AMERIKA

People addicted to opioids rarely get life-saving medications. That may change.

December 17, 20225:00 AM ET
BRIAN MANN
NPR

Methadone and other opioid-addiction medications are proven to save lives. But most people addicted to fentanyl, heroin and pain pills never get medical treatment.Kevin D. Liles/AP

Doctors and researchers have known for decades that safe, easy-to-use medications are a game-changer for people addicted to opioids.

Buprenorphine and methadone reduce cravings for opioids and ease withdrawal symptoms, helping people avoid relapses and deadly overdoses.

"If somebody has access to these life-saving medications, it cuts their mortality risk by 50 percent," says Dr. Linda Wang, a researcher who treats patients with addiction at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

"It has a huge impact preventing death."

But as fatal opioid overdoses surge in the U.S., topping 80,000 deaths last year, access to these medications remains severely limited.

Wang says in part that's because of complex, often punitive federal regulations that restrict how these medicines are prescribed and dispensed.

Methadone in particular is unavailable to Americans who don't have access to special federally-approved opioid treatment clinics.

Regular physicians aren't allowed to prescribe the medication, even though they are allowed to prescribe highly addictive opioid pain medications.

"It comes down to policy and legislation that got passed at a time when we were enacting a war on drugs and criminalizing addiction," Wang said.

As a result, public health officials say only one in 10 Americans struggling with addiction ever receive treatment. Studies show access to treatment is especially difficult for people of color.

Those policies left millions of people vulnerable as the powerful, toxic synthetic opioid fentanyl spread in the U.S., making addiction even more dangerous.
As fentanyl deaths surge, lowering barriers to addiction treatment

Now the Biden administration is moving to reform and liberalize federal rules for treating opioid addiction, the first major overhaul in two decades.

"There were significant barriers that were quite stigmatizing for patients as they enter treatment," says Dr. Neeraj Gandotra, chief medical officer for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the federal agency that oversees addiction.

Gandotra points out even people who do manage to get methadone are often forced to visit a government-approved clinic multiple times a week to get doses.

"The idea that they aren't allowed to get take-home [doses], the fact that they have to go to the clinic daily, that is a significant barrier," Gandotra said.

During the COVID pandemic, the federal government and most states relaxed opioid treatment rules on an emergency basis.

Patients could get addiction medications with a telehealth visit, for example, and receive more take-home doses.

Dr. Brian Hurley, head of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM), says that experiment worked.

"There was no evidence that diversion increased or risk increased, but there was evidence that people who gained access to treatment did better," he said.

The rule-change proposed by the Biden administration would make those reforms permanent. It would also eliminate waiting periods for access to methadone and expand telehealth options even further.

Gandotra says SAMHSA also plans to eliminate stigmatizing language from federal rules for opioid treatment programs, including the term "detoxification."

Danielle Russell struggled to gain access to methadone, which helped stabilize her life after heroin addiction. She takes the medication daily and is now finishing her PhD at Arizona State University.Danielle Russell

A life-saving medication and years of stigma

Danielle Russell, who has taken methadone for much of the last 10 years, says these reforms are long overdue.

She struggled to gain access to methadone while addicted to heroin before finding a clinic that would help her.

"I don't think I would be alive without it," Russell says.

She credits methadone for allowing her to stabilize her life and go back to school, where she's about to get her PhD in justice studies at Arizona State University.

But she also says she's faced years of stigma and surveillance within the opioid treatment system, where she often felt less like a patient and more like a criminal.

"It's pervasive," she said. "It almost is like an oil that coats your skin as soon as you walk in [the clinic] door."

During the pandemic, Russell says she was finally allowed to take home a month's supply of her medication at a time. That spared her the near-daily trips to the nearest clinic, a 45-minute drive from her home in Phoenix.

"Not to sound dramatic, but it was life-changing. I suddenly could live like a normal person."

Everyone interviewed for this story agrees these rule changes will help expand access to opioid-treatment medications and reduce stigma.

"The changes in SAMHSA's proposed rule are really ground-breaking," says Sheri Doyle with the Pew Charitable Trust's substance use initiative.

The reforms could be especially important for people of color who "end up facing more stringent requirements than others," according to Doyle.

"There is this inherent lack of trust built into the system of care that is just unfounded," Doyle said.
More reform needed as opioid deaths surge

But Doyle and others say more reforms are needed that would require congressional action.

For now, methadone in particular will remain heavily regulated and will still only be available through a limited number of certified opioid-treatment programs.

"These steps are necessary, but not sufficient," says Dr. Hurley, head of ASAM. "We need additional routes to access for methadone treatment."

Some addiction experts and government officials say the ultimate goal is for opioid recovery medicines to be regulated like medications for other chronic diseases.

"We hope they are placed on the same spectrum as other conditions, such as diabetes and hypertension," says SAMSHA's Dr. Neeraj Gandotra.

He acknowledged that kind of equality of care for addiction patients is a long way off.

"I think it's too early to say whether this [rule change] is a step toward that. We believe it is, but I have to say I'm not sure how far along we still have to go," Gandotra said.

A $1.6 billion lawsuit alleges Facebook's inaction fueled violence in Ethiopia

By Emily Olson
Published December 17, 2022

FoxgloveAbrham Amare, one of the plaintiffs named in a new lawsuit filed against Facebook's parent company, Meta, claims that social media posts directly led to his father's murder in Ethiopia last year.


Facebook actively fueled ethnic violence in Ethiopia's civil war by prioritizing hateful and dangerous content, then not moderating that content fast enough, or sometimes at all, says a new lawsuit filed against Meta, the social media giant's parent company.

Two Ethiopian researchers and a Kenyan constitutional rights group are behind the legal action, which was filed this week in a High Court in Nairobi, Kenya. The city houses Facebook's East African content moderation hub, which opened in 2019.

The hub was too little, too late for the region, the lawsuit says. Facebook treated users in African countries differently than those in Western countries, fostering a "culture of disregard for human rights" that ultimately led to the murder of one of the plaintiffs' fathers, the suit alleges.

The plaintiffs are seeking a $1.6 billion victims' fund and a bigger and better-supported moderation team.

They're also asking the court to deliver what would be a legal first: forced changes to Facebook's algorithm, which has long been blamed for not doing enough to limit the reach of incendiary content.
Meta says it has invested "heavily" in moderation improvements



Carl Court / Getty Images
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Getty ImagesA person holds an iPhone displaying the Facebook app logo in 2016 in London. The app's global popularity has grown in tandem with its ability to capture users' attention.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company has "strict rules" about what's allowed on its platforms and is continuing to develop its capabilities to catch violating content.

"Hate speech and incitement to violence are against these rules, and we invest heavily in teams and technology to help us find and remove this content," the spokesperson said in a statement shared with NPR.

"Feedback from local civil society organizations and international institutions guides our safety and integrity work in Ethiopia. We employ staff with local knowledge and expertise," the spokesperson said.

The lawsuit cites language as one key factor in the company's inadequate moderation. Of the 85 languages spoken in Ethiopia, only three were covered by Facebook's content moderation practices, the lawsuit says.

The Meta spokesperson declined to say how many moderation staff worked in the African hub, which serves a collective population of over 500 million.

Another lawsuit filed in Kenya this year alleges that the hub created an exploitative and unsafe work environment, exposing moderators to high volumes of traumatic content and paying less than promised.

One plaintiff says Facebook is directly responsible for his father's murder

Abrham Meareg Amare, one of the plaintiffs, holds Facebook's algorithm and poor moderation directly responsible for the death of his father, Meareg Amare Abrha.

Court filings say that in October 2021, militants followed Meareg home from work, shot him in the back and leg, and left him to bleed.

Meareg, a well-respected chemistry professor according to the lawsuit, was targeted after Facebook posts spread his name, photo and false allegations that he was associated with a deadly rebel group because of his ethnicity as a Tigrayan, the country's minority demographic.

"I knew it was a death sentence for my father the moment I saw it," Abrham said in an interview with NPR.

"Facebook is a big gun in Ethiopia. [...] People use Facebook as a reliable source of information because they don't have trust in state media. Something posted on Facebook is considered a magic bullet — a valid thing."

Like Abrham, Meareg's friends and neighbors also warned him of the posts, but the professor chose to return from an overseas trip and was killed within weeks, his son said.

In an affidavit, Abrham says he asked Facebook multiple times to remove posts about his father — both before and after his death. Some posts still remained up as of this week.

In addition to restitution from the victim's fund, he's seeking a public apology from Facebook to him and other victims.

"To Facebook, it's as if we're idiots; we're subhuman. [...] Our family doesn't matter if they're making profits," he said.

/ Foxglove
/
FoxgloveFisseha Tekle is a plaintiff in the new lawsuit filed against Facebook.

An Ethiopian national, Abrham is currently living in the U.S. and seeking asylum, he says. Reporting violent posts to Facebook is still a daily ritual.

The other plaintiff is Fisseha Tekle, an Ethiopian legal adviser at Amnesty International whose work — reports into his country's violence — made him a target for online abuse, according to court filings.

Amnesty International, which is one of seven human rights organizations named in the case as legal support for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Tekle now lives in Kenya out of fears for his family's safety.
Ethiopia's civil war has led to death and displacement



Eduardo Soteras / AFP Via Getty Images
AFP Via Getty ImagesA man stands in front of his destroyed house in the village of Bisober in Ethiopia's Tigray region, on Dec. 9, 2020.

Fighting between the Ethiopian government and militant groups started in the northern Tigray region in November 2020. The conflict has claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 people and displaced millions more.

Researchers say media has played a key role in polarizing the country. Three of the country's biggest outlets — ESAT, OMN and Tigrai TV — are divided along ethnic lines.

In a 2021 statement, Facebook said Ethiopia was on its list of countries "at the highest risk for conflict" but it was especially challenging to moderate given the number of languages spoken in the country.

"Between May and October 2021, we took action on more than 92,000 pieces of content in Ethiopia on Facebook and Instagram for violations of our Community Standards prohibiting hate speech, about 98% of which was detected before it was reported by people to us," the company said at the time.

Facebook also said that less than 10% of Ethiopia's population uses the platform — a low proportion relative to other countries, driven primarily by poor internet access.

Ethiopia has one of the lowest internet use rates in the world, with only 24% of residents logging on regularly, according to 2020 data from The World Bank.

Mercy Mutemi, the lawyer representing the two individual plaintiffs, says that Big Tech has been rapidly, but unethically, expanding in Africa.

"Not investing adequately in the African market has already caused Africans to die from unsafe systems," she said in a statement shared with NPR by Foxglove, a nonprofit supporting the plaintiffs.

"We know that a better Facebook is possible — because we have seen how preferentially they treat other markets," Mutemi said.

"African Facebook users deserve better. More importantly, Africans deserve to be protected from the havoc caused by underinvesting in protection of human rights."

Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP Via Getty Images
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AFP Via Getty ImagesKenyan lawyer Mercy Mutemi (center) speaks to the media in Nairobi on Dec. 14 after filing a lawsuit against Meta accusing Facebook's parent company of fanning violence and hate speech.

Meta's oversight board previously recommended a human rights assessment in Ethiopia

Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, reported nearly $40 billion in profits last year.

The lawsuit says that Facebook's earnings are partially tied to how long users stay on the platform, which leaves the company with little incentive to remove eye-catching violent content. Years of internal and external studies suggest that Facebook's algorithm, the platform's engagement engine, spurs extremist beliefs.

In 2018, the United Nations said that Facebook played a key role in fueling violence in Myanmar.

In 2021, leaked documents revealed Facebook did the same in India, its largest market, even as employees spoke out.

The new lawsuit draws a parallel between Meta's allegedly hands-off role in the Ethiopian conflict and its responsive one in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. For the latter, Facebook implemented a crisis plan to promptly mute inflammatory content. The plaintiffs say that crisis plan could be replicated for conflicts in Africa.

Abrham told NPR that demands like these constitute straightforward ways to treat everyone with dignity, which should be a chief goal of a platform that claims to value human connection.

He said Facebook should start by publicly acknowledging its role in generating hate crimes and disinformation.

"There are hundreds of stories, thousands of people who've lost their loved ones because of Facebook," he said.

"After all that they've lost, there is still life. There is a family which is in distress, which has been victimized by arrogant and irresponsible treatment.

"We need to act now or never."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

People in Lebanon are robbing banks and staging sit-ins to access their own savings

By Ruth Sherlock,
Jawad Rizkallah
Published December 17, 2022 

Marwan Naamani/Picture Alliance/Getty ImagesLebanese activists gather outside a local bank in support of Abed Soubra, who stormed the branch demanding access to his own accounts, in Beirut on Sept 16. Lebanese police detained Soubra after he entered the bank and, armed with a gun, demanded access to his deposits. It was the third such incident in Lebanon that week alone.

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — On a recent weekday in Lebanon's second-largest city, the atmosphere at a branch of the IBL Bank is tense. Security and police are gathered outside. Soldiers are clutching M16 rifles. People are crowding the entrance.

Inside, Zahra Khaled, a 53-year-old in a wheelchair who's in urgent need of medical care, is refusing to leave until she is given her savings. The bank has frozen all of it — tens of thousands of dollars. After selling personal possessions and exhausting all other options, she and her adult daughter have now entered the bank and will not budge.

Lebanon's banks froze most accounts three years ago amid an economic collapse. This year, faced with increasingly desperate circumstances, more people are resorting to extreme measures to access their savings. Khaled's protest is one of the milder tactics. Other Lebanese have taken to robbing banks for their own funds, brandishing real or toy guns. Most take only what they are owed, and so far no one has been reported killed in a robbery.

/ Marwan Naamani/Dpa (Photo By Marwan Naamani/Picture Alliance/Getty Images
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Marwan Naamani/Dpa (Photo By Marwan Naamani/Picture Alliance/Getty ImagesA man speaks to negotiators from behind the iron bars of a local bank in Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 11, after he stormed the branch and held employees and customers as hostages. The man, who entered the bank carrying a machine gun and gasoline, demanded part of his deposited money, amounting to $209,000.

At the IBL Bank, Khaled has the backing of her own relatives and other depositors. "I'm here to support her to get her savings," says Mahmoud al Khattib, a retired soldier whose bank account is also frozen. "The stink of this corrupt system has affected us all."

The World Bank says Lebanon's leaders spent decades running the country's economy like a Ponzi scheme. According to its investigation, politicians and their financiers hollowed out public services to enrich themselves and those around them. When the economy collapsed in 2019, the report says, Lebanon's bank owners should have assumed the losses. Instead they froze depositors' accounts.

Since then, the country's politicians and heads of financial institutions have resisted implementing economic reforms — such as laws on money laundering — that would unlock funding from the International Monetary Fund. Critics say one of the reasons for this is because leaving the laws vague has allowed politically well-connected Lebanese to get their money out of the country.

/ Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images
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Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty ImagesProtesters chant slogans as they gather outside the Justice Palace in Beirut on Sept. 19, demanding the release of two people involved in a bank heist the week before.

Meanwhile, more than 80% of the population lives in poverty, including Khaled's family.

Khaled negotiates with the staff at her bank branch for hours. But eventually the cashiers and managers leave, and police escort her and her family out, empty-handed.

"The bank brought the cops on us. We're only asking for our rights," her son Ismail Mohammed, 32, shouts, gripping the handles of his mother's wheelchair. "You've left us to starve."

"May God smite our leaders," his mother cries.

Ruth Sherlock / NPR
/
NPRZahra Khaled, 53, sits in a wheelchair in the apartment she shares with her sister in Tripoli, Lebanon, on Nov. 23. Khaled has lost a leg to diabetes and needs to pay for continued medical care, but is unable to access her savings.

Khaled lives with her sister in a large apartment with high ceilings and brightly colored traditional Lebanese floor tiles. But it's so empty now that their voices echo in the rooms. Khaled has sold her furniture, piece by piece, just to get by. A small coffee table in the living room is piled with cans and vegetables they'd emptied from the kitchen fridge before selling it too.

Ismail Mohammed shows NPR bank statements indicating the family has close to $90,000 in their account. Part of this is money is from a house he and his mother sold just before the banks froze depositors' accounts.

In the economic collapse, Mohammed lost his job. The Lebanese lira has lost almost 90% of its value since October 2019, and inflation has soared. Now, the family's debts are piling up.

"It's humiliating," Mohammed says. "We're even forced now to take produce from the grocer's on credit. I can't bring myself to look the greengrocer in the eye."

Khaled's daughter Amina Mohammed, 35, says she and her husband and their three children will be evicted by the end of December if they cannot pay their rent. She's also worried for her mother's health. Khaled has already lost her right leg to diabetes. Now she has pains in her left leg and doctors have told her she needs an MRI scan and possibly surgery — all things she cannot pay for.

Ruth Sherlock / NPR
/
NPRAmina Mohammed, 35, the daughter of Zahra Khaled, sits in her mother's apartment in Tripoli, Lebanon, on Nov. 23. Mohammed says she and her husband and three children will be evicted from her home if she cannot pay the rent.

"When your mother needs medicine and you have money you can't access — what do you do?" says Amina, shaking with rage. "What choice do you have?"

Several days after their visit to the bank, Zahra Khaled's family tells NPR that the bank has agreed to give them some of their savings so she can pay for medical care. Some banks do sometimes release funds for individual depositors on compassionate grounds. But overall, for now, there's no solution and most depositors question if they will ever see their money again.

Kamel Wazni of the Lebanese Control Commission, which supervises the country's banking sector, can't rule out that some of the depositors' money might be gone for good. Billions of Lebanon's dollar reserves have been taken out of the country, and billions more have been spent on subsidies and seeking to respond to the economic collapse.

Banks do allow withdrawals of $400 per account per month, plus some Lebanese currency, in a strategy that he says will repay as many as 70% of depositors.

But this does little to help those who need larger and more immediate sums. So depositors have started coordinating their actions, even forming a movement.

"A depositor gets into the bank; we are outside," says Ibrahim Abdallah, a spokesperson for a group called Cry of the Depositors, recalling a bank heist.

He says the crowd cheers the robber on: "We're like: 'Yeah! Do it. Come on!' We're giving them some motivation."

Ruth Sherlock / NPR
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NPRIbrahim Abdallah, spokesperson for the Cry of the Depositors movement, stands at a protest outside a hotel hosting a conference for bankers in Beirut on Nov. 24. Abdallah says he has millions of dollars frozen in Lebanese banks. These days, he says, he can't even afford to take his son for dinner.

The group has lawyers — they too include depositors locked out of their savings — who sometimes offer legal advice to those staging heists on how to protect themselves from prosecution.

Abdallah says he knows these robberies to "liberate" deposits are not right.

"The normal process [if you've been wronged] is to go through the legal route." But in Lebanon, he says, the legal route is blocked by corrupt judges.

The country's leaders, he says, "are forcing the depositors to become criminals."

At a protest by Cry of the Depositors outside a hotel in downtown Beirut where bankers gathered for a conference, Abdallah points to a nearby glass-paneled skyscraper whose many apartments he helped sell through his work in real estate.

"I have millions in the bank. Millions," he says. "My son sometimes says, 'Let's go have dinner.' I can't afford to have a dinner."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org


Ruth Sherlock
Ruth Sherlock is an International Correspondent with National Public Radio. She's based in Beirut and reports on Syria and other countries around the Middle East. She was previously the United States Editor for the Daily Telegraph, covering the 2016 US election. Before moving to the US in the spring of 2015, she was the Telegraph's Middle East correspondent.

THE END OF MACARTHURISM IN JAPAN
U.S. hails Japan's new security strategy as China lashes out over moves

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks at a news conference in Tokyo on Friday. 

| POOL / VIA REUTERS

BY JESSE JOHNSON AND GABRIEL DOMINGUEZ
STAFF WRITERS
Dec 17, 2022

The U.S. has welcomed Japan’s “bold and historic step” to revise key security documents — laying the foundation for the country’s defense policies for years to come — while China slammed the move, sending an aircraft carrier-led flotilla through a key strategic waterway near Okinawa Prefecture in an apparent message to Tokyo.

The moves by the United States, Tokyo’s top ally, and China, which Japan has formally labeled as its “greatest strategic challenge ever,” came as Japan on Friday approved revisions to three key security documents, in a major shift in defense policy under its pacifist Constitution that signaled it is now more ready than ever to shed some of the postwar constraints on its military.

The revisions to the three security documents, which came after months of debate, will see Japan acquire a so-called counterstrike capability, which allows it to hit enemy bases and command-and-control nodes with longer-range standoff missiles. The country also set in stone a target of doubling its annual defense spending to about 2% of gross domestic product within five years.

“Japan has taken a bold and historic step to strengthen and defend the free and open Indo-Pacific with the adoption of its new National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program,” U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, praising the defense spending hike, which he said “will also strengthen and modernize the U.S.-Japan alliance.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Pentagon backed Tokyo’s decision to acquire new capabilities “that strengthen regional deterrence,” including the counterstrike capability, adding that the updated documents reflected “important alignment” between the two allies’ vision and priorities outlined in their security strategies.

The documents referred to the U.S.-Japan alliance the “cornerstone” of Tokyo’s security policy, a stance echoed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who called Japan an “indispensable partner in addressing the most pressing challenges to global stability.”

Antony Blinken | POOL / VIA REUTERS

“Our alliances and partnerships are our most important strategic asset, and Japan’s new documents reshape the ability of our alliance to promote peace and protect the rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world,” Blinken said.

Japan’s revised strategic documents also revealed a tough new stance toward China as it continues to flex its military muscle near Japan’s southwestern islands, some of which lie as close as 120 kilometers from Taiwan, the self-ruled island that has become a potential flash point for Beijing, Washington and Tokyo.

“China has intensified coercive military activities around Taiwan, and concerns about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are rapidly increasing not only in the Indo-Pacific region, including in Japan, but also with the entire international community,” Japan’s new National Security Strategy said.

China has vowed to unify Taiwan with the mainland, by force if necessary. In recent years, Beijing has ramped up military pressure on the democratic island, including by conducting military training at a nearly nonstop clip nearby. This pressure culminated in August, when it lobbed five ballistic missiles inside Japan’s claimed exclusive economic zone near Okinawa Prefecture for the first time ever, during large-scale military drills.

China lashed out at Japan’s policy shift late Friday, with the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo decrying the move to characterize Beijing as an unprecedented challenge.

“Saying such things within the documents severely distorts the facts, violates the principles and spirit of the four China-Japan political documents, wantonly hypes the ‘China threat’ and provokes regional tension and confrontation,” a spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy said in a statement published by the state-run Global Times newspaper

.

China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier sails in the Pacific Ocean on Friday.

 | DEFENSE MINISTRY JOINT STAFF / VIA KYODO

The criticism was part of an apparent two-pronged response out of Beijing, which also saw China send a six-ship flotilla led by its Liaoning aircraft carrier into the Pacific Ocean after transiting the Miyako Strait between Okinawa’s main island and Miyako Island.

The sailing by China’s carrier and five accompanying vessels, including two advanced guided-missile destroyers and a combat support ship, according to the Japanese Defense Ministry, was the first in the area since May. The flotilla was expected to conduct exercises in the Pacific Ocean.

Amid the closer cooperation with Washington — and Tokyo’s willingness to signal a harder line in its China policy despite an ice-breaking first meeting last month between Kishida and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — analysts say the moves are unlikely to lead to a further deterioration of ties with Beijing.

“What this does is to bring the language used in Japan’s security discourse in line with the rhetoric in Europe and the U.S.,” said Sebastian Maslow, an expert on Japanese security issues and a lecturer at Sendai Shirayuri Women’s College.

Still, perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the new security documents was Japan’s growing willingness to bring up the issue of Taiwan, long seen as a kind of taboo in Tokyo for fear of alienating Beijing, which views the fate of the democratic island as a core issue.

Although Tokyo has not changed its Taiwan policy or committed to helping defend the democratic island in the event of a conflict, experts view its repeated mentions in the revised security documents as an indication of support for Taipei.

“Japan considers Taiwan a key concern for its own national security,” said Maslow. “As such, the message is that Tokyo will be a stakeholder in whatever crisis might unfold and that it is willing to play its role in preserving the current status quo.”

In Chicago, a Battle Over a Religious Statue Is About Much More Than Religion

The city’s Pilsen neighborhood used to be home to Polish immigrants. Now it’s mostly Latino. Both groups see much at stake in the fate of a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà.

Judy Vazquez, left, and other protesters had sought to prevent the removal of the Pietà statue from the shuttered St. Adalbert Church in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.

By Julie Bosman

Photographs by Todd HeislerDec. 17, 2022

CHICAGO — On a cold Tuesday morning in Chicago, police officers lined an alley on the West Side. Across a chain-link fence, a group of people in parkas paced nervously in a backyard.

Then the officers stepped aside. A three-ton statue wrapped in blue cloths was loaded from the vacant St. Adalbert Church onto the bed of a truck, beginning its slow journey down the alley.

Even shrouded in blankets, the statue had a lifelike quality: It was a replica, still visible in silhouette, of Michelangelo’s Pietà, the marbled figure of Mary cradling the body of Jesus.

“Don’t take her away!” shouted Judy Vazquez, one of the people in the backyard, as the statue passed by.

“Alleluia!” said another protester, Bronislawa Stekala, clutching a rosary of brown wooden beads and raising her fist in anger.

For more than five years, a group of Polish and Latino Catholics from Chicago and its suburbs has been waging a fierce but quixotic fight against the Archdiocese of Chicago.

For many Polish and Latino Catholics in Pilsen, the church and statue have served as reminders of their history in the community.

The statue as it was removed from St. Adalbert. The church has been closed since 2019.

Judy Vazquez, left, visiting the Pietà at its new home nearby, St. Paul Catholic Church.

They first objected to the closure in 2019 of St. Adalbert, a towering brick structure in the Pilsen neighborhood, part of a wave of parish consolidations tied to shrinking attendance and the exorbitant cost of repairing antiquated buildings. Then the group turned its efforts to the statue inside, which was slated to be moved to another Catholic parish, St. Paul, a mile away.

Their mission was about more than the statue. For the Polish members of the group, the church and the statue were monuments to their ancestors and a reminder of their ties to Pilsen, which was once an entry point in Chicago for Polish immigrants. For the Latinos, the fight was to preserve community anchors including churches, as the neighborhood becomes increasingly gentrified and working-class Mexican families are being forced out by rising rents.

“If they sell the property of St. Adalbert’s, it’s going to change the fabric of Pilsen,” Ms. Vazquez said. “This is unacceptable that they want to sell every piece of church property to developers. The developers will have carte blanche. They’re going to continue to develop Pilsen. They’ll take the culture away from the neighborhood.”

The Archdiocese of Chicago says the changes reflect reality: The number of weekend churchgoers at St. Adalbert had shrunk to about 200, far less than is needed to sustain a church of its size. And the building required millions in repairs because of its crumbling brick facade, a decades-old problem that was explained in detail to parishioners before St. Adalbert merged with a neighboring parish.

Moving the statue to that parish, also in Pilsen, will give the beloved Pietà a home, the archdiocese said, a place where it can be protected and preserved for the community.

People holding a vigil behind St. Adalbert also paid tribute to victims of gun violence.

St. Adalbert was closed because repairs to its crumbling building would have cost millions of dollars.

A celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe outside St. Adalbert.

“We understand that change is difficult and many have worshiped at St. Adalbert or have family history with the church,” Manuel Gonzales, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said in an email. “We truly hope the small number of former St. Adalbert parishioners, who are among the protesters, will join with their neighbors to help the unification succeed.”

I watched the protesters one morning in November as they gathered for one of their regular prayer sessions in the alley. They drank coffee, shared memories of the church and prayed the rosary with their eyes lowered. Most of the group carried memories of what St. Adalbert was like more than a half-century ago, when it was a thriving parish with a school and a vast convent that was home to dozens of nuns.

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, the alderman who represents Pilsen on the Chicago City Council, stood among the prayer group, recalling all the history of the church and the multicultural effort to save it. In front of St. Adalbert, a faded sign still notes a Mass schedule, with separate services in Polish and Spanish.

“Both communities are trying to save St. Adalbert,” he said. “It’s a sacred and important site for both communities.”

Mr. Sigcho-Lopez had pushed for a zoning change that would give the community more input into the fate of the church building, should it be sold.

“The objective is to find somebody that could repurpose the building,” said Raul Serrato, a member of the finance council at St. Paul. “That’s been the difficulty because obviously nobody, including us, wants the building torn down. It’s a beautiful structure.”

After St. Adalbert was closed in 2019, a group of parishioners still held regular vigils outside.

A sheet of plywood covers a hole at St. Adalbert.

A prayer session in the alley behind St. Adalbert.

On the day of the statue’s removal, Ms. Vazquez and the other members of her group would not let it leave without a fight.

For weeks, they had waited anxiously, knowing that it could be moved at any time. Then Ms. Vazquez heard on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving that crews had arrived at the church. Members of the group raced over and stood in a backyard, watching for hours as workers took the statue out of the church and loaded it onto a truck.

Stanley Rydzewski, 68, reminisced about baptisms and weddings at St. Adalbert, saying that the building was more than a parish, a repository of vital Polish history.

http://moses.law.umn.edu/darrow/documents/The_Jungle_Upton_Sinclair.pdf

Hakawatis: Reclaiming the Arabian Nights



Sarah Shaffi
15 December, 2022

As a new production offers a fresh, feminist take on 1,001 Nights, writer Hannah Khalil talks about the show and how it’s offering a new view of Arab women.

What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘Arabian Nights’? Aladdin and his magic carpet will almost certainly spring to mind. Perhaps Ali Baba and his thieves. At a push, you might think about the storyteller behind it all, Sheherazade.

It’s likely that whatever you do think of has a Western lens on it, and is possibly shaped by Disney or the very British tradition of pantomime.

"It's a woman who wins, a woman who's allowed to win eventually. And we rarely get that”

The versions you’ve seen or heard or read will either sideline women or sexualise and exoticise them, and whatever you’ve consumed will be much less dark than the original.

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Now, all those versions of the Arabian Nights, or 1,001 Nights as it is sometimes also called, are set to be challenged by Hakawatis, a new play at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, written by Hannah Khalil, who is looking to reclaim the stories for women, and Arab women in particular.

Houda Echouafni as Wadiha, Roann McCloskey as Naha, 

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi as Akila, and Laura Hanna as Zuya 

“I think the framing structure of Arabian Nights is incredibly feminist because she [Sheherazade] saves her life and everyone else's by telling stories,” Hannah tells The New Arab. “It's a woman who wins, a woman who's allowed to win eventually. And we rarely get that.”

Hakawatis is a corrective to that, centring not just one, but five women: Fatah the Young (played by Alaa Habib), Akila the Writer (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi), Zuya the Warrior (Laura Hanna), Wadiha the Dancer (Houda Echouafni) and Naha the Wise (Roann Hassani McCloskey).

Alaa Habib as Fatah the Young 

Houda Echouafni as Wadiha the Dancer 

Nadi Kemp-Sayfi as Akila the Writer

After deciding on five parts, Hannah said she wanted to have them as “different facets, sort of archetypes”.

“But there is a world in which you could read this play and say those five women are all Sheherazade,” she says.

Having “always been frustrated with the parts that are available for global majority actors, but specifically Arab women”, Hannah has spent much of her career “trying to create roles that are more diverse and interesting and three-dimensional Arab women”.

The other thing she’s often done in her work is create stories within stories; the Arabian Nights is, of course, one of the ultimate examples of stories within a story, with all its tales framed by the larger story of Sheherazade fighting for survival.

The idea for Hakawatis came to Hannah slowly, then all in a rush. She had seen two productions at the Lyceum in Edinburgh which were adaptations of 1,001 Nights; the first was the Tim Supple-directed One Thousand and One Nights, with stories adapted by Hanan al-Shaykh, and the other was a production for children called Arabian Nights, written by Suhayla El-Bushra.

Hakawatis Rehearsal Photos taken on 11 November 2022 

[Shakespeares Globe]

And then she went to see Lions and Tigers by Tanika Gupta at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and “fell in love” with the theatre space, which is lit by one hundred beeswax candles and is created in the tradition of the candlelit theatres of Shakespeare’s time.

“I think all of those things sort of crystallised in my head as I was walking home along the Thames to the station,” she tells The New Arab. “I thought ‘oh' and that's how I had this idea. So I think it's like all of those things were sitting in different bits of my brain and they all just crystallised having seen that beautiful play and that beautiful space.”

And so Hakawatis came into being, directed by Pooja Ghai, who directed that production of Lions and Tigers that Hannah watched.

Pooja is the artistic director of the theatre company Tamasha; Hakawatis is a co-production with Tamasha.

The play features eight stories in total. Four are from the original 1,001 Nights, with Hannah wanting to use stories people had most likely never heard before, “because there’s only a few used” regularly.

She thought she would read the whole of 1,001 Nights, but “failed because it’s so bloody long”. “But I sort of would start a story and be like, no, not this one,” she says. In the end, she settled on The Fisherman and the Djinn, The Wolf and the Fox, The King and the Sage and The Sparrow and the Eagle.

The fifth story is an adaptation that Hannah, who is of Palestinian and Irish descent, has done of an old Palestinian folktale. The final three are original new stories, specially commissioned by Hannah from al-Shaykh and El-Bushra – the two women whose plays she had seen that helped inspire her story – and Sara Shaarawi.

Their inclusion speaks again to Hannah’s love of stories within stories.

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“I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if we could have some new stories, and wouldn't it be amazing if I could get other Arab women writers to write those?” says Hannah. “And then we've got a situation where the way it's made, the way it's written, mirrors what's happening in the play.”

The play explores, says Hannah, “different notions of storytelling”, perhaps unsurprising for anyone who speaks Arabic and knows that ‘hakawati’ means ‘storyteller’.

The play is exploring the “idea of storytelling written down, which is a very Western form of storytelling,” says Hannah. “And storytelling as in the spoken, the oral tradition, which is obviously much more from the MENA region.”

“If you've got one idea of what you think an Arab woman looks like, you need to bin it”

In a call-out to that oral tradition, every telling of The Fisherman and the Djinn during the play’s run will be unique. “So The Fisherman and the Djinn story is written on the page,” says Hannah, “but it says every night the actors are to improvise this live. It's like an offer to the actors to do it for real.”

Her actors, and the roles they play, are partly how Hannah is looking to push back against people’s stereotypes of Arab women. She wanted to make sure “that all these women are composites of other women I know so that they're truthful”.

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That truth means that Hakawatis, Hannah says, “won't be for everybody”.

“There'll be some people who feel like it's maybe a little bit too racy or something,” she continues. All the women on stage are “strong, beautiful, ferocious women,” says Hannah, adding: “If you've got one idea of what you think an Arab woman looks like, you need to bin it.”

Hakawatis is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse until January 14

Sarah Shaffi is a freelance literary journalist and editor. She writes about books for Stylist Magazine online and is the books editor at Phoenix Magazine.
Follow her here: @sarahshaffi

Photos by Ellie Kurttz

 

Sporting statehood: How Palestine became a FIFA member after decades of exclusion


Badr Taleb Maki
16 December, 2022

Palestinian football history with FIFA reflects Palestinian history more widely – a constant fight for rights and recognition –but its resilience and ultimate victory can offer hope more broadly to the Palestinian struggle. 

With the first wave of Jewish emigration to Palestine at the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement sought to use sport to bolster its project. They believed it could be effectively channelled as a way to prepare Jewish youths in Palestine for building the 'homeland'.

This was before the Balfour Declaration – which gave a huge boost to this project in 1917, with Britain promising to help the Zionist movement establish a Jewish homeland in Mandate Palestine.

In 1925, Jews in Palestine set up a body to organise and govern Jewish football clubs which had already started appearing.

Early on, it applied to join the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) but was unsuccessful; the organisation set up by the Maccabi World Union, didn’t represent both Arabs and Jews. This was the main reason given by FIFA for its refusal to admit it as a member.

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In 1928, the first Palestinian Football Association was created. It included both Arab and Jewish players, with the inclusion of Arabs in order to meet FIFA's demand to represent the whole population in Palestine.

In 1929, the Palestinian Football Association joined FIFA. However, Jewish members were alone in charge of running the organisation, with the role of Arab members tokenised and marginalised.

"The Palestinian Arab Football Association temporarily disappeared after the Great Palestinian Revolt (1936-39), with many of its members arrested and imprisoned by the British mandate government for their involvement in the uprising"

In response, Palestinian Arabs founded the Palestinian Arab Football Association in 1931, which called for a boycott of Zionist teams in Palestine and organised Arab-only sports activities.

The Palestinian Arab Football Association temporarily disbanded after the Great Palestinian Revolt (1936-39), with many of its members arrested and imprisoned by the British Mandate government for their involvement in the uprising.

In the following years, many football clubs were established in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Acca, Gaza, and Hebron. In 1944, the Palestine Arab Football Association was re-established and survived until the Nakba in 1948.

Meanwhile, the Zionist-dominated Palestine Football Association participated in the World Cup qualifiers in 1934 against Egypt and in 1938 against Greece. They used the name "Palestine" ("Mandatory Palestine") on both occasions. However, the team that played had no Arab players. Some of the Jewish footballers were soldiers serving in the British army.

Jibril Rajoub, current head of the Palestinian Football Association 

[Abbas Momani/AFP via Getty]

First Palestinian attempt to enter FIFA

The first true Palestinian attempt to join FIFA took place in Luxembourg in 1946. FIFA refused, after a representative of the Jewish association argued that the "Palestinian Football Association" had been accepted previously, and was inclusive – containing four or five Arab clubs – although it contained a Jewish majority and archival documentation affirms the existence of over 50 Palestinian Arab football clubs in that period.

FIFA rejected a second membership request from the Arab Palestinian association, claiming that two associations from 'the same country' were not possible and that it would contradict its internal rules to accept part of a state as an independent member.

Despite that, Palestinian Arabs participated in pan-Arab tournaments, in Alexandria in 1952, Syria in 1956, and Lebanon in 1958. Some of the players taking part were believed to have been from the Palestinian diaspora, exiled after the Nakba.

"The first Palestinian attempt to join FIFA took place in Luxembourg in 1946. FIFA refused, after a representative of the Jewish association argued that the "Palestinian Football Association" had been accepted previously, and was inclusive - containing four or five Arab clubs"

After the West Bank was annexed by Jordan, some Palestinian teams participated in the Jordanian league, like the Shabab al-Khalil (Hebron Youth), and the Jerusalem Muazpheen Club.

The Six-Day War

Palestinian football came to a halt once more when Israel seized and occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The Palestinian Arab Football Association was re-established outside of Palestine in 1971. Gradually, some football clubs started becoming active again in the occupied territories, in and around Jerusalem, Nablus, Jericho, Hebron and Gaza. Meetings were set up to organise sports activities and games.

Palestinian clubs played multiple matches against each other at stadiums that existed in that period, such as the St George's School stadium in Jerusalem, Hussein Bin Ali Stadium in Hebron, Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza, and Al-Baladi in Jericho.

In 1980, a Palestinian Clubs League was established in the West Bank, alongside another in Gaza. The two leagues oversaw many tournaments before the First Intifada broke out in 1987, and sports activities stopped completely, as football clubs became strongholds of resistance.

Among the thousands killed, prisoners, and wounded, many were footballers and athletes, who played a prominent role in the Intifada.

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A Palestinian diaspora squad was set up abroad, with footballers from the Palestinian diaspora in Iraq, Syria and Kuwait. The team took part in a sports tour, travelling to France, Italy, and Spain, where football matches were arranged with friends of the Palestinian people.

Four years later, in 1991, footballing resumed in stadiums in the West Bank and Gaza, and a People's Neighbourhood Championship was organised. This situation lasted until 1993's Oslo Accords and saw around 350 active clubs across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In November 1993 the Palestinian (Arab) Football Association asked FIFA to accept its membership bid, in line with the recognition of the Palestinian Olympic Committee by the International Olympic Committee that year.

In 1994, with the start of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) era, a Ministry of Youth and Sports was established, headed by Dr Azmi Shu'aibi. The Ministry cooperated with the Olympic Committee to establish sporting associations, including the Football Association. In September 1995 the Palestinian Football Association was finally granted provisional member status by FIFA, a decision ratified in Zurich in July 1996.

"Football clubs became strongholds of resistance, with athletes dedicating their skills to the Palestinian cause. Among the thousands killed, prisoners, and wounded, were many footballers and athletes, who played a prominent role in the Intifada"

On 8 June 1998, during the 51st FIFA conference in Paris, Palestine was accepted as a full member of FIFA. The late prince Faisal bin Fahd Al Saud, former president of Youth Welfare in Saudi Arabia played a decisive role in Palestine's entry into the FIFA family.

He had met repeatedly with Joao Havelange, FIFA's then-president to press for Palestine's inclusion. He also offered his financial and moral support to Palestinian football and this support outlived him, being reflected later on by Saudi support for Palestine within FIFA, and through funding the construction of the Faisal Al-Husseini International Stadium in the Al-Ram suburb of Jerusalem.

George Ghattas, who was deputy president of the Palestinian (Arab) Football Association at the time, recalls that "a surge of emotion overcame the Palestinian delegation, amidst thundering applause from the delegates of national associations from all over the world", when the vote was cast unanimously by the representatives of every country, including the Israeli representative (who initially opposed the motion but found himself outnumbered and ended up voting with it).

Palestine won the bronze medal at the 9th Arab Games in Amman in 1999, and over the last decade, Palestine has participated in the AFC Asian Cup finals on a number of occasions. Some international actors have tried to organise football matches between the Palestinian and Israeli teams – an attempt at sports normalisation – however, the Palestinian side has always rejected these attempts.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition. To read the original article click here.

Article by Badr Taleb Makki: Sports editor for the al-Sha'b newspaper in Jerusalem from 1986 to 1993 and Secretary of the Hilal Al-Quds Club from 1990-2007. Media director for the Ministry of Youth and Sports from 1994 to 2014. Media spokesman and Secretary of the Palestinian Football Association from 1996 to 2007. Media director for the Palestinian Olympic Committee from 2015-2018.

Translated by Rose Chacko

What Itamar Ben-Gvir as security minister will mean for Palestinians

Jessica Buxbaum

Analysis: The far-right extremist has long sought to change the status quo at al-Aqsa mosque and his new role will galvanise the settler movement while empowering soldiers and border police to clamp down on Palestinians.

On 25 November, an Israeli soldier in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron was filmed telling an activist that Israeli parliament member and incoming national security minister Itamar “Ben-Gvir's going to bring order to this place… You're done for... I decide what the law is around here”.

In a separate incident, another soldier in Hebron was caught on camera slamming an activist to the ground and punching him in the face. Together, these events illustrate what life may be like with Ben-Gvir running the police.

On the same day as the soldiers’ assaults, Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power Party and re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party struck a deal placing Ben-Gvir in the newly created national security minister role.

"The settler movement is empowered now because they know they're untouchable"

Dov Waxman, director of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, called the appointment irresponsible, saying, “It’s like putting a pyromaniac in charge of a fire”.

The position expands the public security minister's job to include overseeing the Border Police in the occupied West Bank in addition to Israel’s national police. The Defence Ministry is currently in charge of the West Bank’s Border Police unit, but Ben-Gvir’s new role changes that authority.

“Trying to expand [the security minister] authorities is a way for Ben-Gvir to fulfil his own agenda,” Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, said.

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Internally, the new role is already facing pushback from Israeli politicians. Outgoing Defence Minister Benny Gantz accused Netanyahu of giving Ben-Gvir “a private army” in the West Bank. Having control over the Border Police means Ben-Gvir will be in charge of law enforcement handling Palestinian protests and Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank.

While all Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal under international law, only outposts are illegal under Israeli law. The far-right lawmaker has long supported legalising outposts.

Ben-Gvir's new role expands the public security minister's job to include overseeing the Border Police in the occupied West Bank in addition to Israel’s national police. [Getty]

Possible policy changes under Ben-Gvir

The New Arab’s conversations with several experts indicate that one of Ben-Gvir’s top policy issues will be shifting the norm on Al-Aqsa, Islam’s third holiest site.

“Everything that governs Palestinian life will be divided between Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich,” Israeli activist Miko Peled said, referring to Smotrich’s position as a minister in the Defence Ministry. “The burning of Al-Aqsa and the building of a new temple is very high on their priority list.”

Along with groups of Israeli extremists, Ben Gvir has stormed Al-Aqsa Compound several times, often performing religious rituals there. Currently, Jews are allowed to visit the area, known to them as the Temple Mount, but not pray there.

Some Temple Mount activists have advocated for the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque, where they believe two ancient Jewish temples once stood, to then be replaced with a third temple.

"His rhetoric emboldens soldiers and border police to clamp down on Palestinians"

Ben-Gvir has said he wants to change the status quo regarding Jewish prayer, which could further inflame tensions at the flashpoint site.

The lawmaker, who was convicted of racist incitement against Palestinians in 2007, has also advocated for targeted assassinations of Palestinians in response to terrorism, shooting Palestinians for throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails, and stripping Palestinians of Israeli citizenship for their deemed disloyalty to Israel or for attacks against soldiers.

With Ben-Gvir’s role to include managing the Israel Prison Service, Palestinian political prisoners may also feel the upcoming minister’s harsh reforms. He has proposed worsening prison conditions for Palestinians, who are already treated inhumanely in jail - living in cramped cells, undergoing physical and psychological abuse, and being denied family visits.

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Emboldening Israeli soldiers and settlers

The soldier, Yair Levy, who berated an activist in Hebron last month was initially sentenced to 10 days in military prison. However, after Ben-Gvir met with Levy’s father and denounced the soldier’s punishment, his jail time was reduced to six days.

Waxman noted that Ben-Gvir’s language “encourages Israeli soldiers to feel like they can act with more impunity”.

Over the weekend, Ben-Gvir praised an Israeli soldier who fatally shot Palestinian Ammar Mefleh at point-blank on Friday.

One of Ben-Gvir's top policy issues will be shifting the norm on Al-Aqsa, Islam's third holiest site. [Getty]

"Precise action, you really fulfilled the honour of all of us and did what was assigned to you," Ben Gvir told the soldier, calling him a “hero”.

“His rhetoric emboldens soldiers and border police to clamp down on Palestinians,” Yara Hawari, a senior policy analyst at the Palestinian policy network, Al-Shabaka, told The New Arab.

But activists and experts warn that the Israeli army and police aren’t the only groups galvanised by Ben-Gvir gaining greater power.

“The settler movement is empowered now because they know they're untouchable,” Peled said. “Not that they were ever held accountable before, but this is going to be amplified now a thousand-fold."

"Everything that governs Palestinian life will be divided between Ben-Gvir and [Bezalel] Smotrich"

This year, there have been more than 260 settler-related incidents resulting in Palestinians being injured or killed. This number is already nearly 70 per cent higher than last year’s figures. More than 100 incidents of settler violence were recorded within 10 days in October, just as Israel was gearing up for its November election.

According to Zonszein, with Ben-Gvir, who lives in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, now holding a top government position, it “gives everybody who lives in the settlements trying to intimidate Palestinians, all the more legitimacy to continue doing what they're doing”.

06 December, 2022

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist covering Palestine and Israel. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The National, and Gulf News.
Follow her on Twitter: @jess_buxbaum

DECRIMINALIZATION 

New Cannabis Research Institute will study the effects of marijuana and how best to manage it

2022/12/16

A cannabis-themed mural by artist Olusola "Shala" Akintunde on display, April 4, 2022, outside Sports World in Wrigleyville. - Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/TNS

CHICAGO — A new cannabis research center in Chicago will explore the effects of the plant and how best to manage the industry, officials announced Thursday.

The Cannabis Research Institute is expected to do work on crop production, health benefits and risks, worker training and advocacy on policy issues such as social equity.

Likely topics include the impacts of cannabis legalization, demographic gaps of medical cannabis programs and effects on medical conditions, such as anxiety and inflammation.

It’s a joint project between the state and city, to be operated by the Discovery Partners Institute, part of the University of Illinois system.

The few cannabis research centers at other universities, such as UCLA, Harvard and MIT, have taken money from cannabis investors, the Los Angeles Times reported.

While the Illinois institute will work to improve the legal industry, it will stay impartial by not accepting funding from companies that directly work in cannabis, Discovery Partners Executive Director Bill Jackson said. Instead, it will be funded primarily by federal, state and local grants.

The institute also must work with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to conduct its research, because marijuana remains illegal under federal law. However, Jackson said, the institute may do work related to President Joe Biden’s recent announcement to reconsider the designation of marijuana as a Schedule I substance with no medical value and a high potential for abuse.

Illinois is an ideal place to conduct cannabis research, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said, because it’s home to four of the biggest cannabis companies in the nation, and one of the largest markets.

“Being able to do research, which the (National Institutes of Health) hasn’t done much of, as you know, being able to foster new innovations for the industry, all of that should happen in the city of Chicago and in the state of Illinois,” the governor said. “And so having a research institute just makes all the sense in the world, and the industry itself believes that.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the institute would promote the city’s position in the industry and expand the science needed to shape public policy. With the opening of the institute in the Loop to proceed over the next few months, administrators have begun the search for an executive director.

Students with trauma are not more likely to be triggered when reading potentially disturbing content, study finds

2022/12/16


Modern academic literature often contains trigger warnings – statements intended to warn readers about potentially disturbing materials that might exacerbate their distress related to a previous trauma. However, a new experiment on U.S. students showed that reading passages about physical and sexual assault did not lead to much distress, regardless of trauma history, trigger warning type, and students post-traumatic disorder scores. The study was published in the Journal of American College Health.

Trigger warnings are meant to allow individuals who have experienced trauma to be warned in advance about material that may elicit unwanted, intrusive memories from their past. Theoretically, such warnings should be particularly protective of persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in whom such materials might trigger strong emotional and physiological responses. The idea is that if such people are warned in advance, they will be able to avoid emotional distress.

On another note, trigger warning may generate expectations in readers that might be problematic. Researchers warned that they may encourage avoidance and prevent the processing of materials related to trauma that might actually facilitate recovery.

Trigger warnings were a topic of much debate in the academia, but most of the research so far showed that trigger warnings have little effect – they do not lead to avoidance and do not change how students emotionally respond to materials. However, such studies mainly focused on whether trigger warnings are present or not, not on which form they are in.

To study whether different forms of trigger warnings in literature might have different effects, Matthew Kimble and his colleagues conducted a study on 123 undergraduate students taking introductory psychology courses. The students completed assessments of trauma exposure (Life events checklist – LEC) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD checklist for DSM-5, PCL-5). There were no exclusion criteria for participation – all students were eligible to participate, but given the potential sensitivity of the topic, the researchers did not collect any demographic data.

Based on their assessment of trauma exposure (LEC), students were categorized into three groups. Those reporting experiencing sexual or physical assault were categorized to have a “Trigger Trauma”, those reporting other traumatic experiences were the “Other Trauma” group and those reporting no trauma were the “No Trauma group”. After completing the assessments, students (regardless of their trauma category) were randomly divided to either read a neutral passage or a triggering passage.

“Both passages came from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the triggering passage included descriptions of both physical and sexual assault. The neutral passage was of similar length but included no physical or sexual assault content. The 91 participants who received the potentially triggering passage were further randomly assigned to receive a neutral trigger warning, a positive trigger warning, or a negative trigger warning,” the authors explained.

These three types of warning differed in how they framed the upcoming text and what they focused on – the neutral warning stated that some individuals may get upset with the materials, the positive warning emphasized that the text is an American classic frequently used in class, but that it may cause discomfort. The negative trigger warning focused on describing possible negative emotional reactions to the text.

After receiving the warning, students read the 18-page text for 30 minutes and completed an assessment of psychological distress (Subjective Units of Distress Scale). Two days later, participants were asked to complete the distress assessment again. Two weeks later, they were asked to repeat both the distress assessment and the assessment of PTSD they took on the first day (PCL-5).

“On average, the triggering passage was upsetting relative to the control passage, but distress did not differ based on trauma history,” the researchers wrote. Additionally, the level of distress experienced by students did not change based on the type of trigger warning used.

“All students were somewhat distressed immediately after reading the passage, an effect that dissipated in all groups from Day 1 to Day 2 and remained low. The passage did not appear to trigger symptoms of students’ personal traumas. Students responded the same to the passage regardless of whether the warning was positive, negative, or neutral. Thus, trigger warnings do not seem to generate problematic (or helpful) expectancy effects. This should inform instructors that, if they are inclined to give a trigger warning, the nature of the warning makes little difference,” the study authors concluded.

While study results lead to very clear conclusions, it should be noted that these findings represent an average response and do not negate the possibility that some individuals might respond strongly to a text. Additionally, study participants were students and the sample size was limited, so it is unclear how much the results can be generalized to other populations.

The brief report, “Students responses to differing trigger warnings: A replication and extension”, was authored by Matthew Kimble, Jennifer Koide, and William F. Flack.

© PsyPost is a psychology and neuroscience news website dedicated to reporting the latest research on human behavior, cognition, and society.

Dr. Goran Zangana on Turkey's use of chemical weapons

Dr. Goran Zangana spoke about Turkey's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds

ANF
LONDON
Saturday, 17 Dec 2022, 

Dr Goran Zangana, a medical doctor with experience in acute medicine, public health, epidemiology, health policy and health systems in conflict- affected settings, speaks to journalist Erem Kansoy about Turkey's use of chemical weapons.

  

Swedish internationalists protest Turkish war crimes

Swedish internationalists carried out an action to condemn the war crimes committed by the Turkish state by projecting images of Turkish President Erdogan's cooperation with ISIS.

ANF
STOCKHOLM
Saturday, 17 Dec 2022, 

Swedish internationalists drew attention to the war crimes committed by the Turkish state in Kurdistan by projecting images on Gröna Lund, a sports and entertainment arena in the capital Stockholm. The images of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan symbolizing cooperation with ISIS were projected on the wall. The struggle against fascism was reflected with the slogan ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’.

Activists made statements on social media using the hashtags ‘We see all your crimes’, ‘Let's crush Turkish fascism’ and ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’, saying that the fascist Erdogan regime accelerated the Kurdish genocide campaign, using all kinds of weapons, including chemical weapons, while the OPCW remained silent.

The statement underlined that the Swedish government also turned a blind eye to these crimes and even extradited Kurdish refugees to Turkey to please Erdogan. The activists said that Sweden became a partner in a war crime by accelerating the sale of weapons to the Turkish state in return for NATO membership.

At the end of the statement, a call was made to attend the central march to be held in Stockholm on 21 January.