Slovak PM Fico on surprise visit to Kremlin

By AFP
December 22, 2024

Kremlin insider Pavel Zarubin posted a short video showing the two leaders smiling and shaking hands - Copyright POOL/AFP Gavriil GRIGOROV

Russian President Vladimir Putin held surprise talks at the Kremlin on Sunday with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, officials said, after he had warned of harsh reprisals against Ukraine over a drone attack.

Fico is one of the few European leaders Putin has stayed friendly with since the 2022 eruption of hostilities with Ukraine.

Russian TV journalist Pavel Zarubin, a Kremlin insider, posted a short video showing the two leaders smiling and shaking hands.

The visit by Fico, whose country is a NATO and European Union member, had not been previously announced. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told Zarubin that it had been arranged “a few days ago”.

Peskov did not give details of the talks but said it could be “presumed” that Russian gas supplies would be discussed.

Later Peskov said the meeting had ended and that the two leaders would not make a comment.

Ukraine has said it will not renew a contract allowing the transit of Russian gas through its territory, which expires on December 31.

Slovakia and Hungary, which rely on Russian gas, have raised concerns about the prospect of losing supplies.

Fico ended military aid to Ukraine when he became prime minister again in October 2023, and like Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban, he has called for peace talks.

He also announced in November that he would go to Moscow in May for ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.



– Putin vows ‘destruction’ –



Earlier Sunday, Putin vowed to bring more “destruction” to Ukraine after a drone attack on Kazan on Saturday.

Videos on Russian social media showed drones hitting a high-rise glass tower block and setting off fireballs, though there were no reported casualties.

Ukraine has not commented on the strike.

But Putin told a televised government meeting: “Whoever, and however much they try to destroy, they will face many times more destruction themselves and will regret what they are trying to do in our country.”

The Kazan strike was the latest in a series of escalating aerial attacks in the nearly three-year conflict.

Putin has previously threatened to target central Kyiv with a hypersonic missile in response to Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory.

And Russia’s defence ministry has called strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities over recent weeks retaliation for Kyiv using Western-supplied missiles to hit Russian air bases and arms factories.



– Russia claims fresh advances –



The threats heightened as Russia claimed fresh battlefield advances in east Ukraine.

The defence ministry said on Telegram that troops had “liberated” the villages of Lozova in the northeastern Kharkiv region and Krasnoye — called Sontsivka in Ukraine.

Krasnoye is close to the resource hub of Kurakhove, which Russia has almost encircled and would be a key step in its efforts to capture the entire Donetsk region.

Russia has in recent months sought to secure as much territory as possible before US President-elect Donald Trump comes to power in January.

The Republican has promised to end the conflict, without specifying how.

Moscow’s army claims to have seized more than 190 Ukrainian settlements this year, as the rival army struggles with manpower and ammunition shortages.

Ukraine on Sunday also accused Russian forces of killing captured soldiers — an alleged war crimes violation.

A video posted by Ukraine’s 110th separate mechanised brigade showed “the shooting of soldiers who surrendered,” Kyiv’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said in a post on Telegram.

Drone footage showed Russians shooting the Ukrainians at point-blank range after they had already surrendered, he said.

AFP could not verify the footage.

Ukraine has made several allegations of war crimes during the conflict.

UN surge teams mobilise as Vanuatu hit by second earthquake

22 December 2024

UN agencies are intensifying their response in Vanuatu after a 7.3 magnitude earthquake killed 12 people and injured over 200 earlier this week, with a second 6.1 magnitude tremor on Sunday further exacerbating the challenges for affected communities.


A state of emergency remains in effect across the island nation, and a seven-day dusk-to-dawn curfew in parts of Port Vila was scheduled to end on 24 December. Access road to the seaport is also reportedly blocked.

The second earthquake heightened concerns, with further updates on its impact, including on the reopening of Port Vila airport to commercial flights, still awaited.
Humanitarian needs

As of Saturday night (local time), over 80,000 people have been affectedOpens in new window by Tuesday’s earthquake, with nearly 1,700 individuals temporarily displaced. Eleven evacuation centres are sheltering more than 1,200 people, while others are staying with host households.

Immediate needs include access to clean water, food and healthcare, as communities face rising risks of waterborne diseases.

Health services are also reported to be severely strainedOpens in new window, with the Vanuatu Central Hospital (VCH) requiring essential medical supplies and coordinated surge support to address critical gaps.

Source: UNOCHA
Vanuatu earthquake Impact in Shefa province (as of 21 December 2024).
Coordinated response

In response to the escalating crisis, a humanitarian flightOpens in new window coordinated by the UN World Food Programme (WFPOpens in new window)’s Pacific Humanitarian Air Service (PHAS) landed in Port Vila on Saturday, delivering surge teams from UN agencies, huamnitarian partners and relief supplies.

Agencies including the World Health Organization (WHOOpens in new window), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEFOpens in new window) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPAOpens in new window) are working alongside national authorities to support the responseOpens in new window.

UNFPA has set up maternity tents at VCH, while UNICEF has established four tents to manage patient overflow and deployed child protection teams to support families and healthcare workers.

UNICEF also deliveredOpens in new window bladder water tanks to VCH to ensure continued access to clean water.

WFP has deployed emergency telecommunications specialists to restore disrupted communication networks crucial for coordinating relief efforts. It is also working with the National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) and partners to assess food security needs.

Additionally, the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) is conducting satellite-based damage assessments to guide resource allocation and prioritize affected areas.

Humanitarian partners, including Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), are also providing on-the-ground assistance alongside national response teams.
Timely response crucial

Alpha Bah, Director for WFP Pacific Multi-Country Office, based in Fiji, underscored the need for timely response for affected families.

“We are saddened by the loss of lives and destruction to property caused by this earthquake. This concerted effort is crucial to ensure that people affected by the earthquake receive timely and essential assistance,” he said.

“WFP is dedicated to supporting the NDMO and other national institutions, and we will continue to step up our efforts to bolster Vanuatu’s response in the face of this crisis.”

Vanuatu residents traumatised by quake afraid to return to homes

Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor
@KoroiHawkins koroi.hawkins@rnz.co.nz

A seaside community in Vanuatu holds an open air church service to bring people together. Photo: RNZ Pacific / Koroi Hawkins

Some Vanuatu residents in Port Vila are still too scared to sleep in their own houses as powerful tremors continue to rock the city in the wake of last week's devastating earthquake.

Early on Sunday morning a 6.1 magnitude quake shook many in the capital awake.

The chairman of the seaside community disaster committee, Tom Alick Noel, said some people in their community had erected tents in open spaces to sleep in.

"Some families are still afraid to go back to their homes, so they set up these small tents to sleep in them outside; because we are still feeling strong aftershocks from the big earthquake that struck us last Tuesday," he said.

The president of the Central Ward's council of women, Enneth Fred, said they would stay there as long as the state of emergency remained in place.

Community leaders across the Vanuatu capital are trying to take people's minds off the 7.3 magnitude earthquake.

They have organised daily devotions to bring people together and games and activities for children to try and get them back to just being kids.

Enneth Fred said it was difficult seeing the looks on people's faces after the quake.

Vanuatu Central Ward Council of Women president Enneth Fred. Photo: Supplied

"In my community, especially on women's faces you can see tears, you can see fear, you can see panic attacks and it still haunts them," she said.

She said the community events are about bringing everyone together, so no one feels like they are facing things alone.

Fred was at the top floor of a multi-story building when the quake struck.

"I survived the earthquake and it was a very scary experience and one that I will never forget in my life," she said.

She hoped everyone would learn from the experience.

"I believe it will help us to look at constructing our buildings better in the future so that we can avoid the situation we faced during the earthquake," she said.

The death toll has been updated to 12 in the most recent official report.

Meanwhile, local authorities are urging communities living near landslips and flood-prone areas to relocate to safer ground ahead of several days of stormy weather forecast to start on Monday.

Ex-OpenAI engineer who raised legal concerns about the technology he helped build has died

HERE COMES THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

By The Staff The Canadian Press
Posted December 21, 2024 1

Balaji was a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who died in November 2024. Balaji Ramamurthy via AP

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.


Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He was well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

“We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time,” said a statement from OpenAI.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on Nov. 26 in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

His parents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy said they are still seeking answers, describing their son as a “happy, smart and brave young man” who loved to hike and recently returned from a trip with friends.

Balaji grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and first arrived at the fledgling AI research lab for a 2018 summer internship while studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned a few years later to work at OpenAI, where one of his first projects, called WebGPT, helped pave the way for ChatGPT.

“Suchir’s contributions to this project were essential, and it wouldn’t have succeeded without him,” said OpenAI co-founder John Schulman in a social media post memorializing Balaji. Schulman, who recruited Balaji to his team, said what made him such an exceptional engineer and scientist was his attention to detail and ability to notice subtle bugs or logical errors.

“He had a knack for finding simple solutions and writing elegant code that worked,” Schulman wrote. “He’d think through the details of things carefully and rigorously.”

Balaji later shifted to organizing the huge datasets of online writings and other media used to train GPT-4, the fourth generation of OpenAI’s flagship large language model and a basis for the company’s famous chatbot. It was that work that eventually caused Balaji to question the technology he helped build, especially after newspapers, novelists and others began suing OpenAI and other AI companies for copyright infringement.

He first raised his concerns with The New York Times, which reported them in an October profile of Balaji.

He later told The Associated Press he would “try to testify” in the strongest copyright infringement cases and considered a lawsuit brought by The New York Times last year to be the “most serious.” Times lawyers named him in a Nov. 18 court filing as someone who might have “unique and relevant documents” supporting allegations of OpenAI’s willful copyright infringement.

His records were also sought by lawyers in a separate case brought by book authors including the comedian Sarah Silverman, according to a court filing.

“It doesn’t feel right to be training on people’s data and then competing with them in the marketplace,” Balaji told the AP in late October. “I don’t think you should be able to do that. I don’t think you are able to do that legally.”

He told the AP that he gradually grew more disillusioned with OpenAI, especially after the internal turmoil that led its board of directors to fire and then rehire CEO Sam Altman last year. Balaji said he was broadly concerned about how its commercial products were rolling out, including their propensity for spouting false information known as hallucinations.

But of the “bag of issues” he was concerned about, he said he was focusing on copyright as the one it was “actually possible to do something about.”

He acknowledged that it was an unpopular opinion within the AI research community, which is accustomed to pulling data from the internet, but said “they will have to change and it’s a matter of time.”

He had not been deposed and it’s unclear to what extent his revelations will be admitted as evidence in any legal cases after his death. He also published a personal blog post with his opinions about the topic.

Schulman, who resigned from OpenAI in August, said he and Balaji coincidentally left on the same day and celebrated with fellow colleagues that night with dinner and drinks at a San Francisco bar. Another of Balaji’s mentors, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, had left OpenAI several months earlier, which Balaji saw as another impetus to leave.

Schulman said Balaji had told him earlier this year of his plans to leave OpenAI and that Balaji didn’t think that better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence “was right around the corner, like the rest of the company seemed to believe.” The younger engineer expressed interest in getting a doctorate and exploring “some more off-the-beaten path ideas about how to build intelligence,” Schulman said.

Balaji’s family said a memorial is being planned for later this month at the India Community Center in Milpitas, California, not far from his hometown of Cupertino.

Israeli expert urges justice for both Israeli, Palestinian victims of sexual violence

By Dylan Robertson The Canadian Press
Posted December 22, 2024 

A battle-scarred home in Kibbutz Be'eri, a communal farm on the Gaza border.

Tsafrir Abayov/

The Israeli expert leading a civilian commission into sexual violence by Hamas and Israeli soldiers is calling for global bodies to recognize “a new crime against humanity,” involving violence targeted at families.


Cochav Elkayam-Levy said the world should take a stance against the destruction of families as a specific, identifiable weapon of conflict, aimed at terrorizing one’s kin. She is proposing the crime be called “kinocide.”

In an interview, she also said Canadians can demand Hamas be brought to justice while also seeking accountability when Israeli troops commit sexual violence against Palestinians, without drawing a false equivalence.

“We have to see Canada’s leadership in addressing the lack of moral clarity of international institutions,” Elkayam-Levy said in an interview during a visit to Ottawa last month.

Elkayam-Levy is an international-law professor at Hebrew University who chairs Israel’s Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes Against Women and Children.

That non-governmental body originally set out to document patterns in sexualized violence by Hamas and its affiliates during the 2023 attack and against hostages it took into the Gaza Strip.

The aim wasn’t to come up with a tally of assaults, but to instead document systemic factors in how women were raped, tortured and mutilated. The idea was to have an understanding that could help victims and their descendants cope with intergenerational trauma, and to create an archive for researchers and prosecutors to use for possible investigations.

Elkayam-Levy’s team reviewed hours of footage featuring “very extreme forms of violence” from closed-circuit cameras and what militants themselves recorded.

They started to notice six patterns of violence involving among the circumstances of more than 140 families.

These include using victims’ social media to broadcast that person being tortured to their friends and family, including hostages and those killed. Another involved murdering parents in front of their children or vice versa, while another is the destruction of family homes.

“We started understanding that there is something here, a unique form of violence,” she said. “The abuse of familial relations to intensify harm, to intensify suffering.”

Elkayam-Levy said she developed the term with the help of experts, including Canadians like former attorney general Irwin Cotler. The rules undergirding the International Criminal Court only mention families in procedural contexts, but not as a factor in war crimes, she noted.

“It’s a crime without a name,” she said, arguing that impedes victims’ healing.

She said experts in past conflicts have agreed with her, saying kinocide should have been a factor in how the world understood and sought justice for atrocities on various continents, such as how Islamic State militants targeted Yazidi families from 2014 to 2017.

“Justice begins with this recognition; healing begins with recognition,” she said.

Elkayam-Levy noted “gender-based violence” existed for centuries before the United Nations officially recognized the term in 1992.

She’s also taken aim at “the silence of many international organizations, and the lack of moral clarity,” in calling out sexual violence on a global scale.

In particular, UN Women did not condemn Hamas’ sexual violence until nearly two months after that attack, a move Elkayam-Levy said sets a bad precedent for upholding global norms.

“They have fuelled denial of the sexual atrocities,” she said, adding that a constant demand for physical evidence pervades social media “in a very antisemitic way.”

Israeli police have said forensic evidence was not preserved in the chaos of the attack, and people believed to be victims of sexual assault were often killed and immediately buried.

Acts of sexual violence were not part of 43-minute video that Israel’s foreign ministry has screened for journalists, including The Canadian Press, which was sourced from security footage and videos filmed by militants during their October 2023 attack.

In March, a UN envoy said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape and “sexualized torture” during the attack, “including rape and gang rape,” despite the group’s denials.

That same month, released hostage Amit Soussana went public about her captors groping her and forcing “a sexual act” that she asked not to be specified.

As part of its avowed feminist foreign policy, Canada funds initiatives abroad to prevent sexual violence and support victims. Yet the Conservatives have lambasted the Liberals for not condemning Hamas’ sexual violence until five months after the attack.

In March, Ottawa came under fire for pledging both $1 million for groups supporting Israeli victims of Hamas sexual violence and $1 million for Palestinian women facing “sexual and gender-based violence” from unspecified actors.

Global Affairs did not say whether that referred to domestic abuse or sexual violence by Israeli officials, drawing a rebuke from a senior Israeli envoy.

Human-rights groups have long accused Israeli officials of sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees in the West Bank. In July, those concerns escalated when Israeli soldiers were accused of perpetuating the filmed gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner from the Gaza Strip. Far-right Israeli cabinet ministers voiced support for mobs attempting to free soldiers under investigation.

Elkayam-Levy said Canadians can call out the patterns of sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis, and also demand the Israeli state investigate and prosecute its soldiers who undertake acts of sexual violence against Palestinians.

“The fact that (Western leaders) are trying to make the right political decision, instead of the right moral decision, is creating confusion, is creating moral blur — instead of making space for all victims to be heard for what they have endured,” she said.

To her, there is a “false parallel” being made between individual cases of sexual assault from soldiers who should be held to account, and a group using patterns of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.

Elkayam-Levy said people should uphold the principles of international law.

She is aware that many have instead argued that Israel’s military campaign has broken international law and undermined the systems meant to uphold human rights.

Elkayam-Levy has been critical of the Israeli government, arguing before the conflict that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought anti-democratic reforms to the country’s judiciary.

She has been critical of his war cabinet for lacking any women and has highlighted extensive media reports that female military personnel had detected Hamas was planning a large attack only to be dismissed by male leaders.

She said the world needs to condemn violence against families and try prosecuting those responsible. Otherwise, she fears combatants in other countries will take up its brutal tactics.

Otherwise, “we are going to see an international system that will not last for long,” she said.

Israel and Turkey Shape a New Syria From Their Borderlands

By Alisa Odenheimer and Selcan Hacaoglu

December 22, 2024 

BNNBLOOMBERG

(Institute for the Study of War a)

(Bloomberg) -- Syria’s leadership isn’t the only aspect of the country to be changing as a result of this month’s toppling of longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. The blurring of its borders is also underway — from Israel to the southwest and Turkey to the north.

Israel’s military wasted no time advancing on Syria after Assad was overthrown by Islamist-led rebels two weeks ago, with troops moving eastward into a buffer zone established by a ceasefire between the two countries 50 years ago. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wary of a new threat after more than a year fighting Iran-backed groups Hamas and Hezbollah in the region.

“Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities,” Netanyahu’s office said last week. It described the deployment as temporary until a new Syrian administration — now led by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, a former affiliate of Al-Qaeda — commits to the 1974 agreement.

Turkey has shown similar urgency in asserting its influence over a far greater portion of Syria, and US President-elect Donald Trump has called the country a key player in shaping the post-Assad political landscape.

One of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s key priorities is to push back Kurdish groups in the north with links to the PKK, an organization that’s long battled for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey.


The Syrian National Army, a group funded and advised by Ankara, has seized two northwestern towns since late November from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish ally in the US’s fight against Islamic State. The SNA will now likely try to capture more territory, Turkish officials familiar with the matter said this week.

Erdogan’s ultimate aim is to create a buffer zone along the entire 900-kilometer (560-mile) Syria-Turkey border, though that goal looks hard to achieve in its entirety. Turkey says HTS supports the dismantling of Kurdish forces, though HTS hasn’t publicly commented.

Israel’s advance has extended its control of the Golan Heights — a piece of high ground that’s been a focus of global dispute since Israel seized it from Syria during a 1967 war.

Before the fall of Assad, Israel controlled about two thirds of the territory, giving its military a view of southern Syria between the border and the capital, Damascus, 60 kilometers away, enabling it to monitor troop movements. The Golan offers fertile land — Israelis grow grapes and apples there — and is an important source of water.

While Trump officially recognized Israeli sovereignty of its Golan territory during his first term in 2019, the United Nations still considers it legally part of Syria.

Dolan Abu Salah is head of the council in Majdal Shams, a village in the Israel-controlled part of the Golan that’s home to about 12,000 Druze people, a Middle Eastern religious and ethnic group. He says the local community is broadly welcoming of the Israel Defense Force’s advance, viewing it as a necessary security measure.

Assad’s fall “was a source of very great happiness, to the people here, to the Druze residents of the Golan,” Abu Salah, 46, said in the town, nestled in the foothills of the Hermon mountain and surrounded by orchards. But the “creation of a security zone is very, very important for the Golan Heights communities.”

Asked if Israel’s capture of new territory should become permanent, the council leader said it depends on the new Syrian leadership and “the potential for peace.”

“If we see that the new regime is potentially another terrorist group that will set the agenda, then the security zone must be permanent,” Abu Salah said.

Majdal Shams was caught up in Israel’s battles with Iran-backed militias in July, when twelve children were killed and more than 20 injured in a rocket attack. Israel blamed the attack on Hezbollah, based across the border from Golan in Lebanon.

Nabih Al-Halabi, another Majdal Shams resident who works on solar-energy projects, said he’s optimistic about a stronger Israel-Syria peace deal post-Assad, but sympathizes with Israel’s wariness.

“I can understand their fears — they want to protect their borders,” he said. “They want to be sure about the stability of the new regime in Damascus and whether they will sign the peace agreement.”

Turkish Visit

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan paid a visit to Damascus on Sunday, meeting HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa. Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency aired footage of the two hugging each other in front of cameras.

Fidan on Wednesday said the “last thing” the nation wants is to be seen as the regional power with final control over Syria, though the government has made contact with, as well as making military gains in the north.

“We recognize the current administration, the new one, as a legitimate partner for Turkey and international interlocutors,” Fidan said. “I think HTS has taken huge steps to divorcing itself from al-Qaeda and Daesh and other radical elements,” he said, using an alternative name for Islamic State.

Ankara has a strong incentive to secure influence over how Syria is eventually run. Turkey hosts more than 3 million refugees from its southern neighbor — a legacy of a more than 13-year war — while Turkish companies would stand to be major beneficiaries if and when postwar reconstruction starts.

“Ankara will look to shape the political and economic landscape in Syria to expand Turkish interests,” wrote Eurasia Group analysts including Emre Peker. “A good outcome in Syria for Turkey would help Erdogan project himself as an influential global leader and boost his historically low popularity.”

--With assistance from Beril Akman and Julius Domoney.

(Updates with Turkish minister’s visit in 18th paragraph.)

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.

In data: Syria after the war

Thomas Latschan
DW

22/12/2024

The war in Syria has left a trail of destruction. The country is devastated, fragmented, and economically ruined. Millions of people are displaced, or dependent on humanitarian aid. DW presents an illustrated overview.

INFOGRAPHS

Seven million displaced people, half a million casualties of war, hunger and poverty — after 14 years of civil war, Syria is in ruins. The cost of rebuilding the country will be massive. DW has compiled some key data on the situation in Syria.

With an area of about 185,000 square kilometers, Syria is roughly half the size of Germany. Around 24 million people live in the country, two-thirds of whom are dependent on humanitarian aid. Western Syria in particular is densely populated, but there are entire metropolitan areas around cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs that are now in ruins.

At least 140,000 buildings, including 3,000 schools, have been either completely destroyed or severely damaged. The healthcare system has also been heavily impacted across much of the country. During the war, several human rights organizations reported that Russian and Syrian forces had deliberately bombed numerous hospitals.

Estimates vary as to what it will cost to rebuild the country, but it is clear that the total will be huge — potentially as high as one trillion US dollars. Reconstruction efforts may be further complicated because Syria is heavily contaminated with landmines, and the full extent of the problem is not known. Of the more than half a million people who were killed in the war, 12,000 were killed by mines or unexploded ordnance. For years now, Syria has been one of the three countries in the world that are most seriously affected by landmines.

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Millions of refugees

Around 7 million Syrians are living as displaced persons in their own country. The northwestern province of Idlib, in particular, became a place of refuge for millions fleeing the Assad regime's forces. At least 6 million more Syrians fled abroad, the majority to the neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Germany has also taken in almost 800,000 refugees from the war.

In Lebanon above all, the true number of Syrian refugees is likely to be far higher than the official figure. The United Nations estimates that there are between 1 and 2 million Syrians in the country. The population of Lebanon itself is only just over 5 million.

Returning to a shattered country

Many of these people would like to return to their homeland, but the future is still uncertain. After 14 years of war, Syria's economy is shattered.

The country's GDP has essentially collapsed. Unemployment is high, and those who do have work earn only a fraction of their pre-war income. Meanwhile, inflation has skyrocketed: It is now almost 30 times higher than in 2011. Today, almost all Syrians live below the poverty line defined by the World Bank. The German Red Cross reports that two-thirds of them live in extreme poverty.

Syria is fragmented

These problems are compounded by the current political uncertainty. It remains unclear how the country is going to evolve. After toppling the Assad regime, the Islamist HTS militia has taken control in Damascus and begun to form a transitional government.

The group's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, presents himself as a moderate. However, his organization is still classified as a terrorist group by many countries, including the EU.

Foreign powers will continue to jostle for influence in Syria. Turkey and the militias it supports are fighting against the Kurds in the north. The United States maintains a military base in the southeast, from which it is able to target positions of the so-called Islamic State (IS) terrorist group in the sparsely-populated east of the country. The aim is to prevent an IS resurgence.

Meanwhile, Israel has occupied some areas of the demilitarized buffer zone near the Golan Heights in the southwest, and has carried out strategic bombings in Syria, partly out of concern that chemical weapons stockpiles might fall into the wrong hands.

Until recently, Russia maintained two strategically important military bases in the west of the country. It is unclear what will happen with them now. Iran, the biggest supporter of the Assad regime, is also trying to maintain its influence in the country as best as it can.

Religious minorities are afraid

During the long rule of Bashar Assad, Syria was considered part of the so-called "Shia Crescent" region, dominated by Iran — even though three-quarters of the Syrian population are Sunni, not Shia, Muslims. Assad himself belongs to the Alawite sect, a separate offshoot of Shia Islam.

There are some 2 to 3 million Alawites in Syria, many of whom are now afraid they may be branded beneficiaries of the Assad regime, and persecuted as a result. Officially, Syria also has more than 2 million Christians, although many are likely to have fled the country in recent years. They too are concerned about the potential for religious persecution.

What will happen to the Kurds?

During the war, the Kurds were able to establish an effectively autonomous, self-administered area in northeastern Syria, as they did in northern Iraq. Syria has almost 3 million Kurds. In neighboring Turkey, they are believed to number as many as 15 million.

Ankara is determined to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state. One of the main reasons it gives for opposing this is that "fighters from Kurdish terrorist militias" might carry out attacks in Turkey, and take refuge in northern Syria. This is why both the Turkish military and the Syrian militias it supports have continued to attack Kurdish regions in northeastern Syria, even after the fall of Assad.

At the very least, Turkey wants to establish a buffer zone controlled by its own military along the Syrian border. Ankara is presumably afraid that Kurds in Turkey may call for autonomy, or even an independent state, if they manage to achieve this in the neighboring countries.


With an estimated 25 to 30 million people worldwide, the Kurds are one of the largest ethnic groups without a state of their own. Their traditional homeland spans parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The conflicts in this region have simmered for more than a century, since the restructuring of the Middle East that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. It is therefore doubtful that the political reorganization in Syria will bring lasting peace to the northeast of the country.

This article has been translated from German.

Israel tells Syria it won't accept Jihadist presence in southern part of country

Message sent to de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa stresses Israel intends to maintain its security and will consider leaving buffer zone should stable government be established

Itamar Eichner, Lior Ben Ari|

YNET 

22/12/2024

Jerusalem issued a message to Syria’s de factor leader Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammed al-Golani) saying any attempt by jihadists to move to the country’s south won’t be tolerated. 

The message further clarified that if a responsible governmental authority forms in Syria, Israel might consider transferring control of the buffer zone to it. Until then, Israel will continue to ensure its own security. This comes a week after al-Sharaa said he had no intention of clashing with Israel.
 
IDF troops in Syria
(Photo: Aris MESSINIS / AFP)


(Photo: Bakr ALKASEM / AFP)

A few days later, al-Sharaa said that Syria would adhere to the disengagement agreement signed in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War following the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime. He called on the international community to ensure that Israel remains committed to the agreement as well.

Meanwhile, Jerusalem added in its message to Syria's new leadership that the Israeli military's presence in the buffer zone is motivated by defense and security concerns, particularly in preparation for potential incidents like those of October 7, 2023, originating from Syria. "We won’t allow that to happen," officials in Jerusalem stressed.

During a recent Security Cabinet meeting held at the IDF Northern Command, participants discussed the situation in Syria and Lebanon, delving into security briefings they received. Israel understands that the rebels are trying to present a specific image to the Western world, but Jerusalem remains vigilant regarding developments in Syria.



IDF officers in Syria



Ahmad al-Sharaa
(Photo: SANA / AFP)

The deterioration of security on the Syrian side since the fall of Assad's regime prompted Israeli forces to advance into the buffer zone between the two countries to neutralize threats. According to Lebanon's Al-Mayadeen network, Israeli forces have established seven permanent positions along the buffer zone in rural areas of Damascus, Daraa and Quneitra.

The report noted that two of these positions, located in the Mount Hermon area, "overlook Damascus and its western suburbs." Syrian channels have regularly reported on the Israeli military's advances toward Syrian villages, interactions with the local population and operations at various sites near the border in recent weeks.

Expelled from Aleppo as children, these fighters returned as its liberators

Al Jazeera speaks to Syrian opposition fighters who came back to liberate their homes and pursue their dreams.

A man gestures at Saadallah al-Jabiri Square as people celebrate, after President Bashar al-Assad's 24-year authoritarian rule ended, in Aleppo, on December 8, 2024 

[Karam al-Masri/Reuters]

By Justin Salhani
22 Dec 2024

AL JAZEERA

Aleppo, Syria – When Abdallah Abu Jarrah was 13, he dreamed of becoming an engineer or a lawyer.

But his home city of Aleppo was besieged by Syrian regime forces, aided by Iran, Russia and Hezbollah.

“The situation was terrible with bombings, beatings and killing,” the now 21-year-old told Al Jazeera. “I remember the regime’s massacres, the killing, and the hitting of bakeries and hospitals.”

Eight years later, a series of images went viral on social media. Youth, displaced by the regime in 2016, had returned as fighters to liberate the city of Aleppo. The side-by-side photos showed children boarding buses in one photo. In the next photo, they are young men smiling broadly, wearing military fatigues and carrying rifles.

On December 22, 2016, a four-year battle that pitted regime forces and their allies against the opposition ended with the evacuation of thousands of opposition forces from East Aleppo on buses.

War crimes were rife.

Syrian rebel fighters who liberated the city of Aleppo [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

The al-Assad regime besieged opposition areas, which included thousands of civilians, while the Russian air force bombed hospitals and bakeries. The regime used internationally banned chlorine bombs, according to the United Nations, killing hundreds.

The UN reported in November 2016, a month before the end of the battle, that East Aleppo had no working hospitals.

“The brutality and the intensity of the fighting was not seen before,” Elia Ayoub, a writer and researcher who covered the fall of Aleppo, said.

The UN also criticised opposition groups for indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas “to terrorise the civilian population” and for shooting at civilians to try and keep them from leaving the areas.

At least 35,000 people were dead and much of the city destroyed by 2016 – most of it still in ruins eight years later. At least 18 percent of the dead were children.

“I thought we would never come back,” Abu Jarrah told Al Jazeera.

Destroyed buildings opposite the Aleppo Citadel [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

Capital of the Syrian revolution

When a peaceful uprising demanding reforms broke out in Syria in 2011, al-Assad responded with brutal force. The opposition took up arms and challenged the regime around the country.

The regime relied on foreign intervention. Hezbollah and Iran joined the fight in 2013 and the Russian intervention in late 2015, ostensibly to counter ISIL (ISIS), pushed the opposition back.

“Symbolically, Aleppo was the capital of the revolution,” Ayoub said. “Its fall was preceded by other cities and it was this final nail in the uprising’s coffin at that time.”

The city would stay under regime control for almost eight years. Many who fled Aleppo moved to Idlib in Syria’s northwest and huddled in displacement camps, where they suffered years of air attacks by the regime and its allies.

In November, opposition fighters led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army launched an operation to retake Aleppo.

Among the factors in their favour was that the Syrian Army was possibly weaker than it had ever been and its allies were preoccupied with their own battles – Russia in Ukraine and Iran and Hezbollah with Israel

.

The Syrian flag waves near the historic Aleppo Citadel [Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

‘I felt human again’

On November 30, the Syrian opposition reentered Aleppo for the first time in eight years and quickly took control of the city.

Among the returning fighters was Abu Jarrah, who had joined a faction in the Free Syrian Army when he was about 16.

“I felt human again,” he told Al Jazeera, his eyes shining outside the city’s historic citadel, dressed in military fatigues adorned with Syria’s green, white and black flag, with three red stars. “Today is an indescribable joy.”

Standing not far away was Abu Abdelaziz, another Free Syrian Army fighter who had fled the city when he was 17. He wore fatigues and a black face mask with a skull imprinted on the front, and carried a rifle.

“They forced us to leave, displaced us and cursed us and we returned to where we were raised, where we spent our childhood with our friends and school,” he said. “It’s a great feeling of great joy. You can’t measure it.”

Abu Abdelaziz said the first thing he did when the city was liberated was visit his old school.

“When I was young I wanted to be a heart doctor,” the fighter who is now 24 years old said. The war, however, took a heavy toll on him. His family was killed and his house in Aleppo was destroyed. Still, he said, he wanted to stay in Aleppo and become a doctor.
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“Now, God willing, I will complete my studies,” he said.

Abu Abdelaziz was displaced from Aleppo when he was a teenager. He returned at 24 to liberate the city [Ali Haj Suleiman/ Al Jazeera]

‘We will build this country together’

Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and historically among the Middle East’s most economically important. Hittites, Assyrians, Arabs, Mongols, Mamelukes and Ottomans all ruled it before it became part of modern Syria. Before the civil war, it was Syria’s capital of industry and finance.

Parts of Aleppo have largely fallen into disrepair. Locals told Al Jazeera that even before the war, the regime had stopped investing in the city. But very little of the damage from the fighting from 2012 to 2016 has been repaired. Even its crown jewel, The Citadel of Aleppo, was badly damaged and left to rot. Buildings destroyed by air attacks are still visible from the foot of the Citadel today.

Even in the city’s rif – or periphery – entire neighbourhoods are completely abandoned. Collapsed roofs and crumbling facades rest behind empty pools as wild dogs roam the ghost towns.

Now that the war is over, the city’s returning fighters hope to trade in their guns to help fix their city.

“If a field of study opens up I want to complete my studies,” Abu Jarrah said. “And we will build this country together.”

In ruined homes, Palestinians recall former Syria leader’s torture

AFP/Yarmuk

 December 22, 2024 | 

Mahmud Khaled Ajaj, 30, reacts while standing before a destroyed apartment building in the Yarmuk camp for Palestinian refugees south of Damascus.

School lessons ended in Syria’s biggest Palestinian refugee camp on October 18, 2012, judging by the date still chalked up on the board more than a decade later.

“I am playing football”; “She is eating an apple”; “The boys are flying a kite” are written in English.

Outside, the remaining children in the Damascus suburb of Yarmuk now play among the shattered ruins left by Syria’s years of civil war.

And as the kids chase through clouds of concrete dust, a torture victim — freed from jail this month when rebels toppled Bashar al-Assad’s government — hobbles through the rubble.

“Since I left the prison until now, I sleep one or two hours max,” 30-year-old Mahmud Khaled Ajaj said.

Since 1957, Yarmuk has been a 2.1-square-kilometre (519-acre) “refugee camp” for Palestinians displaced by the founding of the modern Israeli state.

SHATTERED CITY

Like similar camps across the Middle East, over the decades it has become a dense urban community of multi-storey concrete housing blocks and businesses.

According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, at the start of Syria’s conflict in 2011 it was home to 160,000 registered refugees. Rebellion, air strikes and a siege by government forces had devastated the area and left by September this year only 8,160 people still clinging to life in the ruins.

With Assad’s fall, more may return to reopen the damaged schools and mosques, but many like Ajaj will have terrible tales to tell of Assad’s persecution.

The former Free Syrian Army rebel fighter spent seven years in government custody, most of it at the notorious Saydnaya prison, and was only released when Assad’s rule ended on December 8.

Ajaj’s face is still paler than those of his neighbours, who are tanned from sitting outside ruined homes, and he walks awkwardly with a back brace after years of beatings. At one point, a prison doctor injected him in the spine and partly paralysed him — he thinks on purpose — but what really haunts him was the hunger in his packed cell. 

“My neighbours and relatives know that I had little food, so they bring me food and fruit. I don’t sleep if the food is not next to me. The bread, especially the bread,” he said.

 “Yesterday, we had bread leftovers,” he said, relishing being outside after his windowless group cell, and ignoring calls from his family to come to see a concerned aunt.

“My parents usually keep them for the birds to feed them. I told them: ‘Give part of them to the birds and keep the rest for me. Even if they are dry or old I want them for me’.” As Ajaj spoke to AFP, two passing Palestinian women paused to see if he had any news of missing relatives since Syria’s ousted leader fled to Russia.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has documented more than 35,000 cases of disappearances under Assad’s rule.

Ajaj’s ordeal was extreme, but the entire Yarmuk community has suffered on the frontline of Assad’s war for survival, with Palestinians roped into fighting on both sides.

The graveyard is cratered by air strikes. Families struggle to find the tombs of their dead amid the devastation. The scars left by mortar strikes dot empty basketball courts.

Here and there, bulldozers are trying to shift rubble and the homeless try to scavenge re-usable debris. Some find work, but others struggle with trauma.

Haitham Hassan al-Nada, a lively and wild-eyed 28-year-old, invited an AFP reporter to run his hand over lumps he says are bullets still lodged in his skull and hands. His father, a local trader, supports him and his wife and two children after Assad’s forces shot him and left him for dead as a deserter from the government side.

Nada told AFP he fled service because, as a Palestinian, he did not think he should have to serve in Syrian forces. He was caught and shot multiple times, he said.

“They called my mother after they ‘killed’ me, so she went to the airport road, towards Najha. They told her ‘This is the dog’s body, the deserter’,” he said.

“They didn’t wash my body, and when she was kissing me to say goodbye before they buried me, suddenly and by God’s power, it’s unbelievable, I took a deep breath.” After Nada was released from hospital, he returned to Yarmuk and found a scene of devastation.

 

Human smugglers welcome Trump's return

By Diana Baptista - December 21, 2024 

Clothes belonging to migrants who crossed the Rio Bravo river in search of asylum in the United States hang at the border between Mexico and the United States, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on Friday (Dec 20). — REUTERS

FOR the human smugglers who ferry migrants northwards from Central America, the return of Donald Trump is a welcome New Year gift that promises to supercharge their business.

"Bless Donald Trump for winning," said one people smuggler, who talked on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Mexico's authorities as well as its drug cartels.

"We're eagerly waiting for Jan 20 to be back in business and start earning some more dollars," said the 45-year-old, who has spent the past six years transporting undocumented migrants, most from Central America and the Caribbean, to the United States.

Now he is banking on a pickup in trade due to Trump's campaign promise to crack down on migrants once he takes office on Jan 20, vowing to lengthen the border wall to keep migrants out and enforce mass deportations of those who have made it

Like thousands of other smugglers, he is hoping to cash in big time from Trump's return, expecting an increase of at least US$2,000 in profits per person.

Smugglers, or coyotes as they are called locally, are also tapping into a rising sense of panic among migrants, many of whom are fleeing deepening violence and poverty, fearing it will become harder to gain asylum under a second Trump presidency.

Even before Trump won re-election, smugglers were peddling disinformation and scams on social media, telling migrants to make it to the southern US border before Trump takes office as his presidency will make it harder to cross.

In recent years, the father of three said he had ferried about 30 people a week to the United States, be it young men or families with children, charging at least US$5,000 a head for passage to a new life by plane, bus or car.

His business comes from word-of-mouth recommendations from families who have made it to the US, and the smuggler said he also connects migrants with a series of safe houses where they can eat, sleep and use the Internet.

This past year, he said, business was down 80 per cent after the US Customs and Border Protection (CBB) agency set up an app that let migrants make their asylum claim at the border.

Instead of hiring a smuggler to get them across, migrants instead waited at the border in Mexico for an appointment, even if it meant living several months in areas rife with crime.

Last year, there were 1,450 appointments available a day on the CBP One app.

But as Trump has vowed to get rid of the app, effectively closing the main legal option for people seeking asylum, this will likely raise demand for smuggler services.

"They say they will close the border, but we always find a hole to sneak people through.

"They can't close the entire border, it's impossible," said the smuggler.

The coyote said he had a near-100 per cent success rate by scaling the wall in areas controlled by cartels.

On the US side, he then drives the migrants to their chosen destination.

Trump is expected to declare illegal immigration a national emergency on taking office, pulling resources from across the government to crack down on both legal and illegal immigration.

Yet tightening the restrictions does not dissuade people from migrating, said Maureen Meyer with the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola), a human rights advocacy group.

"Increased enforcement does very little to decrease migration flows to the United States. What it does is feed profits into organised criminal groups," said Meyer, Wola's vice-president for programmes.

According to 2017 estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking to the US earns criminal groups up to US$4.2 billion a year.

Smugglers also pay corrupt officials so they can get through checkpoints expressly set up to catch migrants, the coyote said.

Cartel violence is especially fierce in Chiapas state in southern Mexico, a key crossing point for migrants heading north from Central America or from as far as the Darien Gap, a perilous stretch of rainforest straddling Colombia and Panama.

Every child and adult pays 1,200 pesos to the cartel just for the right to cross the river that divides Mexico and Guate-mala.

Whoever refuses to pay — migrant and smugglers alike — runs a high risk of kidnap or murder.

*The writer is from Reuters

Trump vows to end Middle East chaos, prevent World War III

2024-12-22 13:28

Shafaq News/ On Sunday, US President-elect Donald Trump asserted that he will end the war in Ukraine, address the chaos in the Middle East, and prevent the outbreak of World War III.

In a Christmas speech, Trump announced that he would direct the military to "establish an Iron Dome system to protect the US's skies."

These statements come less than a month before Trump officially assumes office as President of the United States.

Trump added, "We will stop engaging in the foolish foreign wars that the United States has entered."

Regarding the United States' relationship with neighboring countries, Trump said, "I have informed officials in Mexico that what is happening at our border is unacceptable," referring to the influx of migrants towards the US border.

Trump also claimed that his country is "being robbed in the Panama Canal," emphasizing that "securing it is crucial for American trade."

On Saturday, Trump threatened to regain control of the Panama Canal, accusing Panama of imposing exorbitant fees for using the canal that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

In a post on his social media platform "Truth Social" on Saturday, Trump also warned that he would not allow the canal to fall into "the wrong hands," seemingly cautioning against potential Chinese influence over the waterway, stating that the canal "should not be managed by China."

Who is we? Of mice and men in longevity science | Book Reviews

Photo by Haley Lawrence on Unsplash

LONG READ

Jason Fletcher
December 22nd, 2024

LSE 

The re-election of Donald Trump to the US presidency this year has brought focus on pseudoscience in healthcare and the search for ‘silver bullets’ in health and longevity research. Jason Fletcher reviews three books which purport to have insights into how to live longer: Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia, Lifespan: Why we age—And why we don’t have to by David Sinclair, and How We Age: The Science of Longevity by Coleen Murphy. He writes that these books’ focus on ‘silver bullet’ solutions to aging takes focus away from slow diseases which are leading us to have shorter and less healthy lives.

Attia, Peter, and Bill Gifford. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Random House, 2023.

Sinclair, David A., and Matthew D. LaPlante. Lifespan: Why we age—And why we don’t have to. Atria books, 2019.

Murphy, Coleen, How We Age: The Science of Longevity, Princeton University Press, 2023

On November 15th, the president-elect, Donald Trump announced that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. If RFK Jr. is confirmed by the US Senate and becomes health secretary, it will be an unfortunate watershed moment for the mainstreaming of pseudoscience in America. The grand irony of this is not lost on public health researchers: we’ll be appointing the country’s preeminent vaccine opponent to lead the Department of Health and Human Services only a few years after the world witnessed the unprecedented effectiveness and speed of discovery of COVID-19 vaccines. According to the National Institutes of Health, this modern marvel of science may have prevented more than 14 million deaths across the world in its first year alone. This was made possible thanks to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which provide gold-standard evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between an intervention (such as a drug) and a pre-specified outcome of interest.

Thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine, RCTs seemingly reclaimed their place on the pedestal of public consciousness, and many in public health hoped that the vaccine’s success foreshadowed a reversal in the popularization of pseudoscience and its more subtle cousin, the bait-and-switch, where instead of evidence and intervention strategies, we have “concepts of a plan”.

Searching for more public health ‘silver bullets’

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been the case. Americans continue to search for silver bullets for all manner of health issues, while the closest thing to a public health silver bullet in decades continues to be attacked by communities on the cusp of taking control of the American government. Part of the problem is that most of our remaining health questions are much more resistant to silver bullet answers than COVID-19 was. It is tougher to crowd out strategies with no evidence base, like injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19, without gold-standard evidence to take their place (and even then…). We want to believe that a similar level of success is right around the corner for other causes of death and ailments, yet we have been fighting a seemingly intractable war on cancer for over fifty years. We have obesity, diabetes and opioid epidemics. Heart disease continues to kill millions. Central to these failures may be their slow accumulating effects. It turns out fast deaths, including many infectious diseases, have advantages; their speed allows us to know quickly and clearly when something works or does not. This is the perfect situation to leverage an RCT. We do not have to wait 20, 50, or 70 years to see if it works. But our remaining enemies work slowly to wear down our systems, to use our slow body processes of cell division and growth against us.

A lack of progress, zero RCTs showing human longevity gains, and the innate desire by humans to prolong life make for excellent pseudoscience and bait-and-switch markets, including a thriving literary genre. Most are pure snake oil salespersons not constrained by scientific evidence or standards. These “wellness experts” flourish in breathlessly touting the newest miracle diet or the newest exercise regimen. However, some authors in the longevity science genre take different tacks, and the successful authors who groan at the snake oil while making their own cases by employing a bait-and-switch, rather than straight pseudoscience are particularly revealing. These authors have 200-400 pages to fill and, in the end, zero silver bullets to show, so what do they do?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Fox Tucson Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, February 2024.
“Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore

Before loading their own counterfeit silver bullets, many authors trudge through a dense and anecdote-filled wasteland. They often write at length about individual centenarians—Betty smoked every day for 86 years, while Herb has eaten only bacon every morning since World War II and has eight percent body fat. Or they describe so-called ‘blue zones’ that mysteriously overproduce centenarians and provide surface-level observations about how one place is known for its beach and laid-back lifestyle while another one serves a lot of fish. After some wishy-washy “wouldn’t it be great if the beach was a silver bullet” discussion, we typically then move on to the even more treacherous wasteland of epidemiological studies, a posterchild of the warning, “correlation does not imply causation”. The treachery here comes in the form of the many promised oases dressed up as RCTs, often after the author has highlighted several mirages from other sources that we are too smart to have fallen for. Indeed, often we stay at a last oasis for the remainder of the book.

Attia, Peter, and Bill Gifford. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. Random House, 2023.

Peter Attia is one of the country’s most popular “wellness experts” who runs in similar circles to RFK Jr. (they have both appeared on the popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience), yet his work maintains a patina of scientific rigor. His 2023 book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity is an apt example of this genre. Burnishing his “bro science” bona fides, he begins by highlighting extreme exercise and related performance (a favorite metric is VO2 max)—“exercise is by far the most potent longevity ‘drug’”. The quality of evidence for this is comparable to headline-grabbing studies associating red wine with early mortality or, conversely, extended life. Dr. Attia then moves through diet, sleep, emotional health and drugs, essentially with the same quality of evidence, which largely consists of centenarian anecdotes, research that ‘works’ in animal tests, and the epidemiological studies wasteland. It follows the tried-and-true template of focusing on the sheer number of existing studies and a heavy dose of anecdotes. Put another way, it’s the shock-and-awe approach that comes with rattling off specious study after specious study while sprinkling in compelling human-interest stories.

We are also meant to be dazzled by the level of surveillance we could engage in if so desired – diet is now “nutritional biochemistry” and we can personalize our eating patterns with our genetics and individuality. Likewise, the variety of sleep monitoring devices is massive, but the evidence that directly links specific sleep-related intervention targets with longevity is missing. And I don’t even know where to begin with the claims about exercise. One such claim that quantity beats quality of evidence notes, “…the epidemiology linking strength and cardiorespiratory fitness to lower risk for neurodegeneration is so uniform in its direction and magnitude that my own skepticism of the power of exercise has melted away.” Many dream of an exchange rate where enough bad studies eventually convert into one good one.

Attia makes an interesting claim that the key solution to the slow wear and tear on our bodies is to intensely focus on fortifying your body against the inevitable. There is a very similar idea in Alzheimer’s Disease of cognitive reserve. Faced with no effective treatments for dementia and an overwhelming lack of understanding, a remaining idea is to start our inevitable cognitive decline from a higher hill. The current hope is that educational attainment and stimulating work environments might all add to the height of our hill that we then slowly roll down later in life until we meet dementia criteria. Attia promotes a similar, but much more interventionalist, idea to invest in our own physical functioning reserves so that we start at a higher level when the declines start and thus might roll into death with high levels of physical functioning (that is, having a high ‘health span’). It’s an interesting idea, but we have no evidence that it works. Perhaps just as likely is that these maximalist interventions—always having a 30lb rucksack strapped to our backs—could cause injuries and make us not enjoy our life during our prime, which appear nowhere in Attia’s calculus. And again, it appears that his evidence is subject to a vote rather than our typical criteria: “While we can’t establish causality here, the strength and reproducibility of findings suggest this is more than just a correlation. Muscle helps us survive old age.”

The reader should be left with a great deal of uncertainty—we were promised the science of longevity, and we got it; it’s just incremental, inspirational, and aspirational. It’s not quite wiping down our grocery bags during COVID-19, but these are bullets painted silver.

Sinclair, David A., and Matthew D. LaPlante. Lifespan: Why we age—And why we don’t have to. Atria books, 2019.

In his 2019 book, Why We Age—And Why We Don’t Have To, David Sinclair approaches the subject differently than Attia. Sinclair is a scientist/researcher/professor at Harvard. He produces, rather than merely summarizes and amplifies, research. The reader still gets a walk through the wasteland with stops at various oases. But Sinclair also has a different focus, which is to move the goalpost. We learn a lot about lifespan and treatment successes… for worms and mice. It turns out that the US government (under NIH) and many venture capitalists have made major investments over several decades that have served to increase survival of yeast and worms. And using the tried-and-true method of bait and switch, readers are encouraged to dream about how these advances for worms will transform human longevity through understanding and tinkering with our biology.

Some choice passages include: “[DNA] can also tell you what food to eat, what microbiomes to cultivate in your gut and on your skin, and what therapies will work best to ensure that you reach your maximum potential lifespan”, “It won’t be long before prescribing a drug without first knowing a patient’s genome will seem medieval”, and “In the near future, proactive personal DNA scanning is going to be as routine as brushing our teeth.” This is certainly what 23andme was hoping for in their recent shift to subscription services en route to a complete collapse and probable removal from the Nasdaq. We never arrive at RCTs that show that what we’ve done to worms ports over to humans. The closest we get is an “ongoing” RCT for Metformin on longevity, which as far as I can tell has still not started, five years past the book’s claims. It’s an interesting form of snake oil – it’s not lying (exactly) when you encourage people to hope that we are like worms.

Murphy, Coleen, How We Age: The Science of Longevity, Princeton University Press, 2023

Coleen Murphy’s 2023 book splits the difference a bit but leans more toward Sinclair with much more restraint. The book’s title, How We Age: The Science of Longevity, might be the most fraught for a purportedly serious and scientific book – who would have guessed that in an age of so much disagreement over proper pronoun use, “we” could get in the crosshairs? In this case, the main issue is that her human audience might expect that “we” equals “humans.” Only after slogging through 350 pages of experiments on flies, worms, and mice do we (the readers) realize the “we” to be a bait-and-switch. Sometimes, we do get some “we” advice for “we, the reader’s species”, but here Murphy includes flourishes reminiscent of Attia: “…but one of the easiest ways to extend our lifespan…is to exercise more” with no accompanying gold standard evidence in humans. While she focuses on worms, she mercifully does not traverse the wasteland that Attia and Sinclair trudge through.

Starting out, Murphy soothes that she won’t tell us what she eats or weighs or how she exercises because this is “just bad science.” But then she guards her flank (and the pronoun in her title) by telling us in advance that she will not be “using the popular phrase, ‘…at least in worms and flies.’” Of course, the phrase is popular because we (humans) really do want to know whether extending a worm’s life by 50 percent (aka, a couple weeks) has any meaning for us (humans); but Murphy is not going to play this diminutive game of qualifying the insights of her book. This is because “almost all we know” about longevity was first understood in model systems (e.g. worms) and then “tested later in higher organisms (mammals like mice)…”. She claims that we are “right in the middle” of understanding aging but that we don’t yet know “all of the answers”. Seems fine so far. Maybe this will be a purely descriptive book about worms and mice, just to satisfy our interest in these animals, right? Maybe the “we” is indeed supposed to be read as worms. Yet, she can’t resist ending her introduction by saying, “With this information at our disposal, we should be able to make wise decisions about how to manage our own longevity.” Here the “we” is not actually the worms but the readers. And now we are back to hopes and dreams.

While the Murphy book is a scientifically driven analysis (so many worms!), the author succumbs to the temptation to stretch a bit; to try to get back to the subject of her title: We. Many findings on mice or worms have “promise” as a “possible clinical therapeutic” or “may represent a new class of longevity treatments to be explored” with no accompanying evidence. The reader also gets a short excursion into findings on human athletes’ declining performance with age: “While anaerobic (sprinting) events generally show greater changes with age—just like a worm’s decline in maximum velocity…aerobic performance also declines, but at a later stage.” (italics added). It is in this way that the author, and this wing of the longevity-industrial complex, entices readers’ yearnings for good news. This aligns it with other full-on proclamations from Sinclair and Attia. The reader should wonder if the book should have been titled, How (Some) Creatures Age. But would humans buy this book?

No silver bullets in longevity science

We might ask ourselves if we are repeating history. It’s not exactly as if our pursuit of longer lives or even immortality are new concepts. Selling the possibility certainly isn’t. But with so few actual silver bullets, most disease categories – as well as the longevity-focused investigators filling our bookstores and social media feeds – must toggle between incremental progress and hocking hope. Bruno Latour, the famed French intellectual, described the pre-Pasteur hygienists of mid-19th century France as having “…an accumulation of advice, precautions, recipes, opinions, remedies, regulations, anecdotes, case studies” because illness, “…can be caused by almost anything. Typhus may be due to contagion, but it may also be due to the soil, the air, and/or overcrowding. Nothing must be ignored, nothing dismissed.” Swap in aging for illness here and you have an apt description of what longevity science boils down to in 2024. Like our “wellness experts,” the 19th century hygienists similarly wandered adrift in a wasteland where “none of the evidence certain and none can be abandoned.” Latour labels this circumstance “all-round combat” because “…if anything can cause illness, nothing can be ignored.” Mix in enormous uncertainty and our current methods of surveillance, and we quickly arrive at Latour’s conclusion that, “to act everywhere is to act nowhere…like an army trying to defend a long frontier by spreading its forces thin.”

Further dividing our own forces to also defend against findings from animal models in addition to accumulated folk tales leaves us continuing to hope for a miracle while slouching toward shorter and less healthy lives. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, we know how to go about getting an answer to these questions by deploying sufficient resources to attain gold standard evidence in humans. We also learned a great deal about the importance of combatting the snake oil salespeople and the loudest storytellers, and the Herculean effort required to do so in an information environment awash with counterfeit silver bullets and their enthusiastic purveyors. A big part of that is figuring out our scientific pronouns—whether “we” is we or them or everything. This in itself is a new battlefront in “all-round combat” yet unresolved.

Note: This review gives the views of the reviewer, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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About the author

Jason Fletcher is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs with appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A specialist in health economics, economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy, Professor Fletcher focuses his research on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and examining how in utero and early life conditions affect later life health, cognition, and mortality.
Posted In: Book Reviews | Healthcare and public services