The splat is out of the bag: a first-ever look at the making of the Rorschach test


The ink blots have been used as a diagnostic tool for 100 years, but the making of new ones, every five years, has been a closely guarded secret – until now

Say what you see … Rorschach ink blots. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

Jeremy Millar

The Guardian
Wed 17 May 2023


For images that have been reproduced for more than a century and looked at, quite intently, by millions of people, there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding the Rorschach ink blots. These famous cards – both intensely guarded and instantly recognisable – continue to be used for psychological diagnosis around the world. New copies are only printed every five years or so, and no one has ever been allowed to document the process. So when I asked the publisher recently if I might do so, I had not expected them to say yes. There were conditions, of course: the most perplexing of which was that if I were to document the printing of the Rorschach ink blots, I must do so without revealing any information about the printing of the Rorschach ink blots. It seemed a test as exquisitely elegant as the one for which the cards themselves are used.

The ink blots are named after Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychologist who died so young that he only makes it halfway through his biography. One Sunday in late March 1922 he is taking his wife Olga to see Peer Gynt at the theatre and a week – five pages – later he’s dead. He had been born in Zürich 37 years earlier, the first of three children – two boys and a girl – to Philippine and Ulrich. His father was an extremely skilled artist and wrote a 100-page treatise titled Outline of a Theory of Form in which he considered many aspects of visual perception, asking: “Who among us has not often and with pleasure turned our eyes and imagination to the ever-changing shapes and movements of the clouds and the mist?”. Hermann became a gifted student and joined the elite academic Gymnasium in Schaffhausen, northern Switzerland. His skill as an artist was perhaps his defining characteristic, however, and led to his admiringly mocking nickname of Klex, a shortening of klexen or klecksen, which means something like “to daub”. Klex also means ink blot.

Unique inks being mixed. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

Rorschach was not the first to consider the importance of these indeterminate forms, and in the newly developing science of psychology, ink blots were being used as prompts by which one might gauge a subject’s imagination. As a medical student, Rorschach came to use them similarly, showing psychiatric patients and young teenagers alike newly made blots and noting what they saw. He soon began to consider these methods as somewhat unimaginative, however, and in 1917 he started developing his own test – although he thought of it more as an experiment – creating images which seem not to have been made at all but which were also not simply random. Their purpose must not be obvious, but they must seem to have one.


As well as the ink blots, Rorschach also had to design the “protocol” by which the subject’s responses were gathered and assessed, and here he adopted categories that seemed to relate to the avant-garde art of the period with which he was fascinated: Detail and Whole; Movement, Colour and Form. Each subject’s response was given a code that not only related to what they saw but also how well they saw. Rorschach would then collate these and make some simple calculations, noting the percentages of response which corresponded to Movement, or Colour, or whether the noted Forms were well or poorly seen.

As Rorschach understood, if the responses of different subjects are to be compared, then the thing to which they are responding must be the same, and given that this is a test that depends on visual acuity, then it must be exactly the same; “similar” is hardly a scientific category. The practical difficulties of reproducing the ink blots led to delays in first publishing the work – which was given the title Psychodiagnostik – and when it did appear in 1921, Rorschach had personally supervised the production of the print run of 1,500 sets, even, at this late stage, eliminating elements that he considered irrelevant for diagnostic purposes. The book was sold with 10 printed ink blots in a separate envelope; the buyer was to glue the images to card themselves.

A densitometer ensures consistency. Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian


It was a young apprentice, Herr Bögli, who worked on this first printed set of ink blot images, and he recorded all of Rorschach’s instructions in the most minute detail, from subtle tonal shifts to the all-important asymmetries in what – at first glance – seem to be the most symmetrical of images. Bögli’s notes became the “printing bible” for the production of the ink blots, and even when a new publisher took on the work in 1927, Bögli worked on it once more, and would continue to do so for decades to come.

Can we trust the Rorschach test?

While the inkblots were soon becoming well known, the method of their production remained secret – and that remains the case to this day. (Even the printer does not know it all: each ink colour is specially prepared elsewhere and is used for the ink blots alone.) Developments in print technology over the past century have meant that great care has had to be taken in order to ensure consistency. For most of this period, the ink blots were printed using a letterpress machine in which raised metal plates called – happily – clichés transfer a single colour on to the prepared sheet; when new plates had to be made, even a different composition of the metal used produced new effects – flatter colours, crisper edges – and minute, crucial adjustments then had to be made. For the past decade the ink blots have been produced using lithographic plates, but not with the cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks used to print magazines, for example, but with the specially mixed Rorschach ones.

Some of the blots bleed on to other sheets.

 Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian

And so for an undisclosed period at the end of March, in an undisclosed location near Bern, I watched as both printer and publisher gazed intently at sheet after sheet taken off the press. Few ink blots can have been looked upon as carefully as these, although this time it was the forms being tested, and not those looking at them. I was not allowed to look so directly, however, so my camera was turned obliquely, glancing seemingly familiar shapes obscured by other objects or sliding across the shine of their glossy surfaces. There were ink blots and stains everywhere, of course, and sometimes the shapes would seem to slip from the printed sheets and surface elsewhere – on plastic tubs or radiators – and one could not help but wonder what any of them might mean. At other times, test prints would mean that ink blots would be overlaid one upon the other and new mutations would form, and one could not help but wonder what new conditions they might diagnose or which they might help bring about.

Much of my life has been spent looking at images, wondering what they might mean, and though these ink blots may not be artworks, they operate perhaps in a similar way, depending on a “leaning-in” of the viewer and then inviting them to do so. And, invited, I leaned in too, in a small printshop in a village settled in a Swiss valley and there I found … well, I cannot say.

The ink blots will probably not be printed again for another 10 years, and this may be the final time that they are mechanically reproduced with smudges and stains, klex. What do you see?

Jeremy Millar is an artist and head of programme, MA writing, at the Royal College of Art, London. All photographs are from the series Detail and Whole; Movement, Colour and Form (2023); more images from the series can be found at jeremymillar.org

We’ve done so much damage’: Beatriz Milhazes’s carnivalesque odes to nature

Ahead of a historic survey of her work at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, the Brazilian artist discusses her global inspirations, shape-shifting patterns, and why she’s still an optimist

Skye Sherwin

The Guardian

Thu 18 May 2023 

Navigating Beatriz Milhazes’ febrile reinvention of geometric abstraction can feel like trying to make headway through a carnival crowd. Hoops, mandalas, flowers and other circular motifs spin like dancers across her canvases, their bright colours slamming into each other. With its erupting forms, which have evolved from tumbly, lacy arabesques to hard-edged grids, sprouting leaves and flowing waves, the Rio de Janeiro-based artist’s work has the excess of a street party, a baroque church, a jungle.

“I’ve tried to bring new possibilities to the course of abstraction,” she says while getting ready for her first UK institutional show in more than two decades: a survey, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, of 20 key paintings spanning her 30-plus year career as one of the world’s leading abstract painters. “My challenge is how to work with geometry and life. I’m in favour of life, we need it!”

Milhazes recalls how, when she studied art in Rio in the 1980s, painting had been a lesser force in Brazil’s cultural scene. Instead it was dominated by the Tropicália installations of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticia that melted boundaries between art and life. So Milhazes looked to Europe. Her first and enduring touchstones included Piet Mondrian and his interest in nature and structure as well as Henri Matisse, a forebear in collaged shapes, vivid colours and the pursuit of beauty, with whom she felt “the deepest connection”.

You never really find the centre in my work. I call it a mathematical dream

To bring new heat to these ideas she turned to Rio, taking inspiration from its architecture and vernacular culture. Her graduate works collaging spangled carnival fabrics were inspired by the spectacular creations of the great carnival designer Fernando Pinto, while historical dress and women’s domestic labour making lace and crochet was another early reference. In 1989 she began developing her signature transfer technique, using cut-out plastic shapes loaded with paint to imprint forms on the canvas. The resulting surfaces have intense colours but are not poster-smooth. Rather they’re visibly layered, textured and cracked.


Club tropicália: the mesmerising power of Brazilian art

At Turner Contemporary, Milhazes’ earliest paintings will come as a surprise to those familiar with the artist’s later bold abstractions. Recalling lacework, wallpaper and floral fabric prints, their patterns are looser and more obviously hand-worked. Flowers, though, are a constant motif and not just because of what Milhazes sees in Rio’s famed botanical gardens or national park. “They ornament the sad moments, the beautiful moments, and are part of people’s life,” she says.

As her vision progresses, the compositions become staggeringly complex. In Maracorola, an enormous 2015 painting of almost three metres, she composes a landscape with pulsing hoops, waves, vegetal squiggles and a blazing sun across a chequerboard ground. It’s a controlled riot of form and colour, with two key motifs: the circle and wave. “The circle is an organic shape and has no end,” she says. “It’s spiritual and meditative. My interest is more about movement, though. You never really find the centre in my work. I call it a mathematical dream.”

Inspired by Rio’s coast and parks, Milhazes has grown more interested in nature lately, and it is a focus of her Margate exhibition. “We’ve done so much damage; it’s not just about stopping that but also examining our hope for nature to renew,” she says. “I’m an optimist and I want to show how much we need the breath of the leaves, the water, sky and sun. My work is about life. Wherever it’s shown, people connect to it.”

Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 27 May to 10 September.
Circles of influence: four works from Maresias

Douradinha em cinza e marrom (main image), 2016, acrylic on linen
This eye-popping recent work, whose geometric forms pulse outwards from its citrus centre, shows Milhazes’s pioneering use of figurative elements – here flowers and leaves – in abstract painting.

Photograph: Courtesy Ivor Braka Ltd/Manuel Águas and Pepe Schettino/Beatriz Milhazes Studio

Maracorola, 2015, acrylic on canvas
Milhazes sees this vast painting as combining key aspects of her development as an artist, including how she thinks of composition in terms of landscape’s possibilities. It explores the sea’s rhythms, seen clearly in the rippling waveforms.

 

Photograph: TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection/Fausto Fleury/Beatriz Milhazes Studio


Maresias, 2002, acrylic on canvas
This work gives Milhazes’ exhibition its title, and means “sea air”. Like one of her forebears, the avant-garde French artist Sonia Delaunay, Milhazes has explored buzzing circular forms. This painting suggests multiple references, from mandalas to targets and floral decoration.
 

Photograph: motivo/Jonathan and Wendy Grad/ Vicente de Mello/Beatriz Milhazes Studio

A Casa da Maria, 1992, acrylic on canvaas
In one of the earliest works in the show, Milhazes draws on the history of dressmaking and women’s domestic labour in Brazil, referencing “the kind of crochet my grandmother used to do”. Its gold palette recalls church ornamentation.

Interview

‘Everyone encounters some kind of abuse’: Stephen ‘Jorbs’ Flavall speaks out on the dark side of Twitch streaming

In his new memoir, Before We Go Live, the Twitch and YouTube star pulls back the curtain on the world of pro game streaming – and details some of the toxic behaviour he says he has witnessed

Kim Liao

The Guardian
Thu 18 May 2023

Stephen Flavall – or Jorbs as he is known on YouTube and Twitch, where he has more than 100,000 followers – rose to fame streaming strategy games such as XCOM and Slay the Spire, a game in which he has achieved several world records. He’s considered a high-ranking Twitch streamer, with a soothing monotone voice and an infectious laugh. He’s very consistent. When you watch Flavall’s Twitch channel, you know exactly what to expect: funny and cerebral anecdotes, informative strategy tips and a supportive community.

But his new memoir, Before We Go Live, does something unexpected: it pulls back the curtain on the back end of professional game streaming – which, as anyone who follows online gaming culture knows, is rife with rampant toxicity, abuse and harassment. It’s a chilling wakeup call for the industry, from the top down.

Achieving solvency as a professional streamer is no easy task. For every person on Twitch pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are hundreds of thousands of people barely making a dime. Flavall knew this when he took the leap of faith to become a pro streamer, but he pursued it anyway. “I knew that I was good at breaking things down and analysing them in ways that people could understand,” he tells me when we meet via video call. “I knew I could make content that people would enjoy if I could find an audience for it.”

Flavall has been playing games and offering commentary on them since he was a child. Growing up in New Zealand, he learned how to play chess at age three, and watched a lot of cricket – with televised commentary and stories from his father, who worked for the national cricket team. At six, Flavall was playing games of solo cricket in the back yard, commentating the whole time. He studied Classics, learning Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, reading ancient texts that are still being translated, analysed and interpreted. “I was attracted to it because it’s messy data about humanity. Those are things that I’m interested in: stories about humans and trying to make sense of it all,” he says. On his way to becoming a streamer, he found success as an online poker player, playing 3.5 million hands in three years.

In his early 20s, he posted a few YouTube videos about the notoriously difficult alien-invasion PC strategy game XCOM. Developers working on a mod for the game called Long War 2 took notice, and he was offered the chance to play an early version as a design adviser before it came out. “When [the mod] was released, all of a sudden, there was a reason for people to watch me: I was the person who knew about this new game,” he says. “I had all the strategies and understood how it was coded. That was the moment I knew I would be able to stream for a living.”

Flavall hit it big as a streamer after he began streaming Slay the Spire, a popular strategy card game from 2018 that was recognised on many game-of-the-year lists, and has been credited with launching an entire sub-genre. It’s a tricky game to play, even without self-narrating or conversing with viewers in Twitch chat: the player collects cards, potions and relics, and combines the powers they grant in order to kill a rotating slate of enemies while climbing a demonic spire to reach its toxic heart, the ultimate boss. This strategy game offers a metaphor for professional streaming: if, by chance, you can amass just the right combination of powerful resources and deploy them skilfully, you can avoid death by enemies, bosses and unfortunate events.

A screenshot from Slay the Spire, for which Flavall holds several world records

As he navigated the tricky economics of streaming, Flavall joined a pro esports team. In his book, he explains how such teams capitalise on the popularity of many streamers working together to “leverage collective bargaining power, hire staff who understand the space, and ideally find [their] streamers better deals for better money and from better companies. A great team might even be able to help your channel grow by throwing its brand behind it.”

But in the three years he spent with the team, Flavall was alarmed by what he perceived to be problematic behaviour he encountered from business partners, promoters, sponsors and other streamers. In one incident described in his book, Flavall was invited to the Tyson Ranch near Los Angeles for conversations about investments and sponsorships, only to discover, he alleges, an executive spending the weekend creepily isolating and hitting on a young female streamer on the company’s dime. While he was spared the worst of the it, Flavall nonetheless dealt with what he believes was boundary-crossing behaviour: “I’d have no idea whether he wanted to tell me about a new sponsor, or he was firing me, or he was upset with someone, or he needed to vent … I felt that disagreeing with any of his personal behaviour risked repercussions for my professional success.”

Something finally snapped when he says he was not paid for three months of work. He was furious. Discussing the situation with a friend and colleague, she alleged that she had endured an endless litany of sexism, disparagement and harassment from individuals within the team, as well as other streamers. This conversation became the foundation for the book. “What struck me – what made me write the book – was that these people had just treated her absolutely awfully, and they did so while treating me fairly respectfully, at least on a surface level.”

While writing his book, Flavall interviewed 30 other streamers, testing his hypothesis that however bad he’d had it, it was worse for women in the gaming world. It was, by far. “Every single woman I talked to had encountered some form of abuse,” Flavall says, “whether it was a microaggression at a tournament when they went to collect their prize money, or being threatened or sexually harassed when they streamed.”

Misogyny in the gaming world is a longstanding problem, stretching back to 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign and far beyond. Female streamers and competitive players have shared many stories about it in recent years; some base aspects of their streaming personality around fighting back against the sexism they encounter, and some let their skills speak for them. Before We Go Live implicates the whole industry. Along with his friend’s allegations, it also recounts the stories of Hearthstone players Pathra and Nicholena, who experienced barrages of insults during tournaments, threats on social media and being shunned after rejecting romantic advances by managers.

Before We Go Live by Stephen Flavall. 

Photograph: Spender Books

With all of this rampant abuse, what would Flavall want to tell a young, naive would-be streamer before they dive into this difficult world? “Being a streamer – or a ‘content creator’ – is an idea that has been created by companies like YouTube,” he says. “If something’s just ‘content’, then you can put ads on it, and you don’t have to think about what the content actually is. I’ve never really been a streamer. I am a strategy gamer and a storyteller. If Twitch went down overnight, I would still be a strategy gamer and a storyteller. I’d find a different job doing something to do with strategy, games and storytelling. Twitch TV … just happens to be somewhere where I create my work right now.”


Ultimately, Flavall does not fear retaliation from the bad actors called out in his book. He wanted to use his platform to make the world of streaming a better place. “The story felt like it had to be told,” he says. “If someone wants to come after me, they’re not going to break me down more than other people have. I have my community behind me. I was in a situation where I felt like I had to stand up for myself, and for my friends.”

In some ways, writing a book offered closure. “There was a separation of the psyche that started to happen when I was in front of an audience for so many hours a week, pretending that everything is OK, when it obviously wasn’t,” he says. “During the pandemic, that separation of my psyche was genuinely difficult. I had to repair that for myself, and healing was more important than the idea that other people might hurt me if I spoke out.”

Norway under pressure to scale back fossil fuel expansion plans

Campaigners say development of huge Rosebank field in North Sea would drive climate breakdown

THE GUARDIAN

17 May 2023 

The Norwegian government is facing growing pressure to scale back its huge global fossil fuel expansion plans – including the development of a controversial new oilfield in the North Sea.

Climate activists from around the world descended on Stavanger in Norway last week to attend the AGM of the state-owned oil and gas giant Equinor. They warned that its plans to develop the huge Rosebank field in the North Sea, as well as other mega-projects in Canada, Brazil and Suriname, would drive climate breakdown with devastating consequences for humanity.

“You have been warned that we cannot have any new oil and gas fields if we are to have a shot at limiting the absolute worst of climate breakdown,” Lauren MacDonald, 22, from Scotland, told the Equinor board during a speech at the AGM. “[But] you continue to expand fossil fuel operations despite desperate warnings from climate scientists and are spending next to nothing on the transition that is our only hope of survival.”

Climate campaigners accuse the Norwegian government, which owns 67% of Equinor, of hypocrisy. They argue that at the same time as portraying itself as a climate leader on the world stage, the Norwegian state is ploughing ahead with new oil and gas developments around the world.

Recent analysis by Oil Change International found Norway is Europe’s “most aggressive” explorer of new oil and gas fields, awarding 700 new exploration licences in the past decade as well as Equinor’s specific plans.

In addition, it found the oil and gas within fields that are already licensed but not yet developed could lead to an additional 3 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions – 60 times Norway’s annual domestic emissions.

Frode Pleym, the head of Greenpeace Norway, said: “Norway is rightly praised for its success of its electric vehicles, it was one of the first countries to ratify the Paris accords but at the same time it is planning to lock in oil and gas production for decades to come – not just for Norway but, because of the scale of its involvement, for the whole of Europe. It is taking climate hypocrisy to a whole new level and it has to stop.”

The Rosebank project is one of Equinor’s most controversial schemes and is facing widespread opposition in the UK. A massive North Sea development, three times bigger than the Cambo field that was put on hold more than a year ago, it has the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil, which when burned would emit as much carbon dioxide as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.

Last month it was revealed that Rosebank would effectively blow the UK’s carbon budget in the next decade, as greenhouse gas emissions from its operations alone – not counting emissions from any oil produced – would exceed the guideline amounts for the oil and gas sector.

Johan Sverdrup oilfield in the North Sea west of Stavanger, operated by Equinor. Climate campaigners accuse the Norwegian government, which owns 67% of Equinor, of hypocrisy. 

Photograph: Carina Johansen/NTB Scanpix/AFP/Getty Images

The campaign group Uplift has also calculated that Equinor could receive an estimated £3.75bn of tax breaks and tax-funded incentives towards the estimated £4.1bn cost of the development, owing to loopholes in the government’s windfall tax on North Sea fossil fuels. About 80% of the fossil fuels produced by Rosebank are likely to be exploited, and the development could turn into a net loss of £100m to the UK taxpayer.

A spokesperson for Equinor denied it was in line for any tax breaks or that UK taxpayers would lose out. They added: “Oil and gas will be needed in the decades ahead. As long as there is a need for oil and gas, we think it is important that we continue to invest in fields that can contribute to energy security with a low carbon footprint, while creating jobs and value for society.”

The International Energy Agency warned before the UK-hosted Cop26 climate summit in 2021 that no new oil and gas exploration should take place if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures. This year, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called on governments to halt new licences for oil and gas exploration and development.

A decision on whether Rosebank can go ahead is believed to be imminent, and the UK government could stop it, though the energy secretary, Grant Shapps, has said repeatedly the decision is not up to him.

Opponents of the project are working with climate activists from Norway, Brazil, Canada and Argentina to try to stop Equinor’s wider expansion plans.

Tessa Khan, the executive director of Uplift, said the Norwegian government was under increasing pressure to act.

“Norway claims to be a climate leader, but there is no way that it can show its face in the next round of climate talks while its state-backed energy firm is bent on massive oil and gas expansion … Norway can and must force Equinor to align its plans with the climate science and massively ramp up its transition to clean power, it must side with those countries that are already experiencing the climate crisis, that are demanding action now because they are running out of time.”

Earlier this year, the Norwegian government passed a white paper saying all state-owned companies should set targets and implement measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement.

At the AGM, campaigners from Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature put forward a similar motion. The motion failed, with the Norwegian government voting against it – although it did add a statement to the minutes saying it expected “the board and administration to work actively with the state’s expectations” in relation to climate change.

Ragnhild Elisabeth Waagaard, the head of the climate and energy team at World Wide Fund for Nature Norway, said the Norwegian government’s statement was a positive step and had increased the pressure on Equinor’s board of directors. “We now expect the company to set targets and take measures to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. This means that there is no room for new development of oil and gas fields”.

In a statement, Halvard Ingebrigtsen, the secretary of state at Norway’s ministry of trade, industry and fisheries, said: “In the new white paper on the state’s direct ownership, the government states that our goal as an owner is the highest possible return over time in a sustainable manner. We also state that this requires the companies to balance economic, social and environmental factors.

“Norway is the first country to expect companies with state ownership to have short- and long-term climate targets in line with the Paris agreement, which implies net zero emissions by 2050.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Walgreens reaches $230m settlement with San Francisco over opioids crisis

Company averts a trial to determine damages as drug-related deaths surged by 41% in the city in the first quarter of this year

Abené Clayton

in Los Angeles and agencies
Wed 17 May 2023 

San Francisco has reached a $230m settlement with Walgreens over the corporation’s role in the city’s unprecedented opioid crisis.

The settlement is the largest ever awarded to a local government amid years of continuing, nationwide opioid-centered litigation, according to San Francisco’s city attorney.

The agreement comes nine months after a federal judge found the company’s failures played a “substantial” role in a crisis that has had “catastrophic” effects on the city, overwhelming hospitals and devastating neighborhoods. The US district judge Charles Breyer also faulted Walgreens for its “15-year failure” to properly scrutinize opioid prescriptions and flag possible misuse of the sometimes highly addictive drugs.

In his ruling 10 August 2022, Breyer found that Walgreens had a profit-driven “fill, fill, fill” culture in dispensing powerful opioids including fentanyl, oxycontin and oxycodone.

“This decision gives voice to the thousands of lives lost to the opioid epidemic,” David Chiu, San Francisco’s city attorney, said in a statement. “This crisis did not come out of nowhere. It was created by the opioid industry, and local jurisdictions like San Francisco have had to shoulder the burden for far too long.”

Walgreens’s settlement averts a trial to determine damages. In a statement, Walgreens said it “disputes liability” and did not admit fault, but that settling would allow it to focus on patients, customers and communities. “Our thoughts are with those impacted by this tragic crisis,” it added.

The Deerfield, Illinois-based company had been the only remaining defendant in San Francisco’s civil lawsuit, after several drugmakers and distributors reached settlements worth more than $120m.

Breyer found that Walgreens’s San Francisco pharmacies had received more than 1.2m opioid prescriptions with “red flags” from 2006 to 2020, yet performed due diligence on less than 5% before dispensing them.

The city attorney’s office said money from the settlement would be used to help San Francisco fight its drug crisis.

The settlement was far less than the city had initially requested. San Francisco had estimated it might cost $8.1bn to abate the opioid crisis, and that Walgreens was legally liable for the entire amount.

Overdoses in San Francisco have reached unprecedented highs in recent years. Drug-related deaths surged by 41% in San Francisco in the first quarter of this year – with one person dying of an accidental overdose every 10 hours. The city saw 200 people die of overdoses in the first three months of this year compared with 142 in the same months a year ago, according to reports by the San Francisco medical examiner.

The surge in deaths began in December and by January the city had seen 82 deaths, putting the city’s overdose fatalities at an all-time high. This rise came just after the city closed a key outreach center, where people were using drugs with medical supervision, and increased policing in San Francisco’s long-under-resourced Tenderloin district.

“We have seen the devastating impacts of opioid addiction in our most vulnerable communities and this decision is an important step forward in our efforts to save lives,” said Dr Grant Colfax, the director of the San Francisco department of public health, in a statement released by the city attorney’s office.

Avian flu vaccine for California condors approved amid fears of extinction



Vaccine gets emergency approval as ‘highly contagious’ virus sweeps through flocks of species on the brink of extinction

Gabrielle Canon and agencies

Wed 17 May 2023

A new vaccine has been granted emergency approval to protect California condors from a deadly strain of avian influenza, federal officials said this week, amid attempts to pull the endangered species back from the brink of extinction.

The emergency action underscores an outbreak that has alarmed the conservation community, which fears that condors, a vulnerable species that has spent decades in recovery, could be dealt a devastating blow. After first being detected in a deceased condor in late March, the illness has swept through the small flock of wild birds, which are closely monitored by agencies in the south-west. So far 21 condors have died, impacting eight breeding pairs, according to a statement issued by the US Fish and Wildlife service.


Top-flight recovery: the inspiring comeback of the California condor

The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI, is a virus that has been described as “highly contagious” by the agency. An April statement confirming deaths of the first infected condors in early April said the virus can spread quickly though “bird-to-bird contact, environmental contamination with fecal material, and via exposed clothing, shoes and vehicles”.

Several condors remain in the care of experts, including a newly hatched chick whose egg was pulled from its contaminated nest before its mother succumbed to the disease. Officials and rescue workers remain hopeful that the orphaned baby, now being nurtured with the help of a plush condor at the Liberty Wildlife facility in Phoenix, Arizona, can soon be returned to the wild. For now the chick is nestled among blankets and its stuffed surrogate, awaiting placement with foster parents at the Peregrine Fund’s captive breeding facility.

Despite it being limited to one flock in Arizona, conservation groups are concerned that the deadly illness has already taken a devastating toll on the delicate condor population. “In a matter of weeks, this event has set our recovery effort back a decade or more,” the Peregrine Fund, an organization dedicated to protecting birds of prey and a key federal partner in restoring and rehabilitating California condors to the wild, wrote in a late-April update on the HPAI impact on condors, adding that the new threat posed by avian flu “highlights the need to address preventable and manageable threats, and rely even more heavily on proven strategies such as captive breeding to increase the wild population”.

Once abundant in the skies across their western range, which spans from the Pacific north-west to Baja California, Mexico, only a few hundred of these iconic and enormous vultures remain in the wild even after decades of dedicated breeding and conservation efforts.

The fast-spreading disease is one of several threats condors have faced since populations were first decimated by hunting during the California gold rush, including dangers posed by the toxic DDT pesticide and lead poisoning from ammunition lodged in scavenged carcasses. Recovery has been slow. Condors don’t mate until they reach maturity at around eight years old, and females only produce a single egg every two years.

This dangerous strain of avian flu has rapidly spread across the US, killing millions of domestic and wild birds since it arrived in North America at the end of 2021. Though the virus is not considered a high risk to humans, it’s been among the most devastating outbreaks for birds in the country’s history. Roughly 58 million commercial poultry have had to be euthanized in attempts to slow the spread of the disease, which has also claimed the lives of hundreds of bald eagles and been detected in more than 6,700 wild birds, a figure widely considered to be underestimated.

While the emergency-use approval by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is limited to California condors, the agency is continuing work to develop options for other types of birds. Before administering it to condors, a pilot study has been initiated to test the vaccine on North American vultures – “a similar species” – to ensure there are no adverse effects.

“APHIS approved this emergency vaccination of the condors because these birds are critically endangered, closely monitored, and their population is very small which allows close monitoring of the vaccine to ensure it is administered only to the approved population,” the agency said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

Along with the hopeful announcement that a vaccine may soon be ready to administer, efforts to isolate infected birds have been successful. Infections among the Arizona flock where the virus was found are holding steady.

“Our field teams have not detected any additional compromised California condors in northern Arizona since April 11,” the Peregrin Fund posted in an update this week, adding that four birds under its care are showing signs of recovery. “The Peregrine Fund’s captive breeding program is also in full swing, and new life is hatching,” it added. “Of 18 eggs laid, nine young have hatched and a new season for the recovery effort begins.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting

WARM BEER AND TAMPAX

Rishi Sunak cites cheap beer and sanitary products as benefits of Brexit

 

On his way to the G7 summit, the prime minster insists household income is ‘outperforming’ expectations

Rowena Mason

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 17 May 2023

Rishi Sunak has insisted Brexit is working by citing cheaper beer and sanitary products, as he claimed the economy was looking up and people’s household incomes were “hugely outperforming” expectations.

Despite consumers struggling with high inflation and the cost of living crisis, the prime minister claimed there were “lots of signs that things are moving in the right direction” with the economy.

Rejecting claims from the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage that Brexit had failed under the Tories, he cited freeports, cutting VAT on sanitary products and reforming beer duty as major successes.

“Economic optimism is increasing, consumer confidence is increasing, growth estimates are being raised,” he told reporters on the way to the summit of G7 leaders in Japan.

He said official figures for real household disposable income growth had been “very pessimistic” but were now “hugely” better than predicted.

“That’s a very important measure of people’s living standards – hugely outperforming what people thought,” he said.

The Resolution Foundation said in March that typical household disposable incomes were on course to be lower by the end of 2027 than they were during the Covid pandemic, and last month Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, said people needed “to accept” they were poorer.

Average living standards have been broadly stagnant since 2007. However, the latest figures for March 2023 showed a 1.3% increase in real household disposable income after four quarters of negative figures.

Sunak acknowledged things felt “tough” for families but highlighted the government’s contribution to energy bills.

He also defended the economic benefits of Brexit in the face of criticism that it has held back the economy and not brought promised prosperity.

“I introduced freeports – a Brexit benefit around the country attracting jobs and investment to lots of different places,” Sunak said.

“We cut VAT on sanitary products, we reformed the alcohol duties that mean this summer you will be able to get cheaper beer in pubs. These are all very tangible benefits of Brexit that I’ve already delivered.”

Sounding a positive note on the economy, he said two surveys of business leaders were showing “enormous confidence” in the UK.

“That’s what’s actually happening with the economy, that’s what global CEOs who actually have the money and are making investment decisions are saying,” he said, adding that he was “glad to have got that off my chest”.

Sunak acknowledged the UK was dealing with high inflation and elevated borrowing but said he was sticking to his aim to “reduce the tax burden” with tax cuts after dealing with those problems first.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies this week said one in five people would be caught in the higher rate of tax by 2027, leading to pressure on Sunak from his backbenchers to cut rates.

The prime minister’s assessment of the UK economy comes as he prepares to land in Tokyo for meetings with world leaders on the economy and defence.

He is expected to strengthen defence cooperation with Japan at a time of concern about China’s increasing militarisation and aggressive stance towards Taiwan.


Ford, Vauxhall owner and JLR call for UK to renegotiate Brexit deal

Before the trip, the former prime minister Liz Truss inflamed tensions by visiting Taiwan and calling for a tougher stance on China and for it to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But Sunak said he was not paying any attention to Truss’s trip and the UK approach to Taiwan was “longstanding and has not changed”.

He said western allies and Japan were “aligned” on their policy towards China, despite the US taking a tougher stance than some European countries. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is due to meet Sunak in Japan this week, said last month that Europe should not involve itself as a “vassal” in clashes between the US and China.

AUSTRALIA

Westpac bans transfers to world’s largest crypto exchange Binance

Bank customers can no longer make payments to the cryptocurrency exchange, in a move to reduce scams

Josh Taylor
@joshgnosis

Guardian Australia

Thu 18 May 2023 

Westpac has banned customers from transferring funds to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, in a move aimed at reducing losses from scams.

The Australian big four bank said on Thursday it was blocking a number of cryptocurrency exchanges as part of a trial, after its own data showed investment scams accounted for about half of all scam losses, and a third of all scam payments were transferred directly to cryptocurrency exchanges.

The bank did not name Binance but it is understood the exchange has been hit with the ban.

Westpac’s group executive of customer services and technology, Scott Collary, said the move could save millions lost to scams.


Crypto exchange Binance has Australian financial services licence cancelled by Asic

“Digital exchanges have a legitimate role to play in the financial ecosystem. But since the rise of digital currency, we’ve noticed that scammers are increasingly using overseas exchanges,” Collary said.

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“Often our customers only discover they’ve been scammed after the money has left the country, making recovery extremely difficult.”

The block on the exchanges will be rolled out as a phased trial in the coming weeks, Westpac said.

Binance announced on Thursday it was unable to accept PayID payments in Australian dollars “due to a decision made by our third party payment provider”.

“We are working hard to find an alternative provider to continue offering AUD deposits and withdrawals to our users,” the company said.

The move comes a month after the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) cancelled Binance’s Australian financial services licence to sell derivatives. The regulator found Binance had incorrectly classified hundreds of retail customers as wholesale investors.

Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, with 128 million customers globally and processing $65bn in daily trades.

Binance and its chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, were sued, in March, by the US commodity markets regulator, which alleged wilful evasion of US law. The complaint alleges the company had grown its US business despite publicly stating its intent to block US customers from accessing the platform.

The allegations against Binance include that the company knew it was facilitating illegal activity via its platform, and knew of loopholes to get past Know Your Customer rules.

At the time a Binance spokesperson called the regulator’s actions “unexpected and disappointing” and said the company had “made significant investments over the past two years to ensure we do not have US users active on our platform”.

“Nevertheless, we intend to continue to collaborate with regulators in the US and around the world.”

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Scamwatch reported in April that investment scams made up the largest portion of scams reported to Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, IDCare and Asic.

Total reports were over 500,000 with losses of over $3.1bn, while investment scams accounted for $1.5bn of this.

Bank transfers were the most reported payment method, with 13,098 reports accounting for $210.4m lost.

But the ACCC said 3,910 people reported cryptocurrency as the payment method, up 162.4% with $221.3m lost.

Renovation of Brussels park ignites debate on decolonisation

Triumphal arch in Cinquantenaire park ‘linked to exploitation of Congo’, says cultural group in Belgian capital


Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

THE GUARDIAN

Thu 18 May 2023

For many Belgians, the Cinquantenaire park in Brussels evokes memories of childhood visits to see the stuffed horses of the military history museum, or vintage cars at Autoworld, two institutions on the edge of the park.

The much-loved green space’s cheerful flowers and whimsical follies contrast with the steel canyons and beeping traffic of the adjacent EU quarter, but above all it is an expression of national pride, with a giant Belgian tricolour often suspended underneath a massive triumphal arch. Built in 1880 to mark 50 years of the Belgian state, Belgium’s federal government last month launched a redevelopment plan for the 200th anniversary in 2030.

Yet often overlooked are the traces of Belgium’s former colonial empire, embodied in monuments including the arch. At a recent public meeting to announce the 2030 “masterplan”, none of the dignitaries, including five Belgian government ministers, one EU commissioner and the minister-president of the Brussels capital region, mentioned its heritage.

In the slick prospectus for what was billed as “Europe’s most ambitious heritage project” – renovating the park’s museums and launching an architectural competition to cover the road that slices it in two – there was only one fleeting reference to decolonisation.


Call for Brussels statue to be melted and made into memorial for Congo victims

The silence is surprising because Brussels authorities last year published a detailed report on the decolonisation of public space in the Belgian capital, which included a section on the Cinquantenaire. Georgine Dibua Mbombo, a member of the 14-strong group of historians, architects and other specialists that produced the report, said it was “a little confusing” that there was no mention of the colonial past at that event, or in other city heritage plans. “It’s bizarre that in all the declarations we don’t see the will to say certain things,” she told the Guardian.

“For me the Parc du Cinquantenaire remains a park strongly linked to the exploitation of Congo,” said Dibua Mbombo, who runs Bakushinta, a group dedicated to promoting Congolese culture in Belgium.

The triumphal arch and semicircular arcades were built on the orders of Belgian King Leopold II, who ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom from 1885 to 1908. These grandiose structures were funded with the proceeds of Congolese rubber, a fact well known at the time – one Belgian socialist politician spoke of “the arch of severed hands”, a reference to the horrifying fate that awaited Congolese workers who failed to meet their rubber quota.

The park also houses prominent monuments to colonialism, including one to Gen Albert Thys, who oversaw the construction of a railway line that was indispensable for transporting Congo’s ivory and rubber wealth from the interior to the coast.

Black Lives Matter protesters with a DR Congo flag on a statue of Leopold II in Brussels.

 Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The monument to the “Belgian pioneers of the Congo”, completed in 1921, is perhaps the most notorious tribute to empire. “It is really one of the most horrible monuments in the Belgian public space. It cannot remain as it is because it is a monument that completely discredits the Congolese people,” Dibua Mbombo said.

Although weathered, the monument still displays all the hallmarks of colonial-era propaganda: a depiction of a nearly nude African woman offering her baby to a seated European; a “heroic” Belgian soldier crushing an “Arab” slave merchant under his foot. “I have undertaken the Congo project for the benefit of civilisation and the wellbeing of Belgium,” reads the inscription quoting a 1906 speech by Leopold II.

Belgium begins to face brutal colonial legacy of Leopold II

The former Belgian king is remembered on the other side of the park with an equestrian statue in the Royal Museums of Art and History. Next to the work is a plaque recounting the “unbridled capitalist greed … crime and dehumanisation” Leopold II showed in ruling the Congo. The museum’s director, Bruno Verbergt, said it is considering commissioning works by modern artists to sit nearby, with the aim of highlighting the reality of Belgian colonial rule.

The decolonisation group has also called on Brussels to make the history that has been ignored or forgotten visible. In the Cinquantenaire that could mean exhibitions about Congolese soldiers who fought for Belgium in the world wars in the military history museum, or research into the 1921 Pan-African Congress that took place in the building that now houses Autoworld. That gathering brought together luminaries such as WEB Du Bois, the African American intellectual and civil rights activist, and Paul Panda Farnana, a first world war veteran, whose fight for Congolese rights paved the way for independence. For now, Dibua Mbombo said, “there are many absences and things not spoken of”.

A spokesperson for the Brussels capital region said an action plan on the decolonisation of public space would be published by the end of May. The final recommendations will have to be signed off by the regional government.

Asked about the Cinquantenaire’s colonial heritage, the Belgian state secretary for strategic investments, Thomas Dermine, referred to the decolonisation report and said there would have to be discussions with the “communities involved”. He added: “If we remove all traces of the [colonial] past [it] is not a good solution, because if we remove these traces of the past, we lose also the opportunity to contextualise, to explain to a young generation behaviours that are out of step with our current values.”

But agreeing on how to “contextualise” a work glorifying the colonial past is not a simple question. Putting up a few information panels or QR codes is “not a solution”, Dibua Mbombo said, unconvinced that people read them. When it comes to the pioneers’ monument, she suggested a more radical option: breaking the work into pieces – a dramatic “decomposition” that would incentivise parkgoers to read panels on the work’s origins and fate.

‘The strongest fear I had ever felt’: RK Russell on coming out in the male world of football



In an adapted extract from his new memoir, the former NFL player reflects on coming to terms with his queerness in college and the life-altering conversation that gave him salvation

RK Russell
Thu 18 May 2023 

Back in Texas, everyone I knew had strong feelings about homosexuality. If you were straight, you would use slurs like faggot and pussy boy and rant about masculinity and manhood – things no teenage boy knows anything about. If you were gay, you had to fight for your freedom and sometimes even your life. I only knew of one openly gay kid at Creekview; our lockers were near each other’s junior year. Sometimes I would catch him at his locker, not opening it, not rushing to class, not coming or going, just standing there, staring off into the distance and trying to breathe, hiding in plain sight.

I hid at Creekview, too, I guess, acting happy when I was spiraling, being popular when I was filled with self-loathing.

At that point I had only been with women. I had had sex with women, had even fallen in love with them. I enjoyed sex, though I had it too young. Maybe I was trying to fill a void of affection, or maybe I thought that through sex I could become a man.

With consistent performances and big plays, I was on the radar of NFL draft scouts. On paper, I had a realistic path to achieving a dream – but I wasn’t sure whose dream it was. The questions in my head grew louder. Self-doubt about my sexuality and my identity overflowed into worries about the future.


As I played my role at Purdue and blindly searched for meaning in private, I felt like I was living a double life before I even knew how each of those lives worked. I had hidden my creative side from my teammates throughout middle school and high school – and I was doing it again with my college teammates. I worried that a young man who wrote poetry, drew pictures, and enjoyed slow songs about love would be seen as less masculine and, therefore, less of a football player. Being actually queer seemed like an instant, irreversible verdict on my belonging, on my right to exist in the male world of football.

When I first heard the news about Michael Sam coming out, I remember I tried to differentiate us in my mind as much as possible. He was gay, not bisexual, so naming his identity publicly seemed more clear-cut, or maybe he saw it as his only choice. He was SEC Defensive Player of the Year, so he would have gotten a shot at the NFL regardless. I was in the Big Ten, and Purdue wasn’t one of the top schools in our conference: my future opportunities weren’t so obvious.

Also, he had someone. The video of Sam and his boyfriend kissing when he was drafted played every hour on the hour that draft day, exposing what a lot of my peers, teachers, and family really thought about two men kissing. But I did all these mental gymnastics because deep down, I knew that in the most significant ways, we were the same. We were both different from what we were told from birth that a football player should be. We were Black, which meant society already judged us more harshly. And we both wanted to play in the NFL more than anything. Our very being threatened our biggest dream. I was afraid for him. I was afraid for myself.


The potential consequences of my worlds crashing into each other – would both of those sides be obliterated? – was the strongest fear I had ever felt. All the success I found on the field I attributed to my dedication, my hard work, my masculinity, my sacrifices. All the failures I blamed on my duality. A bad game was never just a bad game but a knock on my personal world, my creativity, my emotions, my sexuality. In our first four games of 2o13, we went 3–1, and I was having runaway success at my position. But when conference play began, we started losing and kept losing. What was the point of working so hard if we couldn’t win when it counted? What was the point of coming so far in my career if my sexuality would make me unwelcome in the NFL? What was the point of being good if it wasn’t good enough?

During an evening of playing Madden with Joe in our dorm room, something finally broke open. Joe and I would often play sports video games, but when Purdue football was struggling, our matches got a little more competitive; we randomly selected our teams for the video game. Joe landed on the Atlanta Falcons, me on the New York Jets. Joe liked teams that paired a strong running game with a vertical attack, and he was gashing me with Michael Turner, Julio Jones, and Tony Gonzalez. I was being overpowered – but I wasn’t even trying. Before long Joe realized I wasn’t even putting up a fight. He knew I wasn’t the type to quit. Not virtually, not in real life, never. So even a lackluster Madden effort alerted him that something wasn’t right. He didn’t turn to look at me or put down the controller, but he asked me what was wrong.

I didn’t know what to say. Honestly, a lot of my time in college up to this point had been trying to figure out what I could say. Everyone talked about their problems, but what if the problem was me?

In that moment, I remembered that Joe and I both loved Frank Ocean more than any other musical artist. When Channel Orange was released, and Frank revealed he was bisexual, Joe had hardly flinched – a piece of knowledge that felt like a sign, or just enough of a push.

Practically shaking, I asked Joe if he felt like we were close as a team, if we jelled well.

Joe took a deep breath before answering. “Sometimes. Some people really care, and others don’t give a fuck. They come to practice high and drunk and are just used to losing.”

“How well do you think you know everyone on the team?”

“I know them well enough. I know who is here to win,” he said with a shrug. It was that simple for Joe: he didn’t care about anything other than a man’s character and a teammate’s work ethic.


“What if they were gay?” I asked. The word gay didn’t quite fit me, but at that time, I thought no other description did. As I let the word slip out of my mouth, my video-game quarterback was being sacked. I felt suddenly afraid of what I’d done. I could feel each heartbeat pulsing through my temples. I didn’t look away from the television.

“If he’s here to win and he respects me, I could care less.”

It was an answer that should have made me feel better, but it wasn’t enough.

“What if he was your friend, also?”

Joe took a shaky breath, but I wasn’t sure if it was because he had just thrown an interception to my cornerback or if he was picking up the increasingly blatant subtext.

The Jets were a good matchup for the Falcons, because they had a stout defense. Even as I agonized over my words, I’d managed to focus on Madden a bit. The turnover gave me some momentum, and my guys were suddenly marching down the field.

Joe, eyes still glued to the game, asked me, “How close of friends?” The world outside of Madden had stopped. My running back had just pushed through a huge hole in Joe’s defense for a touchdown, but I couldn’t hear the simulated announcers shouting. I wasn’t sure how much of what I was saying applied to me. Did it even matter? What if this was just some kind of phase, and my attraction to women won out in the end? What if I married a woman, and this was all for naught? What if the rest of the team found out? What if the truth stained me in some way that everyone in the locker room could see? Would I lose my chance at the NFL and financial security? Would I lose my scholarship? Would I lose my best friend? Why did I have to know what Joe thought about a queer player, what he thought about me?

In a voice barely above a whisper, I answered, “What if it’s your best friend?”

As my question hung in the air, the screen showed the updated score, and Joe went back on offense. On the first play of the drive, he sent Julio Jones up the sideline on a go route. Matt Ryan took his drop step, stepped up, and launched the ball as deep as virtual-humanly possible. True to his real-life version, video game Julio Jones seemed to climb into thin air to grab the ball, and then dragged my defender briefly before breaking free for a touchdown.

Joe responded firmly, “If he’s my best friend, then that’s all that matters. We’re best friends.”

His answer felt like salvation.

This is an adapted excerpt from The Yards Between Us by RK Russell. 

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