Supply rodents with more food than normal – and you get more rodents and more become diseased and pass disease to humans planting more food – duh? Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is a rodent-borne disease caused by hantaviruses. Landscape can influence the risk of hantavirus infection for humans, mainly through its effect on rodent community…
US ambassador to Panama quits and says he cannot serve under Trump
- John Feeley writes letter of resignation and will quit on 9 March
- Feeley says he signed an oath to ‘serve faithfully’ but can no longer do so
The US ambassador to Panama has resigned, telling the US state department he no longer feels able to serve Donald Trump.
Related: Donald Trump denies using the phrase ‘shithole countries’ in immigration talks
The violent repercussions of Trump’s declaration
Trump’s speech sparked a new blood feud that claims the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians, unleashing forces destined to kill even more.
Yael Shevach, widow of Rabbi Raziel Shevach attends her husband’s funeral in the West Bank outpost of Havat Gilad, January 10, 2018. Shevach was murdered in a drive-by shooting near the outpost. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Israel was reeling this week after a shooting attack Tuesday evening that killed a 35-year old father of six near the West Bank outpost where he lived, called Havat Gilad. Although Rabbi Raziel Shevach lived in a community not even recognized under Israeli law, he was also a civilian: at the time of the shooting, he was not in a situation of active combat, and as far as is known, he was unarmed. His life in that territory was a highly political act, but his death is a crime with no justification.
And yet there is no escape from the political context of his death, both the causes and the consequences.
The attack that killed Raziel Shevach is part of a wave of violence that is the direct result of U.S. President Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. While neither Trump’s move nor anything else justifies killing civilians for political aims, the likelihood of escalation was so clear that even Trump had to call for calm in the very speech he knew would break it.
But since the declaration changed nothing for the U.S. or for Israel, what exactly was the point other than bloodshed? And if Trump doesn’t share the sorrow over the Palestinians who died over the last month, is the death of a Jewish Israeli father of six what he had in mind?
Despite the routinized Hamas mantra that the attack was about defending Jerusalem, it seems more like the next response in the month-long blood feud: revenge for 12 unarmed Palestinians, including two on Thursday alone, who have been killed since the speech. Most were killed during protests, which for Israelis proves that they were violent upstarts courting their own death. It is an image honed over decades of viewing Palestinians as rabble to be controlled by a military regime, rather than as individual human beings with the right to protest having been made to live as prisoners.
Palestinian burning a picture of US President Donald Trump during a protest against US President Donald Trump’s latest decision to recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Rafah, in the Southern Gaza Strip on December 8, 2017. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
What is a demonstrator? As a child, I pored over the famous image of a protestor killed at the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at Kent State University, fascinated by the iconic power of the photo to horrify America for what it had done. When a 16-year old Palestinian demonstrator, Nadeem Nawara, was killed in 2014 at a demonstration while posing no threat, the state shrugged for three years. On Wednesday, while the Israeli airwaves were filled with mourning for a murdered Jew, it shrugged again.
As for the consequences, each such death brings out more of the very dynamics that caused them in the first place. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli death devalue Palestinian lives to one-twelfth of an Israeli in the local mindset. The awful truth is that some Palestinians have internalized that devaluation too.
Next comes the response inside Israel. As if reading from a script, settlers paraded through the media calling on the government to reinstate checkpoints in the West Bank, one of the obvious sources of rage among an imprisoned population. This prescription says that the symbolic injury of Trump’s declaration just wasn’t sufficient. Thus, it is time to bring back physical suffocation.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett speaks with Jewish Home MK Bezalel Smotrich during a Knesset plenum session, November 13, 2017. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Betzalel Smotrich – not just any extremist, but a lawmaker from the Jewish Home party, which sits in Israel’s governing coalition – had a better idea. He told IDF Radio, among other news outlets throughout the day [my translation]:
The problem is when you’re dealing with mosquitoes. When you kill mosquitoes, you manage to kill 99 of them, and the one hundredth mosquito that you didn’t kill, it kills you. The real solution is to dry up the swamp. Dry up the swamp, and take away the motivation behind terror. If Arabs think that they’ll beat us through terror and that’s how they’ll get a state, they need to understand that the opposite is true.
Calling Palestinians “Arab” is a dim-witted attempt to wipe their identity off the map. Smotrich should be ashamed.
Or he should be arrested and investigated for incitement. “Mosquitoes” are close to “cockroaches,” the term Rwandan Hutus used to label Tutsis on mass media before murdering 800,000 of them in 1994. It sounds a lot like “vermin,” too. Smotrich might argue that he means to kill only terrorists, but why put a fine point on it? If he were an Arab citizen of Israel, he would be defending his case in court by now. But even that won’t erase the damage done.
New Der SPIEGEL Cover explained: The Age of Fire and Fury
Humanity as a whole is being set back just because of one single Person. Where is the world supposed to start again if it manages to survive Donald Trump?
India’s Supreme Court judges warn democracy is in danger
In a stunning move, four of the senior most judges of India’s Supreme Court have publicly slammed the functioning of the country’s top court and warned that democracy will not survive without an independent judiciary.
New security flaw detected in Intel hardware | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 12.01.2018 but there’s a flaw in the claim – see below
F-Secure said once an attacker had the chance to reconfigure AMT (for which he would initially need physical access to the device in question), the device could be fully controlled remotely by connecting to the same wireless or wired network as the user.
F-Secure said once an attacker had the chance to reconfigure AMT (for which he would initially need physical access to the device in question), the device could be fully controlled remotely by connecting to the same wireless or wired network as the user.
Norwegians decline President Donald Trump’s offer to move to US
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Norwegians have been quick to decline the offer from Donald Trump to move to the US. The president had said in less than polite terms that they would be more welcome than migrants from other American or African states.
Making Journalism Great Again
Image courtesy DW
OXFORD – In the debate over the future of journalism, “fake news” has taken center stage, with storylines featuring a ranting American president, Russian communication “bots,” and betrayal and subterfuge competing for public attention. But in an era of diminishing profits and shrinking audiences, is fake news really the biggest threat that traditional media face?
In a news environment increasingly prone to hyperventilation, it can be difficult to separate fact from fabricated or deliberately skewed content shared via social media. The proliferation of “bots” – computer programs that automatically spread disinformation – has blurred these lines further. And as the methods of manipulation multiply, the problem is only likely to worsen.
And yet the near-constant focus on fake news has distracted many in the industry from more serious challenges confronting professional journalism. The erosion of business models and growing dependence on third-party digital distributors – like Facebook and Google – have handcuffed news organizations and cut deeply into their profits. Worse, audiences no longer trust the information presented to them. This suggests that the problem is bigger than fake news.
In fact, large, traditional, or legacy media organizations still trump social media as trusted sources. As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report 2017 revealed, 40% of news consumers say that established media organizations – The New York Times, for example – accurately differentiate fact from fiction. For social media, this share is only 24%.
But this also means that 60% of news consumers regard the legacy media as being careless with facts. That statistic alone should be a cause for grave concern to everyone in the industry.
According to the report – which surveyed some 70,000 Internet users in 36 countries – 29% of respondents said they were avoiding news altogether. For many, this was either because producers’ preference for negative stories put them in a bad mood, or because they viewed the reporting as politically slanted and therefore untrustworthy.
Without trust, there is no audience; and without an audience, there is no business. If the survey’s results are representative of broader trends, one of the world’s most important pillars of democracy – a free and open press – is in jeopardy.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. In the digital era, trust deficits have affected most major institutions, from political parties and big companies to religious organizations and universities. This could be a sign of a more informed and critical citizenry; or, more likely, it could be a response to feeling overwhelmed by choice and powerless in a complex world.
But what has changed for news organizations is that, thanks to social media, they no longer have a monopoly on holding the powerful to account. On the contrary, they have come to be identified with the powerful – part of a media-business-political elite divorced from the concerns of ordinary people. Having become a target of popular anger, journalism will need to “disrupt” itself to regain credibility and restore audiences’ trust.
To this end, media organizations should take at least six steps. For starters, news outlets must set their own agendas, rather than wasting resources on pursuing someone else’s. The international investigation that led to the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers are brilliant examples of journalism that is relevant and interesting – two fundamental criteria that all reporting should meet.
Second, reporters have a responsibility to their audiences to analyze what powerful actors are doing, rather than what they are saying. As the Washington Post’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan recently observed, coverage of US President Donald Trump has focused narrowly on his words, at the expense of his policy.
Third, the media must become better listeners. Journalists’ distinction between “reporting” and “reporting on the ground” highlights the reality that a sizable proportion of newsroom staff never leave their desks. Journalists don’t necessarily do this by choice; many are glued to their screens because their companies lack resources, or force them to follow and report on twitter feeds. In a sense, reporters’ behavior is merely a symptom of an editorial pathology.
Fourth, news organizations must engage audiences – talking to them, not down to them. Very often, the news cycle is driven by assumptions about what viewers or readers might like, rather than what they actually want. Diversity in a newsroom is vital to broadening the relevance of its coverage.
Fifth, in the rush to experiment with new forms of storytelling, some media companies are forgetting their mission. News outlets should forego expensive, flashy projects if they do little to further audiences’ understanding of a story.
Finally, rebuilding trust will require a new definition of news itself. When audiences feel overwhelmed by information and complexity, the response can be to tune out. The media must give people a reason to tune back in. (One example: positive news is dramatically undervalued in today’s media environment.)
If traditional media outlets allow themselves to be defined by the fake-news debate, they, too, will be overwhelmed. So long as social media companies optimize for advertising revenue, their algorithms will tend to reward the extremes, and news organizations will waste valuable resources battling disinformation.
A better approach would be to make news less boring. Reputable media companies have always sought to capitalize on facts: the scoop, the exclusive interview, the probing investigation. Truth, like trust, is a commodity. The future of the industry depends on getting better at producing it.
Alexandra Borchardt is Director of Strategic Development at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017.
‘The New Normal’ in Pakistan: a Journalist on the Run From Gunmen
Taha Siddiqui, a reporter and frequent critic of Pakistan’s military, escaped an attack by a dozen men who diverted his car just outside the capital.
Op-Ed Contributor: Maybe Trump Is Not Mentally Ill. Maybe He’s Just a Jerk.
Without proper neuropsychological testing of the president, we can’t know if he has a mental disorder or is a narcissistic bully.
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