Tag Archives: WorldNews

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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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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Katharine Hayhoe: ‘A thermometer is not liberal or conservative’

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The award-winning atmospheric scientist on the urgency of the climate crisis and why people are her biggest hope

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She has contributed to more than 125 scientific papers and won numerous prizes for her science communication work. In 2018 she was a contributor to the US National Climate Assessment and was awarded the Stephen H Schneider award for outstanding climate science communication.

In 2018, we have seen forest fires in the Arctic circle; record high temperatures in parts of Australia, Africa and the US; floods in India; and devastating droughts in South Africa and Argentina. Is this a turning point?
This year has hit home how climate change loads the dice against us by taking naturally occurring weather events and amplifying them. We now have attribution studies that show how much more likely or stronger extreme weather events have become as a result of human emissions. For example, wildfires in the western US now burn nearly twice the area they would without climate change, and almost 40% more rain fell during Hurricane Harvey than would have otherwise. So we are really feeling the impacts and know how much humanity is responsible.

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This is the Nancy Pelosi moment and Donald Trump should be very afraid | Sarah Churchwell

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For two years the President has shown disdain for the institutions and practices of governance. Bad move. A new era has just dawned

The Trump White House has frequently been called chaotic, wild, undisciplined, disorderly. But a better word might be “unruly,” because if there’s one thing Donald Trump can’t abide, it’s rules. Not only has the Trump administration signally failed to follow the rules, it’s not clear it ever bothered to learn them. But as the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives last week, that abruptly changed. Trump is about to get schooled in the rules of the game.

For two years, thanks to a Republican Congress that chose not to honor its constitutional duty to maintain oversight of the executive branch, the American political drama has centred on special counsel’s Robert Mueller’s investigation. But that focus is about to widen, as Nancy Pelosi, the once and future Speaker of the House, reclaimed the gavel, promising to show Americans its power: the picture of her smiling as she wielded it went viral, for good reason.

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