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Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Pope Francis says the world is ‘seriously ill’ from the consequences of the pandemic (Washington Post) Pope Francis on Monday offered a grim assessment of humanity’s response to the pandemic in a lengthy speech that highlighted aspects big and small from a year of isolation and “despair.” He talked about domestic violence in homes under pandemic lockdown. He emphasized the job losses predominantly among off-the-books workers, with no safety net on which to rely. He described a generation of children, alone and in front of their computers, enduring the “educational catastrophe” of school shutdowns or distance learning. The world, Francis said, “is seriously ill.” “Not only as a result of the virus,” the pope continued, “but also in its natural environment, its economic and political processes, and even more in its human relationships.” “The pandemic shed light on the risks and consequences inherent in a way of life dominated by selfishness and a culture of waste, and it set before us a choice: either to continue on the road we have followed until now, or to set out on a new path,” Francis said.

Nothing to sneeze at: Global warming triggers earlier pollen (AP) When Dr. Stanley Fineman started as an allergist in Atlanta, he told patients they should start taking their medications and prepare for the drippy, sneezy onslaught of pollen season around St. Patrick’s Day. That was about 40 years ago. Now he tells them to start around St. Valentine’s Day. Across the United States and Canada, pollen season is starting 20 days earlier and pollen loads are 21% higher since 1990 and a huge chunk of that is because of global warming, a new study found in Monday’s journal the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. While other studies have shown North America’s allergy season getting longer and worse, this is the most comprehensive data with 60 reporting stations.

Divided Senate votes to proceed with impeachment trial of Trump (Washington Post) A divided Senate voted 56 to 44 on Tuesday to proceed with the impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, rejecting his lawyers’ argument that it is unconstitutional. Most Republicans stood with Trump and his legal team, which contended the Senate cannot convict a person no longer in office. The House impeachment managers, in pressing for the trial to proceed, said Trump had a role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and should be held accountable. Opening arguments in the trial are set to begin Wednesday.

Sheriff: Hacker tried to taint Florida city’s water with lye (AP) A hacker gained unauthorized entry to the system controlling the water treatment plant of a Florida city of 15,000 and tried to taint the water supply with a caustic chemical, exposing a danger cybersecurity experts say has grown as systems become both more computerized and accessible via the internet. The hacker who breached the system at the city of Oldsmar’s water treatment plant on Friday using a remote access program shared by plant workers briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide by a factor of one hundred (from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million), Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday. Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is used to treat water acidity but the compound is also found in cleaning supplies such as soaps and drain cleaners. It can cause irritation, burns and other complications in larger quantities. Fortunately, a supervisor saw the chemical being tampered with—as a mouse controlled by the intruder moved across the screen changing settings—and was able to intervene and immediately reverse it, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar officials have since disabled the remote-access system, and say other safeguards were in place to prevent the increased chemical from getting into the water.

Mexican Census: Evangelicals at New High, Catholics at New Low (Christianity Today) The Catholic majority in Mexico is slipping, as Protestants surpassed 10 percent of the population in the country for the first time ever. According to recently released data from Mexico’s 2020 census, the Protestant/evangelical movement increased from 7.5 percent in 2010 to 11.2 percent last year. The Catholic Church has historically dominated the religious landscape across Latin America, but especially in Mexico, which ranks among the most heavily Catholic countries in the region. Today, though an overwhelming majority of Mexicans still identify as Catholic, declines are accelerating. It took 50 years—from 1950 to 2000—for the proportion of Catholics in Mexico to drop from 98 percent to 88 percent. Now, only two decades later, that percentage has slipped another 10 points to 77.7 percent.

Venezuela’s exodus (Foreign Policy) Colombia is to grant temporary legal status to the more than 1.7 million Venezuelans who have taken refuge in the country. Under the terms announced by Colombian President Iván Duque on Monday, Venezuelans who entered Colombia without permission before Jan. 31 will be eligible for legal protections, making it easier for them to live and work in the country. Roughly 5.4 million people have left Venezuela in recent years, according to U.N. estimates.

EU countries expel Russian diplomats in Navalny dispute (AP) Germany, Poland and Sweden on Monday each declared a Russian diplomat in their country “persona non grata,” retaliating in kind to last week’s decision by Moscow to expel diplomats from the three European Union countries over the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Russia had accused diplomats from Sweden, Poland and Germany of attending a demonstration in support of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s most high-profile political foe. In a statement, EU lawmakers also appealed to “all EU Member States to show maximum solidarity with Germany, Poland and Sweden and take all appropriate steps to show the cohesiveness and strength of our Union.”

Rescuers look for survivors of Indian glacier flood disaster (AP) Hundreds of rescue workers were scouring muck-filled ravines and valleys in northern India on Tuesday looking for survivors after part of a Himalayan glacier broke off, unleashing a devastating flood that has left at least 31 people dead and 165 missing. One of the rescue efforts is focused on a tunnel at a hydroelectric power plant where more than three dozen workers have been out of contact since the flood occurred Sunday. Rescuers used machine excavators and shovels to clear sludge from the tunnel overnight in an attempt to reach the workers as hopes for their survival faded. The disaster was set off when part of a glacier on Nanda Devi mountain snapped off Sunday morning. The floodwater, mud and boulders roared down the mountain along the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers, breaking dams, sweeping away bridges and forcing the evacuation of many villages while turning the countryside into what looked like an ash-colored moonscape.

Cooped up in the pandemic, Chinese couples were not in the mood for love (Washington Post) When Chinese families were ordered to stay at home last year amid the coronavirus outbreak, authorities hoped for a much-needed baby boom. It turns out that few couples were in the mood. New data this week showed that birthrates in the country continued to plummet, with 10.04 million births registered in 2020, a 15 percent drop from the year before, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Although not the official birthrate, the latest figure was a third lower than the number of births recorded in 2019—already the country’s lowest since the early 1960s, when China was in the middle of a famine. China has been working to reverse falling birthrates caused in part by decades of population controls. After the country relaxed its infamous one-child policy in 2016, allowing couples to have two children, initiatives have ranged from the supportive to the punitive. Policymakers face a demographic crisis that could cause the country’s population to start to shrink as early as 2027, according to a worst-case estimate from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Official 2020 population data is expected to be released later this month, but in January some local governments published birth data showing declines as steep as 30 percent.

Myanmar police fire into air to disperse protest, four hurt by rubber bullets (Reuters) Police fired gunshots into the air and used water cannon and rubber bullets on Tuesday as protesters across Myanmar defied bans on big gatherings to oppose a military coup that halted a tentative transition to democracy. Four people were hurt by rubber bullets in the capital Naypyitaw, and one of them, a woman, was in critical condition with a head wound, a doctor said. The Feb. 1 coup and detention of elected civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi has brought the largest demonstrations in more than a decade and a growing civil disobedience movement affecting hospitals, schools and government offices.

Fish Farm (Hakai Magazine) A new fish farm in Singapore will produce up to 3,000 tonnes of grouper, trout and shrimp annually. This fish farm is notable primarily because of its location, which is an eight-story indoor aquaculture facility being constructed in the city-state. Singapore imports 90 percent of its food, and would prefer to scale that back a bit, with the national goal of producing 30 percent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. If all goes according to plan, the new facility’s efficiency will be six times higher than that of other fish farms in Singapore.

Anger grows at Israel’s ultra-Orthodox virus scofflaws, threatening rupture with secular Jews (Washington Post) The Shinfelds, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in this most religious of cities, are used to being a bit at odds with the rest of Israel. Their community’s tradition of large families—the couple has 10 children and 30 grandchildren—strict observance and exemption from military service have long created friction with the more secular majority. But they say they have never felt hostility like they do now, as a pandemic-exhausted nation has turned its rage at ultra-Orthodox scofflaws. As Israel endures its third national lockdown, social media has been inflamed by images of black-clad men brazenly crowding schools, weddings and other events, including 20,000 at a recent Jerusalem funeral of a leading rabbi. Secular critics have cast the ultra-Orthodox, fairly or not, as superspreaders supreme. “Now it’s not only tense—it feels like hatred,” said Vivian Shinfeld, 60, of the anger she feels even from some less-religious members of her own family. The backlash could have cultural and political impacts well after the pandemic ends. “There has been a schism growing for a while, and the pandemic is making it wider,” said Tamar El-Or, an anthropology professor at Hebrew University and longtime scholar of ultra-Orthodox culture. “When this virus is gone, nothing is going to be same.”

Ethnic clashes in Darfur could reignite Sudan’s old conflict (AP) Sayid Ismael Baraka, a Sudanese-American visiting from Atlanta, was playing with his three children, and his wife was making tea, when the gunmen stormed into his family village in Sudan’s Darfur region. The gunmen went through the village of Jabal, shooting people. The 36-year-old Baraka was shot to death as he rushed to help a wounded neighbor, his wife and brother said. The attack on Jan. 16 left more than two dozen dead in and around the village. They were among 470 people killed in a days-long explosion of violence between Arab and non-Arab tribes last month in Darfur. The bloodletting stoked fears that Darfur, scene of a vicious war in the 2000s, could slide back into conflict and raised questions over the government’s efforts to implement a peace deal and protect civilians.

Try a ‘Shultz hour’ (NYT) When George Shultz—who died Saturday at 100—was secretary of state under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, he developed a weekly ritual. He closed the door to his office and sat down with a pen and a pad of paper. For the next hour, Shultz tried to clear his mind and think about big ideas, rather than the minutiae of government work. Only two people could interrupt him, he told his secretary: “My wife or the president.” That’s even more useful advice today than it was four decades ago. These days, we are constantly interrupted by minutiae, via alerts and text messages. They can make it impossible to carve out time to think through difficult problems in new ways or come up with creative ideas. Letting your mind wander, Sandi Mann, a British psychologist, has said, “makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas.” The Dutch have a word for this concept: niksen, or the art of doing nothing. As Amos Tversky, a path-breaking psychologist, said, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

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