SOS! Scientists sound climate alarm with exclamation mark

by Alister Doyle | @alisterdoyle | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Monday, 22 August 2022

Global warming is having a new side-effect: forcing scientific publication to bend their punctuation rules

Common in social media and activism, "!" enters formal writing


Leading scientific journals strictly limit exclamation marks


UN Climate Change uses "!" emoji to warn of Europe's heatwaves

By Alister Doyle

OSLO, Aug 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Most scientific studies - even those with remarkable findings - have long had their wider appeal dimmed by unremarkable titles.

But as researchers - who mostly err on the side of cautious understatement - grow more alarmed by worsening climate change impacts including heatwaves, droughts and melting ice, an unfamiliar piece of punctuation is creeping into their work: the exclamation mark.

"SOS! Summer of smoke" reads the title of one study referenced in a flagship series of reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released this year. Another trumpets, "Too hot to help!".

Climate protesters have long deployed the punctuation on banners urging "Climate Action Now!" or warning "There is no planet B!".

Activists hope that exclamation marks, by stirring visceral feelings to match scientific findings about the deteriorating state of the planet, can spur greater efforts to cut the greenhouse gas emissions heating it up.

"It's about emotions – this affects all our lives," said Nuala Gathercole Lam, a spokeswoman for the Extinction Rebellion (XR) activist group in Britain. But, she warned, "exclamation marks can seem like over-labouring" an already-clear message.

XR's global website starts with the sober sentence: "This is an emergency", followed by a lower section urging "Act Now!".

Some researchers say the appearance of the exclamation point in scientific work reflects growing concern about rising temperatures among the wider public.

Adeniyi Asiyanbi, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, wrote a report cited by the IPCC entitled: "'I don't get this climate stuff!' Making sense of climate change among the corporate middle class in Lagos".

He drew the emphatic punctuation from a Nigerian businessman he spoke to, who expressed frustration that climate solutions are hard to understand.

"I won’t be surprised if more exclamation is being used ... deliberately to create a sense of urgency and a sense of fear too," said Asiyanbi.

"I personally have my reservations about (doing it) - but that's what I see around increasingly now," he added in emailed comments.
SOBER SCIENCE

The IPCC's February report on adapting to the impacts of climate change refers to more than a dozen studies that include an exclamation mark in the headline, up from just four in the previous – albeit shorter - IPCC science assessment in 2014.

The IPCC, whose findings must be approved by all governments ranging from oil-producing OPEC nations to climate-vulnerable Pacific island states, has no specific guidance to authors on using exclamation marks, said spokesman Andrej Mahecic.

As a rule, IPCC reports avoid using "!", except when citing titles of other scientific studies.

But a single exclamation mark slipped into Chapter 2 of the February IPCC report in the sentence: "Hotter temperatures also increase mosquito bite rate, parasite development, and viral replication!".

Editors spotted the rogue "!" and it will be deleted in the final version, said Camille Parmesan, a coordinating lead author of the chapter who is affiliated with France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, the University of Plymouth and the University of Texas at Austin.

"No, generally exclamation marks are not used in IPCC (!!!!!)," she wrote in an email interview.

There is also some unease over the "!" creeping into scientific papers, with many journals strictly limiting its use, fearing it comes across as self-defeating shrieking.

The style guide for the respected journal Science says: "The exclamation point is rarely justified in scientific writing except as a factorial symbol in mathematics."

"Science may allow an exclamation point as part of a direct quotation, but we don’t use exclamation points for emphasis," added Meagan Phelan, who leads the magazine's media relations.

The Nature scientific journals are also restrictive.

"Our general guidance is to avoid exclamation marks," said Lisa Boucher, press manager for publisher Springer Nature.
TREND-SETTING TRUMP

By contrast, the attention-grabbing punctuation abounds in social media posts, as users express emotion from horror to enthusiasm.

An unlikely role model for climate scientists, former U.S. President Donald Trump sprinkled his tweets with "!"s before he was suspended from the Twitter platform in 2021.

During a cold spell in January 2019, he asked: "What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!"

Nowadays, even traditionally more cautious tweeters are starting to adopt the "!" to get their point across.

With the severe summer heatwaves besetting Europe, UN Climate Change in July included a yellow warning sign emoji, containing an exclamation mark, in a tweet saying that rising temperatures increased the risks of death from heat stress.

"We are ramping up the rhetoric a bit because the situation is increasingly dramatic. Exclamation marks are increasingly appropriate," said John Hay, head of content at UN Climate Change, adding that its Twitter account rarely uses "!".

Liuba Belkin, an associate professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who studies social psychology, wrote an article referenced in the 2022 IPCC report about how employees in shops in Eastern Europe are less likely to help clients in energy-draining heatwaves.

Her study, "Too hot to help! Exploring the impact of ambient temperature on helping", was published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

"I try to use meta-communication (exclamation points, smiley faces, etc.) as much as possible to enrich and more accurately convey the intended message," she said by email.

Still, many are in two minds about liberally sprinkling writing with "!".

Danny Rubin, a U.S. author of books on business writing, said exclamation points are over-used, weakening their value, and are rarely justified to convey "excitement or urgency".

"As in all things, moderation is key," he added.Related stories:

'Ridiculous' length? How to make IPCC climate science reports an easier read

Removing carbon from air vital to reach climate goals, IPCC says

Dead or alive? COP26 climate talks strive to save 1.5C warming goal

(Reporting by Alister Doyle; editing by Laurie Goering and Megan Rowling. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. Visit http://news.trust.org/climate)

Peru’s Castillo says they want to “tie up” his family to “break” him


ByJuan Martinez
August 22, 2022

Peruvian President Pedro Castillo said Sunday that prosecutors are taking steps to “tie up” his family, including his wife Lilia Paredes, over alleged corruption charges he adamantly denies.

Speaking at a political rally in the town of Andahuaylas, in the southern department of Apurímac, the president said they want to “break” him, but his opponents do not know that he and his family come “from hardship, from below, from suffering.”

“I know they are going to take my wife, they want to put her in chains, and they want to put the rest of my family in chains,” said the head of state, whose sister-in-law, Yenifer Paredes, is in custody, waiting for the judiciary to decide whether to extend her pretrial detention.

Pedro Castillo’s wife, Lilia Paredes. (Photo internet reproduction)

Castillo promised that in the face of this situation, which has plunged his government into a constant political crisis in recent months, he would “resist” until the people asked him to do so and that they would not “break” him.

At the same time, he pointed out that some political figures spend their time “claiming they belong to the people” and who enrich themselves unlawfully, which is why he asked for help to “identify and punish them.”

“We have not given them space and support to enter a ministry in the name of Pedro Castillo to make a profit for their own pockets,” said the Peruvian president.

The investigation launched by Peruvian prosecutor Patricia Benavides against Castillo on various charges, which include accusations of criminal association, has plunged Peru into a political crisis.

His entourage is also affected by the new corruption allegations, including his wife, Lilia Paredes, and sister-in-law, Yenifer Paredes. They grew up as the daughter of the presidential couple and turned herself in to prosecutors on Aug. 10 as part of the investigation against him.

According to prosecutors, the first lady, Lilia Paredes, allegedly coordinated a criminal network “with the knowledge and permission of her husband,” Pedro Castillo, to direct public works through the Ministry of Housing, Construction and Sanitation.

Paredes went to the prosecutor’s office on July 8 to testify as a witness in the corruption case at the Housing Ministry that initially implicated her sister.

Castillo said last Friday that his wife would respond appropriately to the investigation and that she was “ready to hand over her passport to prove that she will not leave the country at any time.”

“Surely they want to file a motion to prevent my wife from leaving the country?” the president asked, guaranteeing that she would “submit” to justice to “prove her innocence.”

Extremism expert: How the far right is winning the 'information war'
Chauncey Devega, Salon
August 22, 2022




Proud Boys // Anthony Crider, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons


The world is experiencing multiple crises all at once. Russia's war in Ukraine is the first such large-scale conventional conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. China's power and reach are increasing, not just in the Pacific but around the world. The United States is reorienting its military, diplomatic and economic resources in response to China's rising superpower status. Some type of clash seems inevitable.

The COVID pandemic has receded somewhat in the U.S., although hundreds of people continue to die every day. The pandemic continues to cause death and misery around the world, with an estimated death toll of 6.5 million and an incalculable amount of personal, societal and economic suffering.

Extreme wealth and income inequality grows largely unabated. Many of the world's richest people have exploited this period of crisis and challenge to expand their power rather than to improve the human condition. Global democracy is in retreat around the world as fascist, authoritarian and other illiberal forces, operating under the banner of "populism," continue to expand their power and influence.

Here in the U.S., Donald Trump's political cult and a Republican Party dominated by fascists are attempting to end multiracial democracy. This is a revolutionary struggle whose goal is to create a new American society, that in practical terms will be an apartheid Christian fascist plutocracy ruled without challenge or accountability by a small number of rich white men. As seen on Jan. 6, 2021, and throughout the Age of Trump, right-wing political violence, including acts of terrorism, is now integral to the neofascist campaign against democracy.

The existential danger of global climate disaster looms over all the world's crises and challenges. Humanity has faced many great challenges before. But the world is now hyperconnected through digital media and other technologies with such speed and immediacy that our ability to properly process and understand these challenges has been greatly impaired.

In an effort to make sense of these many overlapping and simultaneous problems, I recently spoke with Stephanie Foggett, who is director of global communications at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consulting firm, and a research fellow at the Soufan Center, its affiliated independent nonprofit. In that role, Foggett specializes in monitoring white supremacist, neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Foggett shares her views on how "malign actors" are using this moment of global disruption to expand their power by undermining liberalism and Western-style democracy, both internationally and in the United States. She argues that finding shared solutions to these many challenges has been made exceptionally difficult because truth and reality itself have been debased and rejected by the global right.

She highlights how the global far-right and their allies have used the internet and conservative media (especially Fox News), along with the Republican Party and its agents, to mainstream and weaponize the feelings of social alienation, disconnection and victimization felt by many white Americans as a way of destabilizing the country's democracy and society.

Foggett details how some of the most dangerous elements of the far-right view conspiracy cults and online communities like QAnon as a conduit for recruitment, and as a means of sowing chaos and disorder. Toward the end of this conversation, Foggett warns that American democracy and society face an existential threat from the global right in a climate where political violence has been increasingly normalized.

Given everything that is happening in the world right now, with these multiple overlapping crises, how are you making sense of it all?

There is so much going on, which makes it hard to focus on any one thing. In my space, Russia's invasion of Ukraine put the return of conventional warfare front and center. Military conflict between states is now a reality. But that conventional war does not detract from the importance of monitoring non-state actors such as hate groups and other far-right extremists that we have been seeing in the online space, among others.

How does it feel to see some of your predictions come true?

It is a difficult balance between reaction and reflection. There are things happening that need to be responded to immediately, but those events aren't happening in a vacuum. This means reflecting on why they are happening, what they mean and how experts from other fields are making sense of this all.


There is a cluster of events at the international level that are realigning global power. Where is power being lost? Where is power being gained? What does this look like going forward? These changes can create anxiety across the board because this type of flux and disruption can create opportunity for dangerous actors. They will use moments such as this to reassert themselves.

What are some of the larger concerns and events that you're tracking?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine certainly overshadows things. Specifically, what does that mean for our understanding of conventional military and military threats? What does that mean for Europe and North America? What does it mean in terms of our conversations about China? Of course, there are regional powers and conflicts that need to be included in these conversations as well.


There are the non-state actors as well, ranging from terrorist organizations to militia groups and some of these online hate movements. How are they reacting to this dynamic situation? In all, what do these changes mean for our way of life in the West and for peace and prosperity more generally around the world?

How do you assess the public mood?

Every issue is being muddled with disinformation and half-truths and narratives that paralyze action by creating confusion and doubt. This makes it hard to chart a shared path forward.


"Confusion" is the word that stands out for me. It's very difficult to even have discussions about politics and current events when there is less of a shared understanding of reality, the truth and facts. Every issue is being muddled with disinformation and half-truths and narratives that paralyze action by just creating confusion and doubt. This makes it hard to chart a shared path forward to explain to the public what is happening.

So where people may have thought, "This is the clear way forward," or "Of course this is an issue," we're seeing so many things and so many ideas going into the mix that it gets harder to explain. Many people look at the world today and are very confused — and that outcome is intentional.

There's an information war going on. Malign actors are sowing confusion and doubt and that serves to exacerbate fault lines in society. This confusion and doubt impact national fault lines as well as the global order. These dynamics are ultimately impacting what is happening within a given society around political and social identities — such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion and the like — and interstate relationships and conflict as well.


Who are these "malign actors," specifically?

At the international level, we're talking about states who threaten security and our way of life. Russia is an obvious example right now. China is of concern as well. Malign actors ultimately are those who aren't playing by the rules that have been set out in the post-Cold War era, which have tried to establish better mechanisms for how we discuss and establish peace at the international level. On a basic level, malign actors are disruptive forces for norms and rules, which in turn makes the international environment less safe.

What about right-wing extremist groups?


They're an enormous concern. After 9/11, the global counterterrorism architecture was almost singularly focused on the threat from Salafi jihadist terrorism. Many people have spent 20 years only thinking or being told that terrorism has one face or one mission, and that's very much not the case.

Far-right and white supremacist extremism is not new. It's been around for a very long time. Since the rioting and mayhem in Charlottesville in 2017, these far-right and white supremacist organizations and individuals are back on the radar, so to speak, for security experts. They are behaving differently than they used to, and need to be tracked much more carefully and with more resources.

What is their understanding of the world? Do they believe that they're winning or losing?


The far-right is not a monolith. There is diversity within the movement. That said, I do think there are important similarities. At their core, the far-right, white supremacists and other such organizations and individuals want to create a white "ethnostate." They want to destroy liberal democratic society. They do not view Western democracy and pluralistic, liberal societies as legitimate. The far-right propagates a political worldview that white people are under attack by some type of out-group, be it immigrants or non-whites. The safety of white people will only be secured under these white ethnostates.

To that point, the white supremacists and other far-right extremists also believe that social inequality is important, and they want to uphold it to serve their racial group and power interests. Conspiracy theories such as the "great replacement" are central to their worldview. The victimhood narrative fosters a sense of urgency and legitimates violence.

The far-right is also obsessed with civilizational collapse, and false claims that security and stability emanate from white people, and specifically from white Christian "civilization." In their fantasies, people like them built the world and made the world. Civilization as we know it can't exist outside of white people like them. Of course, there is the white supremacy, but also an assertion of "traditional" gender roles are a glue that holds so much of the white supremacist and other far-right extremist cosmology together.


That sounds like what Fox News broadcasts on a daily basis.

That is true. That echo chamber has many elements to it. Fox News and other parts of the right-wing media are laundering violent extremist content and ideas and projecting them into the mainstream. This is happening across media, politics and the business and tech space. Influential actors have wittingly or unwittingly spread these narratives across the media and information space. At present, there is a dwindling gap between the right-wing extremist fringe and the mainstream. That's incredibly concerning.

There is a dwindling gap between the right-wing extremist fringe and the mainstream — and much of the far-right online ecosystem has been interspersed with entertainment and memes.

Moreover, much of the white supremacy and far-right online information ecosystem has been interspersed with entertainment and memes. The far-right normalize hate through making it funny, as a way of filtering it to the mainstream. The goal is to normalize hate and far-right extremism by getting more people to look at it their content, engage with it, share it and think, "Oh, it's not a big deal." Infiltrating the online gaming space is integral to their strategy of spreading hate and extremism to a new younger audience.

The far-right and white supremacists have been wanting to shed the skinhead, tattooed-up, jackboot image for some time. They are doing this by giving their message a type of collegial, professional look. Since Charlottesville, they wanted khakis and buttoned shirts, and women in floral dresses, to be the faces and voices of the movement. That is exactly what is happening today.

What do they view as their greatest victory so far? How do they talk, about the world in terms of seeing this happening?

The culmination of going from the Obama administration to the Trump administration and seeing their rhetoric being normalized was one of the great victories for the far-right. With Trump and many Republicans and a larger global right-wing presence, what were once fringe, extremist ideas are now in spaces of power they were denied access to before.

The far-right also feel that they're speaking for more people, under the banner of "populism" and being against the "elites." Right-wing extremists and white supremacists and such elements are applying that model across many issues.

What do we know for example about the "trucker convoys" that we have seen in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere, and how they fit into the right-wing extremist threat?

From the trucker convoys to the anti-COVID lockdown protests, the far-right and other right-wing extremists will find a way to co-opt those feelings of anger and alienation. That is a standard tactic. The far-right aspire to take that anger and anxiety and then pivot it to white supremacy, anti-government narratives and other extremist ways of thinking.

To that point, there is a huge amount of co-optation of the QAnon movement. The far-right does not have any respect for people who believe in QAnon, but they know they can recruit and manipulate them.

In fact, the leadership and online spaces of the far-right routinely use derogatory language about the people they're trying to recruit. They just view them as a source of grievance that they can pull into their movements for critical mass. Antisemitism is another important vector. That many of these social protest movements include overt antisemitic tropes or coded anti-Jewish undertones means that the far-right will seek out ways to insert their politics where they already see fertile ground.

In these spaces that you monitor, what was the reaction to Jan. 6, 2021, and to Donald Trump more generally?

It was mixed. But overall, Jan. 6 and Trump's presidency emboldened the movement. The far-right saw a critical mass of people who were organized, and who took their struggle to the halls of American democracy and government and were willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

Leadership of the far-right routinely uses derogatory language about the people they're trying to recruit. They just view them as a source of grievance that they can pull into their movements.

What most concerns me is: Are we going to see a repeat of Jan. 6 and other right-wing violence, and conspiracy theories such as the Big Lie and "Stop the Steal" protests and disruptions, every election? Is this going to be something that happens every election cycle? I believe the answer is yes, for the far-right and white supremacists, because they do not believe there is a nonviolent political solution for the concerns and grievances that they have.

What do we know about this "grooming" narrative, which has recently been mainstreamed by Republicans and the right-wing media?

This is a direct page out of the far-right and white supremacy playbook. The far-right have their in-group and they have their out-group, and they project lies and distortions and stereotypes onto the latter in an attempt to present them as some type of extreme criminal deviant threat.

The LGBTQ+ community have, throughout the history of the far-right, been falsely labeled and presented as pedophiles, as groomers. That has always been there. For the far-right, if you can frame an entire section of the population as groomers, then you're inciting violence against them. At present there is a whole political party and media machine, as well as some churches and other right-wing elements with great influence and power, that are doing just that.

If you've got millions and millions of people buying into this here in America and in certain parts of Europe, what does this mean for the safety of the LGBTQ+ community?

How do these right-wing extremists view the "normies," meaning "good white people" who are somewhat sympathetic but need to be "brought into the movement" or have their "eyes opened"?

When you're looking at right-wing groups and parties in Europe and North America, they do believe that there is a future for their movement, and they just need to appeal to the right people to grow it. Bringing so-called normal people into the fold, especially young people, has been a big focus. They're really trying to get boys and young men as they transition to adulthood by playing on insecurities about masculinity. Others, like violent far-right accelerationists, just want to burn society down and are less concerned with doing that type of mainstreaming and political work.

What do we know about the "black flag" and "dark MAGA" movements, and their threats of violence, terrorism and civil war?

Its adherents believe that MAGA had its chance, but they were too soft. They were too forgiving. And that when MAGA does come back, it needs to be dark. MAGA gave too much space to its enemies.

On a basic level, what does the MAGA movement mean for its members and other believers?

MAGA is an enormous political force in this country. There's a huge number of people who feel that they have a grievance. The Make America Great Again movement has been able to tap into a wide range of economic, social and other grievances, almost exclusively among white people.

The far-right sees a lot of their politics reflected in MAGA — but they also see an opportunity to take the MAGA movement and brand and make it even more right-wing and more extremist than it already is. The far-right cloak themselves in the language and imagery of American democracy: patriotism and flags and related symbols and imagery. In reality, there is nothing that the far right and these white supremacists want that has any semblance to democracy and any institutions that protect us today.

What would America be like if the right-ring extremists and white supremacists, or the most die-hard MAGA types more generally, get their way?

It will be an anti-democratic world. This world is one where the "white race" deserves to be at the top. White supremacists believe they were made to be at the top. For the far-right and white supremacists, there are people they should rightfully defend, and everybody else is a threat. America and Europe will be white ethnostates, with white heterosexual males at the top of the social and political order who are protecting white heterosexual females (if they conform) and white children. Anybody who doesn't fit this mold will be subjected to persecution and violence. It's a genocidal political worldview, underpinned by racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia and anti-liberalism.

It is truly tragic to see that there are people in the Republican Party, Trump movement and the larger "mainstream" right who are mainstreaming such vile beliefs and the horrors they want to force on the world.

Erdogan Joins Top Turkey Officials Seeing Better Syria Ties

Beril Akman
Mon, August 22, 2022



(Bloomberg) --

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become the latest top Turkish official to call for better ties with Syria, as Ankara appears to shift its stance on the government of Bashar al-Assad.

“We need to achieve forward steps with Syria. With these steps we will spoil many games in the region,” Erdogan told reporters in remarks carried by national TV channels over the weekend. “Political dialogue or diplomacy cannot be cut off between states.”

Turkey was a staunch supporter of Syrian rebels during the height of the country’s long war, regularly condemning Assad for the actions of his troops.

With backing from Russia and Iran, though, Assad’s government has regained control of much of Syria. That’s left Turkey to largely focus on Kurdish militants in northern Syria it sees as a threat for their links to the PKK, which has been fighting for autonomy on Turkish soil for decades and is designated a terrorist group by the European Union and US.

Earlier in August, Erdogan traveled to Sochi for talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, apparently seeking his blessing for another cross-border offensive targeting the Kurdish People’s Defense Units, or YPG. After the meeting, Erdogan told reporters that Putin had urged Ankara to solve its problems with Damascus.

On Friday, the Turkish leader suggested he wasn’t backing down from his willingness to again strike across the frontier. “We might come suddenly one night,” Erdogan said, a phrase he uses when referring to imminent military operations.

Oytun Orhan, a Syria specialist at the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Studies, said any imminent breakthrough in ties with Assad was unlikely as the two administrations have competing security priorities.

Damascus wants Turkey to end support for its remaining Syrian opponents, Orhan said. Turkey, meanwhile, is determined to dismantle Kurdish self-governance in Syria, and in the past has mobilized Syrian rebels to fight against the YPG.

“My expectation is for intelligence contacts to become more frequent and for talks to eventually evolve to the political dimension,” Orhan said in an interview.

The plight of Turkey’s economy could be one factor spurring a rethink in Ankara. A cost-of-living crisis is stalking voters less than a year before elections, threatening to strip away support from Erdogan. Some Turks resent the presence of the 3.7 million Syrian migrants living in Turkey, and Erdogan’s challengers are seeking to capitalize on anti-migrant sentiment, pledging to deport Syrians if they are elected to power.

Erdogan has announced plans to relocate at least one million refugees to communities being constructed by Turkey in a strip of land it controls in northern Syria.

Anger Over 3.7 Million Refugees Is Piling Pressure on Erdogan

“Erdogan is cornered at home. Elections are approaching. Because the economy is doing terribly, there is increased opposition to migrants,” said Gonul Tol, director of Turkey program at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C.

Syria also became a pariah in the Arab world after Assad’s crackdown on an uprising in 2011 triggered the war. But in March, Assad traveled to the United Arab Emirates for talks as Gulf Arab governments increasingly concluded they’d rather bring Syria back into the fold than abandon it to rival Iran.

Turkey, which has embarked on wide-ranging diplomacy to repair tattered regional ties in recent months, could be following suit. Some of Erdogan’s top aides have recently called for direct engagement with Assad’s government.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu sparked controversy earlier this month when he disclosed publicly that he spoke to his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, at an international meeting last year.

Last week, he said “reconciliation” between the Syrian government and opposition was necessary for peace. Erdogan’s key domestic ally, nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli, echoed Cavusoglu’s remarks; and deputy chairman of the governing AK Party Hayati Yazici said Turkey could begin “direct” and “higher level” talks with Syria.

Putin’s influence may prove pivotal. Turkey and Russia have been at odds in Syria, but Erdogan and the Russian leader have worked closely elsewhere. The Turkish president mediated a deal to resume grain shipments from Ukraine’s blockaded Black Sea ports.

Turkey refrained from joining Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Russia’s a major supplier of energy and tourists for Turkey.

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season broke an 1893 record — 4 simultaneous storms

Randi Mann
Digital Reporter

•  
•  

•  

Monday, August 22nd 2022

On this day in weather history, four hurricanes were active in the Atlatic.

This Day In Weather History is a daily podcast by The Weather Network that features stories about people, communities, and events and how weather impacted them.

--

The 1893 Atlantic hurricane season was moderately active, with a total of 12 tropical storms forming. In the United States, it was the deadliest season to date, with over 2,000 deaths.

On Tuesday, Aug. 22, 1893, there were four hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin, which didn't happen again until 1998.

The first of these hurricanes formed on Aug. 13. near the Lesser Antilles. It strengthened to hurricane status over the Leeward Islands. On Aug. 16, it approached Puerto Rico, making landfall at Patillas. It travelled across the island, producing heavy rains and damaging crops, including coffee.

The second hurricane of the group formed on Aug. 15 in central tropical Atlantic. It reached Category 3 strength but weakened as it moved toward New York City. However, the storm maintained hurricane status as it hit the city, with winds up to 137 km/h. It's one of two hurricanes in the 19th century to hit New York City (the other one is the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane).

 *"This map shows the tracks of all tropical cyclones in the 1893 Atlantic hurricane season. The points show the location of each storm at 6-hour intervals. The colour represents the storm's maximum sustained wind speeds as classified in the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale (see below), and the shape of the data points represent the type of the storm." Courtesy of Wikipedia*

The third hurricane (fifth overall in the season) formed near Bermuda on Aug. 15. It moved northwestward and strengthened into a Category 2. The hurricane travelled across Sable Island and hit Newfoundland on Aug. 18. with wind speeds of 145 km/h.

The final hurricane formed near Cape Verde on Aug. 15. During its first 11 days of inception, it turned into a Category 3 storm. The hurricane made landfall near Savannah, Ga., killing around 2,000 people. It moved northeastward and dissipated on Aug. 31.

This was the first time that three storms formed on the same day (Aug. 15, 1893). This record was broken during the 2020 hurricane season, when Wilfred, Alpha, and Beta formed on the same day.

To learn more about the 1893 Atlantic hurricane Season, listen to today's episode of "This Day In Weather History."

NATO secretary general to focus on Arctic during Canada visit

"Given the locations, there will be a significant focus on the Arctic and how climate change is affecting security."

By

 Steve Scherer, Reuters, Kanishka Singh, Reuters

 -

August 22, 2022

4

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg attends a NATO summit in Madrid, Spain June 30, 2022. (Susana Vera / Reuters)

OTTAWA—NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will visit Canada next week to focus on Arctic security amid climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office said on Friday.

Stoltenberg will travel to Canada from Aug. 24 to Aug. 26 and will be accompanied by Trudeau during the visit.

On Thursday he will stop in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, a hamlet in the far north and one of the main stops for vessels traversing the Arctic Ocean’s Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

On Friday, he will travel to a Canadian jet fighter base in Cold Lake, Alberta, to discuss plans to modernize NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian North American defense organization, the statement said.

“Given the locations, there will be a significant focus on the Arctic and how climate change is affecting security,” a government spokesperson said.

Stoltenberg has made trips to Europe’s Arctic this year, mainly to show support for Finland and Sweden’s bid to join the alliance. Nearly 40% of Canada’s land mass is considered Arctic, while Russia stretches over 53% of the Arctic Ocean coastline, according to the Arctic Council.

In June, Canada said it would invest C$4.9 billion ($3.8 billion) over the next six years to modernize NORAD, which experts say is in dire need of upgrades.

The more-than six-decade-old system detects security threats to North America, and its early-warning radar for the polar region dates back to the late 1980s.

Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch threatened an Aussie news site. It's fighting back

David Folkenflik
August 22, 2022 

Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, shown above in 2019 in Sun Valley, Idaho, is threatening to sue an Australian news site for defamation over a June 29 column about rhetoric on Fox. In the U.S., Fox News is defending itself against two defamation suits, saying "Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected."
Drew Angerer | Getty Images

Fox Corp CEO and Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch — already busy fighting two multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits aimed at Fox News here in the U.S. — has threatened a news organization in his family's home country of Australia with legal action.

The threat stems from commentaries accusing him of being responsible for rhetoric on the network that helped fuel the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Now the Aussie political news site Crikey has a message: Bring it on.

"Lachlan Murdoch appears desperate to disassociate himself from the actions of Fox in inciting the January 6th insurrection," Crikey's editor-in-chief, Peter Fray tells NPR from Sydney. "And he's taking quite extraordinary steps to shut down public debate in this country."

Fray says his news site was not literally saying Murdoch personally incited people to violence that day. But, Fray says, "the buck has to stop somewhere."

So, in full-page ads set to appear today in The New York Times and the Canberra Times in the Australian capital city, Fray and Eric Beecher, the chairman of Crikey's parent company, Private Media, proclaim they welcomed Murdoch's threat of a lawsuit.

In the written text of their ad, the two men suggested they wanted it to serve as a test of Australian defamation laws, which, they wrote, "are too restrictive."

Fox Corp declined to comment yesterday on the dispute with Crikey.

Murdoch's complaints arose from a June 29 piece driven by revelations about the activities of former President Donald Trump and his allies ahead of the insurrection at the U.S. Congress last year.

Crikey's political editor said Fox was among Trump's top allies, and concluded a column by calling Murdoch and his father Rupert "unindicted co-conspirators" in the siege because of the incendiary rhetoric Fox often aired.

"We at Crikey strongly support freedom of opinion and public interest journalism," Beecher and Fray wrote.

The two men said they decided to publish all the legal demands and accusations against Crikey from Murdoch's attorneys, and the site's replies, "so people can judge your allegations for themselves."

Fox News faces a pair of defamation suits in the U.S.

The flap occurs at the same moment Fox News is publicly invoking free speech ideals as it seeks to defend itself from two multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits from election technology and voting machine companies in the U.S.

In response to those two lawsuits, Fox News said, "freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected."

And the network called the damages sought — more than $4 billion combined — "nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs."

A day after Crikey political editor Bernard Keane's June 29 column alleging a link between Fox's broadcasts and Trump's actions, Lachlan Murdoch's Australian media attorney, John Churchill, sent a note threatening a defamation suit and demanding an apology.

Churchill argued that Crikey had made an "unwarranted attack" in personally connecting Murdoch to the Jan. 6th attacks that was "malicious and aggravates the harm."

Crikey took the post down, saying it was doing so as a courtesy. But no apology was forthcoming, and earlier this month, Crikey re-posted Keane's column.

Its executives told the Sydney Morning Herald that the episode was just one of several moments in which Murdoch had sought to bully the news site.

Former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt is sworn in at a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 13.
Jabin Botsford/Getty Images

Australia remains key to the Murdochs

Australia plays a recurring and central role in the Murdoch family's many dramas, both personal and professional.

Lachlan's father, Rupert Murdoch, was born there and made the foundation of his wealth there from a small newspaper granted to him by his father in Adelaide. Nearly two decades ago, Lachlan moved to Australia, seeking to make his own mark, when he quit his father's Manhattan-based media empire over corporate infighting. Lachlan's wife is Australian. He holds Australian citizenship and considers Australia home.

Though Lachlan returned to the fold, and once more helps to lead the family media empire, he moved with his wife and children back to Sydney during the pandemic. They still live there.

In defending its coverage of unproven allegations of voter fraud involving Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic election technology companies, Fox Corp and Fox News have argued that the network was merely covering newsworthy, if false, claims made by then President Donald Trump and his allies.

Republican and Democratic election officials at the local, state, and federal level have concluded there was no meaningful election fraud in the 2020 presidential race. Judges appointed by Trump were among the dozens who ruled against the Trump campaign in its legal challenges to the presidential election results.

Similarly, the New York City-based general counsel for Fox News, Bernard Gugar, wrote a formal complaint last September against a two-part documentary program Four Corners on the Australian Broadcasting Corp, called "Fox and the Big Lie."

The documentary focused on Fox's coverage following the 2020 elections, which it contended boosted Trump's false claims. But Gugar asserted the documentary was biased and false.

His very first objection: the fact it said it relied on network "insiders." He noted that the six former Fox News staffers interviewed by the ABC included people who left as far back as 2016 and 2017, as well as its former political director, who was let go several months after the election. (Fox sparked Trump's fury when its decision desk was the first to project that he would lose Arizona on Election Night in November 2020. )

According to two people with knowledge of the matter, the complaint was rejected by the internal unit at the ABC that reviews outside objections. Fox subsequently lodged its objections with the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the regulator that oversees broadcasting there. The regulator has not yet acted upon it.

The Crikey column that started the spat

The latest clash between the Murdochs and the Australian press hinges on a June 29th column by Crikey's politics editor, Bernard Keane, inspired by the revelations of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection.

Keane made two references to a Murdoch, though it's not clear whether the initial one pointed at Lachlan or Rupert.

The headline of the column, unmistakably a work of political commentary, calls Trump "a confirmed unhinged traitor" and goes on to say "Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator."

The column's final line reaches a grand rhetorical crescendo to make a case for the Murdochs' moral culpability: "the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators are the unindicted co-conspirators of this continuing crisis."

Churchill, the attorney for Fox and Murdoch, argues that connecting the Murdochs to such violent acts is unfair, inaccurate and ultimately defamatory.

Fox's attorneys have taken the first steps toward filing such a lawsuit against Crikey. In Australia, such cases are much easier to win than in the U.S.

"We're unwilling to be bullied by Lachlan Murdoch any more," Crikey's Fray tells NPR. "We thought it was important to make a stand for free speech and for independent journalism — something Lachlan Murdoch, his father Rupert, and his grandfather, too, have stood up for over the years."

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

BOOK REVIEW

Can the NORTH American Mall Survive?
On loving and loathing some of America’s most common public spaces

Jillian Steinhauer/August 22, 2022
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER OUMANSKI

LONG READ

In the days before the pandemic, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art, I would stop at Mrs. Fields. Mrs. Fields does not have the best cookies, especially in a city teeming with boutique bakeries. But getting a snack there was never about the quality of the food itself. A Mrs. Fields cookie summons up a weekend in the early 1990s when my parents would pack me and my siblings into our Volvo station wagon and drive us half an hour over state lines to the mall in Stamford, Connecticut. There, my mom would peruse high-end stores that didn’t have locations in our hometown, while my dad would take us kids to buy cookies and eat them on the steps that formed the mall’s gathering spot.

You could tell the story of many suburban childhoods through a progression of visits to such anodyne shopping centers. Once I was old enough to go to malls on my own, I met up with friends at the two main ones in White Plains, the New York City suburb where I grew up: the Galleria, where I got my ears pierced at Claire’s, and the Westchester, a shiny new beacon whose upscale nature was reflected in the fact that it had carpeting. By the time I moved away for college, I was over the world I left behind. When people asked where I was from, I’d answer, “a soulless suburb of New York City with no culture but lots of malls.”


Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall
by Alexandra Lange
Buy on Bookshop
Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $28.00

I haven’t spent much time in shopping centers since—partly by choice, partly through circumstance. Malls have been struggling in one way or another since the 1990s, thanks to a slew of factors: a glut of such shopping centers, the replacement of department stores with big-box ones, recessions, the rise of the internet, and a new generation of mega-developer owners who are more cutthroat about their bottom lines. Even before the pandemic, which made gathering indoors dangerous, fewer Americans were whiling away their weekends and after-school hours at the mall. Yet for so many of us, the image of a sunlit atrium crossed by steadily gliding escalators, with a Bath & Body Works looming in the background, evokes a deep nostalgia. Like how, the minute I walk by a Mrs. Fields and smell that intoxicating scent of butter, sugar, and chocolate, my defenses drop.
Beat inflation: Subscribe before prices rise.1 year for $10.Subscribe

The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Shopping is part of our daily lives, as are the spaces where we do it. Malls are fixtures of our physical and psychic landscapes, embedded with social and personal histories. They’re loaded symbols within our culture, inspiring feelings of allegiance or contempt. In George Romero’s famous 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead, the mall is a home for humans and zombies alike. In the third season of the ’80s-nostalgic TV show Stranger Things, it’s simultaneously a place of teenage possibility and a Russian front for a sci-fi lab. In contemporary “ruin porn” photography, the empty shells of malls represent the just deserts of late-stage capitalism.

What makes malls the object of both longing and disdain? The civic purpose of the mall—unlike libraries, schools, and museums—has never been entirely clear. “In contrast to many other forms of public architecture, which embody fear, power, and knowledge, the mall is personal,” Lange writes. It’s not an institution, officially speaking, but it is social, a rare type of place intended to encourage hanging out. “At their best, malls create community through shared experience,” Lange says; at their worst, they’re temples to consumerism. They offer freedom—from parents, strict rules, the weather—even as they’re policed. They’re public, sort of, but also private, providing convenience at a price. Malls are not necessarily the communal spaces we would design for ourselves, but in a country short on alternatives, they’re the ones we’ve been given. Is it any surprise that we want them to be so much more?

The story of the mall, like so many quintessentially American things, begins with an immigrant. The architect Victor Gruen (née Viktor Grünbaum) was an Austrian Jewish émigré who fled the Nazis in 1938; upon arriving in the United States, he began designing eye-catching shops and other commercial projects in a European modernist style. Visionary and ambitious, Gruen didn’t invent the mall whole cloth, but he did pioneer the form and help embed it firmly in the American landscape.

Twentieth-century malls grew in part out of nineteenth-century arcades and department stores, important spaces for shopping and socialization. Their more immediate predecessors, however, were the shopping centers created for the suburbs that were growing around U.S. cities. As Lange explains, many of these were modeled on the idea of a high street: “the most artistic pattern for shopping districts outside the urban core looked like Main Street—but a Main Street transplanted to the edge of town and built all at once.” Gruen was drawn to the idea of creating a “one-stop shopping area” designed to serve a given community, but he wanted to find a different way to do it.

His first attempt was theoretical: For a 1943 issue of Architectural Forum magazine, he and his partner, Elsie Krummeck, dreamed up a neighborhood shopping center with an open-air courtyard that would be more than just a place of commerce; it would contain the “necessities of day-to-day living,” like doctors’ offices and a library. “Shopping thus becomes a pleasure, recreation instead of a chore,” they wrote. Eleven years later, that vision—in spirit, if not details—became a reality with the opening of Northland, a shopping center outside Detroit. Northland was funded by a downtown department store, Hudson’s, which also served as the core of the new complex. Around it, Gruen arrayed five more buildings containing smaller shops. The spaces between the buildings were connected by manicured, art-filled outdoor plazas, which were named after the features of various European cities (and curated by the artist Lily Swann Saarinen, wife of architect and designer Eero).

Northland was a success by multiple measures: Critics applauded the design, and people came, tens of thousands of them. Gruen next went to Minneapolis, where, in a similar scenario—a downtown department store investing in the suburbs—he expanded on his original concept by adding a key feature: air conditioning. The mall would be entirely enclosed, meaning you could shop, worry-free, year-round; an ad for the new center, called Southdale, boasted, “Every day will be a perfect shopping day.” Hammering home the wonder of such a feat, Gruen designed a “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring,” which Lange deems “the inspiration for all future mall atria.” It occupied the center of Southdale, stretching three stories high and almost a block long, with trees, a café, art, a carousel, and a cage filled with birds. Like Northland’s plazas, it was a leisurely environment, the kind of space where you’d want to linger—but now you could do so anytime, in any weather.

The court helped set the stage for what theorists call the “Gruen transfer,” defined by Lange as “the moment when your presence at the mall tips from being goal-oriented ... into a pleasure in itself.” Why come to buy one item when you could while away the day? This was what made Gruen’s designs novel: In his hands, the mall wasn’t just utilitarian; it was aspirational. Not just “Somewhere To Go”—to use a phrase coined by Ray Bradbury and referenced by Lange—but somewhere to be.

Depending, of course, on who you are. One of the problems of malls, like so many American things, is the discrimination embedded in them from the start. They originated in the suburbs, where white Americans fled in the postwar decades, building segregated communities in the process. Lange discusses Kansas City’s Country Club District, an early and influential suburb with its own Main Street–style shopping plaza. The developer, J.C. Nichols, “set a design standard that would be imitated in many other places,” she writes, and enforced it with form-based deed restrictions that also included racial strictures: no Black buyers. “The shopping mall, from its origins in plazas such as this one in Kansas City, has to be seen as a racist form,” Lange concludes, “born from speculation that a whites-only version of the city ... would prove to be a better return on investment.”

Even when discrimination was less blunt, structural forces still ensured that malls were meccas mostly for white people. The Federal Housing Administration, commercial banks, and developers colluded to keep Black people out of certain neighborhoods by redlining and refusing to insure mortgages, and exploited them by flipping houses in white neighborhoods at higher prices, a practice known as blockbusting. What’s more, while Gruen had envisioned his malls sitting within mixed-use neighborhoods that would integrate more of the needs and activities of a community, the developers he worked with often sold off the surrounding land in order to make money. This, combined with mid-century federal funding for highways at the expense of all other forms of transit, further consolidated the exclusionary realities of the suburbs and their attendant malls. “In proposing a downtown outside downtown, protected from the elements, ringed by parking lots, designed for a single use and rigidly planned,” Lange observes, “Victor Gruen had also created a mechanism to protect white, upwardly mobile homeowners from those unlike themselves.”

The malls of the ’50s and ’60s departed from Gruen’s vision in other ways, too, becoming more uniform and less surprising as they spread across the country. Amid a wave of new building, architects and developers set standards dictating how malls should look and feel. The Urban Land Institute’s annual Community Builders’ Handbook proposed, for instance, that a community center should have 20 to 40 businesses, including a florist and liquor store, and offered four types of layouts. There was the cluster format that Gruen had used for Southdale, but more popular was a simpler form of mall: the I-shaped plan with anchor department stores on either end, connected by two rows of shops and an enclosed hallway. From there, L- and T-shaped plans developed that allowed for three anchor stores, or an X, which had four. Recognizing these elements as the core building blocks of malls—although they would become more bloated and complicated—helps explain why they often feel so familiar. It’s not just certain stores that appear again and again; it’s the way they’re laid out. There’s an underlying logic to them.

That extends to the interiors as well. The handbook recommends everything from a maximum ideal hallway distance between stores (65 feet) to the inclusion of “active features such as statuary, bird cages, kiosks, small animal cages (but be careful to avoid having monkeys), aquariums, and the like,” in order to induce “an active and attractive environment which creates an appeal not possible on a conventional pedestrian sidewalk.” This is the stuff of the Gruen transfer, and it’s essential to how malls were constructed, as sterile pleasure gardens of a kind. It’s also part of what makes them feel so weird. The inclusion of fountains and plants (but not monkeys!) dresses up the artificial space of the mall in nature; the inclusion of art wraps shopping in sophistication. These qualities can feel especially jarring when you step outside and find yourself facing a sea of paved parking lot.

In many ways, the process of implementing standards and designing shopping malls was about control. Lange tells of how Gruen’s idea for Northdale came in response to driving around Detroit and its environs and finding them a “mess” (her word). In Dallas in the 1960s, Raymond and Patsy Nasher built a shopping center, NorthPark, whose hallmark—beyond the stellar art collection it houses today—is its sophisticated coordination of everything from building materials to graphic design specifications. As the suburbs sprawled, developers, architects, and shoppers alike sought to impose order on them; they wanted to escape and refute the unwieldy realities of the city. “The ‘regional center,’” Lange writes, referring to one of the handbook’s designations, “was clean and neatly maintained ... it lacked vehicular congestion, jostling crowds, street noise, the ‘wrong’ social elements, and crime—all departures from qualities associated with downtown.”

But building your own new downtown comes with problems, too. The more you try to control the environment, the more stifling it becomes. I think this is why I turned on malls after spending my formative years inside them. As I got older, I yearned for the unpredictability of a less manicured and mass-produced reality, one more surprising than what a stop at the Gap or Sbarro could offer. The more I understood the codes and rules of suburban shopping centers, the more I longed for the world outside of them.

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, malls tried to fight their reputation for dreary conformity by going even bigger and more immersive. Inspired in part by the essays of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, the architect Jon Jerde began designing spaces that were more like world’s fairs and theme parks than the orderly, sedate shopping centers of previous decades. Seen from above, San Diego’s Horton Plaza, one of his first major retail projects, looked like someone took a knife and cut a thin, diagonal slice out of multiple city blocks. The colorful, five-level pedestrian mall was dotted with stairs, escalators, and bridges and divided into six sections, each based on a different city’s architecture. It was the classic Main Street idea, given the mega-funhouse treatment. Jerde’s aesthetic was postmodern pastiche, a mash-up of international references, and he included waterways, movie theaters, and, in the case of the giant Mall of America, an entire theme park in his plans. John Simones, who has worked at Jerde’s firm since 1984, summed it up as “the idea of moving from a typical mall, a place of consumption, to a place of experience.”

In a way, Jrde’s idea wasn’t entirely dissimilar from Gruen’s or those of other predecessors: He wanted the mall to be a destination. But he made it so for a wider swath of visitors. He recognized that by the ’80s, splashing fountains and novelty trees were not enough to draw people; you had to “make shopping beside the point,” as a writer for Los Angeles Magazine once summed it up. And it worked. After all, if the mall is a model of consolidation, why not add entertainment? There’s something freeing about shedding stuffy, middle-class values for good old-fashioned American fun, of embracing over-the-top artificiality and not pretending that a shopping trip is about anything besides consumption, whether of pretzels, shoes, or experiences.

Plenty of malls today follow Jerde’s precedent, including New Jersey’s American Dream, where entertainment—including what’s billed as “North America’s first and only indoor, real-snow, year-round ski and snow resort”—accounts for more than half the space. Opened in fall 2019, American Dream has struggled financially, something that Lange attributes not just to the pandemic but to the design itself, calling it a mall that has “gone too far.” While I was working on this essay, though, I saw a friend who’d been there with his daughter the week before. I said I’d heard the mall was too big, empty, and floundering, but this surprised him. He said they’d seen plenty of visitors and had a great time.

Jerde wasn’t just trying to get people to spend more time and money on shopping; he wanted to build on malls’ potential to be social spaces. “In America the last vestiges of community are a parade, a football game and a shopping center,” he once said. And in fact, in many places, malls have served that function, as Lange details in a chapter devoted to various groups and subcultures that have found and made homes there. There are mall walkers like Caroline Knutson, who began doing laps at Salem, Oregon’s Lancaster Mall in 1982 and was still doing them (albeit fewer) in 2013, when she was vision impaired and needed a walker. Mall walking has become so popular that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored a guide to it in 2015, noting the value of “level surfaces, benches for places to rest, water fountains,” and “accessible restrooms.” It’s not just amenities that are a draw, however; it’s the creation of social bonds. For years until a 2015 renovation, the food court at the Gallery in Philadelphia served as a “de facto senior center” on weekday mornings, as mostly older Black men gathered to talk and people-watch. The presence of such groups is how even malls that look disconcertingly like every other mall become particular and unique.

Yet malls often have an uneasy relationship with those groups that love them most. Perhaps the clearest example of this is teenagers, who have been both courted and overpoliced at the mall. In pop culture, as in real places like my hometown, malls are a center of teenage life: a place to see and be seen, to roam without adults, to spend some money figuring out what you want to wear or own or play, and by extension who you want to be. And importantly, they’re capacious, home to Clueless’s Cher, a preppy, rich girl whose favorite form of self-care is shopping, as much as to Mallrats’ Brodie Bruce and T.S. Quint, slacker dudes who take refuge at the mall after being dumped. Malls have spaces—like the thousands of arcades built in the 1980s—and stores—like that trend-tracking staple, Hot Topic—meant for teens, and they promise a modicum of independence.

That independence can easily be taken away. In Mallrats, T.S.’s ex-girlfriend’s dad has the guys arrested on false charges. In real life, a video-game and arcade panic in the late ’80s led many malls to increase private security and install CCTV. Those measures were followed by codes of conduct and parental escort policies, the first of which was instituted by the Mall of America in 1996 and mandated that anyone under 16 had to be accompanied by an adult after 3 p.m. Lange reports that the American Civil Liberties Union “immediately opposed” the policy for “infringing on the rights of young people,” while local activists in Minneapolis felt it had been implemented specifically because teens of color were hanging out at the mall.

Black, Indigenous, and people of color (especially teens) have faced suspicion and profiling at malls. “The problem with going to department stores is every time a Black person enters, they get followed,” says the comedian Chris Rock in voice-over in an episode of his quasi-autobiographical sitcom, Everybody Hates Chris. A satisfying scene in the 1997 film Selena captures how racist and class-based dynamics can play out at the mall: A white saleswoman in a boutique dismisses Selena (Jennifer Lopez) as too poor to afford an $800 dress, but while her friend is trying it on, word gets around among Latinx mall workers that the Mexican American pop star is there. They mob the store asking for autographs, and amid the fawning crowd, Selena calls out to the saleswoman, “Excuse me, miss? We don’t need the dress.”

Some of the most successful—at least by Lange’s standards, maybe not those of developers—malls have adapted to embrace the people who now live near them. If malls began as spaces by and for white people, many have taken on new lives in the intervening decades. For one thing, the suburbs where many of them are located have become far more diverse. Lange discusses places like California’s Westfield Santa Anita, which has flourished by catering to the local Asian American population and bringing in Asian stores and eateries, and Atlanta’s Plaza Fiesta, a community hub that hews to Gruen’s original vision by housing shops as well as dentists, insurance agents, and a bus company that runs trips to Mexico. (Plaza Fiesta is a project by José de Jesús Legaspi, who has “an almost twenty-year career in retrofitting dying malls for Latinx and Caribbean entrepreneurs and customers across the country.”)

Lange also looks at shopping centers that have thrived with a different clientele than the one their builders intended: A prime example is Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn, a longtime shopping street whose makeover in the 1980s failed to attract suburbanites but turned it into a locus for the surrounding, largely Black communities. In such cases, it’s clear how successful malls can be when they actually work for the people around them.

Still, there’s a reason the United States today is littered with dead and dying malls: We have more of them than we need. A question kept nagging me as I read Meet Me by the Fountain—one that Lange answers but not, I think, completely convincingly: Should malls be saved? She says yes, making the case that “the mall is neither a joke nor a den of zombies, but a resource. America’s dead malls represent millions of square feet of matériel that are not going to be reabsorbed without investment and effort.” This is an important point: No one is served by hulking, decaying structures, least of all the people who live nearby, and Lange details some fascinating examples of adaptive reuse, including one former shopping center that’s been transformed into an Austin Community College campus.

But while she’s defensive about those who catalog dead malls with glee (see: ­deadmalls.com), I understand the impulse—although my take has always been more of a lament. Instead of multiple shopping centers with similarly sterile interiors, why couldn’t my suburban hometown have had theaters, a skate park, nature trails, and more sidewalks? We all need places to go to sit among strangers and bump into friends, but I wish I’d been given more opportunities to do so that weren’t linked to commerce or set to the sounds of Muzak or Top 40 pop.

For all the services malls provide, they remain private spaces. We can try to improve them by making them more diverse and democratic, but we also have to contend with the reality that they are in many ways a private substitute for things the government has failed (or, arguably, refuses) to provide. Instead of public plazas with fountains to lounge around, we get food courts. In place of rent regulations to encourage small-business owners, we get Auntie Anne’s and Hot Topic. Our planners forgo walkable downtowns for a strip of shops you have to drive to. More often than public parks, we get parking lots.

When I think about malls, I find myself wondering where else the money spent on them could go. Lange takes considerable time analyzing the layout of the Shops and Restaurants at Hudson Yards, the mall within the $25 billion real estate project on Manhattan’s West Side. Yet she doesn’t ever explain how Hudson Yards’ developer, the Related Companies, siphoned off at least $1.2 billion in funding via a gerrymandered district for a visa program that’s meant to support investment in areas with high unemployment—which Midtown West is not.

We’re living in a golden age of privatization, extending from social media to city parks. This means our amenities come with strings attached and harmful consequences, like misallocation of money or neglect of poorer communities. The history of the mall has at least taught us that. What would it look like if we tried to reclaim some of the space we’ve lost and demanded more from our leaders in the process? When I think about the future I want, I don’t envision a new and improved version of the mall. I want more truly public space, which is so hard to come by in the United States. I have plenty of places to shop. What I want is somewhere to socialize, somewhere to pee, and somewhere to rest.

Jillian Steinhauer @jilnotjill
Jillian Steinhauer writes about art and politics for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and other publications.

Crimes U.S. has committed in Middle East: Establishing black sites, inhumanly treating prisoners

(People's Daily Online), August 22, 2022



Cartoon by Ma Hongliang

The United States has committed a series of crimes that have seriously violated international law in the Middle East and surrounding regions. Its torturing of prisoners from the Muslim community has become an indelible stain on the country’s human rights record.

The “Costs of War” Project at Brown University in the U.S. has noted that following the 9/11 attacks, Washington orchestrated a system of black sites in at least 54 countries and regions across the world. Hundreds of thousands of people were detained at these sites, including Muslims, women and children.

As early as 2003, the U.S. military blatantly abused detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, resulting in a large number of deaths. In September 2021, the U.S. prison and prisoner abuse practices at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were also exposed by the media.

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, which the U.S. has continuously failed to shut down, is one of the notorious “black sites” the U.S. has established overseas to detain “terrorists” from the Middle East and elsewhere. The detention camp has locked up a total of some 780 prisoners, many of whom have been held without bringing any criminal charge.

More than 30 people, old and frail, remain in the prison. They are deprived of their liberty for long periods of time and subjected to endless mental and physical torture.

In addition to widespread abuse and torture at Guantanamo, American personnel have tortured prisoners by desecrating the Quran and violating Islamic beliefs, which sparked collective protests and even caused mass suicides among the detainees.

The humiliating and cruel treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military constitutes a grave violation of their fundamental right to human dignity and of U.S. obligations under international human rights law to prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The black sites are a hugely ironic blemish on American politicians, who on the one hand label their country as a champion of human rights, and yet on the other have been exposed for the hypocrisy and double-standards of American-style human rights.

Related:

Crimes U.S. has committed in Middle East: Killing civilians, trampling on people’s right to life

Crimes U.S. has committed in Middle East: Transplanting American-style democracy, stirring up trouble
(Web editor: Hongyu, Bianji)

Pfizer and Valneva could soon have a vaccine for Lyme disease

Cottage Life - 


Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Valneva are collaborating to create a vaccine designed to protect against tick-borne Lyme disease. The two companies are entering a late-stage clinical trial where they plan to test the vaccine on 6,000 participants.


© Photo by Erik Karits/ShutterstockPfizer and Valneva could soon have a vaccine for Lyme disease

“With increasing global rates of Lyme disease, providing a new option for people to help protect themselves from the disease is more important than ever,” said Annaliesa Anderson, Pfizer’s head of vaccine research and development, in a statement.

Lyme disease: Interview with a biologist

The companies plan to test the vaccine, known as VLA15, in 50 sites where Lyme disease is “highly endemic”, including Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and the U.S. Ages of participants will range from five years old and up.

Participants in the trial will receive three doses of either the vaccine or a placebo, plus one booster consisting of a vaccine or placebo.

“Data from the Phase 2 studies continue to demonstrate strong immunogenicity in adults as well as in children, with acceptable safety and tolerability profiles in both study populations,” Pfizer said.

The vaccine works by blocking a protein, known as OspA, in the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. By blocking OspA, the bacterium is unable to leave the tick and infect humans.

Pfizer and Valneva entered into their collaboration in April 2020. If the clinical trials prove successful, Pfizer said it believes it could seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to release the vaccine in the U.S. and Europe by 2025. Considering the FDA’s close partnership with Health Canada, it’s likely the vaccine would be approved in Canada the same year.

This wouldn’t be the first time the FDA has approved a Lyme disease vaccine. In 1998, GlaxoSmithKline released LYMErix, which reduced new infections in vaccinated adults by nearly 80 per cent. But the drug was pulled after three years due to low sales.

Since the 2000s, the number of people affected by Lyme disease has grown. In 2009, Health Canada reported 144 cases of Lyme disease. Case numbers have progressively gotten higher, peaking at 2,851 in 2021. In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that as many as 476,000 Americans are infected with Lyme disease each year.

Lyme disease is spread through the bite of an infected black-legged tick, typically found in areas with high grass or brush. The ticks attach themselves as people pass by, usually migrating to hard-to-see areas, such as the groin, armpits, and scalp. The tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours for the disease to transfer.

Three simple habits that will help keep you safe from Lyme disease

Signs of infection include fever, chills, headache, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes. If caught early, Lyme disease can be treated with antibiotics. But if the disease isn’t treated, it could result in facial palsy, arthritis, inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, and heart palpitations known as Lyme carditis.

A number of Canadian celebrities have spoken publicly about their battles with Lyme disease, including singers Justin Bieber and Avril Lavigne.

“Lyme disease continues to spread, representing a high unmet medical need that impacts the lives of many in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Juan Carlos Jaramillo, Valneva’s chief medical officer, in a statement. “We look forward to further investigating the VLA15 candidate in Phase 3, which will take us a step closer to potentially bringing this vaccine to both adults and children who would benefit from it.”