Farewell, racial stereotypes. Now we have the true tale of an Indian princess turned suffragette

South Asian actors are at last leaving behind terrorist roles for ones drawn from history

Sophia Duleep Singh selling a suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court Palace in 1910. 

Photograph: Alamy

Anjli Mohindra

THE GUARDIAN

Sun 21 May 2023

My first major role on an award-winning, crowd-rousing, primetime British television show, Bodyguard, as the suicide-bomber Nadia, became a national talking point on the portrayal of South Asian women on screen. To be the poster person of this timely moment of discourse felt terrifying. It made me question my internal GPS: what was my own position in this global conversation on representation?

I did what actors do – I humanised the character before me. But the bigger picture was that the industry was ready for a shift; no longer was the terrorist trope only frustrating for us brown folk, it had become a wider issue.

As reductive as it feels, for many South Asian actors of my generation, playing stereotypes had become a rite of passage: you held your breath and got on with it. Then, once you’d scaled the ladder high enough to be taken seriously, you could use your platform for change. You could even be brave enough, or naive enough, to take matters into your own hands by building your own offshoot ladder while simultaneously clambering – joining the small but tenacious pool of ethnic minority creatives tackling representation from the front.

Eager to tell more South Asian stories, I began screenwriting a few years ago and am working on my first series. Trying to repurpose obstacles into vaulting poles has become my new strategy, and this is exactly what the subject of my upcoming writing project, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, did 100 years ago. As the daughter of the last Maharajah of Punjab, and goddaughter of Queen Victoria, Sophia’s life was nothing short of extraordinary: her actions so bold and anarchic that the press were urged to keep them under wraps lest it cause a royal scandal and tarnish the British crown.

One might have understood their need for positive optics after refusing to return the north Indian kingdom to its Punjabi king. The East India Company had been circling Punjab for decades, and, on the death of Sophia’s grandfather, King Ranjit, it had seized its opportunity. It posed as a friend, offering to help protect the young King Duleep from external threats, and then forced him and his mother, the formidable Jindan Kaur, into exile in Britain, separating him from everything he knew.

My father proudly worked for the British army as a budget manager in the UK and Germany, but years later was held at gunpoint in an attempted robbery. “Go home” was spat at him. The injustice of my dad spending decades working for his country only to be told he didn’t belong, boiled my blood. It’s been on something of a gentle simmer since. Princess Sophia’s father went through the wringer himself. His former kingdom brought a chunk of wealth to the British empire, yet in Britain, a country he was kept in against his will, he was labelled an ineligible bachelor. Though women defied convention to flirt with him, no noble family would accept his proposal of marriage – he was regarded as coming from an inferior race.

The royal office refused Duleep’s re-entry into India, fearful that his presence might spark an insurrection. Feeling trapped, he turned his attention to fashioning his British countryside home into a Moghul palace. Sophia grew up with leopards prowling in pens below her bedroom window and Indian hunting hawks falling from the sky due to the cold. Duleep eventually died alone in Paris.
From the debris of her father’s dynasty, Princess Sophia channelled her fury into becoming patron saint of the underdog

From the debris of her father’s defalcated dynasty (a Game of Thrones-esque story in itself), Sophia channelled her fury into becoming the patron saint of the underdog. She built shelters for neglected migrant workers, treated wounded Indian soldiers (more than a million of whom fought for Britain in the First World War), and battled for the advancement of women both British and Indian.

While her sister Catherine and her partner, Lina, hid Jewish children from the Nazis and her other sister, Bamba, trained to become one of the first female doctors, Sophia was busy in London throwing herself at the prime minister’s car, smacking a “Votes for Women” poster on to his windscreen. It’s no wonder Winston Churchill labelled Sophia “a dangerous woman”. For many South Asians, seeing the brilliant Sharma sisters lighting up our screens in Bridgerton has been thrilling. Those who cry “woke!” may call it unnecessary “diversity” casting, but the truth is the Duleep-Singhs were out there in their silken skirts making major moves.

Statues are being felled as my generation hungers for the truth; the time has never felt riper for stories like Sophia’s. We’ve had flying nannies with magical handbags, talking cars and time-travelling doctors. I almost can’t believe there was a real-life British Indian heroine who did incredible things in the face of adversity. Her story might have been lost were it not for trailblazing Anita Anand, whose “Punjab-(ra)dar” homed in on a sepia photograph of Sophia, prompting years-long research that she compiled into her book, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. On Friday, Sophia will be officially commemorated with a blue plaque, at her former home Faraday House, opposite Hampton Court Palace in London.

Sophia features on Anand and William Dalrymple’s podcast Empire (with its millions of downloads) and with mainstream successes of books such as Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland it’s clear there is an appetite beyond South Asians for this story. Throw in the fact that the Koh-i-noor diamond (formerly in the possession of Sophia’s forefathers) has made global news, with many calling for the world’s most valuable diamond to be returned to India after the death of Queen Elizabeth II: Sophia’s story is a veritable goldmine.

From Never Have I Ever and Ms Marvel to Wedding Season, there’s been an exciting shift. The world’s first brown female superhero and stories that centre Indian characters are hugely important steps for South Asian kids the world over to feel seen and to know that the opportunities afforded their white counterparts are within their reach too. As Marian Wright Edelman said, “you can’t be what you can’t see”. Even if some of these shows are for audiences that the navigation system would flag as “American”, I feel hopeful that the waves will lap the industry here too. Let’s pole-vault our way into the reality we’re hungry for: game-changing South Asian women at the fore and cue the lights up on the incredible Princess Sophia Duleep Singh.

Anjli Mohindra is an actor and writer

The uncounted: how millions died unseen in America’s post-9/11 wars

 

A new report puts the loss of life from Afghanistan to Yemen at 4.5 million – the bulk of them poor women and children who are victims of economic collapse and continuing trauma

Simon Tisdall

THE GUARDIAN
Sun 21 May 2023 

Abdoulaye is a lost child of the post-9/11 world – one among millions. Born into a village community displaced by Islamist violence, he and his family found refuge in an abandoned school near Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Weakened by malnutrition and anaemia, Abdoulaye, 3, contracted malaria. Despite frantic efforts to save him, he died, unremarked and unknown to the world at large.

“Abdoulaye is doubly uncounted: as a displaced person and as a war death,” writes Stephanie Savell, a cultural anthropologist, recalling his brief life in a disturbing new report that reveals the vast, unacknowledged human costs of contemporary global warfare. “Though he is mourned by his family and his community, officially, he never existed. His story is emblematic of how this kind of death, and its omission in counts of the dead, happens in any number of conflicts.”

Savell’s report, How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health, published by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, focuses on what she terms “indirect deaths” – caused not by outright violence but by consequent, ensuing economic collapse, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, destruction of public health services, environmental contamination and continuing trauma, including mental health problems, domestic and sexual abuse and displacement.

Calculated this way, the total number of deaths that occurred as a result of post-9/11 warfare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia rises dramatically from an upper estimate of 937,000 to at least 4.5 million, of which up to 3.6 million were “indirect deaths”. Such deaths grow in scale over time. In Afghanistan, where the war ignited by the 2001 US-led invasion ended in 2021, the indirect death toll and related health problems are still rising.
Levels of child malnutrition are indicators of the scale of war-related damageStephanie Savell, anthropologist

Experts suggest “a reasonable, conservative average estimate for any contemporary conflict is a ratio of four indirect deaths for every one direct death”, Savell says. The poorer the population, the higher the resulting indirect mortality when conflict erupts. “Indirect deaths are devastating, not least because so many of them could be prevented, were it not for war,” she writes. Generally speaking, men are more likely to die in combat. Women and children are disproportionately affected indirectly.

Savell does not attempt to apportion blame between various actors, although the US, which launched the “global war on terror” in 2001, bears heavy responsibility. She concedes that establishing definitive figures for war deaths of any kind is problematic and politically contested. Using the best available sources and data, her aim, she says, is to expand awareness of the fuller human costs of these wars and support calls for governments to alleviate continuing harms.

“The mental health effects of war reverberate through generations, impacting parents and children, and then their children after that. Estimates [suggest] … anxiety and depression are two to four times greater among conflict-affected populations than the global average,” she writes. “Women tend to suffer [these effects] more acutely due to gender-based violence, which is heightened in wartime. In Iraq, rape and sexual violence increased sharply after 2003 [when the US and UK invaded] … Children are also particularly vulnerable. [Those] who experience high levels of collective violence are twice as likely to develop chronic diseases.”

Levels of child malnutrition are indicators of the scale of war-related damage. “More than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia,” the report estimates. “‘Wasting’ means not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death, including from … weakened immune systems.”

In Afghanistan specifically, where the economy has collapsed after the Taliban takeover, more than half the population now lives in extreme poverty. Tens of thousands of children under five are dying of preventable diseases such as cholera and measles, of acute malnutrition and neonatal complications. “As much as anyone killed by an airstrike or a gunshot wound, their deaths must be counted among the costs of war,” the report says.

This scrupulously compiled examination of war’s unconsidered, long-term lethal impacts has great power to shock. In Pakistan, for example, between 2004 and 2010, the US conducted “double-tap” drone strikes, mostly on Pashtun villages in Waziristan, along the Afghan border, in which a second strike targeted people rushing to help victims of an initial bombing.

“Reports document that residents of these regions suffered from PTSD, chronic anxiety and constant fear,” Savell writes. “A local resident explained: ‘God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike.’” Untreated, such trauma is debilitating and unceasing.

In many conflict zones, deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities are a favoured tactic. Both direct and indirect deaths result. At one point in Syria’s civil war, according to a 2019 study quoted in the report, “each attack on a healthcare facility corresponded to an estimated 260 reported civilian casualties in the same month”, because of the resulting non-availability of medical assistance.

Displacement is another big driver of indirect deaths, caused by physical insecurity, heightened mental stress, and abuse, exploitation and indifference suffered during attempted flights to safety. An estimated 38 million people have been displaced since 2001. Britain fought in many of these wars. As it debates tougher anti-migrant regulations, the UK must acknowledge its part in causing this crisis.

The report details many additional, lingering deathtraps, including environmental contamination, unexploded ordnance, landmines, and damage to water, sanitation and aid and food distribution systems. More research data is badly needed, Savell writes, but it’s already evident governments must do more to mend what they broke – and that “reparations … are imperative”.

Those who have died are beyond help. But for millions of adults and children still suffering the consequences of the post-9/11 conflicts, the need is urgent. They are condemned to war without end.

It’s not enough for women to ‘feel’ safe in parks

The point is to change society so they really are safe

‘Bright lights in parks and shortcuts out to the street might make a handful of women feel safer, but they are unlikely to actually prevent men’s violence’: Eva Wiseman. 

Photograph: Juice Images/Alamy

Eva Wiseman
The Guardian
Sun 21 May 2023 

Last week I wrote about parks. I’ve been feeling uncommonly agitated recently, a new kind of rage bubbling in the pit of me, increasingly politicised perhaps – it’s come upon me as I approach middle age, like acid reflux or gout. And that day the sun was out and the news was thick and I focused on parks, because that was where my lividity landed. It was inevitable, perhaps, because these are the places, as a parent of young children, that I spend much of my time, cheering from the bench, bending down to look at snails. And they’re the places, too, that as a migraine-haver and reluctant runner, I circle quickly in leggings on alternate mornings, listening to podcasts about such things as miscarriages of justice or the truth about sugar.

And as in life, so in news – I’m back in the park this week, and so are the papers, to report on a conference called Women and Girls’ Safety in Parks. The takeaway is: women should be involved in the design of the UK’s parks to tackle “unfair and unequal” safety fears. Research commissioned by Tracy Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire, involved interviews with more than 100 women and girls, with most reporting they felt parks were unsafe. “The girls in particular,” said Brabin, “were wonderfully individual and brutally honest, challenging us to ‘change society’ as well as reworking parks.” The conclusions were that changes to the design of parks like better lighting, lower hedges and “escape routes” could reduce the risks of harassment and assault. Environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy’s Allison Ogden-Newton said: “It’s critical that we understand what makes women and girls feel safe or unsafe across our green spaces and what needs to change to make them feel able to use their local park.”

Parks are the only urban public space, I think, dedicated to freedom. And the effort to uphold that freedom is vital

I read this expecting to be cheered, but instead I felt a familiar bleakness, and my mind immediately went to a bar in Brighton in the early 2000s where, upon entry, I was offered an anti-rape lid for my glass. It was a good night; it was a weird night, overshadowed by this grand and well-meant idea that we could prevent “date-rapists” simply by sticking something over the top of our drinks. These little lids joined a long tradition of anti-rape devices, from nail varnish that changes colour when dipped into a drink laced with Rohypnol to anti-rape underwear that is resistant to attempts at cutting, or has a siren built in. One issue with all of these devices (and there are a few issues) is that they ask potential victims to assume responsibility for their own safety and attempt only to deter individual strangers, rather than address, say, the high level of sexual violence enacted by partners. They’re not solutions, they’re distractions.


It was the suggestion, I think, that the aim of the project was to make women “feel safe” in parks that took me back to that Brighton bar. “Feel” safe, as opposed to actually “be” safe. I know, I sound dickish and ungrateful, and it’s not that I want to minimise the intentions of this project, the attempts to make things better, but God, “escape routes”? This conference and this research is a noble step towards safer parks, but it seems grimly limited by ambition and imagination. Yes, women should probably have more of a say in building our public spaces, not so they can point out the high hedges where men might hide, but because diversity in design benefits everyone. Yes, better designed parks would be welcome, but not if it means quickly cycling past the interviewed girls’ real solution, to “change society”.

Because, while the bright lights and shortcuts out to the street might make a handful of women feel safer, they are unlikely to actually prevent men’s violence. And not only that, but these adjustments to the places where we play, the places where we exercise and socialise and drink after work, these plans for escape routes, in fact, seem to suggest that this violence is something we should be prepared to live within, to live beside, to accommodate and be vigilant for every time we leave the house. The only real way to make women feel safer is to make sure they are safe.


And while it is far harder and far more complex a task to try to prevent violence by educating around gender equality, funding long-term public campaigns to shift misogynistic beliefs and counter stereotypes, giving men and boys the responsibility to actively stop male violence against women, offering positive ideas about what it means to be a man, and socialising our sons without aggression, shame or emotional repression than it is to cut down a hedge, it is surely worth a go.

There’s a reason I’m increasingly obsessed with parks, beyond the fact I’m forced to spend so much time in them. They’re the only urban public space, I think, dedicated to freedom. And the effort to uphold that freedom is vital – but only if it focuses on the fact that it’s not a dark park that makes women feel unsafe, it’s the few violent men that lurk there.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman

Constant craving: why we can’t shake the salt habit

We know it’s bad for us, so why can’t we stop sprinkling it?

Emma Beddington

The Observer
Sun 21 May 2023 

Over the years I have done some awful things for work: got up at dawn for a month; done a juice fast; eaten disgusting TikTok foods. But when I find myself contemplating going a single day without salt, my whole being mutinies – I just don’t want to. There’s a French expression, “Long like a day without bread”, and my equivalent is a day without salt: interminable, grey and tasteless.

I know, because I’ve done it before, and not just for a day. Aged 20, I was prescribed high-dose steroids for an auto-immune condition and instructed to cut out salt. I tried – I stopped salting my food and avoided everything obviously salty – and found it a joyless, despair-inducing slog. Since then, I’ve made up for lost sodium. I liberally salt food before tasting, crave olives and capers and have enthusiastically bought into the vogue for salted chocolate (literally, I buy M&S vegan hazelnut sea salt bars in bulk). My favourite drink is a dirty martini – mmm, brine – and I eat crisps every day. Since I cut out dairy, they’re my go-to treat. I gave blood yesterday and surveying the snack table afterwards, happily selected and ate a packet of Seabrook Ready Salted. At 10am.

My favourite drink is a dirty martini – mmm, brine – and I eat crisps every day

But salt is… bad? Right? Unequivocally so, according to Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine and chair of the campaigning group Action on Salt, though getting that message across is tricky. “It’s a very difficult battle because salt is seen as a normal part of our diet – it’s not. Every time you turn on the television there’s a chef adding salt – of course, they’re all salt addicts, they probably have high blood pressure. A lot of chefs have strokes.” The headline issue with salt is precisely that it raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of hypertension, the “silent killer”. “High blood pressure is the biggest cause of death in the world,” says MacGregor, adding that “60% of strokes are due to high blood pressure, and 50% of all heart disease is due to raised blood pressure.” In addition, as MacGregor explains, salt can increase your susceptibility to stomach cancer and a high salt intake causes you to excrete more calcium. “That makes it much more likely that you’ll get bone thinning as you get older.” Excess sodium can increase your susceptibility to kidney stones and, he says, according to research, “There seems to be a link between high salt intake and loss of immunity.”

How worried should I be? I’ve been comforted by the knowledge that my blood pressure is fairly low, but the thought of a stroke terrifies me, osteoporosis is a real concern, not to mention the other nasty stuff. I’m relatively health-conscious: I eat carefully and don’t drink to excess, smoke or vape; I take my vitamin D and omega 3s. So why am I ignoring these risks? What is the hold that salt has over me?

For a start, I’m hardly exceptional. We need salt – our muscles and nerves require sodium to function – meaning we’ve sought it out since we emerged from the primordial ooze. The evolutionary move to land meant we needed to maintain our “internal sea”, turning us into salt seekers, explains professor of physiology Matthew Bailey, who has a particular interest in salt. “As we evolved from marine animals to living on land, we faced the challenge of getting salt. Our body fluids are essentially salt water and you need to replenish that, so mammals evolved lots of molecules that allowed them to find salt in the environment. When the body detects the depletion of the ‘internal sea’, your brain triggers you to go out and find salty food.” That was how prehistoric man operated in salt-scarce times, generating an intake of around 0.5g a day. Now, with salt cheaply, freely available – and added to almost everything we eat – we consume around 8.4g in the UK, vastly in excess of what we need. Our bodies haven’t evolved to cope with that, and our salt-seeking has no off switch.

Our uncontrollable impulses have meant human history is heavily seasoned – we’ve been extracting it from the sea and land since prehistoric times. In 2021, a 6,000-year-old salt hub was discovered in northeast England, the oldest in the UK. There have been salt wars and rebellions, and salt has been used as currency and incorporated into religious rituals. Louis XVI’s salt tax, the gabelle, was one of the key grievances aired in the French Revolution, and Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March protested the salt monopoly and tax imposed by the British, which forbade Indians from making or gathering their own. Our geography is marked by salt, too: prehistoric man followed animals along salt paths to natural deposits of salt, then later salt roads mark the routes along which it travelled and was traded. The common “wich” suffix in British place names sometimes derives from an Anglo-Saxon term for saltworks.

‘I tried to stop salting my food and found it a joyless, despair-inducing slog’: Emma Beddington.

 Photograph: Alex Telfer/The Observer

We initially valued salt as a preservative (and as an antiseptic – “salubrious” is derived from salt), but gradually we’ve shifted to using salt mainly because we like it. We’re hardwired to find eating salt pleasurable. “There’s a molecule on the tongue – an ion channel – that links the gustatory nerve from the tongue to the brain and when sodium passes, a nerve signal goes to the brain and triggers the limbic system, all that pleasurable stuff happens,” says Bailey. “It’s a little bit like the reproductive drive: when you eat salt, you get pleasure for your reward.”

Can we also accept it makes food delicious? Chef James Strawbridge certainly thinks so: “It can provide such sensation and taste and flavour.” His new book, Salt and the Art of Seasoning, is a paean to the transformative effects of natural salts (as opposed to harsh, chemical varieties) on food, from sardines to sauerkraut, amplifying flavour in the mouth and conveying it to the brain. Strawbridge prepares flavoured salt blends (including rhubarb, leek ash, and roast dinner salt) and provides food pairing notes, salt sommelier style, explaining the notion of merroir, the sea version of terroir (how a product’s origins affect its taste).

Speaking from his seaside home in Cornwall, Strawbridge describes salt as “part of my lifestyle”, though he assures me he doesn’t carry salt around with him, à la Nigella and her handbag pinch pot of Maldon. “I get a lot of joy from handling salt, using it and understanding it and that’s what I’m keen to share.” He believes keen cooks can curate collections of salts, learning when and how to use them as they do for herbs and spices.

Strawbridge guides me through a taste test on two slices of tomato: industrial table salt v Cornish flakes. Table salt is “a bit intense, almost chemical. There’s a tang to it which is yuck.” The Cornish is “a lot more tomato-y”. He’s right: the table salt tomato tastes flatter, less sweet and subtle, even to my Hula Hoop-deadened palate. “Like speakers with surround sound compared with a rubbish old radio,” agrees Strawbridge.

Salt as a product with history, provenance and complexity is foodie catnip. I watch the Netflix adaptation of Samin Nosrat’s bestseller Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, in which she discovers there are more than 4,000 varieties of Japanese salt, tastes soy sauce fermented in century-old barrels and visits Kami-kamagari, where prized moshio salt is extracted from hondawara seaweed. This hipsterification of salt does not impress MacGregor, particularly cheffy sprinklings of flakes and crystals. “The bigger the salt crystal, the less salty it tastes. A tiny crystal dissolves much more quickly and you get a strong salty taste straight away.” Chefs prefer large crystals, he says, because “when you put it on your tongue you don’t get that really salty taste. The danger is, you eat more salt without actually tasting it. A lot is consumed before it’s actually dissolved.” He has no time for claims about their beneficial mineral content either. “You’d have to eat a lethal dose of salt to get your potassium intake.”

The one thing everyone agrees on is that we’re consuming far too much salt accidentally, unconsciously, in bread (three in four supermarket breads contain as much salt per slice as a packet of crisps, according to Action on Salt), breakfast cereals, sauces and… well, everything. Processed foods use salt to mask quality and flavour deficiency. “The message is, anything in a packet from the food industry has had salt added unless you can prove it hasn’t,” says MacGregor.

Anything in a packet from the food industry has had salt added unless you can prove it hasn’t

It doesn’t have to be like this. From 2001 to 2010, the UK made a concerted effort to reduce salt content in processed foods, with industry-wide targets and progress monitoring, achieving a reduction of 20-40%. That cut the average salt intake from 9.5g to 8.1g a day with knock-on public health benefits: a fall in population blood pressure and deaths from stroke and heart disease, preventing an estimated 9,000 deaths. But from 2011, the coalition government shifted responsibility to the food industry and salt reduction stalled.

Now, hunting out lower-sodium options requires a PhD in label semiotics and plenty of time. Action on Salt has an app, FoodSwitch UK, to help people navigate the shelves, though MacGregor warns, “you have to go to about 10 supermarkets”. If you can, cooking for yourself at least lets you control your own salt intake. For Strawbridge, “The more you cook from scratch, the more you have a physical, tangible understanding of salt.”

Of course, unless you’re so off-grid Ben Fogle might turn up with a camera crew, it’s near-impossible to avoid processed foods. There are interesting developments afoot, though. Bailey says major food-industry players are investigating substances other than sodium that might trigger the limbic system pleasure response (MSG is one strong contender). Food research is also exploring how complex, umami-rich salted products, such as soy, may also allow the pleasure sensation of salt to be triggered at a lower concentration level.

My salt intake must vastly exceed the UK recommended 6g a day. Bailey has tested his own careful, salt-aware intake on several occasions (it involves peeing in a bucket) and was disappointed to find it was “pretty much the national average, between 8g and 9g”. So should I cut down? What a grim prospect. “It’s not grim,” says MacGregor. “Once you get used to it, food tastes so much better.” Your salt taste receptors readjust and become more sensitive after a month or so, he says. Neither he nor Bailey use “discretionary” salt at home. “It’s a chemical dug up from the ground, why do you want to put it on your food?” says MacGregor. He has even foresworn most cheeses – “if you like eating seawater, go on eating cheese” – based on salt content (English Brie is his top tip).

Some people go cold turkey and adapt even quicker than MacGregor’s prediction. “It takes about a week; just have to replace it with other flavours,” one convert tells me. “Korean red pepper flakes were the key.” “Took me about a fortnight, now I absolutely hate the stuff,” says another.

But in my long-ago year without salt, I never lost my craving and right now, I can’t even manage a single day. Porridge for breakfast is boring but fine and I don’t add soy sauce to my lunchtime supermarket vegetarian sushi (though newly alert to hidden salt, I realise it’s in the rice, the nori, everywhere). But by evening, I’ve fallen entirely off the wagon, sneaking a fistful of crisps as I cook, then sloshing soy into my fried rice and adding a topping of salted peanuts. I’m addicted. I fear they’ll have to drag salt from my cold dead hands; unfortunately, that might be sooner rather than later.

Salt and the Art of Seasoning by James Strawbridge is published by Chelsea Green at £27. 

https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/the-salt-march

The Salt March - Beautiful Trouble 

In 1930, Gandhi famously led a march to the sea to collect salt (which Indians were banned from producing), forcing the British Raj into a classic decision ...

https://thenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu/2021/08/19/salt-march

The Salt March of 1930 – The Nonviolence Project - UW-Madiso... 

Aug 19, 2021 ... Gandhi's concept of satyagraha has 3 factors – truth, nonviolence, and self-suffering. ... Using these 3 factors, Gandhi abstains from anything ...

https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/Gandhis-salt-march-the-tax-protest-that-changed-Indian-history.html

Gandhi's Salt March, The Tax Protest that changed Indian... 

Gandhi's idea was to lead a march about salt. At the time, the British Empire had a stranglehold on salt in India. The essential mineral was heavily taxed ...

‘Care bots’: a dream for carers or a dangerous fantasy?

Robots that can assist caregivers have been talked up as being transformative. But some researchers fear such technology could take more than it gives

Emily Kenway
Sun 21 May 2023 

Ingrid’s 22-year-old son Tom doesn’t understand danger. He cannot leave the house by himself because he does not know that cars may kill him and, in winter, he forgets to wear enough clothes to stay warm. He was born with Down’s syndrome and Ingrid says that “he’s calm and shy and really polite, but he needs help with everything”.

Ingrid is one of millions of people caring for a loved one at home today. In the UK, “family caregivers” constitute about 9% of the population and they outstrip paid care workers by more than three to one. This is because most care continues to be carried out in people’s homes, rather than in residential facilities or by paid workers in the community. For this oft-overlooked army of supporters, it’s a difficult life. According to an annual survey of family caregivers in the UK, 45% had been providing support for 90 hours or more each week, and a similar proportion had not taken a break from caring in the past year. Caregivers consistently report lost income, higher than average rates of depression and anxiety, lack of time to rest, exercise or socialise, or to attend their own medical appointments – to do much of anything for themselves, really.

Many are of working age and juggle their caring responsibilities around paid employment. Ingrid is a teacher and a musician by day and then, from 4pm until the next morning, she is Tom’s caregiver, and on weekends too. Tom has a propensity to wander at night and because he is not aware of danger, this used to mean Ingrid barely slept. She was doing a “double shift” – working at school in the daytime and conducting a waking watch at home. But nights have been eased recently by the installation of an alarm on Tom’s bedroom door that goes off if he leaves.

Semi-humanoid care bot Pepper was built to engage in conversation and lead people in exercises and games. 

The company that made the robot ceased production in 2021 because of lack of demand. 

Photograph: Loïc Venance/AFP/Getty Images

Technology has enhanced their lives in other ways too. Because Tom cannot speak, he uses a “talking board” on which he presses buttons to communicate what he wants – often, it is Coca-Cola or orange juice. These two technologies – the alarm and the talking board – are rudimentary, but the new generation of care tech may markedly alter their lives in years to come. In Japan, a team is developing a “conversation partner” that can use images or words to broaden the choices available to people like Tom – perhaps he wanted apple juice all along?

While Tom cannot talk, “he can understand”, Ingrid says, and she spends a lot of time reminding him to do daily tasks such as getting dressed or keeping clean. This presents another avenue for care tech to change their lives for the better. The ElliQ is an AI-driven social robot that looks a little like a bedside lamp and actively communicates with its users (rather than waiting for voice commands, as Amazon’s Alexa does). It could learn Tom’s daily needs and provide timely and encouraging reminders. This could be invaluable for Ingrid, removing her feeling that she’s “had a small child for 22 years who needs constant attention”.

It is this sort of potential that makes Madeleine Starr, director of business development and innovation at the charity Carers UK, exuberant about the “revolutionary” potential of technology. “Technology can take the pressure off,” she says, as it does with Ingrid’s improved nights. “It gives carers peace of mind, and that’s everything.”

Even more revolutionary would be “care bots” such as Pepper, a semi-humanoid bot that engages in conversation and leads exercises or games. It’s one of several such bots that the Japanese government has introduced to residential care facilities. Robear, another Japanese creation, looks exactly like you might expect a robot bear to look – big round eyes and a stocky body. It is apparently capable of lifting people from beds to wheelchairs. This could be hugely helpful to caregivers, more than half of whom report having their own long-term health condition or disability and so find the physical tasks of care difficult.

But according to James Wright of the Alan Turing Institute, this is little more than fantasy. He spent a year and a half researching the reality of care bots in Japan and warns that “their real-life abilities trail far behind the expectations shaped by their hyped-up image”. He found that care bots were used initially and then “locked away in a cupboard”. Tellingly, the company behind Pepper ceased producing it in 2021, citing weak demand. Wright also found that care bots often created more work for caregivers, who needed to maintain, monitor and operate them. Dr Kate Hamblin leads on digital research for the UK’s Centre for Care, and she echoes the concern that care tech may not be the labour-saving dream it seems. “Context is so important,” she says. “Technologies can support carers… but can also add a layer of complexity and frustration if they’re poorly delivered and designed.” While Wright’s work disabuses us of the idea that a dawn of humanoid care bots is on its way, Hamblin’s focuses on technologies that are already here. This includes simpler tech such as Ingrid’s night alarm and similar devices such as fall sensors, and more cutting-edge machinery like ElliQ, which came to market in spring 2022. And as we have seen from the difficulties faced by caregivers, these very real forms of care tech seem to be sorely needed.

In discussions of care and technology, the focus is usually on care receivers and the ethics of outsourcing their care to machines. When caregivers are considered, it’s usually regarding the liberating potential of technology that Starr describes. But are we missing something about the potential impact of these technologies on caregiving? Because for all Ingrid’s frustrations, she also thinks that caring for Tom has improved her work as a teacher: “I have a good connection with my pupils. I can see when they’re not happy and when they need me to stop in the hallway and just say, come on, let’s talk … I’ve learned how to read people.” She ascribes this to the years of acute attention she has paid to Tom’s facial expressions and body language.

Patience, confidence, purpose – it seems that caregiving generates faculties many of us consider desirable

The benefits of caregiving, like Ingrid’s honed awareness, are being recognised increasingly by social scientists. For decades now, caregivers have been assessed in clinical settings using a tool called the Zarit burden interview, originally developed in 1980 and against which caregivers rate themselves on a score of 0 to 4 with questions such as: “Do you feel your health has suffered because of your involvement with your relative?” “Do you feel angry when you are around your relative?” Now, German researchers are developing a counterpart – the “benefits of being a caregiver scale” – to measure the positive aspects of caregiving such as those described by Ingrid. The scale assesses issues such as time management, patience and feelings of confidence and purpose.

“Carers I have spoken to in my research often see the positive sides,” says Hamblin, “and they wouldn’t want to entirely withdraw from caring.” The scale could help to explain Hamblin’s observation, showing us a different side to caregiving than stories of burden and burnout – that is, the stories that underpin part of the rationale for care tech. In fact, there is already a substantial body of evidence that caregivers routinely report benefits alongside their difficulties. One study, which focused on family caregivers for young people with muscular dystrophy, found that 88% had gained something positive from the situation, including a sense of personal growth, resilience, altruism and increased sensitivity to other people. Another found that parents like Ingrid, who care for adult children with impairments, scored highly on deriving satisfaction from their caring duties. Compellingly, they also felt they had a stronger grasp of what matters in life.

Patience, confidence, purpose – it seems that caregiving generates faculties many of us consider desirable. Perhaps caregivers know something under-recognised in discussions of care and tech: that care, like love, is multidimensional – the good and the difficult coexist.

Prof Shannon Vallor is concerned that the brave new world of care tech has overlooked this dimension of caregiving in its laser-like focus on alleviating hardships. Her work as a philosopher of technology, currently at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, is drawing our attention to the ways in which jettisoning care to the machines might mean we lose important capabilities. For Vallor, the assumption “that caregiving is generally not only a burden upon caregivers … but that it is nothing except a burden” is not only a falsehood, but also a moral risk. What if removal of the caregiving role is also the removal of an important, and importantly human, educational experience – one in which we learn “to practise and cultivate empathy”, among other capabilities, and to develop what she calls “an ethical self”?

Ursine care bot Robear can lift people in and out of bed. In doing this strenuous work, devices like it could be of great benefit to caregivers. 

Photograph: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

There is a risk in talking about care as a moral good, of which Vallor is aware. Today the millions of unpaid caregivers in the UK are suffering. Will sharpening our focus on the benefits of caregiving undermine the changes that they say they need? Starr thinks not. “The answer is this: we can only experience the benefits of care if we have the support we need, otherwise it overwhelms us.” Ingrid’s story bears this out. She brightens when she talks about her work as a teacher, describing it as a source of great satisfaction. It’s a crucial arena in which she can see what she’s gained from being a caregiver, such as her ability to read her pupils’ moods. But Ingrid can only work because Tom has a place at a free day-care centre. “Benefit-finding”, as the social scientists call it, is exactly what it sounds like: an active process, reliant on someone being able to seek the good. And seeking requires energy, and forums in which the good can become apparent. We cannot cultivate the “ethical self” envisaged by Vallor if our practical and material circumstances grind us down too far. As she puts it: “Caregiving in inadequate circumstances is likely to drain us of emotional power and starve empathic responses rather than cultivate them.”

There is a paradox at the heart of care tech. If Vallor is right, then caregiving is a crucial route through which we can help realise our humanity. The “benefits of being a caregiver scale”, and the growing body of evidence underpinning its development, suggest she might be. In this case, the technologies being developed on behalf of caregivers to free them from their “burden” may have an unexpected cost: the loss of important human capabilities. But experts are clear that technology can be vital for reducing caregivers’ load, too. Paradoxically, then, while tech may prevent us reaping the rewards of caregiving, it may also enable them.

Ingrid still finds herself listening out for the alarm, half asleep, through the course of the night. But she is less exhausted than she was. Tom is on a list for a place in sheltered accommodation but the prospect of him moving out scares her, because although caring for him is hard, it is also very important for Ingrid’s fulfilment. Perhaps the same is true for all of us.

Emily Kenway is the author of Who Cares: The Hidden Cost of Caregiving and How to Solve It (Wildfire £22). 

Is it too late to halt deep-sea mining? Meet the activists trying to save the seabed



If mining companies are given the go-ahead to exploit the ocean depths, the environmental cost will be devastating. As the clock ticks down to a crucial deadline in July, Michael Segalov reports

Michael Segalov

THE OBSERVER
Sun 21 May 2023 

For almost 30 years, much of what went on at the secretive-sounding International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica was unreported and scarcely noticed. Whatever was said by delegations from its 168 member countries in its cavernous assembly hall – all mustard chairs, in-ear live interpreters, UN-style country place cards and views out to the Caribbean Sea – was seemingly of interest to only a smattering of environmental NGO types and a handful of representatives from vague-sounding international businesses.

Over the past 18 months, however, more attention has been turning towards the negotiations taking place inside the ISA’s brutalist HQ on the Kingston coast, where the authority has, since 1994, been tasked with deciding if and how mining the deep sea for metals and minerals – once the preserve of science fiction, now edging ever closer to reality – might start to take place n in international waters on the ocean floor.

There have been allegations of secrecy and interference against its governing body and of legal loopholes being exploited. After discussions chugged along quietly for decades, a growing community of campaigners, scientists and now governments are raising an urgent alarm about what’s happening within these walls. They argue that unless immediate action is taken, it might be too late to halt the devastating environmental and ecological impact of mining the global high seas. Their warning is simple: humanity’s insatiable appetite to plunder the planet for profit might mean some of the Earth’s most untouched corners are exploited before we even understand what it is we risk losing. As Louisa Casson, who is leading Greenpeace’s global campaign to stop deep-sea mining, puts it: “It’s a threat, continental in scale, that until recently nobody was even talking about.”

These groups have support from all sorts of places. Global brands including Samsung, Google, Volvo, Philips and BMW have joined the chorus. Countries including Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, New Zealand and Spain have expressed opposition, and an all-out ban has been demanded by France’s President Macron.

Regardless, due to a quirk in an ageing international treaty, deep-sea mining might happen in a matter of months after the pulling of a legal lever by a Canadian-owned company and the government of Nauru. Some believe the ISA’s members have been delivered a legitimate ultimatum: either agree the regulations for mining within two years or allow it to go ahead regardless. Others argue this is a worrying misinterpretation of the body’s ruling text. Either way, the clock runs out this July. There’s every reason to be concerned. That said, on my first morning at the ISA’s 28th session on a bright Tuesday in March there’s little sign of an impending emergency. The debates are anything but fevered. Suited diplomats potter quietly; a merch rail sells ISA-branded T-shirts outside the main assembly room.

Inside, discussions are being held on agenda item 10, Fourth Meeting of the Informal Working Group on the Protection and Preservation of the Marine Environment: Continued Negotiations on the Facilitator’s Further Revised text. It’s slow and tedious. One by one, state delegations lay out their positions. Russia, the UK and Korea discuss the use of the word “synergistic”. Australia wants to tweak a sentence. Norway asks how paragraph five relates to paragraph three. It’s only at the end of each scheduled topic that discussions take on a more pressing tone. In these gaps, those sitting in the galleries above – environmental groups, scientists, conservationists and indigenous activists – make interventions in an effort to shift the focus away from the granular detail and back to the fundamental question of whether deep-sea mining should be allowed to start.

Dr Diva Amon is a Trinidad and Tobago-based deep-sea biologist who has attended these meetings since 2017. “When I first started coming,” she says, “it was very different. We’ve gone from broad discussions to regulations being drawn up, and now negotiated line-by-line. Honestly? It’s like watching paint dry.”

‘It’s a threat, continental in scale, that nobody was even talking about’: Uncle Sol Kaho’ohalahala flanked by Jonathan Mesulam and activist Alanna Smith. Photograph: Yannick Ried

Still, she lays out the basics. Since the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994, nation states have had the right to exploit and explore natural resources, such as wind and wave energy in waters up to 200 nautical miles off their respective coastlines. This international treaty saw countries establish the ISA. What happens on the sea bed beyond these ocean borders was left for ISA members to decide. “That’s 40% of the entire planet’s surface it’s responsible for,” explains Amon. “Because of the vast depths of these oceans, that equates to 90% of the habitable space where animals can live.”

Deep-sea mining exploration and research has been ongoing since the 1960s, but nothing on an industrial scale has yet begun. Much of the technology it would require remains in development, or it’s privately owned and commercially sensitive, and out of the public domain. Regulations for mining are yet to be agreed upon. There’s a vagueness, therefore, to some of the specifics of how mining might occur for various metals and minerals: nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, gold, silver and platinum.

Mining’s major proponents, notably a small collection of European and North American companies, say these materials are needed for renewable technology, in particular car batteries. It’s not just scientists and environmentalists who take issue with this suggestion (“It’s like smoking to ease stress,” says Amon, “a short-term fix that does far more long-term harm”), but car manufacturers, too. BMW, Volvo, Volkswagen and Renault have all called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, saying they won’t use these materials in their products. Regardless, miners hope to drill into hydrothermal vents (those iconic deep-sea chimneys), and also extract metals from mountains protruding from the seabed. Most commonly explored, however, and likely to be the first mining undertaken, are what’s known as polymetallic nodules: lumps of metals and minerals mixed with all sorts of sediment which sit on the ocean floor.

This mining will see hordes of large mining machines moving along the seafloor like bulldozing combine harvesters, scooping up nodules and whatever else is in their path. “Everything around them will be disturbed,” says Amon. “The top 10cm for certain, home to the majority of life on the seafloor. That means huge amounts of habitat and animals will be lost.” Out the back, water, sediment and shredded wildlife will be pumped out, wreaking havoc. Everything else collected will be pumped through a network of pipes up to a ship on the surface. “Here the nodules will be separated from other materials like water, sediment and likely crumbled pieces of metal that will be spewed out into the ocean as waste.”

For scientists like Amon, it’s of huge concern. “If the technology being discussed is used, we know all this will be affected. What’s unknown is the extent.”

Last year she co-authored a paper which found that across all the areas where mining exploration had started, only 1.1% of the science required to ascertain its impact had been done. We simply do not know enough. The deep sea, she accepts, might well feel distant. “But not only is it full of life,” she makes clear, “a biodiversity reservoir, with two thirds of the species that live there still undiscovered, it’s also essential to the planet being habitable.” There’s the ocean’s climate regulation: carbon is locked away beneath the seabed and the ocean absorbs heat (scientists have determined that the ocean absorbs more than 90% of excess heat attributed to greenhouse gas emissions). Billions rely on fish and seafood as a primary source of protein. “And deep-sea life, having survived in extreme conditions, has evolved in ways that are already proving hugely helpful for humanity,” Amon continues. “We’re only just scratching the surface, but we’re finding compounds down there useful for everything from new medicine to household work. There’s so much to tap into that is still unknown.”

With the clock ticking towards the July deadline, the cacophony of opposition to deep-sea mining gets louder. Over the days I’m present at the ISA, two more countries add their names to the list of nations calling for a pause – Vanuatu and the Dominican Republic. But it’s not only a scientific case for a mining moratorium that is being made. At this meeting, for the first time, a delegation of Pacific Island activists are in attendance, each bringing with them the perspective of oceanic communities who, they say, for too long have been left unheard in this debate.

Uncle Sol Kaho’ohalahala is one of them. A seventh-generation resident of Lanai, an island of Hawaii, his relationship with the ocean is profound. Through the 1950s and 60s, he was part of an indigenous group that fought the US army using the Hawaiian island of Kahoolawe as a bombing range, and he’s spent 40 years traversing the Pacific as crew on a traditional canoe. For indigenous Hawaiians, a relationship with the ocean can be traced back to humankind’s creation. “The Kumulipo is our genealogy,” he says, “our chant of creation. It tells us the first creature was the coral polyp. And from that, all creatures follow.” To Uncle Sol and his community, therefore, deep-sea mining isn’t only a scientific and environmental issue, it would be an act of cultural vandalism, too. “Our responsibility as native Hawaiians is to honour our elders and ancestors,” he says. “And our oldest ancestor is in the ocean. At some point, it was decided the ocean belongs to nobody. I challenge that. It belongs to us – people here need to know this is my country they are about to do irreparable damage to.”

Digging deep: from the top 200m sunlight zone, through twilight and midnight zones, 

to the abyss, at 600m.

 Illustration: Carlos Coelho @ debut art


Another indigenous activist, Jonathan Mesulam, shares stories of fighting deep-sea mining for a decade in his home country of Papua New Guinea. “It’s common knowledge that any industry on this scale will cause damage to the environment,” he explains one afternoon over lunch. “We’ve seen it on our land, with logging and mining; we had no doubt the same devastation would be caused by mining at sea.” A teacher by profession, he started to campaign on behalf of his coastal community. “The sea is our home. We’ve survived for generations from marine resources. What’ll happen to us if this goes ahead? Fisheries support the local and national economy. Our traditional practices rely on our waters. This would disturb it all.”

Mesulam successfully fought off mining in Papua New Guinea. Many of those same executives are now involved in the Canadian company working with Nauru.

Despite the best efforts of those desperately trying to change the tide of the debate, the ISA meeting mostly remains on course. At evening and lunchtime events, attempts are made by campaigners to lobby delegates. But the ISA’s secretariat, its administrative body, shows little interest in entertaining the question of pressing pause. Frustration has already begun to bubble up. At the start of this meeting, a German minister wrote to the ISA’s secretary general, British lawyer Michael Lodge, implying he had abandoned neutrality and was interfering with decisions being made. Lodge responded, rejecting the allegations.

When I meet Greenpeace’s Louisa Casson at the end of my week at the ISA, she argues this is symptomatic of a deeper problem. “The ISA has never turned down a licence to explore for mining,” she says, “and it benefits from every application – around $500,000 for each one, and they’re paid regular fees by the contractors. People are questioning how they can be a regulator when they have such a financial interest.” Lodge has also sometimes appeared to downplay environmental concerns – he once told an interviewer: “Turtles with straws up their noses and dolphins are very, very easy to get public sympathy.” He even appeared in a promotional video for a mining company. In a film made by DeepGreen Metals, Lodge appeared on a ship alongside its executives who were promoting deep-sea mining. In a statement, an ISA spokesperson reiterated its commitment to “protecting the environment as a prerequisite for any mining activity”, and said that the footage of Lodge, who was on an official visit, was used without the organisation’s consent.

“The law of the sea says you can only start deep-sea mining if you can ensure there won’t be harm to the marine environment,” explains Casson, “and that it will benefit humankind. Right now, neither of those conditions can be met.” Not a single scientist I speak to makes the case that it’s sensible and safe to start mining now. “And how on earth could this be considered for the good of humankind,” Casson asks, “when the industry is so concentrated in privately owned companies?”

It’s why, she argues, this controversial two-year rule has been tugged. “It stinks of desperation. The only people actively making the case for mining starting now are the companies themselves. For many, it’s their entire business model. But as deep-sea mining gains a public profile, more and more governments turn against it. Earlier this year, we signed a global oceans treaty: it makes no sense to now undermine this with a new destructive industry.”

There are certainly signs that it might be possible to stop deep-sea mining before it even starts. Protecting a part of the planet so untouched and unspoiled? It’s the rarest of opportunities. There are positive signs. Weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the industry’s longest-running and biggest player, recently sold off its seabed mining interests. Just last week, major Danish shipping giant Maersk, dropped its investment in a deep-sea mining company, too.

When the ISA was established, little was known about what lived deep in our oceans, or how important these environments were. We now know so much more. No conclusion was come to at the end of this most recent ISA meeting. The can was kicked down the road. Delegations will return this July, with no more room for delay. As a complicated legal battle unfolds, politicians will be faced with a simple question. “And that,” says Casson, “is should the world be bullied into destroying our oceans because a few businesses want to get rich quick based on an outdated rule? Or should global governments wrestle back control? The answer is really obvious.”

Surge in strikes at Chinese factories after Covid rules end

Action by workers has trebled this year as the country emerges from its draconian coronavirus measures

Workers confront security forces at Foxconn’s Apple iPhone factory in Zhengzhou in November 2022 in a pay dispute. Photograph: AP

Amy Hawkins, Senior China correspondent

The ObserverChina

Sun 21 May 2023 

Protests in China are often small- scale. On 17 May, a handful of workers at an air-purifier factory in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, south-east China, gathered to demand the payment of wages that, they said, were in arrears. The protest was quiet, but it was one of nearly 30 similar demonstrations this month alone.

With China’s factories reopened and draconian coronavirus measures abandoned, workers are also going on strike at a remarkable rate.

This year in China there have already been at least 130 factory strikes, more than triple the number in the whole of 2022, according to data compiled by the China Labour Bulletin (CLB), a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organisation.

The CLB’s database is far from comprehensive – by its own estimate, it captures about 5%-10% of all incidents of collective action in China. But in the absence of any official statistics, the CLB provides a snapshot of the disputes and negotiations that are happening across the country.

And this year, China seems to be entering a “new era” of post-Covid factory strikes, said Eli Friedman, a professor at the school of industrial and labour relations at Cornell University in New York.

For most of the strikes, the root cause is money. Although China’s economy is gradually recovering from the battering it took during three years of strict zero-Covid measures, factories are still struggling. And the worsening political relations between the US and China are starting to make themselves felt in the economy. In a monthly government survey of 3,000 factories across China, all 13 indicators of economic activity – including new orders and prices – declined in April.

With money tight, many factories have resorted to not paying workers, paying them late or finding ways to lay them off without paying severance, such as by relocating to somewhere impossible for the workers to travel for employment.

China may be an authoritarian state, but protests against company bosses are commonplace. Although there was a dip in such incidents during the pandemic, small, isolated incidents about specific issues – typically non-payment of wages – are ubiquitous on the factory floors and construction sites that power the country’s, and the world’s, economy.

Last year, hundreds of workers at the Foxconn technology group’s Apple iPhone factory in Zhengzhou in Henan province clashed with police after unruly protests over delays to bonus payments.

The scale of those demonstrations, and the fact that they came as the country swelled with frustration at the pandemic restrictions, attracted widespread attention on social media. But usually the incidents are contained and lack any connection to a broader workers’ movement.

A paradox at the heart of the communist regime is that the party of workers does not tolerate independent unions.

“That’s as much of an irony as a communist system that embraces consumerism,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine.All workers in China have the right to join a trade union, but that union must be affiliated with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), a government body. That results in “zero trust” between workers and unions, said Friedman. The ACFTU is, he added, a “complete non-factor in people’s lives”.

Some might have expected the workers’ movement in China to develop differently. In the 1990s, as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, the government started to introduce laws to protect workers’ rights.

This culminated in the labour contract law in 2008, which entitled workers to a written contract and severance pay. But, as in many other countries, employers soon found ways around these obligations.

After 2008, “more factories hired temp workers or agency workers – they found a lot of different ways to evade responsibility,” said Aidan Chau, a researcher at the CLB.

Fewer than half of migrant workers – the people who move to the cities to take low-paid factory and construction jobs – have the written employment contracts that they are entitled to.

Another group of workers who suffer from a lack of formal contracts are those in the gig economy.

In April, hundreds of delivery drivers for Meituan, one of China’s two main food delivery platforms, went on strike in Shanwei, a city in Guangdong province, over poor pay and being pressured to drive in dangerous, rainy conditions.

The action was surprising in the number of workers they managed to organise, and in the fact that they attracted support from drivers across the country, as well as consumers.

In the post-pandemic era, the collective action was “remarkable”, said Chau, especially after Chen Guojiang, a food delivery worker, was arrested in Beijing in 2021 for making similar complaints. That “sent a signal to the workers”, said Chau.

Wasserstrom added: “Strikes sometimes get small wins to get people back to work, but sometimes small concessions are made and the organisers are punished.”

But in last month’s Meituan strike, the company seemed to back down, meeting several of the workers. The public sympathy for the drivers helped their case, according to Chau. But anyone hoping to agitate for bigger demands will be cautious: Chen posted a video on his WeChat account in 2022 in which he appeared to have been released, but he has stopped talking about strikes.

The big picture: Bud Lee captures the 1967 Newark riots

The American photographer’s stark images of the clashes in New Jersey and their aftermath kicked off a nationwide debate about police violence

Tim Adams
@TimAdamsWrites

THE OBSERVER
Sun 21 May 2023 

The civil unrest that erupted in Newark, New Jersey, over six days in July 1967 has come to be thought of as an uprising rather than a series of riots. The immediate cause was the arrest and beating in custody of a local cab driver, John William Smith, but the sustained outpouring of anger that followed was an expression of lifetimes of ill treatment of the city’s majority Black population at the hands of the police and the courts. At the height of the conflict, the national guard was called in to occupy the streets with tanks and troops. By the time peace was eventually imposed, 26 people were dead and hundreds severely injured.

Bud Lee was a young photographer on his first major assignment with Life magazine. He brought those events to the national conscience, in particular with a cover photograph of a 12-year-old boy, Joey Bass Jr, who was wounded by the round of gunfire that killed another man, Billy Furr, shot in the back by police for looting a six-pack of beer. Lee’s pictures opened up a nationwide debate about police violence. A new book, The War Is Here: Newark 1967, collects those images, many of them unpublished, and reinhabits not only the fear and the violence – but also, as in this image, the defiance of that bloody week in Newark history.

Bud Lee died in 2015. In an introductory essay to the new book, the journalist Chris Campion describes how the photographer always felt strangely implicated in the death of Furr and the shooting of Bass, whom he visited throughout his months of recovery in hospital. He was traumatised by the idea that Furr might have been provoked to steal the case of beer to impress the man with the camera. Lee won a prestigious national “photo story of the year” for his Newark pictures, but he subsequently moved away from frontline news photography into portraiture and teaching.

The War Is Here: Newark 1967 is published 22 May by Ze Books

Russian mercenaries behind slaughter of 500 in Mali village, UN report finds

Report implicates Wagner group fighters in Moura atrocity, including the torture and rape of civilians

Jason Burke

Sat 20 May 2023 

First came a single helicopter, flying low over the marshes around the river outside the village, then the rattle of automatic fire scattered the crowds gathered for the weekly market.

Next came more helicopters, dropping troops off around the homes and cattle pens. The soldiers moved swiftly, ordering men into the centre of the village, gunning down those trying to escape. When some armed militants fired back, the shooting intensified. Soon at least 20 civilians and a dozen alleged members of an al-Qaida affiliated Islamist group, were dead.

Over the next five days, hundreds more would die in the village of Moura in the Mopti region of Mali at the hands of troops overseen by Russian mercenaries, according to a new United Nations report. All but a small fraction were unarmed civilians.

Published last week after an extensive human rights fact-finding mission conducted over several months by UN staff in Mali, the report gives an hour by hour account of events during a five-day military operation in Moura in March 2022, giving details of the worst single atrocity associated with the Kremlin-linked Wagner group outside Ukraine.

Investigators from the UN human rights office concluded that there are strong indications that more than 500 people were killed – the majority in extrajudicial killings – by Malian troops and foreign military personnel believed to be from Wagner, a mercenary outfit run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, which was linked to the massacre by internal messages obtained by the Guardian last year.

The new allegations again underline the extent of human rights abuses blamed on Wagner, which has also operated in at least six other African countries as well as Libya and Syria.

In recent months, Wagner fighters have spearheaded the Russian push to seize the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been fiercely contested by Kyiv’s forces, and suffered heavy casualties. Wagner has been accused of involvement in multiple massacres in Mali as well as elsewhere in the Sahel and central Africa. Witnesses say the group has been caught up in fierce fighting in Central African Republic in recent months.

As France and the US have shifted resources and attention away from Africa in recent years, Russia has moved to fill the gap, mounting a series of diplomatic offensives and using Wagner to win over regimes in key states by offering to bolster weak security forces against enemies ranging from Islamist extremists to pro-democracy domestic opposition parties.

Western officials allege the Kremlin is using Wagner to advance Russian economic and political interests across Africa and elsewhere. The effort is backed by an extensive disinformation campaign, they say.

Analysts have recorded a surge in violence wherever Wagner has deployed, although rarely with much military success for governments. Last month, at least nine civilians were killed and more than 60 injured in a triple suicide bomb attack in the central Mali town of Sévaré early on a Saturday, an official has said.

When the Russian mercenaries were hired in Mozambique in 2019 to fight Islamist militants there, they were forced to withdraw after suffering heavy casualties. Eventually, Rwandan regular troops were flown in, successfully countering the insurgents’ offensive.

Few of the atrocities alleged to have involved Wagner have been conclusively linked to the group, however. A lack of witnesses, resistance from local regimes, poor infrastructure and acute insecurity have made full investigation of claims difficult.

The Moura massacre is an exception, however. “These are extremely disturbing findings,” said Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights. “Summary executions, rape and torture during armed conflict amount to war crimes and could, depending on the circumstances, amount to crimes against humanity.”

Malian authorities denied requests by the team to access Moura itself but the report is based on interviews with victims and witnesses, as well as forensic and other information sources, such as satellite imagery.

Mali’s elected president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, was toppled in August 2020 by officers angered at the failures to roll back the jihadist insurgency. In 2021, the military forced out an interim civilian government and tilted dramatically towards Moscow, concluding an agreement in which about 1,000 fighters from the Wagner group were deployed to bases across much of the country, which also received consignments of Russian weapons.

Video footage of soldiers burying bodies near an army base in northern Mali in April last year. Photograph: AP


A Malian government spokesperson described the report as “biased” and “based on a fictional account”, and said an investigation by Malian judicial authorities had found “not a single civilian in Moura was killed during the military operation”, only “armed terrorists”.

The operation – described by the authorities as an anti-terrorist military operation against an Islamist extremist group, Katiba Macina, which has imposed its rigorous and intolerant version of sharia law on inhabitants, raised taxes and made local men follow their dress codes – began on 27 March 2022, a busy market day in Moura.

The accounts gathered by the UN support the testimony of witnesses who spoke to reporters last year. Amadou Barry, who lives in the neighbouring village, told the Observer he was attending the market in Moura when helicopters suddenly appeared and troops disembarked, prompting a small group of Islamist militants in the village to shoot at the soldiers before fleeing on motorbikes.

“We started running in every direction, some into the houses. The Malian army then opened fire on people running, killing so many people,” he said.

Then, over the next four days, at least 500 people are believed to have been killed, says the report, which names at least 238 of these victims.

Héni Nsaibia, senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), said in the weeks after the massacre that between 60 and 100 of those killed may have been unarmed Islamist militants, but the rest were civilians. Government forces found large quantities of weapons in Moura.

Witnesses reported seeing “armed white men” who spoke an unknown language operating alongside the Malian forces and at times appearing to supervise operations, the report found. It cites witnesses who claimed Malian troops were rotated in and out of Moura daily, but the foreign personnel remained.

Internal Malian army documents obtained by the Guardian last year revealed the presence of Wagner fighters – referred to as “Russian instructors” – on “mixed missions” with Malian soldiers and gendarmes around the time of the Moura massacre. Wagner were deployed near Moura at the time, and took part in other operations in which many civilians were killed.

According to the new report, on the day after the initial assault soldiers began going house to house searching for “presumed terrorists”, selecting and killing people with long beards, people wearing ankle-length trousers (a sign of religious devotion), people with marks on their shoulders – seen as evidence of firing or carrying weapons – and even those who merely showed signs of fear.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is the owner of the Wagner mercenary group. Photograph: AP


A group of men rounded up in the south-east of the village were led away by soldiers and shot in the head, back or chest, and their bodies thrown into a ditch. Witnesses said that those who resisted or tried to flee were also executed by the Malian armed forces and the “armed white men” and dumped into the ditch.

Detainees were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment during questioning, and dozens of women and girls were raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence, the report claims. In one instance, soldiers brought bedding from a house, placed it under trees in the garden, and took turns raping women they had forced there.

Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s regional director for west and central Africa, said what happened in Moura could constitute crimes under international law.

“While the [UN] notes that around 30 combatants from the armed group Katiba Macina were present in Moura on 27 March 2022 … their presence can in no way justify the extrajudicial executions, rapes and looting committed by the armed forces against the inhabitants and stallholders trapped by their siege,” Daoud said.

Analysts have expressed concerns that the recent crisis in Sudan has distracted attention from deepening problems across the Sahel, an unstable belt of desert and grazing running east from Senegal across the African continent. The zone is afflicted by extreme weather linked to climate change, displacement of millions of people, acute political instability and growing violence. Analysts fear the conflict in Sudan may lead to a “domino” effect of state collapse.