Train drivers to hold first of three rail strikes in England this week


Aslef members will hold widespread stoppages on Wednesday and Saturday, while RMT crew and station staff will strike on Friday


Joe Middleton

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 17.00 BST

Passengers are bracing for the first of three rail strikes this week as services in England come to a standstill amid a long-running dispute over pay and conditions.

Members of the drivers’ union Aslef will embark on a 24-hour strike on Wednesday. The union also plans to strike on Saturday.

On these days, no trains will run on networks including Avanti West Coast, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry, East Midlands Railway, Great Northern, Southern, Southeastern, Thameslink and Northern.


Train drivers’ union says it has received ‘significant’ pay offers in Wales and Scotland

Separately, about 20,000 onboard crew and station staff who are members of the RMT plan to take industrial action on Friday. That strike will disrupt services, but many operators will still run some trains.

The latest stoppages are likely to affect parents and children on the half-term break and passengers trying to travel to big events on Saturday, including the FA Cup final between Manchester City and Manchester United at Wembley and a date of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

The strike comes after Aslef rejected a pay rise offer of 4% a year over two years from the Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents the train operating companies.

The transport minister Huw Merriman has urged Aslef and the RMT to put the government’s “fair and reasonable” pay offer to their members.

The RMT called the pay deal from the RDG “unacceptable” and said no further proposals had been put forward for them to consider.

The union’s general secretary, Mick Lynch, said: “The government is once again not allowing the Rail Delivery Group to make an improved offer that we can consider. Therefore, we have to pursue our industrial campaign to win a negotiated settlement on jobs, pay and conditions. Ministers cannot just wish this dispute away.”

The RDG has warned passengers that between Wednesday and Saturday, rail services will be “severely reduced with variations across the network and no services at all in some areas”.

An RDG spokesperson said: “The upcoming rail strikes called by the Aslef and RMT leadership will not only affect our passengers’ daily commute, but will also impact those travelling from [and] to the FA Cup final and other events across the country, causing disappointment and frustration for tens of thousands of people.

“It will also inconvenience families who have been looking forward and have planned their half-term holidays. It will also further burden our people who have already lost thousands of pounds at a time of financial strain.”

Malaysia investigates Chinese barge suspected of links to looting of British WW2 wrecks

Search of vessel registered in Fuzhou, China, reveals cannon shell suspected to date from second world war

Associated Press
Tue 30 May 2023 

Malaysia’s maritime agency has said it found a cannon shell believed to be from the second world war on a Chinese-registered vessel and was investigating if the barge carrier was involved in the looting of two British warship wrecks in the South China Sea.

The agency said it detained the vessel registered in Fuzhou, China, on Sunday for anchoring without a permit off southern Johor state, and that an inspection revealed scrap metal and a cannon shell it suspected dated from the second world war. It said there were 32 crew members aboard, including 21 Chinese, 10 from Bangladesh and a Malaysian.



The world's biggest grave robbery: Asia’s disappearing WWII shipwrecks

The maritime agency said it believed the rusty cannon shell was linked to the police seizure of dozens of unexploded artillery and other relics at a private scrapyard in Johor. The New Straits Times newspaper reported that the ammunition was believed to be from the warships and that police conducted an on-site controlled explosion of the weapons.

Malaysian media reported that illegal salvage operators were believed to have targeted the HMS Repulse and the HMS Prince of Wales, which were sunk in 1941 by Japanese torpedoes, days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

A total of 842 sailors died, and the shipwrecks off the coast of central Pahang state are designated war graves. Fishers and divers alerted authorities after spotting a foreign vessel near the area last month.

Pictures and a video released by the agency showed a barge carrier with a large crane and heaps of rusty metal on board. Known as prewar steel, the material from the two warships is valuable and could be smelted for use in manufacturing of some scientific and medical equipment.
This undated photo released by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) shows scrap metal and an old cannon shell on a Chinese-registered vessel after it was detained in the waters of east Johor. Photograph: AP

The agency said officials from the National Heritage Department and others will work together to identify the cannon shell.

Britain’s National Museum of the Royal Navy said last week it was “distressed and concerned at the apparent vandalism for personal profit”.

It was not the first time that the two shipwrecks have been targeted.

The New Straits Times reported that foreign treasure hunters used homemade explosives in 2015 to detonate the heavy steel plates on the ships for easy pickings. Other media said authorities detained a Vietnamese vessel involved in the looting of the wreckage at the time.

Protesters clash with police in China over partial demolition of mosque

Unrest breaks out in Muslim town of Nagu in Yunnan as people object to removal of dome and minarets


Amy Hawkins 

Senior China correspondent
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

Hundreds of police have clashed with protesters in a Muslim town in south-west China amid anger at plans to partially dismantle a 14th-century mosque.

The unrest broke out on Saturday, seemingly in response to attempts by the authorities to dismantle parts of Najiaying mosque in Nagu, a town in Yunnan province.

In 2020, a court ruled that recent additions to the mosque, including a domed roof and minarets, were illegal and should be removed. But when the deconstruction work started over the weekend, local people in Nagu, which is populated by the Hui ethnic group, a predominantly Muslim minority, objected, temporarily halting the works.

Videos posted on western social media showed police with riot shields and protective gear clashing with hundreds of protesters outside the mosque. Some of the protesters were throwing chairs and stones. Several people were reportedly arrested.

Another video posted on Twitter showed a man in handcuffs with bruising on his chest, while a woman could be heard complaining about his treatment.

On Sunday, local police issued a statement acknowledging the unrest and giving protesters until 6 June to turn themselves in.

Discussion of the incident on Chinese social media was swiftly censored. Searches on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, for “Najiaying mosque” returned few results, with only pro-government comments left online. Using the hashtag #Najiaying, one Weibo user wrote: “I don’t want to say too much, I just want to say: I strongly support the national policy, and I hope that the state will not spare any wolfish extremists who intend to impact the law.”

The Hui people are China’s third biggest ethnic minority. Unlike China’s other main Muslim ethnic group, the Uyghurs, Hui people speak Mandarin and are seen as being more assimilated with the Han majority.

But Hui communities have still been targeted by the Chinese government. In 2015, Xi Jinping, China’s president, said the growing number of religious believers in the country should be treated with caution.

China’s constitution guarantees religious freedom but in recent years the government has tightened its grip on religious expression, particularly among Muslims. In 2018, hundreds of Hui Muslims in Ningxia, a Hui region in central China, staged a sit-in at a mosque to prevent its demolition. The mosque survived but authorities still removed many of the domed minarets.

Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin

Oldest evidence of plague in Britain found in 4,000-year-old human remains

Traces of Yersinia pestis bacteria were found in teeth of people buried at bronze age sites in Cumbria and Somerset

Ian Sample Science editor
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023 

The oldest evidence for the plague in Britain has been discovered in 4,000-year-old human remains unearthed at bronze age burial sites in Cumbria and Somerset.

Traces of Yersinia pestis bacteria were found in the teeth of individuals at the Levens Park ring cairn monument near Kendal, and Charterhouse Warren in the Mendips, a site where at least 40 men, women and children were buried, dismembered, in a natural shaft.

The shaft at the Charterhouse Warren site, 1972, where the remains 

of at least 40 people were found. Photograph: Tony Audsley

The findings show that an outbreak of the plague which swept Eurasia in the early bronze age spread north-west and across the sea to Britain, thousands of years before the country’s first documented cases of the disease in the Plague of Justinian outbreak in AD541.

“This is the earliest plague found in Britain,” said Pooja Swali, first author on the study in Nature Communications and a PhD student at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Evidence for the ancient outbreak emerged when Swali and her colleagues screened DNA lurking in the dental pulp of teeth taken from 34 skeletons from the two burial sites. Material from one woman, between 35 and 45 years old, buried at the Cumbrian monument tested positive for plague bacteria, along with two children, aged 10 to 12, at Charterhouse Warren.

The burial site at Charterhouse Warren, 1972. Photograph: Tony Audsley


Because DNA degrades rapidly when exposed to the elements, it is possible that other individuals at the burial sites were also infected but were not picked up by the tests. Radiocarbon dating at the sites found that the three people lived at roughly the same time, about 4,000 years ago.

Swali was working in the laboratory late one Friday night when the significance of the findings became clear. “I had my eureka moment, but there was no one to share it with,” she said. “There was a moment of ‘Wow. This is the earliest ever plague genome in Britain’.”

Previous studies have reported cases of the plague across Eurasia between 5,000 and 2,500 years ago, but until the latest work, none had been identified in Britain that long ago.

An electron micrograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria. 

Photograph: Rocky Mountain Laboratories/AP

DNA analysis showed that all three individuals were infected with a form of Yersinia pestis that lacked the yapC and ymt genes seen in later strains. The ymt gene played an important role in allowing the plague to be spread by fleas, leading to the bubonic form of the disease which triggered devastating pandemics such as the Black Death, which killed half of the European population in the 14th century.

The disease that reached Britain 4,000 years ago was probably the pneumonic form of plague, which causes fever, headache, weakness and pneumonia as the bacteria take hold in the lungs. According to documented cases in Europe, pneumonic plague could spread from a single hunter or herder to an entire community within days.

Prof Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at Oxford University and co-author of the study, said it is unclear what happened at the Charterhouse Warren site, which contains the dismembered bodies of dozens of individuals. “Evidence for violence is very rare in early bronze-age Britain, with nothing on this scale having been discovered before,” he said.

“The finding of plague was completely unexpected, as this disease leaves no traces on the skeleton,” he added. “At the moment we’re not sure how this new evidence fits into the story of what happened at the site, and whether or not there may be some connection between the disease and the violence.”

Dr Pontus Skoglund, another co-author and head of the ancient genomics lab at the Crick, said ancient DNA can help identify and reconstruct outbreaks of infectious disease that would otherwise remain unknown. “The only way we know about this one is through DNA. We would have no idea there was Yersinia pestis around otherwise,” he said.

“We hope to build a record and eventually have a number of examples of outbreaks of infectious disease, epidemics, and pandemics, and then be able to understand more generally how our DNA evolves in response to these and how human societies and health are affected,” he added.

Risk of extinction by AI should be ‘global priority’, say tech experts


Hundreds of tech leaders call for world to treat AI as danger on par with pandemics and nuclear war

Geneva Abdul

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 30 May 2023 

A group of leading technology experts from across the globe have warned that artificial intelligence technology should be considered a societal risk and prioritised in the same class as pandemics and nuclear wars.

The brief statement, signed by hundreds of tech executives and academics, was released by the Center for AI Safety on Tuesday amid growing concerns over regulation and risks the technology poses to humanity.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement said. Signatories included the chief executives from Google’s DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI and AI startup Anthropic.

The statement comes as global leaders and industry experts – such as the leaders of OpenAI – have made calls for regulation of the technology amid existential fears the technology could significantly affect job markets, harm the health of millions, and weaponise disinformation, discrimination and impersonation.

Earlier this month the man often touted as the godfather of AI – Geoffrey Hinton, also a signatory – quit Google citing its “existential risk”. The risk was echoed and acknowledged by No 10 last week for the first time – a swift change of tack within government that came two months after publishing an AI white paper industry figures have warned is already out of date.

While the letter published on Tuesday is not the first, it’s potentially the most impactful given its wider range of signatories and its core existential concern, according to Michael Osborne, a professor in machine learning at the University of Oxford and co-founder of Mind Foundry.

“It really is remarkable that so many people signed up to this letter,” he said. “That does show that there is a growing realisation among those of us working in AI that existential risks are a real concern.”

AI’s potential to exacerbate existing existential risks such as engineered pandemics and military arms races are concerns that led Osborne to sign the public letter, along with AI’s novel existential threats.

Calls to curb threats come after the success of ChatGPT after its launch in November last year. The language model has already been widely adopted by millions of people and has rapidly advanced beyond predictions by those best informed in the industry, said Osborne.

“Because we don’t understand AI very well there is a prospect that it might play a role as a kind of new competing organism on the planet, so a sort of invasive species that we’ve designed that might play some devastating role in our survival as a species,” he said.

Yes, you should be worried about AI – but Matrix analogies hide a more insidious threat

We need not speculate on ways AI can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade

Samantha Florea
Tue 30 May 2023 

As the resident tech politics nerd among my friends, I spend a lot of time fielding questions. Help! I’ve been part of a data breach, what do I do? What on earth is crypto and should I care? And lately: should I be worried that AI is going to take over and kill us all?


‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode

There is so much hype around artificial intelligence that the concern is understandable but it’s important that we hang on to our critical faculties. The current AI frenzy ultimately serves those who stand to benefit from implementing these products the most but we don’t have to let them dictate the terms of the conversation.

If there is one thing that I try to impart to friends – and now you – it’s this: Yes, you should be concerned about AI. But let’s be clear about which boogeyman is actually lurking under the bed. It’s hard to fight a monster if you don’t know what it is. No one wants to be the fool using a wooden stake on a zombie to no avail.

Rather than fretting over some far-flung fear of an “existential threat” to humanity, we should be concerned about the material consequences of far less sophisticated AI technologies that are affecting people’s lives right now. And what’s more, we should be deeply troubled by the way AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies.

So let’s sort the speculative fiction from reality.

Every other day a high profile figure peddles a doomsday prediction about AI development left unchecked. Will it lead to a Ministry of Truth a la George Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps hostile killing machines fresh out of Terminator. Or perhaps it’ll be more like The Matrix.

This all acts as both a marketing exercise for and a diversion from the more pressing harms caused by AI.
... We’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist

First, it’s important to remember that large language models like GPT-4 are not sentient, nor intelligent, no matter how proficient they may be at mimicking human speech. But the human tendency toward anthropomorphism is strong, and it’s made worse by clumsy metaphors such as that the machine is ‘hallucinating’ when it generates incorrect outputs. In any case, we are nowhere near the kind of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or ‘superintelligence’ that a handful of loud voices are sounding the alarm on.

The problem with pushing people to be afraid of AGI while calling for intervention is that it enables firms like OpenAI to position themselves as the responsible tech shepherds – the benevolent experts here to save us from hypothetical harms, as long as they retain the power, money and market dominance to do so. Notably, OpenAI’s position on AI governance focuses not on current AI but on some arbitrary point in the future. They welcome regulation, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything they’re currently doing.

We need not wait for some hypothetical tech-bro delusion to consider – and fight – the harms of AI. The kinds of technologies and computational techniques that sit under the umbrella marketing term of AI are much broader than the current fixation on large language models or image generation tools. It covers less show-stopping systems that we use – or are used upon us – every day, such as recommendation engines that curate our online experiences, surveillance technologies like facial recognition, and some automated decision-making systems, which determine, for example, people’s interactions with finance, housing, welfare, education, and insurance.

The use of these technologies can and do lead to negative consequences. Bias and discrimination is rife in automated decision-making systems, leading to adverse impacts on people’s access to services, housing, and justice. Facial recognition supercharges surveillance and policing, compounding the effect of state-sanctioned violence against many marginalised groups. Recommender systems often send people down algorithmic rabbit holes toward increasingly extreme online content. We need not speculate on ways this tech can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade.

As for generative AI, we are already seeing the kinds of harms that can arise, in far more prosaic ways than it becoming sentient and deciding to end humanity. Like how quickly GPT-4 was spruiked as a way to automate harassment and intimidation by debt-collectors. Or how it can turbocharge information manipulation, enabling impersonation and extortion of people, using new tech for old tricks to scam people; or add a hi-tech flavour to misogyny through deepfake porn. Or how it entrenches and seeks to make additional profit from surveillance capitalism business models that prioritise data generation, accumulation and commodification.

The through-line here is that we’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist. Sarah Myers West of AI Now said that the focus on future harms has become a rhetorical sleight of hand, used by AI industry figures to ‘position accountability right out into the future.’ It’s easy to pay attention to the fantastical imaginary of AI but it is in the more mundane uses where the real, material consequences are happening.

The future of AI is chilling – humans have to act together to overcome this threat to civilisation
Jonathan Freedland

When interviewed about his warnings on the dangers of AI, the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton dismissed the concerns of longstanding whistleblowers such as Timnit Gebru and Meredith Whittaker, claiming their concerns were not as ‘existential’ as his. To suggest that rampant bias and discrimination, pervasive information manipulation, or the entrenchment of surveillance is not as serious as the chimera of AGI is disturbing. What such people fail to realise is that AI does pose an existential threat to many, just not people they care about.

Too often AI is presented as a risk-benefit tradeoff; where the historical evidence and present risks are dismissed as the cost of an overblown hypothetical future. We are told that there is so much potential for good, and that to slow ‘progress’ or ‘innovation’ would prevent us from realising it. But overlooking material impacts of past and present AI in favour of an imaginary future will not lead us to socially progressive technology. And that’s way more worrying than speculative AI overlords.

Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer based in Naarm

Divers find wreckage of experimental submarine built in 1907 in Connecticut


The Defender was built by millionaire Simon Lake and visited by Amelia Earhart before it was scuttled in the Long Island Sound


Associated Press in Hartford, Connecticut

Wed 19 Apr 2023
Divers in Connecticut have discovered the wreckage of an experimental submarine built in 1907 and later scuttled in the Long Island Sound.

The Defender, a 92ft craft, was found on Sunday by a team led by Richard Simon, a commercial diver from Coventry, Connecticut.


‘Almost at war’: shipwreck hunters battle it out for sunken treasure

Simon said he had been interested in the story of the Defender for years. He spent months going over known sonar and underwater mapping surveys, as well as government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, to identify any anomaly that fit the size of the submarine.

“A submarine has a very distinct shape,” he said. “It needs to be 100ft long and 13ft in diameter. So I made a list of everything that was that long and there was one target on that list.”

Simon then assembled a group of top wreck divers. Poor tidal conditions forced them to abandon an attempt last Friday. They returned on Sunday and discovered the Defender on the bottom, more than 150ft down, off the coast of Old Saybrook.

“It was legitimately hiding in plain sight,” he said. “It’s on the charts. It’s known about in Long Island Sound, just no one knew what it was.”

Simon described the agony of waiting on the deck of his research vessel, staring at a dive buoy in the fog and waiting for two divers to surface. Once they did and confirmed they had found a sub, the team erupted in “pure joy”, he said.

Diver Steve Abbate inspects a propeller of the Defender on Sunday 16 April 2023. Photograph: Joe Mazraani/AP

Simon said he did not want to give the exact depth, because that could give away the location.

The submarine, originally named the Lake, was built by the millionaire Simon Lake and his Bridgeport-based Lake Torpedo Boat Company in hopes of winning a competition for a US navy contract, according to NavSource Online, a website dedicated to preserving naval history.

It was an experimental vessel, with wheels to move along the sea bottom and a door that allowed divers to be released underwater.

The company lost the competition and Lake tried refitting the submarine for minesweeping, salvage and rescue work, renaming it the Defender. But he never found a buyer. It was a well-known submarine nonetheless and was even visited by the aviator Amelia Earhart in 1929, Simon said.

But the submarine spent many years docked in New London before being abandoned on a mud flat near Old Saybrook. It was scuttled by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1946 but the corps never disclosed where.

Simon said it was clear when his team found the wreckage that it was the Defender. The length, the size and the shape of protrusions on the submarine’s distinct keel, and the shape and location of diving planes characteristic of Lake-built vessels, all helped identify it.


Simon and his team plan to spend the summer diving on the sub, filming it and taking photographs. He said he and the company he and his wife own, Shoreline Diving, put up the money for the search. He has not figured out how to monetize the find, but said that was not the goal. He has contacted the US navy to see if it is interested in helping preserve the wreckage.

The ship has some protections under the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, a 1988 law that would allow it to be treated as an archaeological or historical site instead of a commercial property to be salvaged.

“So, as a wreck diver, I can go visit history; I can touch it; I can experience it,” Simon said. “It’s just a different connection to history, to the past that we don’t have in any other activity.”

Connecticut exonerates victims of 17th-century witch trials

Forty-five people in the state were accused of practicing witchcraft during the trials, and 11 were executed


Erum Salam
Tue 30 May 2023 

After almost 376 years, the bad spell that befell the innocent people accused of being witches during the US’s colonial period is over.

Connecticut last week passed a resolution exonerating people tried and executed for witchcraft nearly four centuries after their so-called crimes.

State senator Saud Anwar, who introduced the resolution, said the gesture was “righting a wrong that has stood in Connecticut’s history for centuries”.

“We cannot go back in time and prevent the banishment, tarnishing or execution of the innocent women and men who were accused of witchcraft, but we can acknowledge the wronghoods they faced and the pain they felt, pain still recognized by their survivors today,” Anwar said.

The resolution resulted from the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project, whose participants became disenchanted by what had been state lawmakers’ failure to apologize for the fate suffered by many convicted of witchcraft.

Passed by a vote of 33-1, the resolution made clear that the state legislature recognized the residents of colonial Connecticut were falsely accused.

The witch trials of colonial America in the 16th and 17th centuries, including the most famous proceedings in Salem, Massachusetts, saw hundreds of people accused of practicing witchcraft and associating with the devil, casting them out of their societies and tarnishing their family names. Many were ultimately tortured and hanged to death.

In Europe, an estimated 50,000 people were executed in witch-hunts between the 15th and 18th centuries.

At least 34 people were indicted for practicing witchcraft in the Connecticut witch trials. Eleven people were hanged.

One of the victims of the Connecticut witch trials was Alice “Alse” Young, who left behind a seven-year-old daughter when she was hanged. Young was a botanist accused of using witchcraft to create a pandemic that killed children in the town of Windsor.

For some of the descendants of these victims, the resolution brought relief.

Hartford resident Susan Bailey, Young’s ninth-great-granddaughter, told the Washington Post: “It doesn’t matter that it was so long ago; it was somebody’s life that was taken unjustly. It may not help her in the afterlife, but maybe it will. But the relatives of hers that know about her terrible death … will gain some peace from it. It will help the healing process.”

Covid lab leak theory should not be ruled out, top Chinese scientist says

Virologist George Gao also states for first time that China has investigated claim virus came from a laboratory

The lab leak claim is based on the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is in the city where Covid-19 was first detected. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters


Amy Hawkins Senior China correspondent
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 30 May 2023

The former director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) has said the lab leak theory for the origins of Covid-19 should not be discounted.

George Gao, an internationally respected virologist, also said another branch of the Chinese government had investigated the lab leak theory – the first such acknowledgment that some kind of official investigation took place. “They haven’t found wrongdoing,” he said.

Gao served as the CDC head until July 2022, putting him at the forefront of China’s investigations into the origins of Covid.

The virus was first detected in Wuhan, a city in central China, in December 2019. Numerous studies have suggested Covid most likely emerged from a wet market in Wuhan where live animals were sold.

However, the city is also home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility that studies coronaviruses. That has led to the theory that the virus may have been leaked from a laboratory. The theory, initially dismissed by public health experts, was pushed by Donald Trump when he was US president. China has vigorously denied it.

Speaking to the BBC, Gao said: “You can always suspect anything. That’s science. Don’t rule out anything.”

Gao is now vice-president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a government funding body.

The investigation into the origins of Covid have been frustrated by the Chinese government’s lack of cooperation with international fact-finding efforts and the politicisation of the issue. In the west, questions about a possible lab leak have become linked to the idea that the virus was deliberately and maliciously released into the world, which has fuelled conspiracy theories.

But since Joe Biden became US president, authorities in the US have started to take the accidental leak theory more seriously. In May 2021 Biden ordered an intelligence investigation into the hypothesis. Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal reported that an updated and classified 2021 US energy department report had concluded with “low confidence” that the virus most likely emerged from a lab leak – a conclusion that runs counter to reports by a number of other US intelligence agencies.


In March 2021 a team of researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded, after a research visit to Wuhan, that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely”. But that visit had been hampered by the Chinese government and phase two of the investigation has since been abandoned. Speaking to Nature in February, Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, said: “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins.”

The Chinese government has called the lab leak theory “false and erroneous”.

But in his BBC interview Gao said: “We really don’t know where the virus came from … the question is still open.”

James Wood, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Cambridge, said: “Professor Gao is an internationally respected scientist. There is strong evidence from virus genomics that the Covid-19 virus was not artificially engineered, or made by humans, but likely arose from another virus infecting wildlife.

“Science deals in probabilities and not in certainties. In reality, it may never be possible to know with confidence how the Covid-19 virus entered the human population. What is important is that lessons are learned and that live wildlife trade, a well-recognised route for zoonotic virus transmission, is reduced or banned and that laboratory safety is properly regulated.”

Gao, who was educated in the UK, the US and Canada, is known in China’s public health community for having good relationships with international colleagues – and for being willing to occasionally speak out of turn with regard to the Communist party line.

In April 2021 Gao caused controversy by seemingly questioning the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines, although he later said he had been referring to all vaccines, not just Chinese ones.

China is grappling with a new wave of Covid infections after abandoning virtually all pandemic control restrictions in December, after three years of pursuing a zero-Covid policy. In May, Zhong Nanshan, a senior Chinese scientist, estimated that the peak of infections would arrive in late June, with about 65 million infections a week.

Can humans ever understand how animals think?

A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species

The eye of a hippopotamus seen at Bioparque Wakata in Jaime Duque park, near Bogota, Colombia Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

The long read

by Adam Kirsch
Tue 30 May 2023


Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected.

In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot had been picked. Monkeys have passed similar tests, and human babies can do it at 12 months old. But giraffes’ brains are much smaller than primates’ relative to body size, so it was notable to see how well they grasped the concept.

Such discoveries are becoming less surprising every year, however, as a flood of new research overturns longstanding assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of. A recent wave of popular books on animal cognition argue that skills long assumed to be humanity’s prerogative, from planning for the future to a sense of fairness, actually exist throughout the animal kingdom – and not just in primates or other mammals, but in birds, octopuses and beyond. In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.

In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul. We know our species as Homo sapiens, “wise man”.

Yet at a time when humanity’s self-image is largely shaped by fears of environmental devastation and nuclear war, combined with memories of historical atrocity, it is no longer so easy to say, with Hamlet, that man is “the paragon of animals” – the ideal that other creatures would imitate, if only they could. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.

In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

If human minds are incapable of solving the problems they create, then perhaps our salvation lies in encountering very different types of minds. The global popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher, released by Netflix in 2020, is just one example of the growing hunger for such encounters. In the film, the South African diver Craig Foster spends months filming a female octopus in an underwater kelp forest, observing most of her lifecycle. Foster presents himself as the anti-Jacques Cousteau; he doesn’t go underwater to study the non-human, but to learn from it.

Humility is a traditional religious discipline, and there is a spiritual dimension to Foster’s quest and to the film’s success. On YouTube, where the trailer has been viewed 3.7m times, thousands of people testify that My Octopus Teacher made them weep, changed their understanding of the world and made them resolve to lead better lives. It’s clear that, for modern people who seldom encounter animals except for pet cats and dogs, entering into a close relationship with a non-human mind can be a sacred experience.

The idea of the octopus as the nonhuman mind par excellence was popularised by the 2016 bestseller Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. A philosopher rather than a marine biologist, Godfrey-Smith got an opportunity to see the creatures in action at a site off eastern Australia known to researchers as Octopolis. There he discovered that octopuses are “smart in the sense of being curious and flexible; they are adventurous, opportunistic”, prone to making off with items such as tape measures and measuring stakes.

A horse, pictured competing in the World Equestrian Games in France. 

Photograph: Régis Duvignau/Reuters


The fascination of the octopus is that while its behaviour seems recognisable in human terms as mischief or curiosity, its neural architecture is immensely different from ours. Since Darwin, humans have grown used to recognising ourselves in our fellow primates, whose brains and body plans are similar to our own. After all, humans and chimpanzees share a common ape ancestor that lived in Africa as recently as 6m years ago. Our most recent common ancestor with the octopus, by contrast, is a worm-like creature thought to have lived 500-600m years ago.

Because the mind of the octopus evolved in a completely different fashion from ours, it makes sense of the world in ways we can barely imagine. An octopus has 500m neurons, about as many as a dog, but most of these neurons are located not in the brain but in its eight arms, each of which can move, smell and perhaps even remember on its own. In Godfrey-Smith’s words, an octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”. When such a being encounters a human at the bottom of the ocean, what could it possibly make of us?

For most of the 20th century, animal researchers wouldn’t even have asked such a question, much less attempted to answer it. Under the influence of the American psychologist BF Skinner, scientific orthodoxy held that it was neither legitimate nor necessary to talk about what was going on in an animal’s mind. Science, he argued, only deals with things that can be observed and measured, and we can’t directly observe mental faculties even in ourselves, much less in animals. What we can observe is action and behaviour, and Skinner was able to modify the behaviour of rats using positive reinforcement, such as rewards of food, and negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks.

When Jane Goodall first went to study chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s, the very notion of animal subjectivity was taboo. Her practice of giving names to the individual chimps she observed – such as David Greybeard, who her studies made famous – was frowned on as unscientific, since it suggested that they might be humanlike in other ways. The standard practice was to number them. “You cannot share your life with a dog or a cat,” Goodall later observed, “and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings. You know it and I think every single one of those scientists knew it, too, but because they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t talk about it.”

Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Scientists speak without embarrassment about animal minds and consciousness. In popular writing on the subject, Skinner appears only as a villain. In his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, primatologist Frans de Waal discusses a mid-20th-century experiment in which researchers at a primate centre in Florida, educated in Skinner’s methods, tried to train chimps the way he had trained rats, by withholding food. “Expressing no interest in cognition – the existence of which they didn’t even acknowledge,” De Waal writes, the researchers “investigated reinforcement schedules and the punitive effect of time-outs.” The staff of the primate centre rebelled and started feeding the chimps in secret, causing Skinner to lament that “tender-hearted colleagues frustrated efforts to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation”. You could hardly ask for a better example of how the arrogance of reason leads to cruelty.


Meanwhile, animals without “rational souls” are capable of demonstrating admirable qualities such as patience and self-restraint. Among humans, the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasure for future gain is called resisting temptation, and is taken as a sign of maturity. But De Waal shows that even birds are capable of it. In one experiment, an African grey parrot named Griffin was taught that if he resisted the urge to eat a serving of cereal, he would be rewarded after an unpredictable interval with food he liked better, such as cashew nuts. The bird was able to hold out 90% of the time, devising ways to distract himself by talking, preening his feathers, or simply throwing the cup of cereal across the room. Such behaviours, De Waal notes, are quite similar to what human children do in the face of temptation.

More intriguing than the convergences between human and animal behaviour, however, are the profound differences in the way we perceive and experience the world. The reason why an encounter with an octopus can be awe-inspiring is that two species endowed with different senses and brains inhabit the same planet but very different realities.

Closeup of African elephant. Photograph: Gaertner/Alamy

Take the sense of smell. As humans, we learn about our surroundings primarily by seeing and hearing, while our ability to detect odours is fairly undeveloped. For many animals, the reverse is true. In his 2022 book An Immense World, the science journalist Ed Yong writes about an experiment by researcher Lucy Bates involving African elephants. Bates found that if she took urine from an elephant in the rear of a herd and spread it on the ground in front of the herd, the elephants reacted with bewilderment and curiosity, knowing that the individual’s distinctive odour was coming from the wrong place. For them, a smell out of place was as fundamental a violation of reality as a ghostly apparition would be for us.

Animals that perceive the world through scent, such as dogs, even have a different sense of time. We often talk about the importance of “living in the moment”, but in fact we have no other choice; since visual information reaches us at the speed of light, what we see around us are things as they existed an infinitesimal fraction of a second ago. When a dog smells, however, “he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future”, Yong writes. Odour molecules from a person or another dog can linger in a room long after the source is gone, or waft ahead before it appears. When a dog perks up long before its owner walks through the front door, smell can seem like a psychic power.

If giraffes can do statistical reasoning and parrots understand the concept of the future, then where does the distinctiveness of the human mind really lie? One favourite candidate is what psychologists call “theory of mind” – the ability to infer that each person is their own “I”, with independent experiences and private mental states. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball describes the classic experiment that tests the development of this ability in children. A child and an adult watch as an object is hidden under one of three cups. Then the adult leaves the room and the child sees a second adult come in and move the object so it’s under a different cup.

When the first adult returns, where does the child expect she will look for the object? Very young children assume that she will know its new location, just as they do. Starting around age four, however, children start to understand that the adult only knows what she has seen herself, so they expect her to look under the original, now empty cup. “Indeed,” Ball writes, “they will often delight in the deception: in their knowing what others don’t.”

Developing a theory of mind is necessary because we can never know what is going on inside other people in the same immediate way we know ourselves. Sane adults take for granted that other people have the same kind of inner life they do, but this remains a kind of assumption. René Descartes was one of the first philosophers to wrestle with this problem, in the 17th century. “What do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines?” he asked. “Yet I judge these to be men.” But Descartes didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to animals. Even more than Skinner, he saw them as automata without any inner experience, “bêtes-machines”. Ball notes that Descartes dissected live animals to study the circulation of the blood, “and dismissed any cries of pain that procedure elicited as a mere mechanical response, not unlike the screech of a poorly oiled axle”.

A common octopus. 

Photograph: Reinhard Dirscherl/Getty Images


Four centuries later, De Waal complains that science still hasn’t overcome the tendency to draw a dividing line between the inner lives of humans and those of other creatures. The reason that scientists have focused on theory of mind, De Waal believes, is because no animal has been shown to possess it. Such “interspecific bragging contests”, he writes, are designed to flatter our sense of superiority. In fact, it seems that even here we’re not clear winners. According to Ball, recent attempts to replicate the theory-of-mind experiment with chimps and bonobos suggest that the majority of them pass the test, though the evidence is ambiguous: since the subjects can’t talk, researchers gauge their expectations by tracking their eye movements.

Even if other species were conclusively found to possess a theory of mind, of course, it would not challenge our monopoly on the kind of “rational soul” that produced the pyramids and monotheism, the theory of evolution and the intercontinental ballistic missile. As long as these quintessentially human accomplishments remain our standard for intellectual capacity, our place at the top of the mental ladder is assured.

But are we right to think of intelligence as a ladder in the first place? Maybe we should think, instead, in terms of what Ball calls “the space of possible minds” – the countless potential ways of understanding the world, some of which we may not even be able to imagine. In mapping this space, which could theoretically include computer and extraterrestrial minds as well as animal ones, “we are currently no better placed than the pre-Copernican astronomers who installed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos and arranged everything else in relation to it”, Ball observes. Until we know more about what kinds of minds are possible, it is sheer hubris to set up our own as the standard of excellence.

Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, observed that if horses and oxen could draw pictures, they would make the gods look like horses and oxen. Similarly, if non-human beings could devise a test of intelligence, they might rank species according to, say, their ability to find their way home from a distance unaided. Bees do this by detecting magnetic fields, and dogs by following odours, while most modern humans would be helpless without a map or a GPS. “Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame,” Gregg says.

But if human and animal minds are so essentially different that we can never truly understand one another, then a troubling thought arises: we would be less like neighbours than inmates who occupy separate cells in the same prison. The kind of understanding Foster achieved with his octopus, or Goodall with her chimpanzees, would have to be written off as an anthropomorphising illusion, just as Skinner warned.

The possibility of true interspecies understanding is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s landmark 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, to which every writer on animal cognition pays their respects, sometimes wearily. Nagel, an American philosopher, concluded that humans can never really understand a bat’s inner experience. Even if I try to picture what it’s like to fly on webbed wings and spend most of my time hanging upside down, all I can imagine is what it would be like for me to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

For Nagel, this conclusion has implications beyond animal psychology. It proves that mental life can never be reduced to things we can observe from the outside, whether that means the way we behave or the pattern of electrical impulses in our neurons. Subjectivity, what it feels like to exist, is so profoundly different from what we can observe scientifically that the two realms can’t even be described in the same language.

An emu at Taronga zoo, Sydney. 

Photograph: Jenny Evans/Getty Images

Few people have ever taken the challenge of Nagel’s essay as literally as Charles Foster in his 2016 book Being a Beast. A barrister and academic by profession, Foster set himself the challenge of entering the mental worlds of five animal species by living as much like them as possible. To be a fox, he writes: “I lay in a back yard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around.” To be a badger, he dug a trench in the side of a hill and lived inside it with his young son Tom, eating earthworms and inhaling dust. “Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week,” Foster notes.


Foster welcomes all this damage and discomfort, but not in the spirit of a scientist doing fieldwork. Rather, he evokes the medieval flagellants who covered their backs with welts to purge themselves of sin. That Foster defines sin as a transgression against nature rather than God doesn’t make the concept any less religious. “Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things,” he writes, and his preaching translates easily into Christian terms: “Say, with Saint Francis, ‘Hello, Brother Ox,’ and mean it,” he demands.

Foster’s way of seeking communion with the animals may be extreme, at times comically so, but his basic impulse is shared by many of today’s students of animal cognition, and an increasing number of laypeople as well. Encountering an animal mind can perform the same function as a great work of art or a religious experience: it makes the familiar strange, reminding us that reality encompasses far more than we ordinarily think.

The great difference is that while a traditional religious experience can awaken human beings to God, an animal epiphany can awakens us to the fullness of this world. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor,” Foster says in the closing lines of My Octopus Teacher, and by “this place” he doesn’t just mean a particular kelp forest, but the Earth itself. At first this might sound like an odd realisation: where else would human beings belong if not on our one and only planet?

But in the 21st century, it is clearly becoming harder for us to think of ourselves as genuinely belonging to the Earth. Whether we look back on our long history of driving other species to extinction, or forward to a future in which we extinguish ourselves through climate breakdown, many humans now see humanity as the greatest danger facing the Earth – a cancer that grows without limit, killing its host.

It is no coincidence that, at the same moment, tech visionaries have begun to think about our future in extraterrestrial terms. Earth may be where humanity happened to evolve, they say, but our destiny calls us to other worlds. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the explicit goal of hastening humanity’s colonisation of Mars. Other “transhumanist” thinkers look forward to a fully virtual future, in which our minds leave our bodies behind and achieve immortality in the form of electromagnetic pulses.

These projects sound futuristic, but they are best understood as new expressions of a very old human anxiety. We have always suffered from metaphysical claustrophobia – the sense that a cosmos containing no minds but our own was intolerably narrow. That is why, since prehistoric times, humans have populated Earth with other kinds of intelligences – from gods and angels to fairies, forest-spirits and demons. All premodern cultures took the existence of such non-human minds for granted. In medieval Europe, Christian and Greek philosophical ideas gave rise to the doctrine of the “great chain of being”, which held that the universe is populated by an unbroken series of creatures, all the way from plants at the bottom to God at the apex. Humanity stood in the middle, more intelligent than the animals but less than the angels, who came in many species, with different powers and purviews.


Love you to death: how we hurt the animals we cherish

Filling the universe with hypothetical minds, superior to our own in wisdom and goodness, helps relieve our species’ loneliness, giving us beings we could talk to, think about, and strive to emulate. Our need for that kind of company in the universe hasn’t gone away, though today we prefer to fill the region “above” us in the space of possible minds with advanced extraterrestrials and superpowered AIs – beings that are just as hypothetical as seraphim and cherubim, at least so far.

Our rising interest in animal minds can be seen as a way of filling in the regions “below” us as well. 

If an octopus is like an intelligent alien, as Godfrey-Smith writes, then we don’t need to scan the skies so anxiously for an actual extraterrestrial. Yong quotes Elizabeth Jakob, an American spider expert, to the same effect: “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets … We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.” Perhaps simply knowing that these other minds exist can help us make peace with the limitations of our own.

ZOOS ARE PRISONS
Death of Emara, beloved giraffe, confirmed as ‘tragic accident’: Calgary Zoo

ANOTHER 'TRAGEDY' 

AT THE CALGARY ZOO
By Destiny Meilleur Global News
Posted May 29, 2023 


WATCH: The Calgary Zoo has released more details about the recent death of one of its giraffes. Meghan Cobb has more on what is being called a ‘tragic accident.’

Emara the 12-year-old giraffe’s death has been confirmed as a “tragic accident” by the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo.

“Our entire zoo family is still mourning this sudden and tragic loss,” said Colleen Baird, interim associate director of animal care and welfare at the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo.

“From the staff and volunteers who loved and cared for her to the visitors she inspired each visit, Emara will be missed by all.”

The zoo confirmed that early May 19, before any staff were present, Emara had gotten one of her ossicones – horns – caught on a cable surrounding her enclosure. The zoo says this likely resulted in a fall against the fence and caused her to break her neck.

Zoo staff found Emara unresponsive against the fence. A necropsy revealed that she died quickly, and staff said it was a relief that she didn’t suffer.

“At 12 years old, Emara was in the prime of her life and had been in excellent health prior to this, so her unexpected departure is being felt deeply by all of us,” said Dr. Doug Whiteside, interim associate director of animal health and welfare at the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo.

The zoo said even though the incident seems isolated, they are evaluating the fencing to determine if there are any changes or improvements that can be made to help increase animal safety.

“The health and well-being of all the animals in our care is our top priority. Major life changes such as this not only affect our people but can affect our animal residents as well. We are closely monitoring the zoo’s remaining giraffes, Nabo and Moshi, and so far they are doing well,” added Whiteside.

Emara joined the Calgary Zoo family of animals in 2016 from the San Diego Zoo. She was known for her gentle nature and cautious yet curious personality.

The zoo asks people to keep the staff in their thoughts as they navigate this challenging time of grief. Grief counsellors are being provided for zoo staff. Members of the public are being encouraged to share their well wishes and any fond memories they might have with Emara on social media.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-zoo-giraffe-dies-of-broken-neck-in-tragic-accident-1.6857933

Calgary zoo giraffe dies of broken neck in 'tragic accid... 

1 day ago ... Emara, a 12-year-old female Masai giraffe, died at the Calgary Zoo earlier this month. A necropsy found the cause of death ...

The anteater's umbrella : a contribution to
the critique of the ideology of zoos

Author Chicago Surrealist Group
Illustrator Leonora Carrington Mexican, born England
1971

Drawings by Leonora Carrington of animals and birds in left, right and bottom margins



Artwork Details
Overview

Title: The anteater's umbrella : a contribution to the critique of the ideology of zoos

Author: Chicago Surrealist Group

Illustrator: Leonora Carrington (Mexican (born England), Clayton Green, Lancashire 1917–2011 Mexico City)

Date: 1971

Geography: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Dimensions: 1 broadside : illustrations ; Height: 14 3/16 in. (36 cm) x Width: 8 11/16 in. (22 cm)

Accession Number: QL76 .C45 1970z Quarto

Rights and Reproduction: © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

546 Critique of the Ideology of Zoos, by   Chicago Surrealist Group

2021 Apr-Jun

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 6:34 | Speaker: Chicago Surrealist Group

The full title of this piece is The Anteater’s Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of the Ideology of Zoos.
This text is included in Surrealist Subversions, edited by Ron Sakolsky and published by Autonomedia.

Drawing on the full range of U.S. surrealist
publications and communiques from the
front lines of the battle against miserabilism,
this volume contains over 200 texts (many
appearing here for the first time) by more
than 50 participants, in the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings ever
assembled.
$22.95 750 pp. https://www.autonomedia.org/files/autonomedia_cat_070427.pdf

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