UK

Universities should say sorry to students if staff strike, says union boss

UCU’s Jo Grady says disruption from any industrial action down to the ‘decisions of management’

Students, whose education has already been hit by the pandemic, face further disruptions if university staff vote to go on strike. 

Photograph: Imagedoc/Alamy

Sally Weale Education correspondent
Sun 26 Sep 2021 

University bosses should apologise for any further disruption to students returning to campuses rather than staff who are due to vote on strike action, a union leader has said.

Jo Grady, the general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), called on students to support lecturers and other university staff who could take industrial action before Christmas and further disrupt learning as campuses try to recover from the effects of the Covid pandemic.

Formal notice of dispute letters were sent to university employers last Wednesday, with strike ballots due to open in 152 universities on 18 October, in the latest chapter of a bitter and long-running dispute over pensions, pay and working conditions, including workforce casualisation.

After all their efforts during the pandemic, Grady said members were angry, morale was at its lowest point ever and she was confident there was huge support for industrial action. In an interview with the Guardian, she said the fight was “too big to lose” and there was “no other option” but to ballot for strike action.

Asked if the union would make an apology to students in the case of further disruption to their studies, Grady said: “I don’t think staff should be apologising for the decisions of management. We are taking action because of the decisions of management.”

Staff were at “breaking point” and if apologies were to be made then it should be vice-chancellors who are saying sorry, she said.

The National Union of Students (NUS) has already come out in support. Its president, Larissa Kennedy, said: “Staff working conditions are student learning conditions and we stand shoulder to shoulder with our educators in fighting for a more just education system.”

Staff who took strike action over similar issues in 2019-20 had widespread support from students. But after the disruption caused by the pandemic, with studies moved online and students stranded for months in their bedrooms, there are fears support might be eroded if lectures are cancelled once again, with fresh demands for tuition fee rebates.

“I think staff will have conversations and I will put out messages with the NUS to students because I think it’s really important they understand,” said Grady. “But I think to apologise for something you too are a victim of would be to send a really mixed message about who should be apologising to students and who should be putting this right.”

The latest ballot over pensions, which affects lecturers, technicians, researchers and administrators at institutions where staff are members of the University Superannuation Scheme (USS), was triggered after employers voted last month for pension cuts to deal with an estimated £14bn-18bn funding shortfall in the scheme.

The UCU claims it would mean cuts of 35% for a typical member – the employers say 7-15% – and argues the valuation on which it is based is flawed. Seven of the 152 UK universities taking part in the strike ballot will vote just on USS, 83 on pay and working conditions, and another 62 on both issues.

A spokesperson for USS employers said: “Instead of punishing students through yet more strike action, the union should formally propose a solution at the joint negotiating committee, the official forum for making changes to the scheme, and we will consult employers on it.”

Lavrov Confirms Contact With Paramilitary Organisation in Mali

26/09/2021 - By Thomas O. Falk IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

More than ten days ago, reports of a possible deployment of Russian mercenaries in Mali surfaced for the first time. Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov has now confirmed contact with a paramilitary group. Whether this is the Wagner Group remains unclear.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has confirmed that the authorities in Mali, West Africa, have contacted a private Russian military company. “We have turned to a private military company from Russia,” Lavrov said at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. “As I understand it, in connection with the fact that France seeks to significantly reduce its military contingent that was there and (…) should fight terrorists.”

Lavrov emphasised that he saw no responsibility for the Russian government in this matter: “We have nothing to do with this. These are commercial contracts between a recognised, legitimate government and those who provide foreign military aid.”

Lavrov did not directly mention the name Wagner. In France and other western countries, reports of the possible use of Wagner in Mali had recently caused great concern. In Germany, voices increased to review the deployment of the Federal Armed Forces in the African crisis state in such a case.

Mali’s government announced around a week ago that the alleged plans to hire Wagner were merely rumours. According to information from the capital Bamako, the leadership, which came to power through a coup, is primarily concerned with its own personal protection. Around 900 men and women from Germany are involved in the UN Minusma mission to stabilise Mali. About 300 German soldiers are also in the country for the EUTM training mission, running since 2013.

SEE 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for WAGNER 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for MALI 

With Merkel Out, Germany’s CDU Suffer Their Worst Result in Federal Election since World War II

26/09/2021 - By Ivan Dikov

With outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel completing her fourth and last term at the helm of Germany, her center-right bloc CDU/CSU suffered its worst result even in a federal election against the backdrop of gains for the center-left and the Greens.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led in Sunday’s election by its chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) received only 24.2% of the votes.

This is the CDU/CSU alliance’s worst electoral score since Germany’s first elections after World War II were held in 1949.

It is a drop of 8.9 percentage points compared with the previous federal election in 2017, and it also the first time the CDU/CSU has received fewer than 30% of the votes.

The decision of Angela Merkel, who has served four consecutive four-year terms as German chancellor, to step down also made the 2021 federal election notable by turning it into the first federal vote in the country’s postwar history in which the incumbent chancellor hasn’t sought reelection.

While the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has come on top, its result of 25.7%, an increase of 5.2 percentage points from the past election in 2017, isn’t much greater than the CDU’s, and leaving wide open the question as to who led the coalition to form Germany’s next government.

The environmentalist Greens party came in third in Germany’s federal election on Sunday, with its best electoral score ever at 14.6%, up 5.7 percentage points from 2017.

The liberal centrist Free Democratic Party remained fourth with 11.5% of the votes, up 0.7 percentage points from four years ago.

The fifth spot is for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) which received 10.4%, down 2.3 points from 2017.

The far-leftist “Left” party is sixth with only 4.8% of the votes, down 4.3% from the previous federal elections.

Sunday’s federal vote in Germany saw a rather high turnout of 76.6%.

The results have opened the way for various coalition possibilities although both of the two biggest formations, the CDU/CSU and the SPD, which have been ruling Germany in a “grand right-left coalition” since 2017, might opt to try to form a three-way coalition, most likely including the Greens.

If that proves to be the case, it will be the first time since Germany will have three parties in power at the federal level since the 1960s.

Both the Social Democrats and the Greens have gained more than five percentage points compared with the previous federal election in 2017, which is giving them a morale boost against the backdrop of the CDU/CSU alliance’s grim result.

SPD’s win, however, is hardly too categorical, while the Greens had higher hopes based on projections earlier in the electoral campaign.

(Chart: The projection of the 2021 German federal election results from Infratest dimap/ARD)
Germany election: worst ever result momentarily silences CDU

Philip Oltermann in Berlin 

As the first exit poll flashed up on the screens inside the Konrad Adenauer Haus, the Berlin headquarters of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party faithful who had gathered in the central courtyard fell silent.

Supporters react to estimates broadcast on television during the Greens (Die Gruenen) electoral party, in Berlin on September 26, 2021 after the German general elections. © David Gannon, AF

The black bar representing their conservative party showed up first: 25%, the worst result the dominant political force of modern German politics – the party of Angela Merkel, Helmut Kohl and Adenauer – has achieved in its history. Until today, the CDU’s low point was the 31% it had gained at the first democratic vote in the postwar era, in 1949.

“Vote what makes Germany strong”, urged a large banner outside the building, showing the head of CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet in a line next to its era-defining chancellors. But tonight the CDU looked weak, and Laschet will face an uphill struggle to inherit the chancellory on the back of such a painful result.

Related: Germany goes to the polls to decide Angela Merkel’s successor

The CDU not only has history, however, it also has an uncanny inability to give up a fight. When the television screen showed the bar for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), revealing the two traditional broad-church parties to be neck-and-neck, there were yelps of relief.

By the time it was clear that a leftwing coalition between the SPD, the Greens and Die Linke would on first exit polls not have enough support for a governing majority, young Christian Democrats were cheering and clapping with their hands in the air.

When Laschet took to the stage at his party HQ at shortly before 7pm CET, his speech was almost upbeat: “We knew this would be an open and tight election”, he said. “We can’t be happy with the result, but this will be a long evening”.

Like Olaf Scholz, the SPD candidate, he laid down a claim to lead the next government. Every vote for his party was a vote against a leftwing government, he said “which is why we will do everything to form a government under the leadership of the [Christian Democratic] Union”.

During the Merkel era, Germany’s conservatives had long looked immune to the erosion in support suffered by other traditional parties of the centre-right across Europe. In 2013, the chancellor shored up 41.5% of the national vote behind her party, an emphatic win reminiscent of the time in the middle of the 20th century, when Germany was a de-facto two party state.

Related: The Observer view on the fight to succeed Angela Merkel | Observer editorial

Now that the CDU has caught up with the rest of Europe, it is unclear what the ramifications will be. Rightwingers in the party will blame Merkel for having gutted her conservative outfit of its old ideological core, leaving her successor to pick up the mess. Centrist will say the ideological core has had little to offer to a modern German electorate, and that it is only thanks to Merkel’s skill that the party managed to remain popular for so long.

Many will point a finger at Laschet, whose ran a campaign that lacked focus, energy and a coherent message. The lackadaisical air that has followed him throughout the campaign trail was evident even on the day of the vote: as Laschet posed in front of photographers at the polling station, it was obvious he had accidentally folded his ballot the wrong way around, so that his own vote was clear for everyone to see.

After the result, many commentators will say that the CDU would have won a clear victory if it had picked as its candidate Markus Söder, the highly energetic and waspish state premier of Bavaria.

Sunday’s result in Germany’s south throws a question mark over such received wisdom: the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, on Sunday night looked on course to get 33% of the vote in the conservative stronghold, the second-worst result in its history.

As the Christian Democratic Union’s digested the result on Sunday night, eyes also turned to the result in the electoral district number 196.

The constituency, in an unspectacular part of the eastern state of Thuringia, was seen by some as one battleground that could point to the party’s future: the CDU was represented here by Hans-Georg Maaßen, the former head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency who was forced to resign in 2018 after being accused of ignoring evidence of anti-immigrant riots in the east.

Maaßen sees his job to win back CDU voters who have drifted off to Alternative for Germany (AfD), mainly by co-opting their agenda. On social media channels, he has railed against Merkel’s immigration policy, “economic globalists”, and a perceived takeover of national media by leftwing activists.

The AfD sees it differently: it has hopes that Maaßen could be the door-opener to future coalitions between the large conservative bloc and the far-right upstarts. One local AfD branch, in the city of Suhl, endorsed Maaßen over its own candidate, urging its supporters to vote for “a candidate with backbone and political experience”.

On Sunday night it looked like the Maaßen experiment had failed spectacularly: not only was the SPD on course to win the seat in district number 196, the CDU rightwinger was also trailing behind the AfD in third place.

The worst-case scenario for the Christian Democrats was always that its party would descend into infighting as soon as the clock struck 6 o’clock on Sunday, and be unfit to conduct coherent coalition talks in the coming weeks.

With the eventual result as close as it is, and no emboldened rival in sight, Laschet is likely to survive. His party will do its utmost to block out the historic nature of its defeat, and fight to keep alive its dream of leading the next chancellor regardless.

The center-left Social Democrats are ahead of the conservative CDU/CSU bloc by almost 2%, according to initial projected results. In such a tight race, the possibilities for a coalition are still unclear

The first projected results are in for Germany's 2021 federal election, with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) on 25.8%, narrowly ahead of the center-right Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party (CDU/CSU) on 24.1%.

Both the conservative bloc and the SPD have said they want to lead the next government, and mathematically, either party could if they secure the necessary allies.

The environmentalist Greens are on course to record their best ever result, headed for around 14% of the vote. The pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) had 11.5%, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) had 10.5%. The socialist Left party was hovering around the 5% mark.

The projections suggest the center-left parties were the biggest winners of the election. Both the SPD and the Greens are on course to gain more than 5% compared to their result in the last federal election in 2017.

The conservative bloc suffered heavy losses as the Angela Merkel era comes to an end. They were down by over 8% on the previous election and are heading towards their worst result since World War II.

What this means

In such a tight race, coalition possibilities remain unclear.

According to these projections, one option is a continuation of the "grand coalition" of the conservative CDU/CSU bloc and the SPD that has governed Germany since 2013.

However, with the two biggest parties both vowing to build the next government, Germany could be headed for a three-way coalition for the first time since the 1960s at the federal level.

Options include a coalition between the CDU/CSU, the Greens and the FDP.

Alternatively, the SPD could also seek to partner up with the Greens and the FDP.

All parties have ruled out entering into a coalition with the AfD.

The election of Germany's new chancellor by the Bundestag won't take place until a governing coalition has been formed. This could take months. But SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz said he hoped coalition talks would be wrapped up by Christmas.

"To name an exact date would be absurd, but it must be the case that I, that we, do everything to ensure that we are ready before Christmas — a little earlier would also be good," Scholz said during a round-table discussion with other party candidates on Sunday night.

CDU chancellor candidate Armin Laschet also called for a government to "definitely" be formed before Christmas. In the meantime, Angela Merkel will remain in office in a caretaker role.

What the parties are saying

Scholz celebrated the projected election results at the SPD's party headquarters in Berlin, telling a crowd of cheering supporters that voters had made it clear they want him to be the "next chancellor."

"We have what it takes to govern a country," he said. "Let's wait for the final results, but then we will get down to work."

Laschet said the conservative bloc would do "everything we can" to form a new government, despite the election setback.

"We cannot be satisfied with the results of the election," Laschet told his supporters.

"We will do everything we can to build a conservative-led government because Germans now need a future coalition that modernizes our country," he said. "It will probably be the first time that we will have a government with three partners."

Greens chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock admitted that her party hadn't performed as well as expected, despite winning more votes than in the last federal election.

"We wanted more. We didn't achieve that, partly because of our own mistakes at the beginning of the campaign —mistakes on my part," Baerbock told supporters.

The Greens enjoyed a surge in support earlier in the year, even taking the lead in polls, but their popularity took a hit after a series of missteps, including a plagiarism scandal. Although the Greens don't have a shot at the chancellorship, they could play a role in the next governing coalition.
How does the election work?

The German electoral system produces coalition governments. It seeks to unite the principles of majority rule and proportional representation. Each voter casts two ballots. The first is for what is called a "direct" candidate from their constituency and the second is for a political party.

Any party that gets more than 5% of the votes is guaranteed a place in the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. This ensures that both big and small parties are represented, but has led to the legislature becoming the second-biggest in the world with a possible 900 seats this time around.

The reason is Germany's complicated electoral law, and the mandates for the "overhang" seats (Überhangmandate) and compensation "leveling" seats (Ausgleichsmandate) that assure the composition of the Bundestag will be proportionate to the actual votes for the parties.

How long will it take to form a coalition?

The process of forming could take weeks, or even months.

Coalition negotiations in 2017 were the longest in German history, leaving the country without a government for almost six months. This is because the FDP walked out of talks between the CDU and the Green party after a month of negotiations. For the last eight years, the two biggest parties, the CDU and the SPD, have governed together with Angela Merkel as chancellor.

It remains to be seen if the process will go quicker this time — especially if the political priorities of the partners are more closely aligned.

How is the chancellor chosen?

The parties put forward their candidate ahead of the election campaign. Once a new government is in place, the German president nominates a chancellor to be elected by the Bundestag. This is typically the main candidate from the senior coalition partner in the newly-formed government.

To be elected, the chancellor candidate needs an absolute majority from lawmakers. So far, all chancellors, including Merkel, have been elected in the first round.
Can an election be contested?

In Germany, any eligible voter can contest elections. They must send a written formal objection to the election review commission with the Bundestag in Berlin within two months of election day.

This commission processes all submissions. A decision is made on each individual challenge, and each objector receives feedback from the Bundestag. The entire procedure can take up to one year.

To invalidate the results of a Bundestag election, an objection must meet two requirements. Firstly, there must be an electoral error that violates the Federal Election Act, the Federal Election Code, or the Constitution. Secondly, the reported electoral error would have to have an impact on the distribution of seats in the Bundestag.

Objectors can also contest the findings of the election review commission and go all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court.

A German national vote has never been declared invalid.

The climate crisis has made the idea of a better future impossible to imagine

Despite all the analogies for this possibly terminal emergency, it is unlike anything that has come before

Illustration: Nathalie Lees
Sat 25 Sep 2021

Ian Jack

Writing in 2003, the American environmentalist Bill McKibben observed that although “some small percentage” of scientists, diplomats and activists had known for 15 years that the Earth was facing a disastrous change, their knowledge had almost completely failed to alarm anyone else.

It certainly alarmed McKibben: in June 1988, the scientist James Hansen testified to the US Congress that the world was warming rapidly and human behaviour was the primary cause – the first loud and unequivocal warning of the climate crisis to come – and before the next year was out, McKibben had published The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a lay audience. But few others seemed particularly worried. “People think about ‘global warming’ in the way they think about ‘violence on television’ or ‘growing trade deficits’, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all,” he wrote in 2003. “Hardly anyone has fear in their guts.”


McKibben’s words appeared in the literary magazine Granta, which I then edited, in a piece I’d commissioned for an issue on global warming: This Overheating World. It seemed a timely and important theme, but sometimes editors can get too far ahead of the game. Many thousands of people across the world felt more and knew more about the climate crisis than I did, but few of them, unfortunately, appeared to be literary novelists or writers of narrative non-fiction. The issue included some fine pieces but was not a total success. In fact, Margaret Atwood did publish a novel that year, Oryx and Crake, set in a world ruined by climate breakdown (among other causes), but the most prominent examples of its fictional treatment, the small genre sometimes known as “cli-fi”, had still to come. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, published in 2006, may never be surpassed, not even by the Book of Revelation, as the future’s most terrifying herald.

Literature had good reasons to resist. I’m never sure what the German philosopher-sociologist Theodor Adorno was driving at with his statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; only that he might be suggesting that in the prospect or memory of such a calamity, poetry was useless and the pretension of its relevance simple-minded. And so it might be with novels and the climate crisis. Earlier writers such as Jules Verne and HG Wells entertained their readers with versions of the future that were sometimes frightening, but only in a hide-beneath-the-bedsheets way, and against the common grain of western optimism that the future would be better than the past (a feeling that survived the Eurocentric horror of the last century’s first 50 years, and, in my generation’s case, the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear war).

Who believes it now? The idea of a better future has been replaced by one of a future not as bad as it could be, providing urgent steps are taken; but for more than 20 years (more than 30 years, if the counting starts with Hansen’s address to Congress) the science behind our understanding of climate breakdown was widely dismissed either as an international conspiracy or an inconvenient speculation, or relegated to a problem on a par with McKibben’s “growing trade deficits”. National electorates and their political leaders; media magnates; company stockholders and executives, especially those in the carbon fuel business: few of them wanted to know. As recently as 2015, Boris Johnson could describe worldwide concern over the climate as “global leaders driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity”. In 2012 Anne-Marie Trevelyan, now his international trade secretary, wrote in support of a campaign against windfarms: “We aren’t getting hotter, global warming isn’t actually happening.” As the gospel of St Luke tells us, there will be more joy in heaven over a single sinner who repents than over the 99 righteous people who don’t need to bother, but here on Earth it might be appropriate to have statements such as Trevelyan’s (she made several) incised on durable measuring sticks that can be inserted along the high tidemark of her Northumberland constituency, whose coastline is so long and low.

It would be wrong, however, to confine the blame for our delayed engagement to straightforward denialism. Recognising climate breakdown as a possibly terminal crisis for civilisation led to the difficulty of managing it inside our heads. As David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, wrote six years ago: “It’s hard​ to come up with a good analogy for climate change but that doesn’t stop people from trying. We seem to want some way of framing the problem that makes a decent outcome look less unlikely than it often appears.” He listed the most common analogies: climate was a “moonshot problem”, a “war mobilisation problem”, a “disease eradication problem”. Beyond giving a notion of the effort required, none worked; war, for instance, needed a clear enemy in view – and in the climate crisis, Runciman wrote, “the enemy is us”. Analogies offered a false comfort: “Just because we did all those things doesn’t mean we can do this one.”


Boris Johnson’s climate speech annotated: what he said and what he meant

Climate breakdown is like nothing that has gone before. Like an intermittent fountain, its ghastly prospect shoots high in the air one minute and then vanishes as though it had never been. On 9 August this year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report that spread alarm and despondency everywhere. “A code red for humanity,” warned the UN secretary general. “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions … are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.” By 11 August, A-level results, Brexit lorry queues and Prince Andrew had squeezed the message from every front page.

An ordinary kind of life goes on. Research shows that in 2020 the word “cake” was mentioned 10 times more often on UK television shows than the phrase “climate change’”, and that “banana bread” was heard more frequently than “wind power” and “solar power” combined. Research shows that four in 10 young people around the world are hesitant to have children, while three-quarters of them find the future frightening and more than half believe humanity is doomed. Research (by the climate scientists James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr) shows that if humanity had acted on Hansen’s testimony immediately to stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels and begun a decarbonisation process of around 2% a year, then we would now have a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to 1.5C. If that calculation is correct, the odds these days must be quite a lot longer.

Is there fear in our guts? Boris Johnson spoke to the UN assembly on Wednesday like a boy who wanted the applause of the Oxford Union. He had a clever reference (Sophocles), a popular reference (The Muppet Show), and a reference to a particular kind of English life (“unlocking the drinks cabinet”) that vanished with the Austin Allegro. It seems unlikely that the world can be saved by such a speech, but there is no point complaining. For this dangerous moment, he is what we have.

Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist

Australian PM may not join climate summit: report

Issued on: 27/09/2021 - 

Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter and still reliant on the fossil fuel for most of its electricity, has not made a firm commitment on its greenhouse gas reductions

 GREG WOOD AFP/File

IT'S MINERS ARE MOVING INTO ALBERTA, SASK. AND ONTARIO'S RING OF FIRE

Sydney (AFP)

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, under pressure to adopt a 2050 net-zero carbon emissions target, said in an interview published Monday that he may not join this year's landmark UN climate summit in Glasgow.

The world's biggest coal exporter and still reliant on the fossil fuel for most of its electricity, Australia has not made a firm commitment on its own greenhouse gas reductions. Morrison has vowed to mine and export fossil fuels as long as there are buyers.

Asked about attending the global climate crisis conference in November, Morrison told the West Australian newspaper: "We have not made any final decisions."

"I mean it is another trip overseas and I have been on several this year and spent a lot of time in quarantine," he was quoted as saying.

"I have to focus on things here and with Covid. Australia will be opening up around that time. There will be a lot of issues to manage and I have to manage those competing demands."

The 12-day meeting in Scotland, the biggest climate conference since landmark talks in Paris in 2015, is seen as a crucial step in setting worldwide emissions targets to slow global warming.

Morrison's government has suggested it will achieve net-zero carbon emissions "as soon as possible", and preferably by 2050, but has not made any commitments to do so.

The Australian prime minister told the paper he was trying to bring the government and the country together on future commitments so as to provide certainty for the next 20-30 years.

He has been in tough negotiations over setting a net-zero target within the conservative coalition government, an alliance of his own Liberal Party and the Nationals, who have much of their support base in rural and mining communities.

Climate scientists warn extreme weather and fierce fires will become increasingly common due to manmade global warming.

Environmentalists argue inaction on climate change could cost Australia's economy billions of dollars as the country suffers more intense bushfires, storms and floods.

Asked if he would commit to a specific climate target in a separate interview with The Australian newspaper, the prime minister replied: "I can assure you we will have a plan."

Morrison told the paper that Australia's position as the primary energy exporter in the Asia-Pacific region would change and it was important to make a transition towards a low-emission economy.

The prime minister added, however, that the change had to be managed so "things keep running, things stay open, things keep getting dug out of the ground for some considerable time, you have to keep making stuff, you have to keep eating things and the world needs food".

MORE MODERN THAN THE USA
San Marino voters approve abortion three to one in referendum

Issued on: 27/09/2021 -

Des membres de la campagne pour le "oui" à Saint-Marin, dimanche 26 septembre. 

© Jennifer Lorenzini, Reuters

The tiny state of San Marino voted Sunday to allow abortion in a historic referendum result that will bring the predominately Catholic nation in line with most of the rest of Europe.

Some 77.3 percent of voters approved a motion to allow the termination of a pregnancy up to 12 weeks.

After that, abortion would only be allowed if the mother’s life was in danger or in the case of foetal abnormalities that could harm the woman physically or psychologically.

The picturesque republic of San Marino, situated on a mountainside in the centre of Italy, is one of the last places in Europe along with Malta, Andorra and the Vatican to have a total ban on abortion.

In traditionally Catholic Ireland, abortion was made legal in 2018, also after a referendum.

There were celebrations at Sunday’s result among members of the San Marino Women’s Union (UDS), which had initiated the referendum and campaigned for a “Yes” vote against the governing party and the Catholic Church.

“It’s a victory for all the women of San Marino, over the conservatives and reactionaries who believe women have no rights,” UDS president Karen Pruccoli told AFP.

“It’s a victory against the Catholic Church who were our opponents and tried everything to prevent this result.”

More than 35,000 people were eligible to vote in Sunday’s referendum, around one third of them based abroad. The turnout was 41 percent, some 14,500 people.

‘Respect the result’

In the absence of opinion polls, nobody had wanted to predict the result in a country where the influence of the Church remains strong.

Pope Francis last week reiterated his uncompromising position that abortion is “murder”.

The campaign to vote “No” on Sunday was led by the ruling Christian Democratic Party, which has close ties to the Catholic Church.

“It’s a defeat for a country that has always defended life,” the party’s deputy secretary Manuel Ciavatta told AFP after the result.

But he said the government would propose a law within six months to implement the abortion change, that would then be put to parliament.

“We respect the voice of the voters,” he said, while adding: “Our party will do everything it can to help women to ensure they are not left alone.”

Currently, abortion carries a penalty of up to three years in prison for the woman and six years for the doctor who conducts the procedure.

However, nobody has ever been convicted.

Women who choose to have an abortion typically cross into Italy, where it has been legal for more than 40 years.

Before the result came in, Francesca Nicolini, a 60-year-old doctor and member of UDS, had argued: “The majority of young people are on our side, because it’s an issue that directly affects their lives.

“It’s unacceptable to view as criminals women who are forced to have abortions.”

Radical change

The vote signals a radical change for San Marino, where the ban dates back to 1865 and was confirmed by both the fascist regime in the early 20th century and then again in 1974.

Figures from Italy suggest few women from the tiny state cross the border to take advantage of the abortion laws there.

Between 2005 and 2019, only about 20 women a year from San Marino had abortions in Italy, falling to 12 in 2018 and seven in 2019, according to official Istat data cited by the campaigners against abortion.

This is still too many for opponents such as Rocco Gugliotta, a 41-year-old warehouse worker, who asked: “Why should only the mother decide?”

However, Alfiero Vagnini, a 65-year-old cook, was among the “Yes” voters, explaining: “On many subjects, San Marino is behind. We need to become a more modern country.”

(AFP)

Inside South Africa's deadly initiation rituals

Across Africa, many cultures mark the transition from boyhood to manhood with initiation rituals. In South Africa, the secretive initiation season results in the deaths of dozens of young boys every year and leaves hundreds more terribly injured.

This One Tiny Animal Has Found a Way to Give Up Sex Completely, And Still Do Fine

Oppiella nova up close. (M. Maraun and K.Wehne)

NATURE
MIKE MCRAE
25 SEPTEMBER 2021

Let's face it. Sex isn't always worth the effort. For many animals, the whole mating game is so inconvenient, going it alone and reproducing asexually is the best option.

As appealing as it might sound, however, evolution puts a heavy price on a population that gives up sex for too long. Sooner or later, a eukaryotic species will either need to swap chromosomes in a DNA shake-up that increases genetic variation, or risk fading into extinction.

That's the rule, at least – but the beetle mite (Oppiella nova) is having none of it.

By comparing its genome with that of its sexually active cousin, O. subpectinata, a team of researchers from across Europe has found that this micrometer-sized arthropod has been doing quite all right living a chaste lifestyle for... millions of years.

Like us, these tiny mites have a copy for every chromosome making up their genome, which makes them a diploid organism.

Swapping chromosomes and subjecting them to a bit of mix-and-match every now and then helps give a population a diverse choice in genetic combinations, meaning when catastrophe strikes – be it a plague, a temperature change, or introduction of a new predator – there's bound to be at least a few individuals that will cope.

Strip away all the bells and whistles, and that's sex all summed up. Unfortunately, those bells and whistles (searching out mates, competing with them, producing all that sperm, the whole pregnancy thing) impose a toll on maximizing genetic diversity.

There are other ways to maintain a degree of variation that don't rely on sexual reproduction. These processes cause mutations to build up differently in types of the same gene (or allele), creating a unique signature among the genes of asexual organisms.

Known as the Meselson effect, named after Harvard geneticist Matthew Meselson, this mutation pattern could in theory be used to identify a diploid organism as a bona fide, long-term asexual species.

The only problem is none of the evidence for this effect has been clear-cut, leaving too much room for doubt. Some ancient lineages of species thought to be asexual have since been found to have only recent converts, or – scandalous as it is to suggest – have peppered their genes with the occasional licentious tryst over the eons.

What researchers needed was a strong, unambiguous signal of variation in genes in an animal suspected of having given up sex long, long ago, and never looked back.

Which brings us back to O. nova – a little mite with sublineages that went their separate ways between 6 and 16 million years ago, suggesting it's a species that's been around for quite a while.

More importantly, it's a species known to be asexual, in contrast with others on its branch of the family tree, making it a prime specimen to study for evidence of the Meselson effect.

As one might imagine of an animal that could form a conga-line inside a single millimeter, the task of collecting them and analyzing their DNA wasn't exactly easy.

"These mites are only one-fifth of a millimeter in size and difficult to identify," says reproductive biologist Jens Bast from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

The team even required specialized computer programs to decipher the genomes, but it was all worth it in the end.

"Our results clearly show that O. nova reproduces exclusively asexually," says Bast.

"When it comes to understanding how evolution works without sex, these beetle mites could still provide a surprise or two."

This isn't to say asexual reproduction isn't without its problems. The beetle mite appears to be an exception to an otherwise fairly consistent rule in biology.

But the discovery of an animal that's managed to leave sex millions of years in the past does demonstrate it's possible to thrive without it.

This research was published in PNAS.

The social life of a vampire bat

=REUTERS
SEPTEMBER 25, 2021 



Bonding: Captive bats once released were found to join a “friend” during foraging. 

Photo Credit: reisegraf;iStockphoto

Each bat in the colony has its own network of social bonds

When one thinks of the blood-feasting vampire bats, friendship and cooperation may not be among the qualities that come to mind But perhaps they should.

Scientists have shown how those bats that have forged “friendships” with others will rendezvous with these buddies while foraging for a meal.
Studying female bats

Researchers attached small devices to 50 vampire bats to track night time foraging in Panama, when these flying mammals drink blood from wounds they inflict upon cattle in pastures. The study involved female bats, known to have stronger social relationships than males.

Among the bats were 23 wild-born individuals that had been kept in captivity for about two years during related research into bat social behaviour. Social bonds already had been observed among some of them. After being released back into the wild, the bats were found to often join a “friend” during foraging,possibly coordinating the hunt.

“Each bat maintains its own network of close cooperative social bonds,” said behavioral ecologist Gerald Carter of the Ohio State University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who led the research published in PLoS Biology.

Social bonds

Social bonds among vampire bats as they roost in trees include grooming one another and regurgitating blood meals for hungry pals. The study showed that the social bonds formed in roosts extended into the hunt.

The researchers suspect that the bats, while almost never departing on foraging forays with their “friends,” link up with them during the hunt for mutual benefit. They hypothesise the bats might exchange information about prey location or access to an open wound for feeding.
Live in colonies

Vampire bats, which inhabit warmer regions of Latin America and boast wingspans of about 18 cm, are the only mammals with a blood-only diet. They reside in colonies of thousands.

“Even besides their social lives, vampire bats are quites pecial: specializing in a diet of 100% blood is already quite rare among vertebrates,” said co-author Simon Ripperger, a post-doctoral researcher from Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “They are amazing runners, which you wouldn’t expect in a bat. They have heat sensors in their snouts that help them find a spot to make a bite.”

 

Remains of organic molecules are found in the nucleus of ancient dinosaur cells

• Sneha Mali
 
• September 25, 2021
 
•  Sci/Tech

A team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleontherology (IVPP) and the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) have preserved the finest 125 million-year-old dinosaurs in the northeast. China containing nuclei containing organic molecules and chromatin residues. The study was published September 24 in Communications Biology.

A dinosaur named Caudipteryx was a small peacock-shaped omnivore with long tail wings. During the early Cretaceous, they roamed the shores of the shallow lakes of Jehol Biota in Liaoning Province.

“Geological data has been accumulated over the years and it has been shown that fossil defenses in Jehol Biotta were exceptional because the bodies were trapped by fine volcanic ash and were preserved at the cellular level,” said Li Zhiheng, associate professor of IVPP and co-author of the study.

Scientists removed a piece of distal articular cartilage from the right thigh of this specimen, decomposed it, and used various microscopy and chemical methods to analyze it. After the death of the animal, they realized that all the cells had been mineralized by selection. This silicification most likely allows for the best preservation of these cells.

They also discovered two main types of cells: cells that were healthy at the time of the fossil, and healthy cells that were porous and non-fossilized in the process of dying. “It’s possible that these cells were dying before the animals died,” said Alida Baleul, an associate professor at IVPP and co-author of the study.

Cell death is a process that occurs naturally in the lives of all animals. But being able to place fossil cells in a specific place in the cell cycle is very new in paleontology. IVPP scientists have one goal: to improve cellular images in fossils.

Furthermore, the team isolated some cells and stained them with chemicals used in biological laboratories around the world. This purple chemical called hematoxylin is attached to the nuclei of cells. After staining the dinosaur material, a dinosaur cell showed a purple nucleus containing some dark purple threads. This means that a nucleus in a 125 million-year-old dinosaur cell is so well preserved that it retains some of the original bio-molecules and chromatin threads.

Chromatin is made up of tightly packed DNA molecules in the cells of all living things on Earth. The results of this study thus provide preliminary data that suggest that remnants of the original dinosaur DNA can still be preserved. But to test this precisely, the team needs to do a lot more work and use chemical methods that are more sophisticated than the stains they use here.

“Let’s be honest, we’re clearly interested in fossil cell nuclei because most DNA should be there if DNA is protected.” Last year she published another study reporting exceptional molecular and biomolecular protection in dinosaur cartilage cells in Montana. “So, we have good basic data, very exciting data, but we’re starting to understand cellular biochemistry even in older fossils. At this point, you need to do more work.”

The team insists they need to do more analysis and develop new methods to understand the processes that allow biomolecular protection in dinosaur cells, as no one has ever successfully sequenced dinosaur DNA. In the ancient DNA community, sequence methods are used to confirm whether ancient DNA is preserved in fossils. So far, these methods have only worked for young fossils (not more than a million years old), but they have never worked for dinosaur material. Dinosaurs are considered too old to preserve any DNA. However, the chemical data collected by scientists from IVPP and STM suggest otherwise.

Although more data needs to be collected, this study clearly shows that 125 million-year-old fossil dinosaur cells cannot be considered 100% rock. They are not completely “stoned”. Instead, it still contains remnants of organic molecules. Now, it is essential to find out exactly what these molecules are, whether they retain any biological information and DNA remnants.