Wanted spies: No remote work and must leave cell phone at home

Story by Reuters • May 22, 2023

A sign of the headquarters of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), 

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, is seen in Berlin© Thomson Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) - Calling wannabe James Bonds.

Intelligence services are finding it harder to recruit staff since the pandemic as prospects want to work from home and would rather not part with their personal cell phones, the head of Germany's foreign intelligence service BND said on Monday.

"We cannot offer certain conditions that are taken for granted today," said Bruno Kahl, who described finding enough and the right staff as a great challenge as baby boomers are heading into retirement.

"Remote work is barely possible at the BND for security reasons, and not being able to take your cell phone to work is asking much from young people looking for a job," he added.

Some 6,500 people work for the BND, according to its homepage.

(Reporting by Sabine Siebold; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

 CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Are you prone to feeling guilty? You may be less likely to take a bribe

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY FOR PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Bribery is among the most recognizable forms of corruption, and new research is shedding light on personality traits that could deter this behavior. Guilt-prone people are less likely to accept bribes, particularly when the act would cause obvious harm to other people.

The research, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, contributes to a growing body of literature on individual differences in corrupt behaviors.

“Our results have important implications for current world events, particularly in the realm of politics and governance where corruption and bribery are major concerns,” says author Prof. Xiaolin Zhou, of East China Normal University. “More specifically, our results highlight the importance of assessing candidates’ guilt proneness in personnel selection, especially when electing a leader for a group.”

Researchers conducted two online experiments with 2,082 college students, combining economic games with personality measures. The first study demonstrated that being guilt-prone was negatively associated with accepting bribes, while the second revealed a connection between people’s concerns for others and their willingness to take a bribe. The research also highlights the potential of utilizing computational modeling to study moral decision-making and the underlying psychological mechanisms that shape ethical behavior.

Dr. Zhou notes that the study is correlational rather than causal, meaning that researchers cannot definitively conclude that making someone more guilt-prone will reduce their likelihood of engaging in corrupt behavior. He also notes that the research focuses on being guilt-prone as a single personality trait and does not account for other moral-related personality traits that could influence bribery.

“It would be intriguing to investigate alternative psychological mechanisms – such as responsibility, obedience, or conformity - beyond the concern for others’ suffering, that may underlie the relationship between guilt proneness and bribery,” Dr. Zhou explains.

In the meantime, the researchers would like to see the insights from this study leveraged to deter corrupt behavior.

“We hope that our findings can inform policies and interventions aimed at preventing corruption and promoting ethical behaviors in various domains, such as business and government,” says the first author Dr. Yang Hu.

---

JOURNAL

Social Psychological and Personality Science

DOI

10.1177/19485506231168515 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Are Guilt-Prone Power-Holders Less Corrupt? Evidence From Two Online Experiments

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-May-2023

UK

Investigation reveals “shocking” epidemic of sexual assault in the NHS

NHS trusts are failing to protect staff and patients Medical colleges and unions urge government to launch independent inquiry

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

A joint investigation published today by The BMJ and The Guardian finds that NHS trusts recorded more than 35,000 cases of rape, sexual assault, harassment, stalking, and abusive remarks, between 2017 and 2022. The findings, which show that NHS trusts are failing to protect staff and patients, have led to calls for an independent inquiry.

The data, based on responses to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from 212 NHS trusts and 37 police forces in England, show that a total of 35,606 sexual safety incidents were recorded on NHS premises over this five year period.

At least 20% of incidents involved rape, sexual assault, or kissing or touching that a person did not consent to, although not all trusts provided a breakdown of the type of incidents recorded. The other cases included sexual harassment, stalking, and abusive or degrading remarks. 

The data also show that patients are the main perpetrators of abuse in hospitals. Most incidents (58%) involved patients abusing staff, with patients abusing other patients the next most common type of incident (20%). 

Police recorded nearly 12,000 alleged sexual crimes on NHS premises in the same time period. These include 180 cases of rape of children under 16, with four children under 16 being gang raped.

Yet the investigation found that fewer than one in 10 trusts has a dedicated policy to deal with sexual assault and harassment, and are no longer obliged to report abuse of staff to a central database. 

Latifa Patel, BMA workforce and equalities lead, says she assumes that trusts without dedicated sexual safety policies are “sitting on huge numbers of unreported incidents,” which she describes as “a truly disturbing implication.”

The data show that 193 of the 212 trusts reported 10 or fewer staff-on-staff incidents between 2017 and 2022, but doctors describe this as “implausible” given their numbers of employees, and say that staff are reluctant to report sexual assault.

Simon Fleming, an orthopaedic registrar and author of Sexual Assault in Surgery: a Painful Truth, said: “I know hundreds of female doctors who’ve been assaulted, thousands who’ve been harassed, and a decent number who’ve been raped within the NHS.”

And although more than 4,000 NHS staff were accused of rape, sexual assault, harassment, stalking, or abusive remarks towards other staff or patients in 2017-22, the investigation found that only 576 have faced disciplinary action.

What’s more, when complaints are made against colleagues, women claim that NHS trusts show a “reluctance to suspend perpetrators due to overall staff shortages,” says Deeba Syed, senior legal officer for Rights of Women, a helpline that provides support for women who have been sexually assaulted or harassed at work. 

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the Liberal Democrats, the Hospital Doctors Union, the GMB union, the Society of Radiologists and the British Dietetic Association have all called for an independent inquiry into the epidemic of sexual assault in the NHS in light of the findings.

Fleur Curtis, 43, was sexually assaulted on three occasions by a junior doctor in 2016 and 2017 when she was working as a physician associate at the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford. She told The BMJ that the trust’s poor handling of her complaint had a massive impact on her mental health, forcing her to quit her job in 2020.

So what can trusts do?

Trusts need to be guided by NHS-wide policies on how to deal with allegations, including when to suspend staff and when to report individuals to the police, and should act swiftly to deal with complaints, say Tamzin Cuming and Carrie Newlands, from the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery.

Others agree that action is needed fast. “Employers must ensure that victims are supported and feel empowered to report sexual harm and resolve to take appropriate action,” adds Patel. “It is heartbreaking to see the extent to which the NHS has failed to provide this safety to patients and healthcare staff.”

Health secretary Steve Barclay said that the government has doubled the maximum sentence for those who are convicted of assaulting health workers and is working closely with NHS England to prevent and reduce violence against staff.

In a linked opinion article, Simon Fleming says it is everyone’s responsibility to hold sexual predators in the NHS accountable or risk becoming complicit bystanders. “Criminal behaviour should be dealt with seriously, regardless of who has committed the crime,” he argues. “Failure to challenge, individually or organisationally, these attitudes is akin to accepting them as ‘just how things are.’”

In another opinion article, Rosalind Searle at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, says failures to record, investigate, and act on cases of sexual harassment and abuse in healthcare have enabled perpetrators. She outlines three sanctioning mechanisms—self, social, and legal sanctions—that are needed to reduce these violations in workplaces and society.

The BMJ will be hosting a webinar on this topic on June 8. Register in advance here: https://bmj.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LDW5KZ0eTLqdE5kDaNoZZA

---

JOURNAL

The BMJ

DOI

10.1136/bmj.p1105 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Investigation: Medical colleges and unions call for inquiry over “shocking” levels of sexual assault in the NHS

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-May-2023

Earlier snowpack melt in the West could bring summer water scarcity

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

Snow is melting earlier, and more rain is falling instead of snow in the mountain ranges of the Western U.S. and Canada, leading to a leaner snowpack that could impact agriculture, wildfire risk and municipal water supplies come summer, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, the study documents more than 60 years of change in snowpack water storage across Western North America. It found that from 1950 to 2013, snowpack water storage has significantly declined in more than 25% of the Mountain West, in part because more snow is melting during winter and spring, eroding this seasonal boundary.

“On average and in every mountainous region that we looked at, snow melt is occurring closer in time to when it fell,” said Kate Hale, lead author of the study and a 2022 geography graduate. “The timing of water availability is shifting toward earlier in the springtime, with less snow melt and water availability later in the summertime, suggesting that there will be water scarcity later in the year.”

Timing is everything

The Western U.S. and Canada depend on snow for most of their water. The Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevadas and other mountain ranges have long served as, essentially, water towers for the region: They store snow throughout the winter, which then melts and becomes available as water in spring and summer, when demand is greatest.

Every year on April 1, state and regional water managers use a metric known as snow water equivalent (SWE)—how much water will be produced when an amount of snow melts—to predict and plan for water resources that year, said Hale, now a postdoctoral researcher at University of Vermont.

But that April 1 snapshot is exactly that: one moment in time. It doesn’t reveal if that snow slowly accumulated over the past six months, if it all fell in one giant heap on March 31, or if it was already melting.

“From a hydrologic perspective, the only thing that's unique about snow is that it delays the timing of water input to watersheds. And just looking at a snapshot of snow water equivalent doesn't give you a sense as to how long that snow water equivalent has been on the ground,” said Noah Molotch, associate professor of geography and fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at CU Boulder.

So Hale used two publicly available data sources to develop a new measurement known as Snow Storage Index (SSI) that incorporates the timing and amount of snowfall, as well as snowmelt, before and after April 1. In contrast to the singular moment in time captured by SWE, Hale’s SSI shows a metaphorical video: incorporating into one number, the time between when rain or snow falls on a landscape in the winter season and when it becomes available to that area as surface water.

“The snow storage index allows us to look at snow water storage, not just in the context of how much is there at any given time, but the duration of that storage on the ground,” said Molotch.

This allowed the researchers to analyze how well each mountainous region of the West has acted as a water tower over the past 60 years and discover that their performance has been declining across the board.

Managing water now and for the future

A “high” SSI—a number as close to 1.0 as possible—was found in places where snowfall is very seasonal. In the Cascades, for example, snow accumulates in the fall and winter season, and is stored up to six months before melting somewhat continuously in the spring and summer. Here in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, however, the SSI is lower—somewhere between 0 and 0.5—which means that snow both accumulates and melts throughout the colder half of the year.

But because the Rockies and the Front Range are already used to this alternating pattern of snowfall and snowmelt during winter and spring seasons, as a region it may adjust easier to similar patterns of decreased snowpack water storage associated with global warming. The mountain regions near the West Coast that are highly reliant on snowpack meltwater in the spring and summer, however, may be in for a painful adjustment when that water melts earlier in the year—and is simply no longer available come late summer.

The researchers hope that this new measurement can serve as a tool for scientists and water resource managers to make better predictions and, when necessary, plan ahead for less.

Half a century ago, an era of dam building in the Western United States allowed the region to flourish in terms of access to water for cities and for agriculture, said Molotch. But as these “water towers” melt away, so too may the reservoirs they filled.

“The snowpack is eroding and disappearing before our eyes. That's going to present challenges in terms of managing the infrastructure that's allowed the Western United States to flourish over the last 100 years,” said Molotch.

Additional authors on this publication include: Keith Jennings, Lynker, Boulder, Colorado; Keith Musselman, Department of Geography and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), CU Boulder; and Ben Livneh, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, CU Boulder.

---

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s43247-023-00751-3 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Recent decreases in snow water storage in western North America

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

22-May-2023

 Processing of Marine Resources & a Little-Known Aspect of Palatial Societies in the 2nd M BC

SchAdvStudy

Nov 24, 2021  Institute of Classical Studies

Maritime History Week 4 | The Sea People and Trojan War | Uluburun Wreck | Greek vs Persian Triremes

Dimitra Mylona, INSTAP/Crete

Mapping social values in Moreton Bay | 

Vicki Martin

Reef Authority: Deep Dive

 May 14, 2023 

 NORTH QUEENSLAND

The Moreton Bay Marine Park, off the coast of Brisbane, is under increasing human-induced pressures that are threatening sustainability and conservation in the Bay. Through a series of workshops, Marine Park stakeholders identified the need to learn more about how the public value different areas in the Park. 

With an initial focus on recreational boaters (a key user group in the Bay), we developed a contemporary public participation in geographic information systems (PPGIS) process to collect data about the places boaters enjoy in the Bay, and why they value these locations. 

Spatially-integrated social science has progressed considerably over the last three decades; however, debates continue about the methods and measures used. In this talk, we will discuss the methods used to develop and test the survey instrument, its usability, cognition, and suitability for planning decisions. We will share initial findings, reflect on lessons learned, and provide suggestions for future research in this field.

Dr Vicki Martin is an environmental, social scientist at The University of Queensland who has worked in interdisciplinary research teams in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S.A., and Chile to engage people in environmental solutions. Her recent work has focused on human values of nature and how information about values can be used to inform marine spatial planning. 

She is particularly interested in embracing innovations in digital technologies to create contemporary, inclusive, translational, and more reliable public participation processes that unify efforts  to sustain ocean health.

Betelgeuse Is Being Weird Again. What Gives?

Story by Michelle Starr • ScienceAlert

May 22,2023

betelgeuse closeup

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness.

The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness.

It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156 percent in April.

Currently, Betelgeuse is the 7th brightest star in the sky – up from its normal position as the 10th brightest, triggering speculation that Betelgeuse is about to blow in a spectacular supernova.

Sadly, it probably isn't. Although Betelgeuse is on the brink of death in cosmic timescales, on human timescales, its supernova could be 100,000 years away.

According to scientists, its current behavior is more likely a bit of ongoing wobbliness following the 2019 dimming, and the star will return to normal within a decade.

Betelgeuse, located around 700 light-years from Earth, is one of the most interesting stars in the sky. It hangs above us, glowing like a bloodshot eye, a star in the red giant stage that marks the end of its life.

But Betelgeuse is an uncommon type of star, even for a red giant. Once upon a time, it was an absolute monster: a blue-white O-type star, the most massive stellar weight class.

Stars of this mass range burn through their hydrogen stores more rapidly than lighter-weight stars; Betelgeuse is only about 8 to 8.5 million years old. Compare that to a star like the Sun, which at 4.6 billion years old, is only about halfway through its hydrogen-burning lifetim

Betelgeuse changed its spectral type since it has almost run through its hydrogen reserves. It's now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen and has puffed out to a gargantuan size: about 764 times the size of the Sun and about 16.5 to 19 times its mass.

Eventually, it will run out of fuel to burn, go supernova, throw off its outer material, and its core will collapse into a neutron star.

The Great Dimming event saw the star decrease in brightness by a considerable amount, almost 25 percent. Astronomers scurried to figure out the cause; it turned out that cooling on Betelgeuse's surface caused a massive cloud of dust to condense on the star.

This cloud was subsequently ejected, partially obscuring Betelgeuse, causing it to appear to dim. Fairly normal behavior for a red giant star, scientists say; we just don't usually get such a front-row seat.

Before the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse also had brightness fluctuations on regular cycles. The longest of these cycles is around 5.9 years; another is 400 days. But it seems the Great Dimming has caused some changes in these fluctuations.

A new paper, led by astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, uploaded to preprint server arXiv, found that the 400-day cycle seems to have halved.

This pulsation cycle is driven by expansion and contraction inside the star. According to simulations MacLeod and his colleagues conducted, a convective plume inside Betelgeuse could have welled up, becoming the material that breaks away from the star.

During the process, this upwelling disrupted the phase of the 400-day cycle, producing instead a roughly 200-day cycle that the star is currently exhibiting.

So, Betelgeuse is still reeling from the Great Dimming, meaning it's not unlikely that its current brightening is also related to ongoing issues.

As astrophysicist and Betelgeuse expert Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – a co-author on MacLean's team – told Scientific American, "Just imagine if you take a hunk of the material out. Then everything else is going to swish in, and it's going to slosh around … I think what's happening is that the top layers are having a problem coming back to normal."

However, the team predicts that eventually, normalcy will set back in for Betelgeuse, and it will continue to live out its twilight millennia relatively peacefully for some time to come.

IN MEMORY OF HARRY BELAFONTE (RIP)

Support for extremism among military veterans is similar to U.S. public

Rate is lower that what researchers had expected

Peer-Reviewed Publication

RAND CORPORATION

Support among military veterans for extremist groups and extremist ideals appears similar to or less than levels seen among the U.S. public in general, despite fears that it could be higher, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Surveying a nationally representative group of military veterans, researchers found that support for extremist groups such the Proud Boys and Antifa was generally lower than rates derived from previous representative surveys of the general U.S. population.

Assessing support among veterans for extremist beliefs, researchers found results that were more mixed. Support for QAnon was lower than the public at large, while support for political violence and the Great Replacement theory appeared similar to that of the general population.

The survey found that veterans of the Marine Corps expressed the highest support for extremist groups and beliefs among the different branches of military.

“We found no evidence to support the notion that the veteran community, as a whole, exhibits higher rates of support for violent extremist groups or extremist beliefs than the American public,” said Todd C. Helmus, the study’s lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “However, our findings do suggest work still may be needed to make sure veterans are not susceptible to being recruited by those with extremist ideologies.”

Concern that the veteran community is at increased risk of radicalization to violent extremism has increased since reports that a significant proportion of the people who attacked the U.S. Capital on Jan. 6, 2021, were currently or had been affiliated with the U.S. military.

Several factors are assumed to underpin radicalization of veterans and why some extremist groups have sought to target both active-duty and military veterans. Veterans are considered significant additions to violent extremist groups, given their past weapon training and their logistic and leadership skills. They also lend a sense of legitimacy to militant groups that can further aid recruitment.

In addition, the veteran population is more male and more White than the overall U.S. population, demographic factors that are associated with right-wing (and to some degree left-wing) extremism in the United States, according to researchers.

To better understand the issue, RAND researchers conducted the first nationally representative survey of veterans’ views about extremism and extremist groups.

Researchers surveyed a group of veterans from the NORC AmeriSpeak panel, analyzing responses from 989 people who reported that they previously served on active duty, but were not currently doing so.

Participants were asked about extremist groups such as Antifa, the Proud Boys and white supremacist groups, as well as their attitudes toward QAnon ideology, support for political violence and the xenophobic Great Replacement theory.

Considerably fewer veterans expressed support for Antifa than the overall U.S. population (5.5% versus 10%), and veterans expressed much lower support for White supremacists than the U.S. population overall (0.7% versus 7%). Vet­erans also expressed relatively less support for the Proud Boys (4.2% versus 9%) and the QAnon conspiracy theory (13.5% versus 17%). About 5% of the participants expressed support for Black nationalist groups.

Despite these encouraging findings, support for the neces­sity of political violence (17.7 versus 19%) and support for the Great Replacement theory (28.8% versus 34%) were similar to support in the U.S. popula­tion. Only a minority of the veterans who expressed support for extremist groups also endorsed the need for political violence.

Researchers found that Marine Corps veterans reported the highest levels of support for Antifa, the Proud Boys and Black nationalists, as well as the highest levels of support for political violence and the Great Replacement theory. Both Air Force and Marine Corps veterans reported stronger support for QAnon.

“Given the anecdotal information about extremist group recruitment preferences and their active targeting of veterans, we would have assumed that these reported prevalence rates would be higher,” Helmus said.

Researchers say it could be that veterans who support such groups may be more inclined to actually join them or participate in their activities than nonveteran counterparts. Hence, even a smaller prevalence rate of extremist attitudes among veterans could still represent an outsized security threat to the United States.

“It seems clear that veter­ans bring a unique and danger­ous set of capabilities to extremist groups,” said Ryan Andrew Brown, co-author of the study and a RAND senior behavioral scientist. “So even a smaller prevalence rate of extremist attitudes among veterans could still represent an outsized security threat to the United States.”

Researchers suggest that the U.S. military and veteran service organizations should continue to explore what drives some active-duty person­nel and veterans to endorse extremist beliefs and join extremist causes. Such efforts should include both additional survey work and interview-based studies that would help researchers understand the factors that drive radicalization.

Support for the study was provided by Daniel J. Epstein through the Epstein Family Founda­tion, which established the RAND Epstein Family Veterans Policy Research Institute in 2021, and the Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library.

The report, “Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs: Results From a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community,” is available at www.rand.org. Rajeev Ramchand also co-authored the report.

The RAND Justice Policy Program conducts research across the criminal and civil justice system on issues such as public safety, effective policing, drug policy and enforcement, corrections policy, court reform, and insurance regulation.

---

DOI

10.7249/RRA1071-2 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Survey

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs: Results From a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community

Americans Refuse to Quit Eating Meat

Story by Jess Thomson • NEWSWEEK

May 23,2023

Despite the great strides made by the vegetarian and vegan movements over the past few decades, most Americans aren't going to give up their meat-based diets anytime soon.

An exclusive poll of 1,500 eligible U.S. voters conducted for Newsweek by Redfield and Wilton Strategies on May 17 found that a majority of Americans regularly eat meat and believe that it's a healthy choice. They also said the meat industry is not that bad for the climate.

The polling also found that 81 percent of people eat meat at least once a week, and 10 percent said that they ate it only once or twice a month. Only 4 and 3 percent of the respondents said that they rarely or never ate meat, respectively.

Other questions revealed that 35 percent of people strongly agreed with the statement that it's healthy to eat meat, with 41 percent selecting "agree" and 17 percent selecting "neither agree nor disagree." Only 4 percent said that they disagreed, and a further 1 percent said that they strongly disagreed.

But eating meat, particularly red meat and processed meat, is less than healthy for our bodies. There is a link between increased consumption of red and processed meats and a higher risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and premature death, according to the Harvard Health Publishing website.

The polling also showed that while 34 percent of people believe that eating less red meat would help lower global carbon emissions, 40 percent said that they did not believe this. Twenty-six percent said they weren't sure.

The meat industry, especially the cattle industry, produces a huge amount of greenhouse gases. A paper published in the online journal Nature Food found that raising cows, pigs and other animals for food is responsible for 57 percent of all food production carbon emissions, twice as high as those created by all plant-based food production. Beef alone accounts for a quarter of food production emissions.

The problem is the sheer amount of land needed to grow food for the animals, as well as the felling of trees to clear space for grazing and otherwise raising the animals. More land is used worldwide to feed livestock than to grow crops to feed people, according to the Nature Food paper. Additionally, all the transportation involved in the production process produces carbon dioxide, and the livestock themselves produce methane in their burps, a greenhouse gas with 28 times the warming power of CO2 on a 100-year scale.


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The Guardian reported in 2021 that 5.5 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted for every 2.2 pounds of wheat produced, compared with a staggering 154 pounds of greenhouse gases per 2.2 pounds of beef.

The polling did show that younger people are more likely to agree that meat is bad for the environment. Thirty percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, 50 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds and 47 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds said so. For 55- to 64-year-olds, only 16 percent of people said the same.

One alternative to satisfy Americans' hunger for meat—outside of a vegan or vegetarian diet—is laboratory-grown meat. This is real meat tissue from animals that is grown in a lab rather than taken from the body of an animal. This would help minimize the carbon emissions produced in the meat supply chain, depending on how much the growth process generates.



Stock image of meat in a petri dish. 

Lab-grown meat was backed by President Joe Biden in an executive order last September. He said that the U.S. government is dedicated to investing in biotechnology that will advance the nation's food security, including via "cultivating alternative food sources" and "looking to improve food security and drive agricultural innovation through new technologies...[including] foods made with cultured animal cells."

However, this alternative doesn't seem to have inspired much enthusiasm among Americans.

Twenty-seven percent of those in the polling sample said they would feel safe eating lab-grown meat, with 25 percent saying they would eat it. However, 55 percent said they would not feel safe eating lab-grown meat, and 57 percent would not eat it.

Additionally, while 30 percent of people said that they believed lab-grown meat provides a realistic alternative to meat produced from animals, 51 percent said they did not. Nineteen percent said they didn't know.

The polling shows that while a large number of Americans recognize the meat industry's effects on both human health and the climate, fewer of them are willing to change their habits or diets as a result.

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Marianne Williamson: ‘You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president’
Story by Edward Helmore • Yesterday 

Photograph: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images© Provided by The Guardian

Apenthouse-gym in north-west Washington DC served as a campaign stage for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson last week. Athleisure-clad political consultants came and went, as if typecast from a political TV drama. The Washington monument poked between buildings in the distance.

Williamson is far from an average political candidate, even in the modern era of American politics where it often feels much of what was once unthinkable has become a scary new normal. She is not a politician, but instead an author and wellness guru, whose quixotic first tilt at the White House four years ago was far from successful but saw her grace the Democratic debates and score a viral hit with her message to Donald Trump that she would “harness love” to defeat him.

This time around, Williamson is running a tougher, more grounded campaign – treading the turf as a political outsider appalled at how America’s political elites have ignored the needs of its ordinary people.

The chances that Williamson will become Democratic nominee for president next year are very slim. But there’s no doubt that her message has the power to resonate, particularly among the young and with women, and with those who feel America’s current travails cut deep and are being ignored.

“I’ve had a 40-year-career working with people whose lives are in trouble. When I started that was the exception, not the rule. The work I did then was an adequate response to the suffering I saw in front of me, but now there seems to be a ubiquitous wave of people’s lives falling apart.”

An obelisk is much more than a phallus

Williamson is also increasingly clear on some of the traditional barriers she faces. Williamson, 70, is just the second woman – the first being Republican Nikki Haley – to have thrown her name into the 2024 presidential nomination contest ring. Both have received a seemingly reflexive push-back from their respective parties and some quarters of the media.

Sexist? Quite possibly.

“An obelisk is much more than a phallus,” Williamson said at her event, observing the monument beyond. And then more directly: “You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president.”

But Williamson was less interested in symbols of power than her political agenda. She’s never held public office, though she ran unsuccessfully for California’s 33rd congressional district in 2014, and for the Democratic party nomination in 2019, endorsing Bernie Sanders after dropping out the following year.

Among her platform positions is an increase in the minimum wage, reparations for racial injustice, a more muscular response to climate change, comprehensive educational reforms and the creation of a US Department of Peace. She talks of “soulless hyper-capitalism” which she sees as the fundamental affliction of an America run by a government “of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations”.

Now she’s doggedly upgrading her old messaging about personal growth and universal love, attempting to dig a channel from new age enlightenment to political power, and to turn around what she sees as an economic, environmental and social crisis engulfing America.



Williamson speaks on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, on 30 July 2019. 

Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters© Provided by The Guardian

“I’m socio-economically well-travelled,” she said. “And my experience has had to do with the endurance and transformation of chaos. I’m interested in the principles of truth, and the realization that America is out of control. America is in chaos.”

The liberal, Jewish ex-lounge singer from Texas arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s and began to gather the stars – Madonna, Michael, Liz and Warren – and Hollywood power brokers of the era around self-healing psychotherapy and applied her energy to the Aids crisis.


She set up in New York, giving a talk once a month on a Course of Miracles. Her career took off via Oprah Winfrey, and she became known as the TV star’s “spiritual adviser”. A book publishing empire followed. Almost all her titles applied “love” to whatever the title subject at hand.

After her first run for the party nomination in 2020 she moved to Washington, which she describes as a walled city, not a bubble. She’d recently gotten out to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after the toxic train derailment turned the sleepy burgh into a byword for chemical disaster at the hands of a big corporation.

“The economically oppressed in this country are being oppressed by the same forces, whether on the left or the right. The real divide is not left and right, that’s a veil of illusion, it’s between those who are suffering and those who don’t seem to have a clue. It’s about millions of people living with chronic economic insecurity,” she said.

There’s little sign that those actually arranging Democrat political power have much time for Williamson, and they have fenced her out. But she is not put off, touring the country and doing campaign stops.

“Why would I capitulate? I’m a 70-year-old woman. I’m not part of that system. I’m not coming from that place of do what they tell you and you might get on that committee or get to run in 2028,” she said.

There’s such a fear of Donald Trump, they assume the best way to go is with Joe Biden. I disagree

“There’s such a fear of Donald Trump, they assume the best way to go is with Joe Biden. I disagree. You have to be in complete denial to think that status quo, transactional politics are going to be enough to defeat the energy that he [Trump] represents.

“People are blinded by their fear of him,” Williamson continued. “They think if they attack him enough people will change their minds. But this a man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and supporters wouldn’t care, and I think that’s probably true.

“You’ll beat him by offering the American people a better deal, and agenda for genuine economic reform, an economic U-turn.”

Integral to that, she said, would be a 21st-century economic bill of rights – universal healthcare, free tuition, free childcare, paid family leave, guaranteed housing, a livable wage and sick pay.

Last week, Williamson also announced plans for a Department of Children and Youth, arguing that children, because they have no economic agency and no vote, are “systematically neglected”.

“Public policy in America sets children up to fail. Our children are the biggest collateral damage from hyper-capitalism. So I would place a tremendous focus on children, and create a massive transformation of resources. I want every school to be a center of learning, culture and arts.”

Students go to school in fear of gun violence, a situation she says that will exacerbate mental health issues in the future. The current debate, she says, doesn’t begin to address the issue. “It’s a sophomoric question, is it cultural or is it guns? It’s both. It’s gun safety laws and the glamorization of violence that people make money off.

“Our food policies are violent, our climate policies are violent, our justice policies are violent, our economic policies are violent. The violence perpetrated against women on TV blows my mind – and the emotional violence on social media. We’ve sexualized violence, and we will have a violent society until we chose to become non-violent.”

But her message of love and equity could be marred by other reports of the author behind the scenes. Shortly after she announced her run, Politico ran an article claiming she had episodes of “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage” during her 2020 White House run. Williamson later called the accusations a “hit piece”.

“I raised my voice in the office. They said I threw a phone but I’ve never thrown a phone at anyone. If people feel I’ve been disrespectful to them, of course, I’m very sorry,” she says.

Some also detect a political hand. Williamson has claimed the Democratic National Committee is “rigging” the party’s primaries in favor of Biden by ruling out a debate – “candidate suppression if a form of voter suppression,” she says – and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded to questions about Williamson’s candidacy with jokes about auras and crystal balls.

“Of course they call me an unserious candidate because they don’t want to be called to the carpet for being so unserious about the things that matter most,” she hit back.

“Of course they would see me and those like me as dangerous, because from the perch they’re on I am dangerous.”

Politicians love to talk, but none possibly as much as Oprah-trained spiritual gurus turned politicians. And Williamson is now on a tear. Over the past month, 38 videos have gleaned 4m views and more than 600,000 “likes” on Gen-Z popular TikTok.

But this may be where Williamson likes to be – firing salvoes, getting her voice out there, offering the damned salvation, slipping on occasion into what sounds like life-coaching.

And after the traumatic four-year experiment of allowing a political outsider from the far right to enter the walled city of US politics without knowledge of or care to learn how the levers of political power operate, resistance to another outsider on a political quest is unquestionably elevated.

“I can see that it would be an extremely difficult job, and I can’t imagine that it would be fun every day,” Williamson says of the prospect of the presidency.

“I would simply try to be as good a person as I can be. I’m not claiming to be what I’m not. I’m running for president, not sainthood. I am a decent woman who has, I feel, some insights about this country and some insights about what is happening that could be of value.”