for two months due to the limited muscle movement he had to close his eyes. His eyes become very dry, disrupting his eye-tracking technology. However, it seemed that technology would continue to keep up. In May — only a month before his death — Scott-Morgan informed his followers that his team was now helping him communicate by only thinking, which illustrates how far Scott-Morgan could have gone with new cyborg technology.

HIS TEAM WORKED WITH STEPHEN HAWKING

Stephen Hawking was a natural source of inspiration for Peter Scott-Morgan: both devoted their lives to science and both were inflicted with the same disease. It helps that Hawking survived MND by 50 years, a longevity Scott-Morgan strove for. Scott-Morgan was able to meet Hawking in 2018 before the latter passed away and received a pearl of wisdom that helped Scott-Morgan through adversity: "Focus on what you can do, not on what you can't" (via the New York Post).

Luckily for Scott-Morgan, he was able to work with the same engineers who helped Hawking. He worked with Thorsten Stremlau at Lenovo to build his eye-tracking technology, smart cameras, and all the other intelligence hardware needed to bring his cyborg vision to life. Stremlau and Lenovo previously worked with Hawking to build his wheelchair-and-laptop communication system. He also worked with the director of the Human & AI Systems Research Lab at Intel, Lama Nachman, who developed Intel's Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit. This system helped Hawking when he lost control of his hands and could only communicate by way of a cheek muscle, using a simulated keyboard and word prediction, per Input Magazine.

HE EMBRACED SEDENTARY LIFE

The "locked-in" reality of MND might have been one of the hardest aspects of the disease for someone as lively and energetic as Peter Scott-Morgan. Scott-Morgan called the possibility of being in pain without the ability to ask for help a "waking nightmare of being locked-in, trapped in impotent silence within the straightjacket [sic] of your own living corpse" (via Input Magazine). Even without physical pain, the paralysis itself without the ability to communicate is nightmarish enough. When it came to his synthesized voice, it was important for Scott-Morgan to personalize it or he else would have felt "isolated," according to the New York Post.

But Scott-Morgan had confidence in his cyborg technology, which included cameras and other hardware that detected discomfort and alerted his caregivers. He also made peace with his sedentary life, comparing the experience to a luxury spa hotel in which the maître d insists that he put feet up and not move at all. In an interview with Stephen Fry, Scott-Morgan's AI interface compared himself to a pharaoh and said he discovered his inner couch potato. He added that joy was less a result of one's environment but an act of will (per Literary Hub).

HE HOPED TO HELP OTHERS WITH DISABILITIES

Peter Scott-Morgan knew he was pioneering a new way to be human, so it was obvious his methods could help others with MND and similar disabilities. He and his husband, Francis, set up a charitable research organization called the Scott-Morgan Foundation. The Foundation has worked with designers, engineers, and doctors at companies like Intel, CereProc, DXC, and Lenovo to design his personal cyborg tech and other cutting-edge technology that could help people with disabilities. DXC worked with the Foundation to improve the life-like communication timing of Peter's second-generation avatar, Peter 2.0. The Foundation's design and innovation director, Esther Duran, worked with Intel to also improve Peter's AI communication system, which includes a keyboard simulation and speech synthesis. Prior to Scott-Morgan's death, the Foundation was on the verge of transforming his house into a smart home, replete with smart light bulbs and thermostats, according to Input Magazine.

Peter called his team at the Foundation, and all those who pitched in, rebels. Calling his tech movement a "rebellion" was fitting since he sought to rewrite the rules on how disabled people can survive, per This Morning. On its website, the organization offers disability victims a chance to clone their voices, just as Peter had done, through CereProc technology (via Scott-Morgan Foundation). In 2021, the Foundation also collaborated with Lenovo on its Kind Cities Campaign, which advocated the need for kindness between various communities.

MORGAN-SCOTT EXTENDED HIS LIFE BY NEARLY THREE YEARS

When Peter Scott-Morgan died in June 2022, he outlived his projected life expectancy by nearly three years, and it had been nearly five years since he was diagnosed with the disease MND. In November 2017, his doctors told him he would live for only two more years, but he surpassed those expectations. His post-diagnosis lifespan is nothing to sneeze at; MND mortality rates double every subsequent year after its inception, per The Guardian. What's more, Scott-Morgan said his quality of life was "exceptional" in an April 2021 interview with This Morning. He said that despite his condition, he still had fun and mostly importantly, he was still alive.

On June 15, his Twitter account alerted his followers to his death. The post said he died peacefully while surrounded by family and friends. It didn't specify as to what specifically caused his death, but the assumption is that it was due to his MND affliction. Previous updates hinted at his worsening health condition, including a post on April 8 that said he had trouble blinking, which then interfered with his communication technology (via Twitter).

HE HAD DREAMS OF FURTHER TRANSFORMATION WHEN HE DIED

Peter Scott-Morgan's death in June 2022 tragically cut short a few lofty goals he set to solidify himself as the world's first cyborg. Those goals would've involved pioneering forms of technology that would convince the average person that he was no ordinary human. One plan involved projecting an avatar onto his face in order to simulate muscle movement and emotions, per The Guardian. This new avatar was being developed by Pinewood Studios — the same company that digitally replicated Carrie Fisher's younger face for "The Rise of Skywalker" — and it would have expressed all of the complex emotions that his first avatar couldn't. The engineering team's hardest challenge was to synchronize all of the movements across the avatar's face for a single emotion, i.e., an eyebrow would lift along with a lip parting to convey surprise. Ideally, the avatar would have been indistinguishable from a real person, according to Input Magazine.

Scott-Morgan also had plans for a next-generation self-driving wheelchair. It would have been able to hold his body upright, lay flat, and accelerate quickly. He called it Charlie, which stood for "Cyborg Harness and Robotic Locked-In Exoskeleton." It would've been so much more advanced than existing automotive wheelchairs that Scott-Morgan imagined himself maneuvering around a showroom of porcelain vases. Additionally, as reported by Input Magazine, his home was being redesigned to accommodate him with smart technology. Biosensors reading his body temperature would have adjusted the temperature of his room accordingly.

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The Spectacular Failure of the WTO To Fight Covid

The global body has proven itself unwilling to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry. Here’s what it means for the next crisis.

SARAH LAZARE 

IN THESE TIMES

Attendees sit in the atrium of the World Trade Organization headquarters during the 12th WTO Ministerial Conference in Geneva on June 16, 2022.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES



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Nearly two years ago, in October 2020, India and South Africa proposed that the World Trade Organization (WTO) suspend key intellectual property rules so that poor countries could access cheaper, generic versions of Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments once they became available. The idea was that patents, copyrights and other forms of intellectual property should not be a barrier to access in the face of a world-encompassing and highly lethal pandemic. The proposal became known as a TRIPS waiver, which is a reference to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, the WTO agreement that governs intellectual property rules.


This proposal was followed by 20 long months of stagnation and sporadic negotiations — as well as obstruction and inaction from rich countries, including the United States and European Union. More than 100 countries, the Global South heavily represented among them, threw their support behind the proposal, and global health activists pleaded for its speedy passage in order to save countless lives. Yet, negotiations continued to stall, even as vaccines and then antivirals hit the market, while inequities in global access played out just as the proposal’s proponents feared it would. The pharmaceutical industry aggressively opposed the TRIPS waiver, concerned that any challenge to its monopoly control of intellectual property would cut into corporate profits. An estimated 120 facilities in Asia, Latin America and Africa that had the ability to make mRNA vaccines did not do so, simply because companies would not give them the recipes and know-how they needed to produce the life-saving products.

On June 17, 2022, the WTO finally reached a decision on the issue, and it was a profound disappointment for global health activists.

The decision is so watered down that it bears little resemblance to the original proposal for a TRIPS waiver. It merely restates already-existing rights to compulsory licensing, which refers to governments allowing manufacturing of goods without the permission of a patent holder. The decision does allow for the unlimited exports of Covid vaccines to eligible countries, and makes it slightly less burdensome to send them. But the deal excludes all developed countries, as well as those that opted out, such as China. Tests and treatments — including Paxlovid, an effective antiviral therapy — are also left out. And the deal puts additional restrictions on the ability of countries to divert imports to other nations, though it does ostensibly include a humanitarian exemption. For example, if a country ordered too many vaccine doses, and then wanted to resend some of the leftover doses to another country, the deal would prevent them from doing so, with an exception for humanitarian, not-for-profit reasons.

The deal does not include a robust intellectual property waiver, nor does it explicitly mandate the sharing of trade secrets and manufacturing know-how. Its benefits are so minuscule, it’s like tossing a single lifebuoy to save all the passengers on a capsized ship. According to Robert Kuttner, reporting for The American Prospect, the staff of U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai ​“spent several days trying to get any public-interest group to say something kind about the WTO text. All refused.”

The outcome of this long and arduous process, health activists warn, bodes poorly not only for this pandemic, but future ones as well. A model has been set in which, no matter the scale of suffering and death, or the extent to which global health is bound together, pharmaceutical profits are placed over human lives. ​“In failing to fully confront the current crisis, it sets a negative precedent for addressing future global health challenges,” Ava Alkon, policy advisor at Médecins Sans Frontières-USA, a humanitarian medical organization, told In These Times. Tian Johnson, South Africa-based founder and strategist at the African Alliance, a social justice organization that works across the continent of Africa, agrees. ​“This is a massive setback for the cause of global health equity, which will take decades to recover from,” says Johnson.

It’s easy to blame pharmaceutical companies, which aggressively lobbied against any meaningful waiver while raking in stunning profits as the world faced starkly uneven distribution of life-saving Covid goods. But a significant share of the blame also goes to the states that bowed to Big Pharma. Industry, after all, is always going to behave in a way that benefits shareholders’ bottom lines rather than public health, as we saw during the AIDS crisis. It’s up to elected governments to rein in this industry, and act in the interests of the people.

The European Union was a tremendous obstacle to a good deal, along with Switzerland and the United Kingdom. But, according to Achal Prabhala, India-based coordinator of the Accessibsa project, which aims to expand access to medicines, the United States deserves the lion’s share of the blame. ​“The Biden administration has been, by far, the most significant and the worst negotiator on this deal, but in private,” he told In These Times over email. ​“The limitation of the waiver to vaccines is all thanks to the United States; the exclusion of China from this deal (which makes no sense if we’re only trying to improve vaccine access by increasing production, wherever it comes from) is also solely thanks to the United States. To cap it all, the United States also delayed in providing clarity on their position, or even beginning a negotiation on the actual text.”

There’s also the issue of what the United States didn’t do. Alkon of Médecins Sans Frontières-USA argues that the United States should have ​“used its formidable power in the negotiation process to ensure the agreement would apply to all forms if intellectual property needed to enable production and supply of needed medical products and cover all countries with capacity to produce, without exclusions.”

Even those who hold out hope there could be some minor benefits from the deal ultimately sounded a note of disappointment. Prabhala says that the WTO’s decision is ​“inadequate when it comes to vaccines, incomplete because it leaves out treatments, and far too late, though he does argue ​“it’s very slightly useful.” He hopes that some of its provisions could ​“help existing late-stage vaccine efforts, particularly in the mRNA space.”

Ultimately, he wants Global South countries to follow in Brazil’s example by passing bills that allow them to override any obstacles presented by the WTO, and forge full speed ahead with compulsory licensing (though it’s important to note that Brazil’s efforts have been held up by President Jair Bolsonaro). Developing countries need to stop acting ​“like little puppies in need of help and charity,” he says, and take matters into their own hands.

Others, like Johnson, say that health activists need a campaign to prevent enforcement of any restrictive WTO provisions. ​“In terms of Biden, our call to U.S. allies would be to push them not to enforce the bad deal and take a principled stance in solidarity,” he told In These Times.

Ultimately, the deal raises fundamental concerns about the WTO as an institution. ​“It was formed in the mid-1990s, the high point of free-market capitalism, when the answer to every problem was more markets, more private sector, less government red tape,” notes Nick Dearden, the director of the advocacy organization Global Justice Now. This ​“market knows best” ideology has profoundly failed the world, argues Dearden, a point protesters made in the late-1990s and early 2000s at massive global mobilizations against the institution. According to Johnson, the WTO ​“has proven again to be a vehicle for the protection of powerful vested interests.”

These vested interests are not limited to Big Pharma. Another global crisis, climate change, is already upon us, and it, too, will require sharing of technology and intellectual property if humanity is going to have any hope of curbing the worst impacts. ​“The whole world is better off if we all have green technology,” Brook Baker, a Northeastern University professor who also serves as a senior policy analyst for Health GAP, a health justice organization, told In These Times. ​“If rich countries get to control green technology to prioritize their use in high-income countries, that’s good for their profits, but it’s not good for the world.”

Bill Gates, a prominent opponent of the TRIPS waiver, is also an influential figure in shaping ​“solutions” to the climate crisis. In 2015 he helped found Breakthrough Energy, which calls itself a network ​“linked by a common commitment to scale the technologies we need to achieve a path to net zero emissions by 2050.” Combatting climate change will require the sharing of technology and placing habitability of the planet over profit seeking. What does it mean that a powerful figure in the world of green technology is an opponent of intellectual property sharing?

Likewise, green technology and renewable energy companies are members of organizations that lobbied against the TRIPS waiver. The Intellectual Property Owners Association, an international trade association, was part of an effort to oppose any robust intellectual property waiver as recently as March. The association’s board of directors has a member from Evoqua Water Technologies, a green technology company, and counts the green technologies companies BASF, Ecolab and Evoqua Water Technologies among its members. While it’s not clear what, if any, role these companies played in setting the association’s policy, their membership alone should be an alarm bell for anyone concerned about what green technology monopolies could mean for an ever-warming world.

As has been the case with the Covid pandemic — much less the next, possibly deadlier one — climate change means that no one is safe until we are all safe. Alkon warns, ​“This outcome emerged from a flawed, exclusionary and opaque process that we also fear could repeat itself.”

Lula’s Second Act

If the former Brazilian president returns to office this fall, the countries with the largest economies in the region will all be governed by left-wing leaders for the first time in history.

Giancarlo Summa 

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at a campaign event in Minas Gerais in May (Douglas Magno/AFP via Getty Images)

Brazil’s recent history is summed up by three covers of the Economist, each of which featured a variation on one of the country’s most iconic symbols: the statue of Christ the Redeemer. The first, published in 2009, shows the statue as a rocket launching itself into the sky, under the title “Brazil takes off.” On the second cover, from 2013, the rocket statue is in a spin dive, out of control—“Has Brazil blown it?” The third cover appeared in June 2021, with the statue motionless, possibly comatose, wearing a mask attached to an oxygen tank. The diagnosis is unequivocal: “Brazil’s dismal decade.”

With presidential elections coming in October 2022, polls indicate that most Brazilians are inclined to entrust the task of running the country back to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was president from 2003 to 2010—a period that, in retrospect, seems almost like a golden age. Years after leaving office, Lula was convicted without evidence (or with manipulated evidence) in nineteen different corruption trials, subjected to merciless judicial persecution, and imprisoned for seventeen months, before being fully exonerated by Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court. Now he appears once again to be the candidate to beat. Five of the six most recent electoral polls show that Lula could win in the first round on October 2 with over 50 percent of the vote—in other words, without the need for a runoff against the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who has run the country disastrously since 2019.

With the election of Alberto Fernández as president of Argentina in 2019, Gabriel Boric in Chile in 2021, and Gustavo Petro in Colombia just last week, all eyes are now on Brazil. Lula’s return to power would mark a total change of course for South America: for the first time ever, the countries with the largest economies in the region would be governed by left-wing leaders.

 

The (First) Lula Era

During his tenure, Lula—the former leader of a metal workers’ union and the charismatic founder of the Central Workers’ Union (CUT) and the Workers’ Party (PT)—managed to spur economic growth, social spending, and increased public investment in critical sectors of the economy while overseeing an austere monetary policy, mostly thanks to booming commodities prices and exports to China. When Petrobras, the state-owned oil-and-gas giant, discovered huge deep-water oil fields, Brazil became an energy superpower. The Bolsa Família (family allowance) program—a monthly payment to poor families that met certain conditions, such as having their children vaccinated and enrolled in school—lifted 40 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty. An increase in the minimum wage turned tens of millions more into lower-middle-class consumers, boosting the domestic market and, consequently, international investment and company profits.

However, Lula’s government did not promote any real reform to the country’s power structures while it had the political capacity to do so. The lives of the poorest improved considerably, but social inequalities remained intact. To this day, Brazil has levels of wealth concentration equivalent to those of late-nineteenth-century Europe. The tax system has continued to be extremely generous to billionaires and corporations while penalizing the middle class and the poor, who pay high direct and indirect taxes and receive low-quality public services in return. Political reform also remained in the drawer, allowing the proliferation of myriad parliamentary formations that exist mainly to deliver posts and budget modifications to their local clients. Furthermore, Lula’s government took no measures to reduce the influence of the few large, private groups that have a virtual monopoly on audience share of the country’s news media. And nothing was done to punish those responsible for the crimes of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship or to democratize the armed forces, which continued to take pride in their past criminal actions in the name of the fight against the “communist danger.”

The Lula government made social advances in a handful of key areas. It introduced racial quotas for college admissions, which gave millions of Black and mixed-race young people the opportunity to access higher education for the first time. Domestic workers were given social assistance and higher wages, which provoked a furious reaction from wealthy elites and part of the middle class. But other historical demands of Brazil’s social movements were forgotten or watered down. While the Lula administration guaranteed significant funding for small family farms, for example, it also provided extraordinary support to big agribusiness and only slightly increased the number of titles transferred to landless workers as compared to the previous center-right government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former sociology professor and founder of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party. The basis of Lula’s macroeconomic policy also remained essentially the same as that of the Cardoso government—a “tripod” of a floating exchange rate, a primary budget surplus, and inflation targets.

Lula’s two terms profoundly changed the social base of his electorate. In 2005, during what came to be known as the mensalão scandal, it came to light that the PT had received undeclared funds for the 2002 electoral campaign and partially redistributed them to allied parties. It was an illegal but common and traditionally tolerated practice in Brazil, but the incident nevertheless shattered the PT’s carefully crafted image as a clear alternative to the clientelist practices of the “old” Brazilian politics. From the 2006 elections onward, the PT lost the support of its traditional working-class and middle-class base and attracted poorer voters who lived in the most disadvantaged areas of the country—especially in the northeast—and who benefited the most from the Lula government’s social policies. Brazilian political scientist André Singer, who was Lula’s spokesperson and press secretary until 2006, dubbed this configuration “Lulism”: early support for Lula stemmed from the desire for a break with the past, but by his second term, it came more from expectations that a strong state should improve the living standards of the population, particularly the poorest, without political radicalization or mass mobilization that would threaten the status quo. Social movements and unions, previously the core of the PT’s identity and the subject of lively internal debates, became less important than those elected to parliamentary or administrative positions and bureaucrats who controlled affiliates’ votes in party conventions.

None of this seemed to matter when Lula finished his second term with a popularity rating of more than 80 percent and a 7.5 percent jump in GDP from the previous year. He managed to handpick his successor, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla turned no-nonsense technocrat, who had served as Lula’s chief of staff. She was unknown to the general public and little loved by her government peers, but, with Lula’s tireless support, she became Brazil’s first female president.

 

The Unraveling Rousseff Years

Without Lula’s charisma and formidable talent for political mediation, Rousseff’s government floundered from day one. She became increasingly isolated from the PT’s social base both on the traditional left and among the Lulist underclass. Moreover, Rousseff never showed real interest in foreign policy, one of the strong points of the Lula government, under which Brazil became a protagonist on the world stage and a leader of the BRICS (the economic and political bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

The first big shock for Rousseff came in June 2013, when huge demonstrations erupted in the streets. Millions of young people protested an increase in public transport fares and demanded a more efficient state, able to provide its citizens with quality education, healthcare, and transportation. “We want FIFA-standard services,” the demonstrators shouted. Securing Brazil’s role as host of the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016 had been triumphs for Lula, but symbols and promises were no longer enough. The response to the protests was mostly bureaucratic: a few vague promises without any real change of course. The demonstrations eventually ended, but with commodity prices beginning to wind down, it was evident that the tide was turning.

In 2014, several prominent PT cadres insisted that Lula run instead of Rousseff. Lula, perhaps out of fear that he had not yet fully recovered from the laryngeal cancer he had been diagnosed with in 2011, preferred that Rousseff run again. She was reelected with 51.6 percent of the vote, defeating the candidate for the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, Aécio Neves, by just over three points.

Immediately after her victory, under heavy pressure from financial markets and economic elites, Rousseff made a political U-turn. She dismissed her economic minister Guido Mantega, who had been a loyal member of the PT for decades, and replaced him with a conservative banker with close ties to finance. The government made heavy cuts to public investment and social protections and promoted a steep increase in interest rates. The result was a sharp drop in GDP (which fell by 3.8 percent in 2015 and 3.6 percent in 2016), a deep recession, and an explosion of unemployment.

The PT’s social and electoral base felt betrayed, and Rousseff’s abrupt change of course did nothing to decrease pressure from the opposition. From March 2015 onward, colossal protests, amplified by the media, multiplied throughout the country. Realizing Rousseff’s growing political fragility, Neves and his allies began to lay the groundwork for a parliamentary coup. A small accounting manipulation known as “budget pedaling”—which allowed Rousseff to hide the extent of the public deficit and supposedly helped her win reelection in 2014—became the pretext for impeachment, even though the same maneuver had been used repeatedly by Rousseff’s predecessors and would soon be used by her successors.

On April 17, 2016, the lower house approved the beginning of impeachment proceedings. A then-obscure far-right congressman from Rio de Janeiro, retired army captain Jair Bolsonaro, dedicated his yes vote to the army colonel who headed the infamous facility where Rousseff was tortured during the dictatorship. Less than one month later, on May 12, 2016, the Senate voted to suspend Rousseff from office, practically sealing her fate. When she left the Palácio do Planalto that evening, there were just a few demonstrators protesting the ongoing coup.

Michel Temer, Rousseff’s vice president and one of the architects of the overthrow, became the new president. He called on Henrique Meirelles, the president of the Central Bank during the Lula years, to head the Ministry of the Economy. They quickly secured approval of a constitutional amendment that limited spending growth until 2036, making significant public investments impossible.

Meanwhile, another storm was brewing. In early 2014, a group of federal judges and prosecutors began investigating a money-laundering scheme that had used a car wash in Brasília as a front. Gradually, the Lava Jato (car wash) probe expanded to allegations of corruption and bribery within Petrobras. The investigation also took aim at Brazil’s largest construction company, Odebrecht—which had maintained close ties with all Brazilian governments since the military dictatorship, financing the electoral campaigns of politicians of all parties—for using bribes to increase its operations throughout Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America, and in Africa.

Nobody disputed that corruption was (and is) a serious problem in Brazil—and 318 of the 594 members of the lower house who approved Rousseff’s impeachment were themselves under investigation or faced charges. But it became clear that for the Lava Jato prosecutors and one of the presiding judges in the case, Sergio Moro, the main objective was not to fight wrongdoing but to indict Lula at all costs. An Intercept investigation found that the prosecutors held secret meetings with U.S. Department of Justice officials without informing Rousseff’s government. With the prosecutors’ approval, the United States negotiated deals with witnesses in the Petrobras investigations without following the procedures laid out in the 2001 bilateral Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.

In the absence of concrete evidence against the former president, Moro convicted Lula using a dubious legal maneuver of his own invention: the “indeterminate act of office,” which was inspired, he revealed in an April 2018 Harvard University lecture, by a scene in the movie The Godfather. Moro sentenced Lula to twelve years in prison, accusing him of having received a beachfront apartment as a bribe for facilitating contracts between Petrobras and a big construction company called OAS. But the apartment never belonged to Lula, and he and his family never lived there.

Under Moro’s orders, Lula was arrested on April 7, 2018, six months before elections in which the former president was the front-runner in all polls. The arrest opened the way for the election of Bolsonaro, an unpredictable outsider who won the runoff with 58 million votes, against the PT’s replacement candidate, former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, with 47 million votes—7.5 million fewer than Rousseff won in 2014. Soon after the elections, Moro became the minister of justice in Bolsonaro’s government.

 

The Reaction of Jair Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro’s government has been marked by a level of military influence unprecedented in Brazil’s democratic era. His vice president, Hamilton Mourão, is a retired army general, and more than 6,000 officers hold positions at all levels of his administration, including as ministers. A shadow of dictatorship looms over the former captain; he openly threatened a coup d’état on several occasions and has constantly bullied the Supreme Court, one of the few institutions to have resisted him, at least in part.

Bolsonaro’s administration has deepened the neoliberal economic model first introduced to Brazil in the early 1990s, indiscriminately cutting all public spending, including for education and health services. Its management of the COVID-19 pandemic has been catastrophic: the administration has obstructed any kind of lockdowns or the use of masks, delayed the start of vaccination campaigns, and propagandized the use of hydroxychloroquine and other alternative therapies that lack scientific basis. As a result, Brazil’s number of COVID-19 deaths—670,000 at the end of June 2022—is second only to that of the United States.

The pandemic has aggravated an already dramatic economic situation, especially in the favelas of large cities, where almost half of the inhabitants have lost their jobs. The unemployed, casual workers, and those who have stopped looking for work now represent 27 million people, or almost one-third of the 90 million active economic participants in Brazil. In addition, there are some 36 million informal workers who are poorly paid and lack any social protection. At the start of the Bolsonaro administration in January 2019, there were 12.5 million families living under the poverty line. In thirty months, the number rose to 14.7 million families—6 million more miserable people.

 

Lula’s Return

In April 2021, the Supreme Court annulled all the charges against Lula, citing the many irregularities committed by Moro and the Lava Jato prosecutors. One year later, the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations also recognized officially that “Judge Moro was subjectively partial” against Lula and that the conviction of the former president “violated due process guarantees.”

Having recovered his political rights, Lula has become, once again, the leading presidential candidate ahead of the October 2022 election. Against the backdrop of a dramatic social and economic crisis, Lula appears poised to comfortably win a runoff against Bolsonaro or any of the other candidates who have launched campaigns so far. Moro, who left Bolsonaro’s government in April 2020, announced his presidential candidacy in November 2021. He performed so poorly in the polls that he ended his campaign four months later.

This situation has placed Brazil’s traditional power brokers—business and financial elites, as well as most of the legacy media—in a dilemma. Do they insist on finding a centrist candidate who can rid the country of the intolerable Bolsonaro without bringing back Lula, or do they switch to supporting Lula while attempting to heavily influence his government agenda and limit the role of the PT in a new administration? With all its limitations and problems, the PT still represents the most prominent force on the Brazilian left, and it is the party most closely linked to social movements and trade unions. And, so far, all the names floated as possible alternatives to Lula have fared poorly in the polls.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro retains a hard-core base of support at around 30 percent. This is an impressive figure, considering the disastrous results of his government, and it parallels Donald Trump’s enduring popularity in the United States. The support is strongly ideological, from a segment of the electorate that is proud of being conservative, if not openly neo-fascist, and has sealed itself in a bubble of fake news spread through closed WhatsApp and Telegram groups and open social networks (altogether, Bolsonaro has over 20 million followers on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), in evangelical churches, and on friendly TV networks. According to polls, support for Bolsonaro remains highest among white men in southern Brazil, businessmen, and evangelicals. His lowest score is among women, northeastern Brazilians, and the poor.

Lula, by contrast, seeks to avoid ideological polarization and invokes the good times under his government, when the economy was growing, Brazil was respected around the world, and even the poor could afford to eat steaks on Sundays (one of Lula’s favorite metaphors). Brazil’s problems could be solved, as Lula is fond of repeating, if the country just “put the poor in the government budget and the rich in the tax return.” As in 2002, when he made every effort to shed an image of radicalism that had hurt him in previous elections, the former trade unionist has worked hard to build a wide range of alliances from the left to the center-right and to reconnect with the political and economic sectors that contributed to his imprisonment and the coup against Rousseff.

Lula has chosen as his running mate Geraldo Alckmin, a former governor of São Paulo and one of the last leading cadres from Cardoso’s Social Democrats, who was defeated in presidential elections in 2006 (by Lula) and in 2018 (by Bolsonaro). Other centrist leaders and parties have also quickly jumped onto Lula’s bandwagon. The choice of Alckmin was a clear sign of détente with the country’s elites, much to the surprise and discomfort of PT militants and grassroots organizers. But a key question remains unanswered: if the policy of permanent conciliation that guided the Lula and Rousseff administrations ended in a jail sentence and a coup, why would the outcome be any different this time?

Following the 2016 and 2018 debacles, there was no honest internal discussion in the PT. In an interview in October 2021, PT president Gleisi Hoffmann ruled out the idea of rehashing past failures. “A political party does not do self-criticism. It makes a political evaluation and corrects itself,” she said. “There is no need to externalize. It does what needs to be done.”

If elected, Lula will begin his new administration on January 1, 2023, at the age of seventy-seven; it is hard to imagine him running again in 2026. And there are no natural heirs in the PT. The remaining founding cadres are all out of the game, and, among the younger generation, the left’s best hopes lie with the stars of other parties, such as Guilherme Boulos of the PSOL (a party born from a split in the PT in 2003) and Manuela d’Ávila of the PCdoB (one of Brazil’s two communist parties). Haddad, the defeated 2018 PT candidate, is relatively young at fifty-eight, but his political fate will depend on the outcome of his candidacy for governor of São Paulo, the country’s most prosperous and politically influential state. If elected, he could be a strong candidate to succeed Lula. His conservativism on economic matters could help to build bridges with Brazil’s elites.

Lula has also shrewdly returned to the international scene. In the past few months, he was received with honors normally accorded to a head of state not only in Mexico and Argentina but also in Germany, Spain, and France. In November 2021, he met French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, now the country’s main opposition party. Lula thrilled students at France’s Sciences Po in Paris and members of the European Parliament in Brussels with his promises to rebuild Brazil, fight hunger, and stop the destruction of the Amazon. But he steered clear of deeper analysis on how to heal the wounds caused by Bolsonaro, or how to reduce Brazil’s huge social deficit. “I can help the country’s poor. I can help them work, eat, and go to college,” he said in an interview. On another occasion, Lula proclaimed three priorities that should be part of any country’s progressive agenda: reducing inequality, addressing the “climate issue,” and creating jobs. The program of the coalition backing Lula, officially unveiled on June 21, picks up on these themes without going into too much detail or announcing measures that would overly alarm the financial markets.

Polls confirm that the Bolsonaro government’s disastrous handling of the economy is the main reason for Lula’s growing support. In the meantime, inflation had exploded in Brazil even before the war in Ukraine, and the conflict has further aggravated the situation. The price of basic foodstuffs rose 26.8 percent in the twelve months leading up to May 2022. Gasoline reached a record price of $7.60 per gallon—50 percent more than in the United States. Brazil is the world’s eighth-largest oil producer (2.8 million barrels per day), but since the Temer government, prices for domestic consumption have been linked to international prices in dollars, in order to increase the profits of Petrobras for the benefit of private shareholders. While Bolsonaro promised to fully privatize Petrobras in his eventual second term—a move long demanded by large investment groups—Lula’s government program includes adopting a “new fuel and gas pricing policy that considers national costs.”

 

The Perils Ahead

In a normal situation, there would be little doubt about the outcome of the October election. But Bolsonaro has repeatedly hinted that he is intent on repeating Trump’s example and not recognizing the verdict of the ballot box. It is not a threat to be taken lightly. Reuters recently revealed CIA Director William Burns’s confidential mission to Brasília in July 2021 to deliver a stern message to Brazilian authorities: President Bolsonaro must stop casting doubt on Brazil’s voting system. 

In November 2020, Bolsonaro was one of the last global leaders to acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory. The two presidents met face-to-face for the first time earlier this month, during the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. It was a hastily arranged meeting imposed by Bolsonaro as a condition for participating in the Summit, which had already been deserted by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after the Biden administration decided to exclude the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela because of the “lack of democratic space and the human rights situations.”

According to media reports, Bolsonaro asked Biden for help in his reelection bid and portrayed Lula as a danger to U.S. interests. Biden moved to change the subject of the conversation. In a public statement made in front of the cameras, he lauded Brazil’s “vibrant, inclusive democracy and strong electoral institutions.” Biden also praised Bolsonaro’s handling of the Amazon rainforest, commending Brazil for making some “real sacrifices” to protect it.

Biden’s words were far from reality. According to satellite data analyzed by environmentalist groups, since Bolsonaro took office, average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen more than 75 percent from the previous decade. The timing of Biden’s declaration was unfortunate at best: on the eve of the Summit, the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian indigenous affairs expert Bruno Pereira had disappeared during a trip in the Javari Valley, a remote region of the Amazon plagued by illegal fishing, logging, and mining. Brazilian authorities dragged their feet before starting a research mission. Bolsonaro’s response was callous and dismissive. Days later, the two men’s bodies were discovered, and the suspected killers were arrested. The case has drawn global attention to the perils faced by journalists and environmental activists in Brazil. Between 2009 and 2019, more than 300 people were killed amid land and resource conflicts in the Amazon, according to Human Rights Watch.

In this context, many fear that armed militias, or even military units, may try to prevent the transition if Lula is elected. A showdown could happen on September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, when Bolsonaro could gather his more extremist base in Brasília during a traditional military parade. What would the Brazilian military high command do if Bolsonaro really attempted a self-coup? And what would be the attitude of the U.S. government?

What is certain today is that Lula’s charisma and his prudent reformism, rather than radicalism, will be fundamental in deciding, once again, the electoral outcome. If he wins, governing and rebuilding Brazil will be a much more complex challenge.

---

Giancarlo Summa is a Brazilian-Italian journalist now living in Paris. In 2002 and 2006, he worked on the communications team for Lula’s electoral campaigns. He is the author of, among other works, Le rôle politique de la presse au Brésil de l’élection à la réélection de Lula (La Documentation Française, Paris, 2009). He is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication of the London School of Economics and Political Science and collaborates with the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine of the Université Paris III—Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Nigerian Senator and Wife Charged in Plot to Harvest a Child's Organs in U.K.

SICK

He and his wife will stand trial for conspiracy to arrange the travel of a child into Britain “with a view to exploitation, namely organ harvesting,” authorities said.


Dan Ladden-Hall


Darren Baker/Getty

British authorities say they have rescued a child who was targeted in a disturbing international organ-harvesting plot.

A top Nigerian senator and his wife have been charged with conspiracy over a plan to bring the child to the U.K. in order to harvest their organs, London’s Metropolitan Police announced Thursday. No details were immediately available on the age and gender of the child.

People's Democratic Party politician Ike Ekweremadu, 60, and wife Beatrice Nwanneka Ekweremadu, 55, will stand trial for conspiracy to arrange or facilitate travel of another person “with a view to exploitation, namely organ harvesting,” police said in a statement. Both defendants are set to appear in court in west London on Thursday.

Ekweremadu—who has been a senator since 2003 and served three terms as Nigeria's deputy speaker of the senate from 2007 to 2019—was a lawyer before entering politics. Both he and his wife are high-profile figures in their African homeland.

A spokesperson for Ekweremadu confirmed his arrest to the BBC.

The horrific allegations come after an investigation by the Specialist Crime team at Scotland Yard, which deals with serious offenses in the English capital. Cops launched their inquiry last month, leading to the duo’s arrest after police were alerted to possible crimes being committed under modern slavery legislation.

The child, who has not been identified, has been “safeguarded,” the Met said, adding that the force was “working closely with partners on continued support.” British court rules mean the police are unable to divulge any further details while criminal proceedings are underway.

Forced organ harvesting—in which organs are surgically removed from a victim against their will—has been addressed by recent legislation in the U.K. A law passed in April partly aims to disrupt the black market organ trade by making it illegal for Brits to travel overseas to purchase an organ, a practice known as “organ tourism.” Although the sale and trafficking of organs in the U.K. was already outlawed, the new rules came amid worrying reports of a booming organ trade around the world in recent years.

In London’s Chinatown, a years-long protest has been staged against alleged forced organ harvesting from political prisoners in China. The practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners is legal in China, but an article published in the American Journal of Transplantation in April claimed to have found 71 cases in which prisoners were operated on while they were still alive.

And sadly, because human organs are a valuable commodity, some people even consider voluntarily selling their own organs when conditions are desperate enough. Just this week, a hospital in Kenya had to issue a public declaration telling people to stop asking staff how much they could get for their kidneys. And in Afghanistan—where a devastating combination of widespread famine and international sanctions have pushed millions of people to the edge of starvation—dreadful reports emerged in early 2022 that people were selling kidneys for as little as $1,500 to feed their families.

SEE

BODY SNATCHERS

 LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Gothic Capitalism Redux 

Kazakhstan Uses Spyware Against Its Own Citizens

In the wake of a protest movement which swept Kazakhstan in January, the Kazakh government deployed a spyware to surveil activists, a cybersecurity research group found.

The program, dubbed Hermit, is functionally similar to the Israeli-made Pegasus program. (Photo: Piqusels, License)

WRITTEN BY DAVID KLEIN

The program, dubbed ‘Hermit’ by the Lookout Threat Lab, is functionally similar to the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, though it is believed to have been designed by the Italian group, RCS labs.

The sample detected is designed specifically for Android devices, though Lookout believes that an IOS version also exists.

“Named after a distinct server path used by the attacker’s command and control (C2), Hermit is a modular surveillanceware that hides its malicious capabilities in packages downloaded after it’s deployed,” Lookout said in their report.

The January protests in Kazakhstan were triggered by the rise of fuel prices and have quickly turned violent. The focus of the people’s anger was former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81, who ruled the former Soviet country since its independence in 1991.

His family is believed to control much of the country’s economy. Nazarbayev resigned in 2019 and handpicked his successor but remained until January in power behind the scene.

Kazakhstan isn’t the only country the spyware had been deployed to. The lab also found evidence of its use in Rojava, the Kurdish majority region of Northern Syria which has been under siege by both the Turkish military and the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Assad.

“Prior to detecting the Kazakhstan samples, we found a reference to “Rojava,” a Kurdish-speaking region in northeastern Syria, in the passive DNS records of Hermit,” Lookout said. “The domain we found (rojavanetwork[.]info) specifically imitates “Rojava Network,” a social media brand on Facebook and Twitter that provides news coverage and political analysis of the region, often in support of SDF operations.” SDF stands for Syrian Democratic Forces.

The software has also been deployed in its home country of Italy, the Italian parliament revealed in 2021.

“Italian authorities potentially misused it in an anti-corruption operation,” the report said.

In Addition to Kazakhstan and Syria, RCS lab also has ties with Pakistan, Chile, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar and Turkmenistan.

Turkmenistan is considered one of the world’s most repressive states and Myanmar has been accused of engaging in genocide against their Rohingya minority since at least 2016.

Published: 23 June 2022
https://www.occrp.org/

An Open Letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Behalf of Science for Peace

BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS WORKING GROUPFacebookTwitter

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We write to you today as one last attempt to convince your government to adopt a policy in line with the preference of the vast majority of your citizens, with respect to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into effect last year. It was only a few months ago that the P5 countries (all nuclear powers including China and Russia) issued a joint statement that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. Nonetheless, as I am sure you are aware, the danger of a nuclear war has never been greater than at this moment and none of the current nuclear states, or Canada, have signed on to the treaty. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has kept its Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight (the closest we have ever been to nuclear self-destruction of our species) since January 2020, in response to the abrogation by the U.S. of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement and the Open Skies Treaty — after the administration of George W. Bush abandoned the U.S. commitment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. As Angela Kane, the former UN High Representative for Disarmament and Undersecretary General starkly put it: “The arms control architecture which constituted a strong pillar of strategic stability even in the highly rivalrous Cold War environment has crumbled.” 

All of this was before Russia invaded Ukraine, raising tensions between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet to unprecedented levels. With president Putin warning of “consequences the likes of which have never been seen” for any country doing what NATO is currently doing: arming Ukraine, how long until a tactical nuclear weapon is deployed or a NATO country supplying arms is attacked, leading to a tit for tat escalation to a full nuclear exchange? We are in fact already in a nuclear war if we accept that the mere threat of nuclear attack (implicit in Putin’s warning) is use of nuclear weapons. We would argue that a state’s mere possession of nuclear weapons is an implicit threat to use them. Neither the use, threat or possession of nuclear weapons are in keeping with existing international humanitarian law or basic morality. International law unambiguously outlaws the targeting of civilian populations. Clearly nuclear weapons, by the scale of their destructive powers are contrary to this prohibition, quite independently from the TPNW.

If ever the precautionary principle was appropriate, this would seem to be the time: it advises that in the context of a potentially catastrophic risk, reducing that risk must take precedence over all secondary considerations. It is this concern, in particular the call of humanitarian empathy, that prompted the international community to negotiate the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while having slowed the spread of nuclear weapons, has clearly failed in getting the existing nuclear powers to live up to their commitment to work toward the elimination of their stockpiles. While the TPNW is unlikely to compel nuclear states to surrender their arsenals, it is an important step in delegitimizing nuclear weapons as a tool of statecraft and making those holdout states pariahs.

Canada is not a nuclear state. Does your government really believe that the possession of nuclear weapons by other powers around the world makes Canada safer? If so, how? If not, what possible reason would prevent Canada from signing on to the TPNW? More than 70% of Canadians support doing so. The claim that our NATO membership precludes signing the treaty has already been debunked by an extensive study by Harvard Law School. While none of the NATO members have signed the treaty, several are at least attending the first meeting of parties to the treaty rescheduled for June 21-23. It is your duty, dear ministers, to assure the safety of our country and its citizens and to reflect the opinions of the majority of those who elected you. Both of these duties compel you to reconsider your rejection of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 JUNE 22, 2022

Fears for wolf population after ‘catastrophic’ wildfire in Spain


Blaze in Sierra de la Culebra mountains in Zamora province destroyed 30,000 hectares of woodland

The aftermath of the Sierra de la Culebra wildfire, one of Spain’s largest in several decades.

 Photograph: Mariam A Montesinos/EPA


Stephen Burgen

in Barcelona

Thu 23 Jun 2022 

The Spanish government has declared the Sierra de la Culebra mountain range in Zamora province a catastrophe zone after a fire destroyed 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of woodland, raising fears for the future of the local wolf population.

The decision gives the Castilla y León region immediate access to €2m (£1.7m) in economic recovery funds to help make good the damage caused by the worst fire in a decade, which destroyed a huge swathe of the 600 sq km biosphere reserve in north-west Spain.

The fire broke out a week ago and spread quickly, fanned by high winds and unseasonably high temperatures. More than 650 firefighters from all over Spain battled to contain the blaze aided by planes and helicopters before it was finally brought under control on Sunday.

“The main problem now is soil erosion caused by the wind and rain,” Luis Suárez of WWF said. “It’s fundamental that we stabilise the soil and restore the area in a way that will make it more resistant to fire in the future, which involves sustainable activities such as traditional livestock grazing and responsible forest management.”

As well as the loss of around 25,000 hectares of woodland, there are fears for the future of the local wolf population, one of Spain’s largest. It is thought the adults will have escaped the flames, but the young were only a few weeks old and may not have survived.

“The females usually give birth in mid-May and so the cubs wouldn’t be very mobile,” Suárez said. “It’s very unlikely that the females would have been able to get all the young out of the lairs but it’s too early to say for sure.”

It is thought that the area was home to 10 wolf packs, each occupying its own large territory, much of which has now been destroyed.

Zamora has been held up as a role model for the co-existence between farmers with wolves. A ban on hunting the animals in north-west Spain, where most of the packs are concentrated, only became law last month, despite opposition from rightwing legislators.

There are about 300 packs in Spain, each made up of up to eight wolves, the largest population in western Europe.

The sierra is also home to large populations of deer, wild boar, mountain cats, otters and golden eagles. Observation towers have been built, giving visitors a rare opportunity to watch wolves in the wild.

WORLD BANK
Small islands in Southeast Asia: Awash in a sea of plastic

KATE PHILP|

Environmental Engineer

With nearly 10,000 inhabited islands, there are thousands of diverse island communities across Southeast Asia facing the challenge of beaches covered in plastic. 

Photo: Shutterstock / Mario De Moya F


Imagine standing on a beautiful island beach - soft sand, blue water, palm trees swaying in the breeze – gentle waves from the sea are lapping at your feet... but with each wave comes plastic bags, bottles and wrappers. The beach is covered in plastic.

This is the situation facing islands and archipelagic countries across the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific Islands and islands off the coasts of Africa. But nowhere is it more noticeable than in Southeast Asia. The region is a hotspot for plastic pollution, making up half of the top 10 contributors to plastic waste washed into the ocean. With nearly 10,000 inhabited islands, there are thousands of diverse island communities across Southeast Asia facing the challenge of beaches covered in plastic.

Managing plastic waste on small and remote islands can be particularly challenging. There are often limited waste collection and treatment options on the islands, resulting in much plastic waste dumped or burned in the open, with serious risks to community health and the environment. The lack of easy transport connections to other islands and the mainland mean that it is expensive to treat the waste elsewhere, where there may be larger populations and better treatment options available.

So how can plastic waste management on small and remote islands be improved? We need to consider opportunities for plastic recycling and innovative technological solutions that can help. But technology will not provide an easy fix, it is also essential to reduce the amount of plastic waste produced in the first place.

Having access to markets for recycled plastic is a key factor in determining opportunities for plastic recycling. If the recyclable plastics can be transported along with other valuable recyclables to the mainland or a nearby island recycling hub at a reasonable cost, then these should be fed into existing recycling infrastructure to be effectively and responsibly processed. Small-scale artisanal recycling to produce souvenirs may be able to be implemented on islands where there is a tourist market.

Photo: Shutterstock / Yusnizam Yusof

Unfortunately, there is no single ‘silver bullet’ technological solution to the problem of plastic waste on islands. All recycling technologies require specific types and quality of plastic waste. These technologies must therefore be integrated into a broader waste management system with incentives for separation and pre-treatment of plastic waste. This is a challenge in small and remote island contexts. And even then, recycling technologies cannot be used to treat all plastic waste – a combination of technologies and other solutions is required. This could include disposing of plastic waste in a controlled manner, such as into a sanitary landfill on the mainland or a small, controlled landfill on the island.

The World Bank, in cooperation with the Ministry of Environment and Water, Malaysia, has produced the Technology Options for Plastic waste in Island Contexts (TOPIC) Toolbox. The TOPIC Toolbox was developed by a team from cyclos and Lasaju. Funding was provided by PROBLUE, an umbrella multi-donor trust fund, administered by the World Bank, that supports the sustainable and integrated development of marine and coastal resources in healthy oceans. The TOPIC Toolbox helps island decision makers identify potentially viable technologies and other solutions for treating plastic waste on their islands, empowering them to make effective investment and policy decisions on treatment options.

Using tools such as the TOPIC Toolbox to understand viable treatment options is necessary to manage the plastic waste that will inevitably be produced. But for beaches in Southeast Asia to be free of plastic, upstream solutions are essential to reduce the amount of plastic waste produced in the first place. Upstream solutions can include policies to reduce the import and use of specific problematic plastic items on islands and encourage the use of alternatives, such as the plastic bag and straw ban introduced in Samoa in 2019. Key island sectors, such as tourism, play an important role in implementing these upstream solutions.

 

Photo: Shutterstock / Alen Thien

The World Bank is working with countries across Southeast Asia on marine plastics, including on strengthening countries’ upstream plastics policies. The new Southeast Asia Regional Program on Combating Marine Plastics (SEA-MaP) Regional Project with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will implement many actions in the ASEAN Regional Action Plan for Combating Marine Debris in the ASEAN Member States. This will support innovative solutions and plastics policy harmonization across the region, including upstream solutions to reduce the amount of plastic waste produced.

By working together at the regional, national and island level to reduce plastic waste, we can imagine a day when it will be possible to stand on an island beach anywhere in Southeast Asia and enjoy the sand and the sea without waves filled with plastic bags, bottles and wrappers.