UK

Pro-Palestinian activist to challenge Wes Streeting in election for Ilford North

Genevieve Holl-Allen
Tue, January 16, 2024 

Leanne Mohamad spoke at one of the pro-Palestine marches in October saying 'every supporter of Israel has blood on their hands'

A pro-Palestinian activist has been selected to challenge Wes Streeting at the next election, as anger concerning Labour’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict grows.

Leanne Mohamad was chosen on Monday as an independent parliamentary candidate in Ilford North following a hustings event open to local residents.

Ms Mohamad’s candidacy will complicate the shadow health secretary’s chances of being elected, after Labour faced a fierce backlash against its response to the war in Gaza.

Redbridge Community Action Group, which organised Ms Mohamad’s selection, said on its website that it aims to “challenge Wes Streeting’s Ilford North seat and beat him at the next election”.

The local group says it will also “prepare an independent candidate who is strong on Palestine, NHS, racism, Islamophobia and the cost of living crisis”.

‘Genuine battle on his hands’

The shift in electoral dynamics as a result of Labour’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict is expected to be seen in other constituencies.

One Labour MP said they predict some of their fellow MPs could lose their seats because of pro-Palestine candidates drawing votes away from Labour.

The MP added that Mr Streeting will now “have a genuine battle on his hands” following Ms Mohamad’s selection.

Ms Mohamad is a British-Palestinian activist who last October addressed one of the Palestinian solidarity marches in central London.

She told the crowds: “Every supporter of Israel has blood on their hands, every Western politician who greenlighted these war crimes has the blood of over 3,000 Palestinian children on their hands.”

She also spoke at the first international conference of the Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn, which took place last November.

She has also shared photographs alongside the former Labour leader at Palestine demonstrations in 2021.


Leanne Mohamad spoke at the Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn, in November

Ilford North is located in the London Borough of Redbridge, which has a Muslim population of 31.3 per cent, according to the 2021 census.

A variety of polls held since Israel invaded Gaza following the Hamas attacks on Oct 7 have picked up a drop in support for Labour among the Muslim community.

One poll by Muslim Census claimed there had been a 66 per cent drop in the Muslim Labour vote to just 5 per cent at the end of last October.

Though polling group Savanta projected a much more robust 64 per cent, it found in November that almost half of Muslim Labour voters felt more negatively towards the party as a result of Sir Keir’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.

Mr Streeting won a sizeable majority of over 5,000 in Ilford North in 2019, but any fall in support would in theory make it more difficult for Mr Streeting to win re-election.

Labour suffered a surprise council by-election loss in nearby Plaistow North ward in east London towards the end of last year, when a ex-Labour councillor ran as an independent after quitting the party in protest at Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to demand a ceasefire.

Opinion

Measles is surging again in UK because Covid destroyed trust in the medical establishment

Celia Walden
Mon, January 15, 2024 

Sick child with red rash spots from measles

“You didn’t give your daughter the MMR, did you?” The tone of voice is the first giveaway. Mild incredulity, but not so mild that you would fail to notice it. They need you to notice it so that you can have The Conversation. So that you can be converted. Because like the evangelists standing at your door, brandishing a leaflet, this breed of anti-vaxxer wants to witness the epiphany.

I, however, cannot run fast enough from this particular conversation. I’ve had it enough times to know exactly how it’ll go. They’ll tell you the apocryphal tale of a friend of a friend’s nephew’s son, who was hitting every developmental milestone – until he had the MMR. Shortly after that the behavioural changes started. He was regressing, becoming less sociable in playgroup. He started to develop migraines, or eczema, or constipation – all comorbid conditions that go with autism.

There’s always a knowing nod and a pause before they then ask whether you’re familiar with Andrew Wakefield’s findings. That’s when you have to find a way to leave the room.

Scientific fact will get you nowhere. Neither will statistics. It doesn’t matter how many headlines are reporting measles outbreaks like the one hospitals in the West Midlands are currently flagging up, or how many leading immunologists are warning that unless more children are vaccinated, more hospital admissions and even deaths could be expected in the months and years to come, these parents remain resolutely stuck on Wakefield.

It doesn’t matter that the British anti-vaccine activist who published a case series in The Lancet in 1998 – which suggested that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine may predispose children to behavioural regression and pervasive developmental disorder –

was struck off the UK medical register over a decade ago after being found guilty of misconduct by our General Medical Council.

It doesn’t matter that The Lancet subsequently retracted the paper or that Wakefield’s findings were deemed “fraudulent” after it was established that the case series had “no controls”, “linked three common conditions”, and that the children Wakefield had studied were carefully selected. And who cares that some of his pioneering research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were already involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers? Not the anti-MMR brigade. They know in their heart of hearts that this one-man cautionary tale in the legacy of hubris was right. Deaf to everything but their own beliefs, they will smugly trot out the biggest fallacy of all: “there’s no smoke without fire”.

Almost as tragic as the victims of their parents’ wilful ignorance are the desperate pleas from communicable disease specialists like Dr Naveed Syed, from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), who said he was seeing “cases of measles rising every day in the West Midlands” and that there is now a fear of full community transmission.

On Friday, Birmingham Children’s Hospital confirmed that it had treated 50 children for measles in the past month – it would normally expect zero cases – and the NHS is now at pains to point out that an estimated one in five cases will result in a trip to hospital.

For that reason, our health service even ran a campaign last year, and I remember watching a Filipino friend shake her head in disbelief as we listened to a radio advert begging rather than urging parents to consider the seriousness of a disease that is almost 100 per cent preventable. “Back home, we would be biting their hand off for these free vaccines,” she explained. “What a spoilt society this is.”

The sad truth when it comes to the MMR and other vaccines is that health chiefs are battling two new, indomitable forces. The first is social media, which is obviously more reliable than every learned physician in the country combined and would have continued to erode vaccination numbers even without the pandemic. The second is, of course, Covid, which may have permanently damaged the public’s trust in vaccines.

I have more patience with those who offer up the latter as the main reason behind their vaccine hesitancy. The scale of misinformation out there (much of it, again, online) was unlike anything we have been forced to contend with before. Couple that with the facts we were being given – by scientists, no less – changing day by day, and you can see how deeply this would dent the public’s confidence in the powers that be.

Anyone presenting this as their defence, however, is conflating two things. With Covid, it was a moving situation, with scientists piecing together a jigsaw piece by piece – the sketchy first moments being at a significant remove from the final picture. But with the MMR, the facts have not changed. They are there in black and white: in the estimated 20 million cases and 4,500 deaths – mainly among children – the vaccine has prevented in the UK since 1968. They are in the words of Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, the chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, who said in the simplest terms yesterday: “It would be a tragedy if any child were to die from measles when we have the tools in front of us to stop it.”

Nasa astronomers says signal coming from outside our galaxy is 'unexpected and as yet unexplained'

Polly Thompson
Sun, January 14, 2024 

NASA scientists have found a powerful new gamma-ray signal coming from outside our galaxy.


They detected the alternative signal while looking for answers about the universe's creation.


The discovery has created a whole new cosmic conundrum for the astronomists.

NASA astronomers have discovered an unexpected "signal" coming from outside our galaxy, which they can't explain.

The scientists were analyzing 13 years of data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope when they noticed the mysterious signal.

It was "an unexpected and as yet unexplained feature outside of our galaxy," wrote Francis Reddy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The powerful telescope can detect gamma rays, which are huge bursts of energetic light thousands to hundreds of billions of times as great as our eyes can see. They are often created when stars explode or a nuclear blast occurs. They stumbled on the alternative signal while looking for something else entirely.

"It is a completely serendipitous discovery," said Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, while presenting the findings to the American Astronomical Society.

"We found a much stronger signal, and in a different part of the sky than the one we were looking for."

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, illustrated here, scans the entire sky every three hours as it orbits Earth.NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA/GESTAR)

They had been searching for one of the oldest gamma-ray features for creating the first atoms — known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB.

The CMB has a dipole structure, where one end is hotter and busier than the other. Astronomers generally think our solar system's motion creates the structure.

Instead, the researchers detected a signal coming from a similar direction and with a nearly identical magnitude as another unexplained feature, which had some of the most energetic cosmic particles they had ever detected.

"We found a gamma-ray dipole, but its peak is located in the southern sky, far from the CMB's, and its magnitude is 10 times greater than what we would expect from our motion," said Chris Shrader, an astrophysicist at Goddard.

This week, a paper describing the findings has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They think the discovery could be linked to a cosmic gamma-ray feature observed by the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina in 2017.

The astronomers believe the two phenomena could originate from a single unidentified source, given their similar structure.

They hope to locate the mysterious source or develop alternative explanations for both features.

NASA's unexpected discovery could help astronomers confirm or challenge ideas about how the dipole structure is created.

"A disagreement with the size and direction of the CMB dipole could provide us with a glimpse into physical processes operating in the very early universe, potentially back to when it was less than a trillionth of a second old," said Fernando Atrio-Barandela, coauthor of the research paper.

NASA did not immediately reply to a request for comment from BI.

Read the original article on Business Insider

"Grandiose" treasure trove of ancient artifacts, skeletons found in Brazil

CBSNews
Updated Mon, January 15, 2024 

Workers were just starting construction on a new apartment complex in northeastern Brazil when they began finding human bones and pottery shards, their edges worn smooth by time.

Soon, excavations at the site in the coastal city of Sao Luis had uncovered thousands of artifacts left by ancient peoples up to 9,000 years ago -- a treasure trove archaeologists say could rewrite the history of human settlement in Brazil.

The lead archaeologist on the dig, Wellington Lage, says he had no idea what he was getting into when Brazilian construction giant MRV hired his company, W Lage Arqueologia, in 2019 to carry out an impact study at the site -- part of the routine procedure of preparing to build an apartment building.

Covered in tropical vegetation and bordered by the urban sprawl of Sao Luis, the capital of Maranhao state, the 15-acre plot was known as Rosane's Farm, for the daughter of a late local landholder.

Brazil's Institute for National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) announced the discovery of skeletons and artifacts, / Credit: IPHAN

Researching the site, Lage learned intriguing vestiges had been found in the area since the 1970s, including part of a human jawbone in 1991.

His team soon found much more: a flood of stone tools, ceramic shards, decorated shells and bones.

In four years of digging, they have unearthed 43 human skeletons and more than 100,000 artifacts, according to Brazil's Institute for National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), which announced the discovery last week, calling it "grandiose."

"Barely scratched the surface"

Researchers now plan to catalogue the artifacts, analyze them in detail, put them on display and publish their findings.

"We've been working four years now, and we've barely scratched the surface," said Lage, a 70-year-old Sao Paulo native whose wife and two children are also archaeologists.

In a video posted to social media by IPHAN, archaeologist can be seen working at the site, sifting through bones and artifacts.

"The excavations continue, indicating the potential for new discoveries," the caption reads. "Incredible, right?"

The preliminary findings are already grabbing attention in the scientific community.

Lage says his team -- which grew to 27 people in all, including archaeologists, chemists, a historian and a documentary filmmaker -- has found four distinct eras of occupation at the site.

The top layer was left by the Tupinamba people, who inhabited the region when European colonizers founded Sao Luis in 1612.

Then comes a layer of artifacts typical of Amazon rainforest peoples, followed by a "sambaqui": a mound of pottery, shells and bones used by some Indigenous groups to build their homes or bury their dead.

Beneath that, about 6.5 feet below the surface, lies another layer, left by a group that made rudimentary ceramics and lived around 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, based on the depth of the find.

That is far older than the oldest documented "pre-sambaqui" settlement found so far in the region, which dates to 6,600 years ago, Lage said.

"This could completely change the history of not just the region but all of Brazil," he told AFP.

Scientists have long debated exactly when and how humans arrived in and populated the Americas from Asia.

Lage's find suggests they settled this region of modern-day Brazil at least 1,400 years earlier than previously thought.

Archaeologists now plan to date the artifacts more precisely using isotopic analysis.

Already, the site "represents a landmark in our understanding of prehistoric Brazil," IPHAN said in a statement.

"The discovery … highlights the importance of archaeology in preserving the memory and history of Brazil, offering valuable insights into our ancestry and contributing significantly to the understanding of our origins and identity as a nation," IPHAN said

Archaeologist Arkley Bandeira of the Federal University of Maranhao, which is building a lab and museum to house the artifacts with funding from MRV, said in a statement the site could provide valuable new insights into the culture and history of ancient peoples lost to the past.

"These finds... play a crucial role in narrating our long history," he said.

The announcement of the discovery came just as archeologists said they uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that was home to at least 10,000 farmers about 2,000 years ago in Ecuador.

Will the colorful, loud jeepneys of the Philippines soon disappear from the roads?

Kathleen Magramo, CNN
Tue, January 16, 2024 

They rattle through neighborhoods all over the Philippines decked out in gaudy hand-painted liveries featuring everything from the Virgin Mary to NBA stars, shuttling millions of people on their daily commutes to the tune of blaring horns and rumbling engines.

Affectionately called “king of the roads,” this form of public transport emerged from the resourcefulness of the post-World War II era when local mechanics converted huge numbers of jeeps abandoned by American troops, customizing them to accommodate civilian passengers.

With roughly 200,000 jeepneys across the country, they remain an affordable form of transportation in a country where the average annual income is around $3,500.

Jeepney fares start at just 20 cents (13 Philippine pesos), ferrying roughly 40% of commuters everywhere from workplaces, schools and malls, according to data from the Department of Transportation.

But the government wants to replace these often worn-out, highly polluting diesel-powered vehicles with new minibuses.

For years, jeepney drivers have argued that the cost to transition to cleaner vehicles is out of their reach. Meanwhile, commuters also fear that replacing traditional jeepneys with brand new vehicles could eventually lead to fare hikes.

Groups representing jeepney drivers have held protests in recent months, with the latest gathering set for Tuesday in the capital Manila.

But Mar Valbuena, chairman of transport group Manibela, said police attempted to stall jeepney drivers from joining that protest.

“We cannot proceed because some of our members were stuck at police checkpoints this morning… Some have been held at various police checkpoints for nearly two hours,” Valbuena told CNN affiliate CNN Philippines from the start point of the protest.

Mar Valbuena, chairman of transport group Manibela, has organized several protests against the jeepney modernization plan. - Josefiel Rivera/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Valbuena said he still expects roughly 15,000 jeepney drivers, in Manila and other provinces, to protest against a mandatory program to retire the traditional public transport vehicles arguing the scheme was “not studied properly.”

The transport group’s main concern was that the government scheme lacked funds, putting pressure instead on drivers to take hefty loans to comply with the modernization plans.

The uncertain future of jeepneys began in 2017, when the transport ministry ordered vehicles over 15 years old to be replaced with imported minibuses.

The minibuses come with more spacious seating, air-conditioning and runs on cleaner fuel compared with their predecessors – along with a steep price tag of about $50,000 ($2.8 million Philippine pesos), far beyond the reach of many.

“We really can’t afford that… even if we take out a loan, we’d be in debt until we die,” jeepney driver Joseph Sabado told CNN Philippines.

Jeepneys are mostly privately-owned and are often run by a sole proprietor. As a result, individual drivers have been reluctant to upgrade for new buses, saying the transition is pushing them into debt through hefty financing loans.

To qualify for government loans and subsidies, drivers and small-time operators must join cooperatives or corporations, which will own both the buses and the public franchises to operate them.

The government intended to mandate the switch by March 2020 but it has been pushed back three times due to the Covid pandemic.

This time, a firm deadline for jeepney operators to surrender their franchises and consolidate into cooperatives ended on December 31, 2023.

Jeepney owners who failed to join a cooperative will no longer be allowed to drive certain routes starting February, according to Zona Russet Tamayo, a director at the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board.

The board said it is “determined to implement the program” saying “its benefits far outweigh the misunderstood program flaws,” said chairman Teofilo Guadiz III.

Jeepney drivers protesting the modernization plan on December 29, 2023 near Mendiola, Manila. - Jose Santos/NurPhoto/Getty Images

“We will continue to calibrate each component of the program in response to the clamor of the stakeholders, as we have done since the inception of the program. We will remain focused on the program’s primary beneficiaries – the commuters. We believe that overcoming the program’s challenges will lead in dramatic transformation in our transport system,” Guadiz told reporters in a press conference.

Roughly 76% of jeepney owners have chosen to consolidate under the program and over 1,700 cooperatives have been formed, according to official data, but activists dispute those figures and demanded the government to rethink its plan.

“It’s their right to protest, but commuters said they are getting tired of it. The important thing is that the consolidation is done,” Andy Ortega, head of the Office of Transport Cooperatives, told CNN Philippines.

Origins of the Iconic Philippine Jeepney: A Symbol of Filipino Culture

Theculturetrip.com

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/philippines/articles/how-the-jeepney-became-a-filipino-national-symbol

How The Jeepney Became A Filipino National Symbol - Culture ... 

Oct 10, 2023 ... Jeepneys as a cultural symbol. The jeepney as public transport is unique to the Philippines. It is a proudly Pinoy creation. Considering its ...

Nytimes.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/world/asia/philippines-jeepney.html

Colorful, Iconic Jeepneys May Soon Be Off the Road in the Ph... 

Mar 9, 2023 ... The plan would require jeepney drivers to form a cooperative to be able to borrow funds from government banks to purchase the new vehicles.

Caranddriver.com

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15344340/the-history-of-the-jeepney-the-philippines-mass-transit-solution

The History of the Jeepney, the Philippines' Mass-Transi... 

Dec 23, 2016 ... Once based on World War II Willys Jeeps, these anachronistic buses serve in lieu of modern public transportation in the Philippines.

Stuartxchange.org

http://www.stuartxchange.org/Jeepney.html

The Philippine Jeepney: The Undisputed King of the Road / by... 

Jeepney art is a combination of the "art of the accessory" and the "art of the color" applied on a basic canvas shell of galvanized metal or buffed and ...

Asia.nikkei.com

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Transportation/Philippines-jeepney-transition-plan-runs-into-gridlock

Philippines' jeepney transition plan runs into gridlock ... 

Jan 8, 2024 ... MANILA -- Oliver Valarozo, a grad student, spent a recent morning standing on the side of a street waiting for a jeepney that never came.

Remarkable Philippine Jeepneys


"King of the Road" - A typical jeepney, from Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines.
[Photo Courtesy of UHM Center for Southeast Asian Studies, SPAS]

Jeepneys are the poor-man's transport in the Philippines, from Batanes to the National Capital Region (Manila) and down to Davao City, in Mindanao. Found only in the Philippines, the versatile, durable and colorful jeepney is truly a mestizo - half-local and half-foreign - reflective of the national character of this uniquely Asian country. Its engine is imported, mostly from Japan, as "surplus" (second-hand) material. However, its body or chassis is designed by artistic, Filipino autobuilders who adorn it with variegated images, bouncing psychedelic colors and eardrum-breaking sounds. An average jeepney can normally seat 20 adult passengers. But in the remote areas in the countryside where transport is scarce, the versatile jeepney is typically overloaded. Passengers often ride with non-human cargoes like farm produce, or even animals.

Jeepneys began plying the streets of Manila after World War II, when U.S. soldiers left thousands of unserviceable jeeps. An entrepreneurial Caviteño named Leonardo Sarao saw in them a business opportunity for mass transport. He then remodelled the jeep to increase its functionality by extending the body to accommodate at least twice the number of passengers and by putting some railings at the back and top for extra passengers to cling to, and still leave some room for cargoes. When these GI jeeps ran out of supply, Sarao began importing surplus engines from Japan. Today, Sarao Motors proudly stands in Las Piñas City where the original jeepney is still being produced. However, competition has somewhat edged out Sarao as more jeepney factories and copycats have emerged, continually innovating and luring family buyers and transport operators alike.

What seems more striking about these jeepneys is, that they reveal something about the identity of their makers or owners. During this global age of transmigration and overseas movement of Filipino labor, it is not unusual to see markings on this vehicle's front side like "Katas ng Saudi" (literally, sweat from Saudi Arabia) to suggest that the owner bought the jeepney from his/her savings as overseas worker. Other items that catch the attention of a keen observer is the interior decor, with music loudly played from an improvised, removable radio-stereo set that keeps the driver awake. In front of the driver is a religious icon (usually a cross or a picture of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary), a lei made of fragrant sampaguita, and a "No Smoking" sign that the driver himself ironically ignores.

In a sense, the jeepney is a testament to the Filipino ingenuity. It symbolizes the diasporic, religious and sometimes perplexing character of a people colonized by two European powers.

More about jeepneys are found by clicking this site, or this fascinating narrative.

Text by fm@hawaii.edu

More than 300 companies to start reporting impact on nature

Tue, January 16, 2024 

High-rise apartment buildings and high-rise office buildings are seen at dusk in Tokyo

By Simon Jessop

LONDON (Reuters) - More than 300 companies and financial institutions plan to report on the impacts they have on the natural world as part of efforts to stem the global collapse of biodiversity, delegates at Davos heard on Tuesday.

The disclosures, created by the G20-backed Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, will see the groups share much more information around the risks and opportunities posed by their interaction with the natural world.

By doing so, boards will hopefully make decisions that have a more positive impact on nature - helping meet a global agreement by countries at the COP15 talks on biodiversity in 2022 - and be rewarded by investors and capital markets.

"This is a milestone moment for Nature finance and for corporate reporting," said David Craig, Co-Chair of the TNFD and former founder and CEO of Refinitiv, in a statement.

"This is a clear signal that investors, lenders, insurers and companies are recognising that their business models and portfolios are highly dependent on both nature and climate and need to be treated as both strategic risks and investment opportunities."

After beginning a two-year work programme in 2021, the TNFD's 14 recommended disclosures were published in September 2023 after more than 250 institutions piloted them during the development process.

Framed around four pillars - Governance, Strategy, Risk and Impact Measurement, and Metrics and Targets - the disclosures will force companies to describe how they assess and manage related issues and how they plan to improve their performance.

Among the companies and financial organisations to commit to disclose, beginning in either 2023, 2024 or 2025, were Norges Bank Investment Management, the largest owner of listed companies globally.

"We are committed to leveraging this tool to deepen our understanding of our portfolio's nature-related impacts and dependencies, further reinforcing our responsible investment efforts in this important area," said Carine Smith Ihenacho, NBIM's Chief Governance and Compliance Officer.

(Reporting by Simon Jessop; Editing by Alex Richardson)