The threat to world heritage is changing

The Middle East's situation might be slowly improving, but old certainties are being shattered in the ongoing fight to preserve the world's most precious sites

THE NATIONAL EDITORIAL

A statue wrapped up for protection in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. AFP

The end of the Second World War was perhaps the strangest, most tragic phase of the conflict, as jubilation mixed with understanding of the true extent of the epoch-defining horror that had taken place during just six years.

It was also very complicated, involving many agonised decisions. After a conflict that broke so many norms, Allied powers had the difficult task of striking a balance between mercy and force to make clear that the Axis had well and truly lost. For the US, dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was the answer. In Europe, Britain led campaigns to firebomb the German city of Dresden, sometimes known as the “terror bombing”, which almost totally destroyed the city in just three days.

Both strategies remain controversial to this day, largely because of the number of civilians killed and injured. More than 100,000 people are thought to have died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upper estimates put the total number of dead in Dresden at 250,000.

As well as the human cost, the campaigns are also controversial for what they did to world heritage. Dresden was a medieval-era city of significant architectural and cultural importance. Constructed largely from wood, almost none of it survived. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were similar. Former US secretary of war Henry Stimson is credited with stopping the same happening to Kyoto, a city that today has 17 World Heritage Sites. He cited its cultural significance as a key reason for sparing it.

That one decision taken by Mr Stimson and the actions of those who have worked to preserve heritage over the years since are celebrated today, on International Day For Monuments and Sites, which was established in 1982 by Unesco, the UN’s cultural heritage body.

These individuals and organisations deserve this recognition. They protect not just buildings, but the memories associated with them and the identities they underpin.

In recent years, their work has been desperately needed in the Middle East. Conflict, particularly in Iraq and Syria, has destroyed many of the remnants of some of the world’s most ancient societies. Examples include the Temple of Bel at Palymra in Syria, which was blown up by ISIS in 2016, and, in Iraq, the 12th-century Al Nouri Mosque in Mosul. On a more mundane level, lax legal protection, air pollution, poor urban planning and theft affect them even more.

But progress is being made, and the outlook in 2022, while not perfect, is certainly better than it has been in recent years. Reconstruction is well under way in Al Nouri Mosque, and the destruction of the Temple of Bel has led to innovative projects to reconstitute and preserve the building and its artefacts digitally, techniques that can now be used around the globe.

That is not true for other regions, including ones whose worst days of destruction were thought to be behind them. Ukraine, the site of the biggest European conflict since the Second World War, has seven World Heritage Sites, and fighting is taking place in many of its historic cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv. Russia, a signatory of the Unesco 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and which experienced its own devastating destruction during the Second World War, has a legal and moral duty to protect it.

As conflicts rage, instability spreads and environmental crises intensify across the globe, it is important as ever to protect the many millions, if not billions of people who live under increasing threat. Today, it is also important to remember the preciousness of sites that have been comforting and inspiring the world both in war and peace, sometimes for thousands of years, and which today are equally threatened by the same dangers.

Al Nuri Mosque

Al Nuri Mosque, destroyed by ISIS and being rebuilt with assistance from the UAE. 

Iraqi PM Media Office HO

The clock is ticking down on the world’s climate change goals

Adopting methods for blocking out some of the sun’s rays will limit global warming and buy time for low-carbon technologies to scale up

Robin Mills

Apr 17, 2022

In its latest 2,913-page report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change repeats with ever greater urgency the disastrous effects of climate change and how to limit it.

Recent progress in low-carbon energy has been tremendous. But the heroically unlikely scale of what is needed make it clear that global heating will go beyond the 1.5° Celsius commitment at Paris in 2015. The world needs to plan accordingly.

First, the good news. The Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting warming by 2100 to less than 2°C, with an aspiration of keeping it under 1.5°C.

Previous IPCC reports have laid out the dangerous consequences of even 1.5°C of warming, with rising temperatures causing seas to rise almost a metre, the destruction of nearly all coral reefs, more intense hurricanes, heatwaves, huge wildfires, less food production across the tropics and subtropics, and more insect-borne diseases.

The second-order effects – such as pandemics, economic depressions, embargoes, famines, mass migrations, state collapses and wars – are less predictable, but even more catastrophic. The worst burdens will fall on poorer countries, which lack the finance, infrastructure and capability to cope.

Following Paris, and especially around November’s Cop26 conference in Scotland, there was a flurry of commitments by countries and companies to reach “net-zero” carbon emissions, usually by about 2050.

The IPCC has estimated a range of future scenarios that yield heating between 1°C and a truly apocalyptic 6°C by 2100. New research published in Nature suggests that warming on the current path is likely to be about 2.4°C.

This relative improvement is because of the rapid improvements in performance and cost of low-carbon technologies, and stronger government policies. If all countries meet their net-zero commitments, expected warming is 1.9°C.

We can hope the outcome is likely to be better than this. Government policies will become more stringent, some countries without net-zero targets will adopt them and, above all, technological advances will further replace carbon-emitting energy.

Solar power costs dropped 85 per cent during the 2010s, wind costs by 55 per cent. Offshore wind has rapidly become economically competitive, the share of electric vehicles in Europe and China is soaring, a nascent hydrogen industry is emerging and forests are growing back.

Energy demand and emissions fell sharply during the pandemic. The Russian war in Ukraine and the associated high fossil fuel prices are pushing Europe and other countries to get off oil, gas and coal faster than planned.

The third phase of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum solar park in Dubai.

 Photo: Masdar

But now comes the bad news. Scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C – the Paris aspiration – require greenhouse gases to start falling today and drop by almost 40 per cent by 2030, just eight years away. If worldwide emissions don’t peak by 2030, even keeping warming under 2.5°C will be out of reach.

But 2021 emissions were probably the highest on record, beating the immediate pre-pandemic level.

The Ukraine crisis has distracted international attention from climate change. Getting off Russian gas quickly means more use of dirtier coal. European countries are bringing back oil and gas subsidies to cushion voters.

And, most seriously, the more optimistic projections assume that governments actually live up to their commitments. A net-zero promise 30 years or more away is an easy short-term approach for some politicians.

The required emissions reductions require colossal quantities of renewable energy, batteries and electric cars, hydrogen and carbon capture, biofuels and reforestation, while countries compete for scarce minerals and land. Energy efficiency must improve at rates never sustained historically. And all major countries must act near-simultaneously, with no room for laggards.

Beyond just cutting emissions and replanting forests, the IPCC confirms that we need to suck vast quantities of carbon dioxide back out of the air and lock it away permanently.

Carbon dioxide removal took a tremendous leap forward last week: a consortium of technology companies including Stripe, Google, Facebook and others committed $925 million to accelerate the development of the technology.

But CDR is at an embryonic scale and still far too expensive. Limiting warming to between 1.5°C and 2°C may require capturing 10 billion tonnes of carbon, on average, each year from now to 2100 – an industry a million times larger than today’s.

Carbon pricing struggles to be politically adopted outside Europe. Consumers want climate action but don’t want to take expensive flights, pay more to drive electric cars or stop eating meat, and oppose new nuclear plants, lithium mines, electricity transmission, carbon capture sites, hydroelectric dams and wind farms built near them.

COMPLETE NUTTERS

There is only one way out of this conundrum, one that is unpalatable to most environmentalists. That is “geo-engineering”, or methods for blocking out some of the sun’s rays, such as injecting fine particles into the upper atmosphere. This would limit warming and buy us time for low-carbon technologies and CDR to scale up.

It appears effective and relatively cheap. But activists have blocked serious research. They fear the prospect of large geo-engineering would discourage more rapid emissions cuts, but perhaps the terrifying necessity would instead spur action

ACTIVISTS HAVE DONE NO SUCH THING, MOST STUDIES FIND IT A FAIL, THAT BEING SAID HE GIVES NO EMPIRICAL DATA FOR HIS ASSERTIONS.

This is not a counsel of despair. We are not driving over a cliff-edge, but down an ever-steepening slope.

Every tonne of emissions cut today makes the task for the rest of the century a little easier. Every 0.1°C is worth fighting for.

Every 0.1°C means the preservation of some human well-being, some monument of civilisation and some magical part of the natural world.

Robin Mills is the chief executive of Qamar Energy and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis

WHEN YOU HEAR GEOENGINEERING REMEMBER WHO IS PUSHING IT

US streets: where many homeless go to die

China Daily, April 18, 2022

While the homeless population is soaring in the United States, the mortality rate among them is also rising. Alameda County in California is looking into the deaths of more than 800 homeless people from 2018 to 2020 and how they happened.

According to a "homeless mortality report" issued last Tuesday by the county's Health Care for the Homeless Program, 403 of 809 deaths were due to medical conditions, led by heart disease, followed by cancer, liver disease, cerebrovascular disease, respiratory disease and others. A quarter of the deaths were caused by drug overdoses, making drug overdose the leading single cause of death among the homeless.

The report found the death rate rose significantly for the homeless: 195 homeless people died in 2018, compared with 368 in 2020, a rise of nearly 90 percent.

Accidental injuries caused 10 percent of the deaths, homicides caused 7 percent and suicides 4 percent. COVID-19 had no major direct impact on the homeless, with just six deaths from the virus reported in 2020, the report.

According to the figures the average homeless person in Alameda County dies at the age of 52, while the average resident in the county lives until the age of 75.

Seventy-seven percent of the people who died were men. Sixty-six percent of deaths were outside a medical setting, such as in the street, in a park, or in a vehicle, shelter, encampment, motel, or other location. More than 140 people died on the street.

The report estimated that the 809 deaths during that three-year period represent about 10 percent of the 8,022 homeless people estimated to live in the county, 4.4 times higher than the general population's death rate.

State program

It is the first homeless mortality report for Alameda County, home to more than 1.5 million people in cities that include Alameda, Oakland, Fremont, Piedmont, Berkeley and Pleasanton. The report reveals that most of the deaths, 56 percent, happened in Oakland. On the day after the report was issued, Berkeley was awarded $16.2 million in grant funding through a state program that aims to house the homeless.

"A responsible and just community must work to be closely aware of the deaths of all its members, strive to learn from those deaths, implement policies and practices to reduce preventable deaths, and work to reduce the harm that preventable deaths create for families, friends, caregivers and the community," the authors of the report said.

Alameda County Board of Supervisors President Keith Carson said the county plans to increase efforts to prevent these deaths.

"We increasingly have more teams going to encampments that include mental health and drug and alcohol specialists," he said.

In California, the country's most populous state, deaths in homeless communities have risen throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, which has been put in the national spotlight as the affluent region experiences a worsening in homelessness.

Activists in Santa Clara County, the heart of the Silicon Valley, reported 250 deaths among homeless people between December 2020 and November 2021. The number rose 55 percent from two years ago, compared with 161 in 2019 and 196 in 2020, said the Silicon Valley Interreligious Council, which has hosted annual memorials for homeless people for years.

Mexican power reforms opposed by US face crunch vote


By AFP
Published April 17, 2022

Mexican electricity reforms at the center of diplomatic tensions with the United States faced a major test as opposing lawmakers prepared Sunday to vote on the proposed constitutional amendment.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants to strengthen the state-owned electricity provider and roll back the effects of liberalization under previous governments that he says favored private companies.

But his plans have alarmed the United States and Canada, prompting warnings that Mexico is in danger of violating its trade commitments by favoring state-run entities heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

Members of the lower house of Congress began a marathon debate on the contentious reform bill on Sunday morning, with a vote expected by the early hours of Monday.

Lopez Obrador lacks the two-thirds majority in the Chamber of Deputies needed to amend the constitution, putting him in danger of a high-profile political setback.

The president of the lower house, Sergio Gutierrez Luna, accused the opposition of wanting to remain “imperialist lackeys” at the service of foreign companies.

But Jorge Romero of the conservative National Action Party argued that the bill would put the country “back 50 years” in efforts to protect the environment.

Lopez Obrador’s Morena party and its allies only have 277 seats out of a total of 500 in the Chamber of Deputies, and the opposition bloc has said it will vote against the bill.

“It would represent a big defeat for Morena and Lopez Obrador because it is one of the central axes of their project to nationalize energy,” Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, told AFP.

The United States has warned that Mexico’s reforms risk bringing “endless litigation” that would impede investment and undermine joint efforts to fight climate change.

Canada and Spain are also concerned about the consequences for their energy companies that have invested in Mexico.

The changes would ensure that the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has at least 54 percent of the electricity market — a move the government says is needed to prevent soaring power prices.

A defeat for the constitutional reform bill does not, however, necessarily mean the end of Lopez Obrador’s electricity industry changes.

Mexico’s Supreme Court this month endorsed a reform aimed at strengthening the CFE that was approved by Congress in 2021 but has become bogged down in legal challenges.

Book Excerpt: The Diverse Forces Shaping West Asia and the Implications for India

An excerpt from veteran Indian diplomat Talmiz Ahmad's book, 'West Asia at War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games'.

Residents walk as they flee Maskana town in the Aleppo countryside and make their way towards the Turkish border in Tel Abyad town, Raqqa governorate, June 16, 2015. 

REUTERS/Rodi Said

Talmiz Ahmad

Talmiz Ahmad joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1974 and was posted to Kuwait, Iraq and Yemen, and then as consul general in Jeddah, in 1987-90. After appointments in New York, London and Pretoria, he became the head of the Gulf and Hajj Division in the Ministry of External Affairs during 1998-2000.

He did two stints as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, besides being ambassador to Oman and the UAE, additional secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, and director general of the Indian Council of World Affairs.

After retirement from foreign service in 2011, he was in the corporate sector in Dubai and then, from 2016, has been a full-time academic. He holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune. He has authored three books on West Asian politics, and writes and lectures regularly on political Islam, West Asia, Eurasia and the Indian Ocean, and energy security.

This extract is taken from his new book, West Asia at War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games. The book provides an account of the debates and events that have shaped the region over the last century. It examines the role of domestic and external players in defining the West Asian political order and the continuous efforts of the people to take control of their own destiny in the face of severe challenges.

Deeply anchored in the Indian perspective, the book discusses India’s substantial historic ties with West Asia and proposes a lead role for India in shaping a regional cooperative security order.

---

As we contemplate the events in West Asia over the last century, we can see a broad pattern of external intervention in the region’s political and economic life – either directly through military force or indirectly through the aid of local rulers – and regular resistance to such interference from local populations. Colonial wars and occupations were robustly resisted by local forces that made up in valour what they lacked in weaponry. The last war against settler-colonial occupation took place in 1948, when poorly armed, trained and led Arab forces attempted to reverse the creation in their midst of the Jewish state of Israel.

Nearer to our times, popular resistance to the West-mandated order took on different shapes. After the Second World War, we see the systematic overthrow of puppet regimes planted or sustained by the region’s colonial masters, starting with Egypt and then going on to include Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Libya. These were led by middle-level officers in the armed forces; most of them were animated by nationalist and socialist zeal, who sought control over valuable assets, such as the national oil resources in Iran or the Suez Canal in Egypt. Since these upheavals took place during the Cold War, the Western powers viewed these emerging republics, singing the song of Arab nationalism, with concern and even animosity, and made every effort to curb their appeal with military interventions or economic pressure.

Talmiz Ahmad West Asia at War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games HarperCollins, 2022

Of course, these nationalists – socialist and secular – also faced opposition from within their region: the traditional monarchies tied their interests and destiny with Western powers and, led by Saudi Arabia, combatted nationalist appeal with an older, deeper, grander allure – that of Islam. But it was not Islam that vanquished republican enthusiasm, but the West-sponsored entity in the region – Israel. In 1967, it forcefully switched off the light of the republics, so that the appeal of secular order and the idea of an all-encompassing Arab nationhood vanished from the region.

It was replaced by two trends: one, the claim of state-based nationalism, fostered by authoritarian leaders to command legitimacy and obtain uncritical obedience; two, the transnational appeal of Islam, a political enterprise shaped by Saudi Arabia to obtain political support for its political interests. These two trends set the pattern for Arab regimes to conflate regime-survival with national interest. The traditional monarchies obtained security guarantees for this from Western powers, who, in turn, ensured that these rulers prioritized Western interests over those of their people and nation.

Fortified by unprecedented wealth from its oil revenues, Saudi Arabia’s affiliation with Islam had no connection with genuine doctrinal reform or the amelioration of the deprived within the community, or even to set the global Muslim community on the path of modern education, free thinking, and innovative and creative enterprise. It propagated instead, at home and across the Muslim realm, the doctrines of the most narrow, rigid and hidebound expression of the faith – Wahhabiyya.

Both the republics and the monarchies now faced a challenge from an unusual quarter: Islam was shaped into an ideology of resistance by scholars such as Sayyid Qutb, who had no training in the hoary traditions of their faith. They still drew from the faith’s vast oeuvre of ideas articulated several centuries ago, and reshaped them as weapons to resist Western intrusions in the political, economic and cultural domains of their native lands, as also to resist the tyranny of their rulers at home. Most of these early votaries of ‘political Islam’, as their ideology came to be called some years later, were quickly executed by the tyrants they were protesting against, while others were imprisoned or exiled.

Not surprisingly, Islam was also instrumentalized against state order – the monarch in Iran was brought down by an Islamic revolution and was replaced by an Islamic Republic in 1979. In that same year, a few months later, some zealots from within Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fold attacked their royal masters from the pulpit of the Haram Sharif in Mecca, and were defeated and silenced only with the help of state and foreign forces, who suffered heavy casualties.

The extraordinary year, 1979, placed Islam at the heart of regional affairs. And from being an instrument to promote state power that served the West, it now became a lethal weapon against the West and its allies in West Asia. On 11 September 2001, extremists from the Al Qaeda took their war to the heart of the Western empire, the US. The US was shocked and humiliated and, like a tormented wild beast, it turned its wrath on the sources of the crime and then looked for other targets that were not connected at all with the attacks, but were otherwise Arab and Muslim.

A flower seen in silhouette stands on the south reflecting pool at the 9/11 Memorial site in the lower section of Manhattan, New York City, US, September 2, 2021. 

Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

Both Afghanistan and Iraq were attacked and received shattering blows. But both fought back relentlessly. Both used the ideology of Islam to shape their resistance to the aggression, both took very heavy hits and experienced an enormous number of casualties, but both ensured that the aggressor was not successful in subjugating the land that was theirs.

The last decade has seen the interplay of several diverse trends. Central to this period has, once again, been resistance – the Arab Spring uprisings – that were directed at entrenched tyrants who had allied themselves with the West, and abused and robbed their people with impunity over decades of one-man rule. Though four tyrants fell from their pedestals, the counter-attacks from the Gulf monarchies – their own power threatened – were lethal and effective, and the authoritarian order remained in place.

Regime-survival needed a new armoury: the weapon of choice for the beleaguered monarchies was now to scratch at the fault line of sectarian identity. Regional conflicts were carefully engineered on a sectarian basis that demonized Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were killed in Syria and Yemen, and fruitless battles are still underway so that tyrants can survive and retain their thrones.

There was an unintended consequence as well. These conflicts created the space for a new extremist transnational organization, the Islamic State, that blurred the Sykes–Picot lines, and straddled Iraq and Syria. It ruthlessly targeted the US occupation forces in Iraq, but also included in its web its sectarian foes – the Shia – whom it annihilated with the same ferocity as it did the Americans.

The Islamic State has been destroyed through military action, but its stragglers have taken refuge in the desert and initiate strikes periodically, while some of its adherents obtain fresh recruits to carry out what are called ‘lone-wolf ’ attacks. These are limited as of now, but are lethal in their impact and deeply demoralizing for the communities affected.

Western populations have responded to these assaults with deep animosity for all adherents of Islam, and have installed in their own governments new leaders who would heed their fears and protect them from these ‘monsters from the East’, who, after several centuries, now once again threaten them in their homes. Several Western countries have abandoned the values of the Enlightenment with alacrity and elected rulers who give practical meaning to Islamophobia. The ‘clash of civilizations’ is being shaped as a living reality in several Western capitals.

What then does West Asia look like now? After a hundred years, not a single Arab state provides for any modicum of popular participation in state decision-making. National financial accounts remain non-transparent and without accountability. Though oil wealth is depleting, its revenues are still used to back state efforts at co-option and coercion – the latter now becoming more open, more crude, more vicious … and more frequent.

But popular resistance remains vibrant as demonstrations across the region voice popular discontent with their plight and deeper unhappiness with their sense of being excluded from the march of history towards participation in governance as free citizens. This spirit is best exemplified by the resistance of the Palestinians – though frequently violated, abused, betrayed and killed in large numbers – it has never been stilled. Not for a day. They still raise their hands to throw rocks at their occupiers and take bullets on their chests in the hundreds, looking for that day when Jews and Arabs will live side by side … in peace.

Such opposition is always met with coercion, with brute force. As regional tyrants, abetted by their foreign accomplices continue to accumulate the capabilities to combat resistance, the prospect of successful change across West Asia and North Africa remains very remote.

Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins.

Massive hammerhead shark washes up on Florida beach


By CNN

Apr 18, 2022

A three metre hammerhead shark washed up on a beach in the US, much to beachgoers' surprise.

Visitors at Pompano Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, encountered the shark's corpse on April 6, according to CNN affiliate WPLG.

A team of scientists from the American Shark Conservancy took samples and identified the shark as a female great hammerhead, after moving the body away from onlookers.

The three metre hammerhead shark washed up on Florida's Pompano Beach. (Cassandra Scott)

Hannah Medd, a conservation scientist and the founder of the American Shark Conservancy, told CNN that she and her team took the shark's measurements as well as fin clippings to test its DNA and muscle tissue for biopsies.

The female was pregnant and weighed around 225 kilograms, she said.

The Conservancy, which has a license to take samples from protected species like the hammerhead shark, was alerted to the animal by the Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, which surveys for turtle nests on beaches.

A member of the team had encountered the body with a hook in its mouth.
The "specific type of hook usually indicates someone was fishing for a large animal like a hammerhead," Ms Medd said.

"This species, in particular, is quite susceptible to stress," she said.

Scientists from the American Shark Conservancy took samples from the female shark and its unborn pups. (Cassandra Scott)

Ms Medd explained that a small community of recreational fishermen target sharks for catch-and-release, which is legal in Florida, although the sharks cannot be harvested.
But the stress of catch-and-release, combined with wounds from fishing hooks, can sometimes lead to death.

"This is a pretty rare event," Ms Medd said.

"We get a call for maybe one to four a year [hammerheads] that have washed back up."
She said that her team has advocated for best catch-and-release practices, like using stronger fishing gear, which reduces the "fight time" during which the sharks are struggling with fishermen. Less fight time means less chance of injury or mortality.
"These sharks are really good at fighting," she said. "That's why the anglers like to catch them -- it's exciting."

She added that "because they're prohibited, we typically can't get samples, so in this case it was an unfortunate but good chance for us to learn more about a pretty important species."

After the biologists took their samples, a nearby construction crew dug a hole and buried the shark on the beach, said Ms Medd.

Some beachgoers had emotional reactions to the dramatic sight of the shark washed up on the shore. Ms Medd said she saw some witnesses crying.

"You never want to see an animal this big laying on the beach," said Pompano Beach resident Kevin Nosal, according to WPLG.

"This is 11 feet long and over 500 pounds. It's a female, so it's always sad when a female passes."

Great hammerhead sharks are common in the coastal waters around Florida, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. They can reach as long as 5.5 metres and live for more than 20 years. The fish are sometimes targeted by commercial longline fishermen for their fins, says the commission.

As a predator, hammerhead sharks wield important influence on the ocean ecosystems, according to Ms Medd. "They're just a very important piece of that food web that keeps our oceans healthy."

"Even people enjoying a day at the beach like to see healthy oceans and coastlines," she said. "Sharks are actually a part of that."

What Chinese scientists learnt by teaching 2 monkeys to play Pac-Man

APRIL 17, 2022

ByECHO XIE

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

Pac-Man was a hugely popular video game in the 1980s.
Pixabay

What can scientists learn by teaching 2 monkeys to play Pac-Man?

Quite a lot it seems, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

A team of neuroscientists from the academy said they used the classic video game to look at the way the primates made decisions.


The result was the first study of its kind to show that monkeys were capable of formulating strategies to simplify a sophisticated task, they said.

“To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving,” Yang Tianming, corresponding author of the study, said on Twitter.

The results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife last month.

The scientists used artificial intelligence to come up with a statistical model to find out whether the monkey’s behaviour could be broken down into a set of strategies.

The model consists of a set of simple strategies, each considering a specific aspect of the game to form decisions on how to move Pac-Man.

The monkeys were then trained to use a joystick to manoeuvre Pac-Man around a maze to collect snack pellets and avoid ghosts. The monkeys received fruit juice as a reward instead of earning points.

Yang and his colleagues found the monkeys understood the basic elements of the game because they tended to choose the direction with the largest local reward and knew how to react to ghosts in different modes.

They also found the model reflected the monkeys’ Pac-Man game play with an accuracy of over 90 per cent in the experiment, they said.

More importantly, the researchers found that the monkeys adopted a hierarchical solution for the Pac-Man game by using one dominant strategy and only focusing on a subset of game aspects at a time.

The researchers said the study was significant because it was quantitative and examined complex tasks.

“Most decision-making studies in the field use rather simple decision tasks. They might not be sufficient for us to understand the full cognitive capacity of the brain,” said Yang, who is the laboratory head of CAS’s Laboratory of Neural Mechanisms of Decision Making and Cognition in Shanghai.

“By establishing a new behavioural paradigm that is both sophisticated and quantifiable, we hope to gain a better understanding of the neural mechanism of cognition.”

The study said the findings paved the way for further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sophisticated cognitive functions. The researchers said the study also shed light on building smarter artificial intelligence systems in the future.

The editor’s evaluation on eLife said: “This novel experimental paradigm allowed the authors to analyse and model the kinds of heuristic behavioural strategies monkeys use to solve relatively complex problems. The results provide insight into higher cognition in primates.”

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.

Bella Hadid claims Instagram blocks her posts on Palestine

‘When I post about Palestine, I get immediately shadow banned,’ says famous model

Ahmet Gençtürk |18.04.2022


ANKARA

Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid says she is being silenced by Instagram whenever she posts anything about Palestine.

"My Instagram has disabled me from posting on my story - pretty much only when it is Palestine based I'm going to assume," she said.

"When I post about Palestine, I get immediately shadow banned and almost 1 million less of you see my stories and posts,” she told fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

Being shadow banned means that your exposure on a given social media platform has been restricted and only you and your direct followers can see your posts, the magazine said.

Tension has mounted across the Palestinian territories since Israeli forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard on Friday amid clashes with worshippers, injuring hundreds.

On Sunday, more than 700 Israeli settlers forced their way into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex under heavy police protection to celebrate the week-long Jewish Passover holiday, which started on Friday.

Al-Aqsa Mosque is the world's third-holiest site for Muslims. Jews call the area the "Temple Mount," claiming it was the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, where Al-Aqsa is located, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It annexed the entire city in 1980 in a move never recognized by the international community.​​​​​​​

Sri Lanka's reluctance to tap IMF pushed it into an economic abyss

Sri Lanka's worst economic crisis has triggered an unprecedented wave of spontaneous protests as the island nation of 22 million people struggles with prolonged power cuts and a shortage of essentials, including fuel and medicines.

Protesters in Colombo take part in a demonstration against the economic crisis. Photo: AFP

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's government has come under growing pressure for its mishandling of the economy, and the country has suspended foreign debt payments in an effort to preserve its paltry foreign exchange reserves.

On Monday, Sri Lanka will begin talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan programme, even as it seeks help from other countries, including neighbouring India, and China.

How did it get to this?

Economic mismanagement by successive governments weakened Sri Lanka's public finances, leaving its national expenditure in excess of its income, and the production of tradable goods and services at an inadequate level.

The situation was exacerbated by deep tax cuts enacted by the Rajapaksa government soon after it took office in 2019, which came just months before the Covid-19 crisis.

The pandemic wiped out parts of its economy - mainly the lucrative tourism industry - while an inflexible foreign exchange rate sapped remittances from its foreign workers.

Rating agencies, concerned about government finances and its inability to repay large foreign debt, downgraded Sri Lanka's credit ratings from 2020 onwards, eventually locking the country out of international financial markets.

But to keep its economy afloat, the government still leaned heavily on its foreign exchange reserves, eroding them by more than 70 percent in two years.

By March, Sri Lanka's reserves stood at only $1.93 billion, insufficient to even cover a month of imports, and leading to spiralling shortages of everything from diesel to some food items.

JP Morgan analysts estimate the country's gross debt servicing would amount to $7b this year, with the current account deficit coming in about $3b.
What did the government do?

Faced with a rapidly deteriorating economic environment, the Rajapaksa government chose to wait, instead of moving quickly and seeking help from the IMF and other sources.

For months, opposition leaders and experts urged the government to act, but it held its ground, hoping for tourism to bounce back and remittances to recover.

Newly appointed Finance Minister Ali Sabry told Reuters in an interview earlier this month that key officials within the government and Sri Lanka's central bank did not understand the gravity of the problem and were reluctant to have the IMF step in. Sabry, along with a new central bank governor, was brought in as part of a new team to tackle the situation.

But, aware of the brewing crisis, the government did seek help from countries, including India and China. Last December, the then finance minister travelled to New Delhi to arrange $1.9b in credit lines and swaps from India.

Protesters hold placards as they participate in an anti-government demonstration in Colombo. Photo: AFP

A month later, President Rajapaksa asked China to restructure repayments on around $3.5b of debt owed to Beijing, which in late 2021 also provided Sri Lanka with a $1.5b yuan-denominated swap.
What happens next?

Finance Minister Sabry will start talks with the IMF for a loan package of up to $3b over three years.

An IMF programme, which typically mandates fiscal discipline from borrowers, is also expected to help Sri Lanka draw assistance of another $1b from other multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

In all, the country needs around $3b in bridge financing over the next six months to help restore supplies of essential items including fuel and medicine.

India is open to providing Sri Lanka with another $2b to reduce the country's dependence on China, sources have told Reuters.

Sri Lanka has also sought a further $500 million credit line from India for fuel.

With China, too, the government is in discussions for a $1.5b credit line and a syndicated loan of up to $1b. Besides the swap last year, Beijing also extended a $1.3b syndicated loan to Sri Lanka at the start of the pandemic.

- Reuters

Turkey launches military operation in Iraq

A cross-border ground offense is supported by artillery, jets, helicopters and drones

©  Turkish Defense Ministry

Ankara has begun a major cross-border military offensive, targeting Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the northern part of Iraq, according to Turkey’s Defense Ministry. 

The operation involves an extensive airstrike campaign using jets, helicopters and drones, as well as a ground incursion by commando troops, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar announced in a video address on Monday morning.

Ankara claims it successfully destroyed multiple bunkers, tunnels and ammunition depots, as well as military headquarters of the PKK in northern Iraq's border areas of Metina, Zap and Avashin-Basyan, before its ground forces moved into the neighboring state. It is unclear how many troops and military hardware are involved in the operation.

“Our operation is continuing successfully, as planned. The targets that were set for the first phase have been achieved,” Akar said, as cited by AP.

Turkish forces are only targeting “terrorists,” taking extra precautions to avoid the loss of civilian lives and damage to cultural heritage, the minister claimed.

“Our struggle will continue until the last terrorist is neutralized,” he said. “We are determined to save our noble nation from the terror misfortune that has plagued our country for 40 years.”

READ MORE: The Kurdish project in Syria would be a new Israel in the Middle East

The PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement, who fight for an independent Kurdistan, have been battling Ankara since 1984, in a war that has claimed more than 40,000 lives. Over the years, Turkey has conducted multiple military operations against the PKK, which is based in northern Iraq and has used the territory to fuel insurgency in the eastern part of Turkey. 

The PKK has also been designated a terrorist group by the US, UK, and EU. However, the Kurds were an important ally to the West and the US in the fight against Islamic State terrorists both in Syria and Iraq. Washington maintains a military foothold in Syrian Kurdish-controlled regions, while the Iraqi Kurdistan region hosts several American military installations and a US consulate in Erbil.