Is the anti-vaccine movement putting lives at risk?

YES!

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The re-emergence of the disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield has fueled a resurgence of vaccine scepticism among rightwing populists. After a surge in measles outbreaks across the EU in 2018, Sarah Boseley looks back at how confidence in the MMR vaccine was dented after Wakefield’s discredited campaign against it. Plus: Sonia Sodha on how to improve the British honours system

In 1998, the British doctor Andrew Wakefield announced that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) childhood vaccination programme was linked to autism and advised parents against it.

It was one of the most controversial health stories of a generation and caused a media sensation. In the years after his claim, the UK’s immunisation rate plunged and cases of measles soared. The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, was at that fateful press conference 20 years ago. Since then, the original research has been widely discredited, Wakefield has been struck off the medical register and the scandal subsided.

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German data breach: agencies ‘failing to take security seriously’

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Bavarian interior minister ‘astonished’ at handling of biggest data leak in German history

The German government and security agencies have been accused of not taking internet security seriously, following a huge data breach that affected hundreds of politicians and celebrities.

Joachim Herrmann, interior minister for the southern state of Bavaria, said he was appalled at the way the federal government and information security agency, the BSI, was handling the scandal, the biggest data leak in German history, after it was revealed it had dismissed a breach in December as one-off incident.

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UFC’s Polyana Viana says mugging ended in predictable and bloody fashion

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  • Strawweight says alleged attacker needed medical attention
  • ‘He took the punches very quickly, I think he was scared’

The population of Rio de Janeiro is just over 6 million. On Saturday night, an alleged mugger managed to pick out a UFC fighter among those multitudes.

UFC strawweight Polyana Viana says she was waiting for an Uber when she was approached by a man claiming to have a gun. The results weren’t pretty.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talks to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes

“I know that when the sun sets on my life, I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that we established a single-payer system, tuition for universities, and that we saved the climate for their future, because we decided to be courageous in the moment and make it happen,” she said.

Source: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Talks to Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes

Star-spangled shutdown: how nationalism and nationalization warped US politics

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Three new books help us understand how Trump’s spat with Democrats over 1,000th of one percent of the federal budget came to be so weighted with meaning

As I write, the federal government sits in partial shutdown, ostensibly over a measly $3.7bn difference in funding, less than one 1,000th of one percent of the 2019 federal budget, for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

Related: It’s the demographics, stupid: party loyalties are shifting as 2020 looms

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The proof that Facebook is broken is obvious from its very modus operandi | John Naughton

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Despite employing a small army of contractors to monitor posts, it’s clear the company is no longer fit for purpose

Way back in the 1950s, a pioneering British cybernetician, W Ross Ashby, proposed a fundamental law of dynamic systems. In his book An Introduction to Cybernetics, he formulated his law of requisite variety, which defines “the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states”. In plain English, it boils down to this: for a system to be viable, it has to be able to absorb or cope with the complexity of its environment. And there are basically only two ways of achieving viability in those terms: either the system manages to control (or reduce) the variety of its environment, or it has to increase its internal capacity (its “variety”) to match what is being thrown at it from the environment.

Sounds abstruse, I know, but it has a contemporary resonance. Specifically, it provides a way of understanding some of the current internal turmoil in Facebook as it grapples with the problem of keeping unacceptable, hateful or psychotic content off its platform. Two weeks ago, the New York Times was leaked 1,400 pages from the rulebooks that the company’s moderators are trying to follow as they police the stuff that flows through its servers. According to the paper, the leak came from an employee who said he “feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight – and making too many mistakes”.

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