Buffalo’s Establishment Pulled Out All the Stops to Defeat India Walton

To beat India Walton, the establishment smeared her, changed the rules, and threw piles of cash. In the end, she flipped Byron Brown’s base while he drove up turnout in the city’s wealthiest areas

India Walton walks to a polling place with supporters in Buffalo, New York on Thursday, October 28, 2021. (Matt Burkhartt for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

BYBRANKO MARCETIC
JACOBIN
11.03.2021

When thinking about India Walton’s loss in the Buffalo mayor’s race last night, it’s hard not to first think about the never-ending injustice of being poor.

Consider: incumbent Byron Brown — Walton’s opponent and improbable write-in candidate, after he lost a Democratic primary in a city where its winner is virtually elected mayor by default — has one of the country’s more shocking records. Brown has recklessly run the city’s finances into the ground. He utterly failed to tackle the city’s pervasive poverty, exacerbating it instead. He did little to nothing about its growing lead problem, and has presided over such pervasive corruption, including several scandals linked directly to him, that the FBI was investigating his entourage even as the race was going on, including a raid on one of his offices. In fact, the only reason Brown was even able to stay on the ballot was that a judge with a glaring conflict of interest ruled he could.

Yet as soon as Brown lost the primary, all of the misdeeds he’d committed while actually in power over the past fifteen years took a backseat. Brown successfully turned the election debate to the petty personal mistakes of Walton, a woman who became a working mother as a teen, before becoming a nurse: she was charged with $295 worth of food stamp fraud in 2003; she owed $749 in back taxes in 2004; she was stopped for driving with a suspended license; she visited her cousin before he went to jail; she failed to show up for a court summons sent to the wrong address; she wrote a rude Facebook post; and her car was towed just last month over unpaid parking tickets.

It worked: a week before election day, more than half of voters said their opinion of Walton had gotten worse since the primary.

Most politicians don’t have these particular blots on their records; they either come from backgrounds where money is never an issue, or sociopathically design their entire adult lives, down to its minutiae, so as to have a spotless record when they eventually make their run. Brown exploited the fact that Walton was something exceedingly rare in today’s politics: an actual working-class person who hadn’t graduated from the Ivy League, or spent a decade or more obsessively planning her political career. Having lost her nonprofit job after running for office, Walton was delivering food for DoorDash and living on loans from her mother as she campaigned these last few months.

Brown had other advantages. His improbable comeback was helped every step of the way by a business sector terrified that, after fifteen years getting tax cuts, subsidies, and taxpayer-funded grants, the gravy train was about to end. Brown raised $851,000 in just four months from the city’s moneyed interests.

He was also helped by a bipartisan political establishment united against Walton. New York Republicans put up a united front with Brown, with right-wing party members, most of them outside Buffalo, making up a third of the signatures they helped collect to try to put him on the ballot. Together, they fearmongered about Walton using a playbook indistinguishable from the red-baiting tactics Republicans have used the last few years to rile their voters up against Democrats.

On the Democratic side, despite getting a late endorsement from Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Democrats in the state largely avoided endorsing Walton, with the state party chair comparing her to white supremacist David Duke. At one point, shortly after her primary win, the Democrat-controlled city council voted to “explore” simply eliminating the mayor’s office.

For all the parties’ talk of fiscal responsibility, clean government, and social justice, they went for a corrupt, incompetent fiscal manager who has presided over virtually unchanged conditions for the city’s poor, largely black population. Why? Because Brown suited their class interests: he’s slashed taxes, gone easy on landlords, doled out lucrative favors for the right price, and sent real estate values soaring thanks to the city’s uneven development.
Reversal of Fortune

So how did Brown win?

Walton had caught Brown napping in June’s primary, where a mere 20 percent of Democrats showed up to vote, or about 13.8 percent of Buffalo’s registered voters. The question was how things would shake out in the higher-turnout context of a general election. At more than fifty-eight thousand votes, or 37.4 percent of registered voters, Tuesday’s was the highest turnout for a mayoral election in Buffalo since 2005, when a majority of more than seventy-three thousand voters first made Brown mayor.

As of the time of writing, Walton has more than doubled the 11,132 votes she had gotten in the primary, a testament to her campaign’s grassroots operation. But Walton wasn’t the only one to turn people out. If we treat the write-in votes as a proxy for Brown votes, Brown nearly quardrupled his 9,625 primary votes to 34,273 in the general, nearly eight thousand more votes than his best ever performance in 2009, and nearly double his average vote total in the last four races.

Walton and Brown both turned out a relatively large number of voters — Brown just turned out a lot more. If nothing else, it’s a sharp reversal from the dwindling political engagement that has worsened under Brown.

The incumbent mayor owes much of this to a sharp spike in turnout in the city’s wealthiest, whitest districts, the two highest-turnout districts in 2017. Brown’s advantage in the South District alone — 87 percent white, with a relatively even income split but one of the city’s lowest poverty rates — was responsible for nearly two-thirds of his overall advantage over Walton.

There, Brown’s vote total was more than six times the number he got in the primary, and the gap between him and Walton went up thirteen-fold. This, after losing the district eighty to nineteen four years ago to a hometown opponent who made many of the same critiques of Brown’s record as Walton has this year.

In terms of vote totals, Brown’s second biggest gap, and his second largest gain from the primary, came in the Delaware district, the city’s wealthiest, and typically its friendliest to Republicans. Walton had bested Brown there in the primary, but Brown’s vote total in the district jumped four-fold last night, letting him take the district with an advantage of more than eighteen hundred votes.

By contrast, Walton’s strongest showings were in districts that are less white and wealthy. Walton again narrowly won the Ellicott district, two-thirds black and where more than half earn below the city’s median wage of $35,000 a year; and her home district of Niagara, where one in five residents are black and nearly a third earn less than $20,000 a year. The University district, a majority black district traditionally part of Brown’s base on the East Side, and which he’d won with 64 percent of the vote in 2017, swung significantly to Walton this year, who lost by less than three hundred votes there.

Maybe most notably, where Brown had won his home district of Masten in the primary — long a loyal stronghold of his in mayoral races — Walton flipped it last night. A district Brown had won by as much as 97 percent in 2009’s primary and 68 percent just four years ago went 53 percent for his opponent this year. More than four-fifths of the district’s residents are African American, and nearly two-thirds earn below the median wage. In a significant reversal from 2017, Brown lost a large chunk of his traditional base to Walton this election, and was propelled by some of the districts most hostile to him in previous years.

But this doesn’t tell the whole story, because Brown was able to repeatedly defy this simple pattern. He held onto Fillmore, the city’s poorest district whose population is roughly equally white and black, and he bettered his primary vote share by nineteen points in Lovejoy, a majority-white district where nonetheless nearly 40 percent of residents are African American and more than half earn below the median wage (Brown had lost it four years ago, managing thirty points less than he got in this election).

Likewise, Brown flipped the North district, comparably poor and nearly 50 percent white, but which has benefited from development projects Brown has presided over. He quintupled his primary votes there, adding seventeen points to his vote share. He similarly cut Walton’s lead in her home district by seventeen points and ever so slightly shaved down her margin in Ellicott.

These figures suggest Brown’s built a similar coalition to the one that made Joe Biden the Democratic nominee last year: African-American voters loyal to a long-serving familiar face, accompanied by a surge of more conservative, well-off white voters desperate to stop a left-wing insurgent.

Simple Twists of Fate

As more information comes out, the Walton campaign will no doubt be looking to make sense of what, strategically, they could’ve done differently. Is the local political and media perception correct, that Walton needlessly antagonized Democratic officials after the primary by telling them they were “on notice” and that “we are coming”? Was she fatally dogged by the “defund the police” slogan, which Walton never used but which was associated with her, and which spurred the city workers that populate the South district to organize against her? And to what extent was it ever possible for Walton’s insurgent campaign to combat the widespread voter perception that she lacked the experience necessary to run a major city?

There is a broader lesson here for the Left, too. After Walton’s primary win, many presumed the general election was a done deal. That Brown, with the backing of a corrupt establishment determined to protect its power and standing, could engineer an improbable, history-making comeback — even rewrite the law to do so — seemed beyond the realm of possibility, until it wasn’t. Walton’s campaign worked hard to turn out voters until the day of the election. But engineering the defeat of a united establishment — even just within a single city — may require vastly more resources and manpower than we think.

There is also a lesson from, of all places, Byron Brown’s own career. Brown and his allies didn’t come to dominate Buffalo politics by winning one mayoral election out of the blue. The Grassroots Inc. political organization Brown came out of was founded nearly two decades before his win, by African-American community activists who decided they needed political power to improve their neighborhoods, and set about the long, patient process of gradually unseating the do-nothing establishment hacks in council seats, the state assembly, and anywhere else they could manage a win.

Brown made his way up the political ranks under its auspices, until eventually securing enough of a foothold and support to run for mayor. The tragedy is that both Brown and Grassroots simply replaced the previous corrupt machine with their own.

Besides this, every insurgent challenge is a long shot by definition, and absent the perfect campaign or the perfect set of conditions — and sometimes even with one or the other — a dose of good fortune is pivotal. Walton’s story, of a working-class activist winning an improbable challenge against a complacent, business-focused incumbent, has more than a few parallels with the story of Bernie Sanders in Burlington forty years ago.

Sanders’s shock win then launched the greatest left-wing electoral success story in modern political history. But even with all his political skill, it all rested on a series of fortunate twists of fate: a lazy and out-of-touch opponent; the latter’s alienation of several key voting blocs; the entrance of two extra challengers who split his vote, allowing Sanders to squeak through by only twelve votes.

Maybe most crucially, with Sanders having delivered his upset in a general election and not a primary, the incumbent never had the chance to get his act together and go for round two, though he certainly did what he could. It also meant the press never had the chance to go negative against him — the fact that he was a socialist wasn’t even widely known or brought up until after the election was over.

In a political system where money wins out over people the majority of the time, left-wing politics has always meant losing and losing, until you start to win. The Walton campaign fell short this time, and it will have to evaluate why exactly that was. Those lessons will inform insurgent campaigns of the future — which may look back on this as one more crack in the dam before the walls really started to burst.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Landru: France's chilling killer who inspired Chaplin

Issued on: 04/11/2021 

Bluebeard: Henri-Desire Landru killed at least 11 people from 1915 to 1919 

eba AFP/File

Paris (AFP) – While French soldiers were dying by their thousands at the front during World War I, the country's first modern serial killer was murdering the lonely women left at home and burning their bodies in his kitchen stove.

In a cautionary tale for the Tinder generation, Henri-Desire Landru -- nicknamed "Bluebeard" for bringing to life the folk story about a killer who prayed on lovelorn women -- lured his victims with personal ads promising romance.

His trial, which opened exactly a century ago, both captivated and horrified France, with the little bald charmer with his long black manicured beard mesmerising the packed courtroom.

In one of his many dramatic flourishes during the three-week trial, Landru denied all the charges and demanded: "Show me the bodies!" knowing that all that remained of his 11 victims was ash.

The prosecution wheeled in Landru's stove in an effort to upstage him and it later made its way to a Paris wax museum before being bought by one of France's most famous television hosts.

Landru's piercing gaze and strange charisma not only hypnotised the press, it inspired books and films, including a Charlie Chaplin movie, "Monsieur Verdoux".

Hunting in the classifieds

An odd jobs man who called himself an engineer and inventor, Landru patented a motorcycle but never put it on the market -- the first of his many scams.

Born in Paris in 1869, the altar boy turned bad had spent three stints in prison before being sent to the notorious Devil's Island penal colony in French Guiana as the Great War broke out.

He managed to escape in the chaos of mobilisation, adopting more than 90 false identities and moving a dozen times to stay one step ahead of the police.

With men away fighting and many women left alone, Landru began to hone his deadly ruse.

Fatal attraction

He published a small ad in the classified columns of newspapers proposing marriage and pretending to be a rich widower seeking a soulmate.#photo1

Some 283 women replied, but only the lonely singletons or rich widows interested him. Neat and nimble, he spoke well and put his victims at ease with jokes.

From 1915 to 1919 Landru repeated the same modus operandi.

He lured the chosen fiancee to an isolated rented home in Gambais, west of Paris, had them nominate him as their proxy to pocket their savings and then killed them.

It is believed he then part-burned the bodies in his kitchen stove. Neighbours reported foul smells.

Another particularly chilling detail was revealed at the trial: Landru always bought himself a return train ticket to Gambais but got only a one-way for the women.

In all he killed 10 women and one of their sons. No trace of their bodies was ever found. And there is strong suspicion had he killed a 12th person.

Capture

On April 12, 1919, the most wanted man in France was arrested in Paris after the sister of a victim had recognised him on the street and alerted the police.

His capture and conviction owed much to the persistence of Inspector Jules Belin, who in the absence of hard evidence and a confession gathered clues that convinced the jury.

The profile that emerged of Landru in court was that of a meticulous, obsessive man.

He recorded everything in his notebook -- the physical details of the women, his purchase of dozens of hacksaws, and, next to the names of his victims, a time, presumably the exact moment he killed them.

Courtroom drama

The legend of Landru was firmly forged when his trial opened two and a half years after his arrest.

For three weeks ordinary people and high society types flocked to the trial in Versailles by train on the "Landru express", at once horrified and fascinated by the man standing in the dock and his diabolical methods.

The novelist Colette covered the trial for the "Le Matin" newspaper, describing the spectacle and the mesmerising effect Landru, who was quite the actor, had on his audience.

On November 30 Landru was sentenced to death and executed early on February 25, 1922.

Just before the guillotine came down, Landru's lawyer asked if he wanted to ease his conscience.

"That, sir, is my little suitcase," he said, taking his secrets with him to his grave.

Enduring fascination

Horrifying as his crimes were, Landru inspired a devoted following in France.

While he awaited trial in prison, several thousand people voted for him as an undeclared candidate in an election.

Behind bars he received some 4,000 letters from admirers, including 800 proposals of marriage.

Even after he lost his head some claimed he was still alive.

Rumours persisted that he was secretly released, with sightings all over the world.

Landru became a popular culture bogeyman, the punchline of dark, often sexist jokes.

There have been numerous books, comic strips and films made about him, including Chaplin's "Monsieur Verdoux" and Claude Chabrol's "Landru", as well as classic songs by Charles Trenet and Serge Gainsbourg.

© 2021 AFP

A Year After the Election, Trump’s Effect on Evangelical Churches Lingers

Political tensions in the pews have calmed, and another survey shows leaders’ Trump support yielded more positives than negatives for evangelicals.

DAVID ROACH|NOVEMBER 1, 2021 06:00 AM

Image: Eva Marie Uzcategui / Getty Images

Political polarization has subsided in most American churches a year after the 2020 presidential elections. But there are notable exceptions to that trajectory, and new research has found lingering effects of evangelical support for former president Donald Trump.

In the youthful, mobile, and tech-savvy church, members who “leaned more toward the far left and the far right tended to have the most difficult time in this last season,” Sinnett said, “and they also were the ones that gravitated away from the church.”The remnants of tension are evident at congregations such as Seattle’s Downtown Cornerstone Church, where pastor Adam Sinnett has been surprised “at how challenging it is to really cultivate unity amidst [our] political differences.”

The Seattle congregation’s experience aligns with data released this week by Heart and Mind Strategies, a research and consulting organization. A survey of 1,000 US adults conducted in August found some remaining sources of political strife for evangelicals.

Around half of Americans believe evangelical leaders’ support of Trump hurt the church’s credibility. One in four say evangelical support for Trump reduced their desire to participate in religion. And among evangelicals, 33 percent say their leaders’ support of Trump made personal witness to friends and family more difficult.

EXPAND GRAPH

The political strife the church has endured in recent years “shows the world that Jesus doesn’t really unite people like we say he does,” Sinnett said.

At Downtown Cornerstone, the political differences show up “in three primary spheres: personal relationships, small groups, and most pointedly around decisions of leadership” over whether to address social issues and whether to submit to the government on COVID-19 restrictions, among other issues.

“It’s somewhat of an indictment of the church that we are far more comfortable in our ideological circles than we are with people that have totally different political perspectives but worship the same Jesus,” Sinnett said.

Divides in many churches hit a breaking point in 2020, with heightened political polarization during Trump’s reelection campaign and pastors struggling to maintain unity over pandemic responses. In the aftermath of the contested election and the riot at the US Capitol, pastors even found themselves in conversations around conspiracy theories, fear, and truth.

Amid the tensions, some congregations clashed with their leaders, some pastors left their churches, some members went searching for a new church home, and some have taken a break from church life altogether.

But as the election recedes and pandemic outlooks improve, things feel a lot better in most churches than they did in 2020. The effects still linger, but the intensity of the debates have died down.

The question for analysts is whether the apparent calming of political tension among evangelicals stems from increased spiritual maturity or just the changing news cycle. Author and theologian Jonathan Leeman thinks it’s a combination of both.

“There are risks of dividing over things that are in the news,” said Leeman, coauthor of How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics? “Now we’re not talking about a presidential election,” and the division is subsiding. “Everybody is talking about vaccines and mask mandates, so that’s where you’re going to feel the fissures.”

Still, Christians seem to be learning in 2021 to separate “whole church issues,” on which Christians must agree to be part of a congregation together, from “Christian freedom issues,” which are not as clear in Scripture, he said.

“At least a few more people are beginning to grab onto the idea of Christian freedom as a crucial doctrine that allows the temperatures of conversations to drop at least slightly,” said Leeman, editorial director at 9Marks in Washington, DC.

It can be hard to disagree over politics in church when so many believers see their vote and their political engagement as stemming from their Christian convictions and beliefs in right and wrong. Two-thirds of self-identified evangelicals, according to the Heart and Mind survey, say their faith influences their political beliefs, twice as many as Americans on average.

The majority of evangelicals (57%) believe their support of Trump in 2020 “showed moral courage to try and achieve policies and actions consistent with evangelical Christian values,” and more than a third of Americans overall agreed.

Most who identify as evangelicals or hold evangelical beliefs said evangelical stances on President Trump didn’t affect their church involvement either way. But for a sizable minority, it led them to become more engaged with their church and their faith.

Among self-identified evangelicals, 30 percent say they are more likely to attend Sunday services as a result of how their pastors addressed Trump in the last election, 27 percent say they’re more likely to make donations to their church, and 33 percent are more likely to witness to friends.

EXPAND GRAPH

Approximately 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016 and again in 2020, according to polling data. Trump’s evangelical allies, convened by friend and televangelist Paula White, included leaders like First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, Gateway Church pastor Robert Morris, and Samaritan’s Purse president Franklin Graham.

Some evangelicals who objected to Trump during the 2016 election—such as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler—ended up backing him in 2020 based on his track record on religious liberty, abortion, and other issues. In the Heart and Mind survey, evangelicals who were white, over 55, and weekly church attenders were most likely to agree with such stances, believing Trump kept his promises to champion matters important to faithful Christians.

The evangelical critics of the former president, though, said Trump’s brash approach, as well as his remarks on women and immigrants, revealed a character at odds with Christian values. Pastors like Andy Stanley at Atlanta’s North Point Community Church worried evangelical association with Trump would hurt the church’s reputation and outreach. In the survey, a minority of evangelicals believed the same, concerned about the impact on evangelical credibility and Christian witness.

But surveys so far haven’t reported a significant impact on evangelical affiliation. The new findings from Heart and Mind align with data released last month by the Pew Research Center showing there was no mass exodus from evangelicalism during the four years of Trump’s presidency despite pockets of turmoil. In fact, affiliation grew thanks to Trump’s political supporters adopting the label.

While evangelicalism at large looks to have survived the Trump era without major fissures, division remains for some Black Christians.

The Heart and Mind Strategies poll found 64 percent of Black evangelicals identified with the sentiment that “evangelical leaders’ obsessive support of Trump coupled with his personal failings does more harm than good, tarnishing numerous causes.” An identical percentage of white evangelicals (64%) agreed that they supported Trump because “while not a perfect person, he championed matters important to faithful Christians.”

Those racial differences manifested themselves in the departures of several African American pastors from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) last year. Now Marshal Ausberry, immediate past SBC first vice president and immediate past president of the SBC’s National African American Fellowship, says the suburban DC congregation he pastors may leave the SBC this year.

Members of Antioch Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, Virginia, are “deeply, deeply concerned” over appearances the convention is “in bed with a particular [political] party,” he said.

The Trump administration “reopened” past wounds of racial trauma for African Americans and brought grown men to tears, Ausberry said. Over the past year, the situation “has not improved because anytime you experience pain or racialized trauma resurfacing, it takes time to heal.”

The Hispanic community seems to mirror the larger trend of political calming, according to Javier Chavez, a Georgia pastor and global studies professor at Truett McConnell University. The 2020 election cycle was “difficult” for Latinos due to the “political noise.”

In different parts of the country and among Latinos with different backgrounds, views clashed over the president. Some churches split over the election, and some Hispanic believers changed churches over politics, Chavez said.

This year, however, “is a different story.” Currently, “the discussion of political ideology is not really what is transpiring in my community,” said Chavez, pastor of Amistad Cristiana International, a Spanish-speaking, predominantly Mexican and Central American church in Gainesville, Georgia. “At this moment, the concern is economics: inflation, constant noise of an approaching economic crisis, housing prices.”

EXPAND GRAPH

Amid the slowdown of election conflict, half (52%) of evangelicals agree they are “proud that some in the evangelical community are seeking to separate the gospel message from Trump and toxic politics,” according to the Heart and Mind Strategies survey.

Evangelicals under 35, people of color including Asians and Hispanics, and those living in the Mountain and Midwest areas were most likely to agree.

Many of them likely have their own leaders in mind. Self-identified evangelicals gave their pastors higher marks in their handling of the 2020 election than evangelical leaders in general.

EXPAND GRAPH

Respondents were more likely to say evangelical leaders did a fair or poor job speaking about the presidential election (43%). When asked about their own pastor or church leader, though, just over half (51%) gave them positive marks.

David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.

World's highest ski resort a Bolivian memory
Agence France-Presse
November 04, 2021

Rising 5,300-meters above sea level, Chacaltaya was a popular family weekend retreat for inhabitants of La Paz, just 30 kilometers away

 AIZAR RALDES AFP

Bernardo Guarachi's eyes light up as he reminisces about the glory days of Chacaltaya -- once the highest ski resort in the world but now a crumbling relic to climate change in the Bolivian Andes

"Today, it's a cemetery," said Guarachi, pointing to the rusted poles and cables from the old chair lifts.

His eyes scan the 400-meter slope he once shot down at speed on a blanket of snow, now covered only in rocks.

"It used to be full of skiers on Saturdays and Sundays," said the mountaineer.

Rising 5,300-meters above sea level, Chacaltaya was a popular family weekend retreat for inhabitants of La Paz, just 30 kilometers away.

By 1998, the Chacaltaya glacier had been reduced to just seven percent of its size in 1940, while it disappeared entirely in 2009.

Bolivia has lost around half of its glaciers in the last 50 years and experts say things will get worse as global warming continues.

According to the Andean Glaciers and Waters Atlas, published in 2018 by UNESCO and the Norwegian foundation GRID-Arendal, "the expected warming will provoke the loss of 95 percent of the permafrost in Bolivia by 2050," including the loss of almost all its glaciers.
Disappearing glaciers

It is a familiar theme for Edson Ramirez, a glaciologist at the Mayor de San Andres University who conducted a comprehensive study on the impact of climate change on the Bolivian Andes.

He was also the first person to conduct an inventory of Bolivia's glaciers, including documenting their disappearance.

"All the similar glaciers to Chacaltaya ... are suffering the same process of melting, of death," said Ramirez.

At the end of the 1990s Ramirez and other scientists measured the thickest part of the glacier: 15 meters.

"We knew it could disappear in the next 15 years," he said.

It took only 11 years.

The glaciers are fed by an accumulation of snow but "the planet's temperature has risen to a point where we already cannot have snow in these places any more," said Ramirez.

According to some predictions, the temperature in the Andes could rise by two to five degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century.

"We need to take urgent action between all countries to lower the planet's temperature," said Ramirez, whose challenge is to preserve what remains of Bolivia's glaciers.
Money over nature

Guarachi, 67, looks off into the distance towards El Alto, the large satellite town overlooking La Paz, and the cloud of smog hanging over both.

"Man has changed a lot for one aim, which is to earn money, lots of money, and he has forgotten about nature (and) the mountains," said Guarachi.

Bolivia is 80th out of 181 countries in terms of CO2 emissions.

Earlier this year, the South American country of 11 million submitted a proposal to the United Nations that would see the worst offenders increase by "five to 10 times" their financing for the worst affected countries, as well as greater efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

But Ramirez says that his country cannot be excused of blame, pointing to the forest fires that every year devastate thousands of hectares of the Amazon basin to clear the land for agriculture.

"The effects of the fires also influence the state of the glaciers," said Ramirez, explaining that the carbon produced is deposited on the ice and accelerates the melting process by reducing the ability of snow and ice to reflect sunlight.

Water threat

The disappearance of the glaciers could impact the water supply for millions of Bolivians.

During periods of drought, the ice melt would provide up to 85 percent of La Paz's water needs. Several times in the last five years its residents have been forced to ration water.


Farmers on the Altiplano, above La Paz, have also felt the effects.

Offerings and prayers to Mother Earth -- a traditional deity -- have surged.

Unaffected by the altitude, Guarachi strolls around the ruins of the Chacaltaya resort that was built in the 1930s.

"We have to change our mentality ... because I'd rather have water than a lot of money. You could have a lot of money but you won't be able to buy water if the glaciers disappear," he said.

For biologist Karina Apaza, the environment used to be seen as "an impediment to economic growth, but if you impact it, who are you impacting? Yourself."

© 2021 AFP

'Sad sight': Astronaut reports back on Earth's climate disaster
Agence France-Presse
November 04, 2021

Astronaut Thomas Pesquet (AFP)

A French astronaut reported back on Earth's climate change damage as seen from space on Thursday, calling it a "sad sight" in a conversation with President Emmanuel Macron.

Thomas Pesquet, on his second tour at the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting the planet, told Macron by video link that the destructive impact of human activity was becoming more and more visible, even from 400 kilometres (250 miles) away.

"Unfortunately that is the case, Mister President," Pesquet said. "Through the portholes of the space station, we distinctly see Earth's fragility," he said. "We see the damaging effects of human activity, pollution of rivers and air pollution."

He said the astronauts at the station had observed "entire regions burning, like in Canada. We saw California covered in a cloud of smoke, we saw the flames with our naked eyes," he said.

Similar devastation could be seen in Greece and southern France, the pilot said, also describing "the sad sight of repeated tropical storms".

Asked by Macron whether things had changed since Pesquet's first mission in 2016, the astronaut said: "Yes, the weather phenomena are accelerating at an alarming rate."

Visibly struck by that observation, Macron remained silent for a moment, and then said: "We must speed up our commitments and their implementation much more. That is the objective of the COP26," he said, referring to the ongoing UN-sponsored climate conference.

Pesquet, an astronaut for the European Space Agency, is the current ISS commander.

He is to return to Earth in the coming days following a second six-month stint at the station, five years after his first ISS tour.

© 2021 AFP

Child fossil find in South Africa sheds light on enigmatic hominids

Agence France-Presse
November 04, 2021

Professor Lee Berger shows off a full-scale reproduction of the skull of a hominid named Leti 

LUCA SOLA AFP

Fossils found deep in a South African cave formed part of a hominid child's skull, apparently left on an alcove by fellow members of her species 250,000 years ago, scientists said on Thursday.

The latest find adds to the riddle surrounding Homo naledi -- a species of Stone Age hominids discovered less than a decade ago in a region called the Cradle of Humankind, named after the stunning fossils unearthed there.

"The real mystery about this child is why she was found where she was," said Lee Berger, the scientist who led the project.

"Something amazing was going on in this cave 200,000-300,000 years ago.

Although the researchers refer to the child as "her", they have not yet determined whether it was a boy or girl.

Researchers rarely find fossilized remains of children, because their bones are too thin and fragile to survive over aeons.

The child was probably only four to six years old when it died, with baby teeth intact and adult teeth starting to emerge.

Nearly 2,000 fossils have been found in the caves, which scientists have pieced together into partial skeletons of more than two dozen individuals.

The initial discovery revealed in 2015 helped complicate our understanding of human evolution, by showing that Homo sapiens probably lived alongside other species of hominin -- the name for hominids that include anatomically modern man.

The newly found 28 skull fragments and six teeth were found even deeper in the cave complex, 12 metres (40 feet) away from the main find, through tiny crevices that required the explorers to literally squeeze between the rocky walls.


- 'Superman crawl' -

Parts of the passage are only 10 centimeters wide.

One section required explorers lie flat and pull themselves through with their hands stretched out ahead in a "Superman crawl", and then climb over a ridge dubbed the Dragon's Back, caver Mathabela Tsikoane told AFP.


"For a person that doesn't cave, it's very, very difficult," he said. "You have to literally push yourself through."

Because of its distance from the other finds, the investigators nicknamed the child Leti, after a seTswana word "letimela" meaning "the lost one."

But for Homo naledi, the journey into the cave might have been much easier, as they were smaller than modern humans.


Their bodies also appeared well adapted to climbing, said Tebego Makhubela, one of the scientists on the project.

"Homo naledi were just better climbers than us," he said. "What is difficult for us, might not necessarily have been difficult for them."

These remains are the first of a child's skull. No other bones were found, not even a jawbone, and the skull showed no signs of damage -- as from a carnivore's attack.


Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, the self-proclaimed Cradle of Humankind consists of a complex of limestone caves about 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg. The latest find was made about 30 meters (100 feet) below ground).
Death ritual?

The researchers speculate that other members of the species may have set the skull there, for reasons that could be linked to rituals around the dead, Berger said.

He has proposed such a line of thinking for explaining the entire Homo naledi site, as a site for ritual burials.

If further evidence supports that theory, it would mark a dramatic rethinking about the human odyssey.

Until now, the earliest known hominid rituals associated with death date back to 50,000-100,000 years ago, he said.


But the latest find could push evidence for this behaviour -- a token of grief and possibly belief -- back to a quarter of a million years ago.

The discovery was published in two papers in the journal PaleoAnthropology, with 21 researchers from South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand and 13 other institutions around the world.

© 2021 AFP

'Useless Specks of Dust' Turn Out to Be Building Blocks of All Vertebrate Genomes

Tiny microchromosomes under the microscope amongst larger chromosomes.

 (Shayer Alam)
NATURE

DAVID NIELD
3 NOVEMBER 2021

Originally, they were thought to be just specks of dust on a microscope slide.

Now, a new study suggests that microchromosomes – a type of tiny chromosome found in birds and reptiles – have a longer history, and a bigger role to play in mammals than we ever suspected.

By lining up the DNA sequence of microchromosomes across many different species, researchers have been able to show the consistency of these DNA molecules across bird and reptile families, a consistency that stretches back hundreds of millions of years.

What's more, the team found that these bits of genetic code have been scrambled and placed on larger chromosomes in marsupial and placental mammals, including humans. In other words, the human genome isn't quite as 'normal' as previously supposed.

"We lined up these sequences from birds, turtles, snakes and lizards, platypus and humans and compared them," says geneticist Jenny Graves, from La Trobe University in Australia. "Astonishingly, the microchromosomes were the same across all bird and reptile species.

"Even more astonishingly, they were the same as the tiny chromosomes of Amphioxus – a little fish-like animal with no backbone that last shared a common ancestor with vertebrates 684 million years ago."

By tracing these microchromosomes back to the ancient Amphioxus, the scientists were able to establish genetic links to all of its descendants. These tiny 'specks of dust' are actually important building blocks for vertebrates, not just abnormal extras.

It seems that most mammals have absorbed and jumbled up their microchromosomes as they've evolved, making them seem like normal pieces of DNA. The exception is the platypus, which has several chromosome sections line up with microchromosomes, suggesting that this method may well have acted as a 'stepping stone' for other mammals in this regard, according to the researchers.

Microchromosomes are consistent in birds and reptiles, but mixed up in larger chromosomes in mammals. (Paul Waters)

The study also revealed that as well as being similar across numerous species, the microchromosomes were also located in the same place inside cells.

"Not only are they the same in each species, but they crowd together in the center of the nucleus where they physically interact with each other, suggesting functional coherence," says biologist Paul Waters, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia.

"This strange behavior is not true of the large chromosomes in our genomes."

The researchers credit recent advancements in DNA sequencing technology for the ability to sequence microchromosomes end-to-end, and to better establish where these DNA fragments came from and what their purpose might be.

It's not clear whether there's an evolutionary benefit to coding DNA in larger chromosomes or in microchromosomes, and the findings outlined in this paper might help scientists put that particular debate to rest – although a lot of questions remain.

The study suggests that the large chromosome approach that has evolved in mammals isn't actually the normal state, and might be a disadvantage: genes are packed together much more tightly in microchromosomes, for example.

"Rather than being 'normal', chromosomes of humans and other mammals were puffed up with lots of 'junk DNA' and scrambled in many different ways," says Graves.

"The new knowledge helps explain why there is such a large range of mammals with vastly different genomes inhabiting every corner of our planet."

The research has been published in PNAS.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch: What we know about the trash vortex in the middle of the ocean

Two large vortexes in the Pacific Ocean have collected trash over several decades. Here's where it's coming from.

Katie Teague
Nov. 3, 2021 

Ocean trash is affecting marine life

.Ahmed Areef/EyeEm/GettyImages

Two floating islands of trash, together known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, are taking up a large chunk of real estate in the Pacific Ocean. The Patch is separated into two whirlpools of human detritus -- the Western Garbage Patch (closer to Japan) and the Eastern Garbage Patch (closer to California and Mexico).

The vortexes are primarily composed of land trash, like plastic bottles and straws, that's found its way into the ocean, but they also contain fishing gear that's been discarded into the sea. Although it's not as noticeable as you might think, the pervasive clumps of human-made garbage damage marine life, as well as the environment, and can even exacerbate human-caused climate change.

The trash extends for hundreds of miles, and in August the environmental nonprofit Ocean Cleanup deployed Jenny, its first large-scale cleaning system, which has since removed more than 63,000 pounds of trash. In October, Ocean Cleanup called that work the "beginning of the end of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

This news comes just in time for COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which lasts through Nov. 12. At the summit, roughly 200 nations are meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, to negotiate an updated agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an attempt to keep temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Plastic pollution and microplastics have been shown to contribute to climate change, since heat can cause them to release greenhouse gases. Addressing the climate crisis requires reducing pollution in the oceans, which collect 8 million tons of plastic yearly.

Here's everything we know about the island of trash in the Pacific Ocean and how you can help.

The Ocean Cleanup's goals include eliminating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Here is the outcome of one haul this fall.

The Ocean Cleanup

What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

The garbage patch is two vortexes filled with trash in the Pacific Ocean. They're also known as gyres, which is when two ocean currents come together and create a hurricane-like current, Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told CNET. Materials then get caught in the gyres.

While you may think the patches are solid masses of tangled plastic, they're actually dispersed across hundreds of miles of the Pacific. You could sail through the patches without even noticing you're in them. This is because as much as 70% of the trash eventually sinks to the bottom of the ocean, Wallace said.
How large is the garbage patch?

The Ocean Cleanup estimates that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch occupies 1.6 million square kilometers, about twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France.

However, the actual size of the island of trash is unknown due to a number of factors. For starters, not all of the trash sits on top of the water. It's estimated to span hundreds of miles, Wallace said, and it's a moving target due to waves and wind. It does, however, stay within a specific area due to ocean currents.
How much trash is in the garbage patch?

As of 2015, there was an estimated 8 million metric tons of plastic waste in the garbage patches, according to Wallace, although it's uncertain the exact amount going into the Pacific Ocean. That's the weight equivalent of roughly 57,000 blue whales, according to Conservation.org, which also projects that by 2050, the mass of ocean trash from plastic will outweigh its fish.

The Ocean Cleanup said it found more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch that weigh an estimated 80,000 tons.

At least 8 million tons of plastic enter all the oceans each year, and it's expected to double by 2030, according to the World Wildlife Fund organization.

Where did the trash come from?

Most of the trash comes from land in North America and Asia, while 20% comes from boats or ships that discard debris into the ocean, including lost fishing gear, according to the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.

Trash can also eventually make its way into the ocean from land-based sources, such as rivers, storm water and littering.
How is the garbage affecting marine life?

A western gull wades along the Pacific coast in California. Animals can mistake plastics in the ocean for food.

Stephen Shankland/CNET

You've likely seen photos of sea turtles with fishing nets tangled around their bodies and shells. This is just one terrible effect that human-generated debris has on marine life. Animals in the ocean can also ingest the plastic debris, which can harm them and make them feel as though they're full, Wallace said. This results in the animals not eating the food they need to survive. The plastic could also lacerate their organs.

Plastic can choke and smother marine animals and their habitats and can take hundreds of years to break down, according to the WWF.
Microplastics also have a negative effect

Microplastics are less than 5 millimeters long and come from larger debris that breaks down into smaller pieces, so they're much harder to filter out. These small plastics can pose a threat to aquatic animals as they can ingest the debris.

But can eating fish that have consumed these microplastics hurt humans? Ocean Cleanup says when animals eat the plastics containing chemicals, there's a possibility the chemicals could eventually make their way up the food chain to people.

However, more studies are needed to determine the impacts of microplastics, according to the NOAA.

Is ocean trash contributing to climate change?

In short, yes. Chemical components and legacy pollutants absorb into the plastic the marine animals are eating, Wallace said. Then sunlight and heat cause the plastic to release powerful greenhouse gases. The WWF says as the planet gets hotter, the plastic breaks down into methane and ethylene, which increases the rate of climate change.

Ocean plastic damages air quality, pollutes the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, according to Iberdrola, a multinational electric utility.
Is anything being done to clean up the ocean trash?

Yes. Groups are working to prevent more trash from ending up in the garbage patches by reducing the number of single-use products, such as bottles and straws. There are also people working on cleanup and removal of debris on or near the shore because it's easier to get land trash picked up.

Other groups are looking at doing open ocean cleanup to collect debris like fishing gear and other smaller pieces that are floating around, but there are some challenges since the Pacific Ocean is so big and deep.

Reusable bottles can help prevent more plastic bottles from going into the ocean.

Alina Bradford/CNET

What can I do to help clean up ocean trash?
Businesses and individuals should avoid adding to the problem. For instance, stop littering and start using reusable water bottles instead of single-serve plastic bottles that can easily wind up in waterways.
If you live near an ocean, volunteer to clean the shoreline to help remove debris on shores.
If you don't live near an ocean, you can help clean up parks or local neighborhoods, as trash in those areas can eventually end up in marine environments.
Donate to different organizations that support removing the trash, such as Ocean Conservancy and Oceana.
Shop at companies that are working toward sustainability. They'll typically have this info listed on their website -- for instance, Amazon has a sustainability page with its goals.
Attend COP26's Green Zone event (in person or virtually) to learn more about how the ocean plays a role in our climate.
Support people in all levels of the government who advocate policies addressing climate change.

For more information, read about how COP26 is the "world's best last chance" for climate action and why it's important. Also, scientists estimate 85% of the world's population is affected by climate change.

First published on Nov. 2, 2021 

Yahoo pulls plug on services in China: Report

Yahoo has reportedly cited 'increasingly challenging' environment for its exit out of China.

By Aimee Chanthadavong | November 2, 2021 | Topic: Security


Global tech giant Yahoo has pulled the plug on its services from China, blaming "increasingly challenging" operating environment.

"In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," the company said in a statement, according to Wall Street Journal.

The company added it "remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet".

The move by Yahoo follows Microsoft last month announcing it was shutting down LinkedIn in China. It too cited challenges of keeping up with the country's compliance demand for its reason for leaving the market.

"While we've found success in helping Chinese members find jobs and economic opportunity, we have not found that same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed," said LinkedIn senior vice president of engineering Mohak Shroff, in a company blog post.

"We're also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China," wrote Shroff. "Given this, we've made the decision to sunset the current localized version of LinkedIn, which is how people in China access LinkedIn's global social media platform later this year."

This, however, is not the first attempt by Yahoo to leave China. Over the years, it has been slowly pulling out services, such as its email services and its Beijing research and development centre.

The departures from China comes as the country reportedly warned local companies in July it would tighten oversight of data security.

The country's Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) came into effect on Monday. It lays out ground rules around how data is collected, used, and stored. It also outlines data processing requirements for companies based outside of China, including passing a security assessment conducted by state authorities.

Multinational corporations that move personal information out of the country also will have to obtain certification on data protection from professional institutions, according to the PIPL.

The PIPL also applies to foreign organisations that process personal data overseas for the purpose of, amongst others, providing products and services to Chinese consumers as well as analysing the behaviours of Chinese consumers.

The Chinese government previously said the new law was necessary to address the "chaos" data had created, with online platforms over-collecting personal data.