Monday, January 31
Canada - Freedom Convoy
After a week-long drive across Canada, a convoy of big rigs has arrived in the national capital to protest vaccine mandates and Covid-19 measures. Organisers insist it will be peaceful, but police say they're prepared for trouble.
It's been dubbed the Freedom Convoy, and it's got the country talking.
The movement was sparked by a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US-Canada border, implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government earlier this month.
Upset with the new measure that would require unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing the two nations' boundary to quarantine once they've returned home, a loose coalition of truckers and conservative groups began to organise the cross-country drive that began in western Canada.
It picked up steam and gathered support as it drove east. Many supporters, already opposed to Mr Trudeau and his politics, have grown frustrated with pandemic measures they see as political overreach.
Social media and news footage showed trucks and companion vehicles snaking along highways, cheered on by people gathered on roadsides and overpasses, often waving Canadian flags and signs disparaging Mr Trudeau. READ MORE...
A Posturing North Korea
North Korea has conducted what is thought to be its biggest missile launch since 2017.
The weapon was apparently an intermediate range missile which reached an altitude of 2,000km before coming down in the Sea of Japan.
Japan, South Korea and the US have all condemned the launch, the seventh test this month.
The UN prohibits North Korea from ballistic and nuclear weapons tests, and has imposed strict sanctions.
But the East Asian state regularly defies the ban, and leader Kim Jong-un has vowed to bolster his country's defences.
Experts suggest multiple reasons lie behind the spate of launches, including political signalling of strength to global and regional powers, a desire by Kim Jong-un to pressure the US back into long-stalled nuclear talks and also the practical need to test out new engineering and military command systems.
The timing is also seen as significant, coming just before the Winter Olympics in China, and ahead of the South Korean presidential election in March.
And the tests have also surged as the faltering North Korean economy struggles under US-led sanctions, pandemic-related difficulties and decades of mismanagement.
South Korea reported that the launch took place at 07:52 local time on Sunday (22:52 GMT) off North Korea's east coast.
Japanese and South Korean officials estimated that the missile reached an altitude of 2,000km (1240 miles) and flew for 30 minutes to a distance of 800km (500 miles).
The United States called on North Korea to "refrain from further destabilising acts". READ MORE...
The United States called on North Korea to "refrain from further destabilising acts". READ MORE...
The Disillusionment of a Young Biden Official
January 28, 2022
In the spring of 2019, Andrea Flores, then a thirty-one-year-old associate at a law firm in Washington, D.C., received an e-mail from the head of an organization called National Security Action. Its mission sounded lofty and urgent, and also typical for the time: “advancing American global leadership” and “opposing the reckless policies of the Trump Administration.” What distinguished National Security Action was that it would soon become a laboratory for the Biden transition. Flores, who’d worked in the Obama White House, was seen as an expert on immigration and border policy. She was also still young by the standards of the profession. Consulting with National Security Action put her in élite company. “It exposed my ideas to a much broader group,” she told me. “Usually, you work in your field and share your ideas with mentors. I never thought to diversify in this way.”
Over the next year, she wrote position papers and participated in strategy sessions over conference calls. At one point, while sitting at home on a Zoom call with Madeleine Albright, it occurred to her that she might get a position in the next Presidential Administration. Last January, Joe Biden entered office having made concrete promises to humanize American immigration policy. Flores was hired as the director of border management on Biden’s National Security Council, an influential body that was traditionally white and male. For Flores, it was a source of pride to be one of the few high-ranking women of color. “There’s an expectation, too often, that all the Black and brown people go to domestic policy and that they don’t understand these other issues,” she said. “It was a dream role for me.”
Her first task was to fulfill one of Biden’s explicit promises on the campaign trail: to end a Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or M.P.P., which had forced more than sixty thousand migrants to wait in Mexico after they applied for asylum at the border. In effect, migrants who had fled violence and poverty in their home countries had become stuck in some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico, where criminals and extortionists targeted them with impunity. During the next seven months, Flores orchestrated a process that allowed thirteen thousand migrants, many of whom had spent the better part of two years in makeshift encampments, to enter the U.S. “No one heard about it because it ran so smoothly,” an Administration official told me. Another White House official said, of the effort, “This was how government was supposed to work. Andrea was in charge, and it was beautiful to watch.”
But before Flores could finish the job she was called off. In August, 2021, a lawsuit filed by two Republican attorneys general reached a Trump-appointed federal judge, in Texas, who ordered the government to reinstate M.P.P. Biden’s Department of Justice appealed, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, reissued a memo laying out the case for terminating M.P.P. (It had “endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address root causes of irregular migration,” he has said.) But the effort was rebuffed in the conservative Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. By the end of the year, D.H.S. had reinstated the policy. To Flores, the rush to comply seemed to betray a willingness on the part of the White House to reassert tough measures at the border. “Why launch it before you devise new and creative housing solutions for migrants?” Flores wondered. “Why launch it before you have a case-oversight mechanism?” (A White House spokesperson said it was “false and wrong” to imply that the Administration could have taken more time to deliberate. One of the Republican attorneys general, he said, had filed an additional motion “arguing that the Administration was not acting quickly enough.”)
Flores had already begun looking for work elsewhere. If she stayed at the White House after the court rulings, her new task would be reimplementing, rather than dismantling, a policy that she despised. Since the program was restarted, more than two hundred asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico. Roughly ninety per cent of them are from Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba. Other migrants are being expelled under a different Trump policy, called Title 42, which prevents people from applying for asylum altogether on the ground that they would pose a health risk during the pandemic. Public-health experts roundly oppose Title 42, but Biden has decided to leave it in place.
From the start of Biden’s Presidency, Republicans have accused him of being too lax at the border. Last year, as apprehensions by Border Patrol increased, the attacks intensified. Some White House officials began to question the political wisdom of the President’s agenda. Plans made during the transition to restart asylum processing at ports of entry were put on hold. At one point, the White House deputy chief of staff was tasked with conducting analyses of how much political fallout Biden could sustain if he angered his base on the issue.
This past fall, Flores left the Administration; other high-profile departures followed. According to three current and former Administration officials, the resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions came from the very top of the White House chain of command: Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser. “None of them is an immigration expert,” one of the officials told me. “The immigration experts who were brought in—all those people are not the ones controlling the policy direction. That should tell you something right there. The ones who are at the highest level are political people.”
After Biden’s election, I tried multiple times to convince Flores to speak with me about the Administration’s immigration policy. I knew her only by reputation. During Trump’s final year in office, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, overseeing its portfolio on the border. Word that she was serving on Biden’s transition team generated optimism among sources I knew, who saw her role in the Administration as a sign that the President was serious about charting a new course. For the next ten months, though, Flores ignored me. We finally met only after she’d left the White House, for a wary drink at a tiki bar near the Capitol.
Flores is short, with dark, curly hair and a relaxed, extroverted manner. Her speech—casual, chatty—is inflected with the argot of the Washington policy circuit. (“There’s a big delta between the political expectations and the policy choices,” she told me, over a piña colada.) Her rationale for opening up was bittersweet. She’d recently started a job in the Senate, as the chief counsel to Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, which meant that she was no longer constrained from sharing her views. And yet the freedom of her job with Menendez—a senator with a respected track record on immigration policy and a reputation for outspokenness—was nevertheless a reminder of how far she now was from the levers of executive power.
Anyone working in public policy has to weigh a sense of principle against the realities of political influence. For Flores, striking that balance has defined her entire career. The daughter of a psychiatrist and an educator, both of whom are Mexican American, she grew up in the borderlands, in a small city in New Mexico called Las Cruces. She went east for college—to Harvard, where she became the first Latina to be elected student-body president—determined to return home and work in state politics. Her first job after graduation was for Harry Teague, a Democratic congressman and former oil executive who represented a conservative district in the southern half of the state. What Flores remembers most about her time there was how frequently she was pulled over and questioned by Border Patrol agents en route to work. READ MORE...
Over the next year, she wrote position papers and participated in strategy sessions over conference calls. At one point, while sitting at home on a Zoom call with Madeleine Albright, it occurred to her that she might get a position in the next Presidential Administration. Last January, Joe Biden entered office having made concrete promises to humanize American immigration policy. Flores was hired as the director of border management on Biden’s National Security Council, an influential body that was traditionally white and male. For Flores, it was a source of pride to be one of the few high-ranking women of color. “There’s an expectation, too often, that all the Black and brown people go to domestic policy and that they don’t understand these other issues,” she said. “It was a dream role for me.”
Her first task was to fulfill one of Biden’s explicit promises on the campaign trail: to end a Trump-era policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols, or M.P.P., which had forced more than sixty thousand migrants to wait in Mexico after they applied for asylum at the border. In effect, migrants who had fled violence and poverty in their home countries had become stuck in some of the most dangerous parts of Mexico, where criminals and extortionists targeted them with impunity. During the next seven months, Flores orchestrated a process that allowed thirteen thousand migrants, many of whom had spent the better part of two years in makeshift encampments, to enter the U.S. “No one heard about it because it ran so smoothly,” an Administration official told me. Another White House official said, of the effort, “This was how government was supposed to work. Andrea was in charge, and it was beautiful to watch.”
But before Flores could finish the job she was called off. In August, 2021, a lawsuit filed by two Republican attorneys general reached a Trump-appointed federal judge, in Texas, who ordered the government to reinstate M.P.P. Biden’s Department of Justice appealed, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, reissued a memo laying out the case for terminating M.P.P. (It had “endemic flaws, imposed unjustifiable human costs, pulled resources and personnel away from other priority efforts, and failed to address root causes of irregular migration,” he has said.) But the effort was rebuffed in the conservative Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court declined to intervene. By the end of the year, D.H.S. had reinstated the policy. To Flores, the rush to comply seemed to betray a willingness on the part of the White House to reassert tough measures at the border. “Why launch it before you devise new and creative housing solutions for migrants?” Flores wondered. “Why launch it before you have a case-oversight mechanism?” (A White House spokesperson said it was “false and wrong” to imply that the Administration could have taken more time to deliberate. One of the Republican attorneys general, he said, had filed an additional motion “arguing that the Administration was not acting quickly enough.”)
Flores had already begun looking for work elsewhere. If she stayed at the White House after the court rulings, her new task would be reimplementing, rather than dismantling, a policy that she despised. Since the program was restarted, more than two hundred asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico. Roughly ninety per cent of them are from Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba. Other migrants are being expelled under a different Trump policy, called Title 42, which prevents people from applying for asylum altogether on the ground that they would pose a health risk during the pandemic. Public-health experts roundly oppose Title 42, but Biden has decided to leave it in place.
From the start of Biden’s Presidency, Republicans have accused him of being too lax at the border. Last year, as apprehensions by Border Patrol increased, the attacks intensified. Some White House officials began to question the political wisdom of the President’s agenda. Plans made during the transition to restart asylum processing at ports of entry were put on hold. At one point, the White House deputy chief of staff was tasked with conducting analyses of how much political fallout Biden could sustain if he angered his base on the issue.
This past fall, Flores left the Administration; other high-profile departures followed. According to three current and former Administration officials, the resistance to easing Trump-era restrictions came from the very top of the White House chain of command: Ron Klain, the chief of staff; Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council; and Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser. “None of them is an immigration expert,” one of the officials told me. “The immigration experts who were brought in—all those people are not the ones controlling the policy direction. That should tell you something right there. The ones who are at the highest level are political people.”
After Biden’s election, I tried multiple times to convince Flores to speak with me about the Administration’s immigration policy. I knew her only by reputation. During Trump’s final year in office, she worked at the American Civil Liberties Union, overseeing its portfolio on the border. Word that she was serving on Biden’s transition team generated optimism among sources I knew, who saw her role in the Administration as a sign that the President was serious about charting a new course. For the next ten months, though, Flores ignored me. We finally met only after she’d left the White House, for a wary drink at a tiki bar near the Capitol.
Flores is short, with dark, curly hair and a relaxed, extroverted manner. Her speech—casual, chatty—is inflected with the argot of the Washington policy circuit. (“There’s a big delta between the political expectations and the policy choices,” she told me, over a piña colada.) Her rationale for opening up was bittersweet. She’d recently started a job in the Senate, as the chief counsel to Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, which meant that she was no longer constrained from sharing her views. And yet the freedom of her job with Menendez—a senator with a respected track record on immigration policy and a reputation for outspokenness—was nevertheless a reminder of how far she now was from the levers of executive power.
Anyone working in public policy has to weigh a sense of principle against the realities of political influence. For Flores, striking that balance has defined her entire career. The daughter of a psychiatrist and an educator, both of whom are Mexican American, she grew up in the borderlands, in a small city in New Mexico called Las Cruces. She went east for college—to Harvard, where she became the first Latina to be elected student-body president—determined to return home and work in state politics. Her first job after graduation was for Harry Teague, a Democratic congressman and former oil executive who represented a conservative district in the southern half of the state. What Flores remembers most about her time there was how frequently she was pulled over and questioned by Border Patrol agents en route to work. READ MORE...
Sunday, January 30
Nigerian Scifi
Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Scifi Films With Their Smartphones
Someone should really snap up the rights for a movie about The Critics, a collective of self-taught teenage filmmakers from northwestern Nigeria.
The boys’ dedication, ambition, and no-budget inventiveness calls to mind other filmmaking fanatics, from the sequestered, homeschooled brothers of The Wolfpack to the fictional Sweding specialists of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Be Kind, Rewind.
While smartphones and free editing apps have definitely made it easier for aspiring filmmakers to bring their fantasies to fruition, it’s worth noting that The Critics saved for a month to buy the green fabric for their chroma key effects.
Their productions are also plagued with the internet and power outages that are a frequent occurrence in their home base of Kaduna, slowing everything from the rendering process to the Youtube visual effects tutorials that have advanced their craft.
To date they’ve filmed 20 shorts on a smart phone with a smashed screen, mounted to a broken microphone stand that’s found new life as a homemade tripod.
Their simple set up will be coming in for an upgrade, however, now that Nollywood director Kemi Adetiba has brought their efforts to the attention of a much wider audience, who donated $5,800 in a fundraising campaign. READ MORE...
Anti Work Movement
Many employees are frustrated with the nature of employment. But some fed-up workers are asking a bigger question: what’s the purpose of work?
Chris, a US-based IT professional, says he’s experienced terrible working conditions in his recent roles. He says two separate employers, one offering no sick pay and the other only a week’s worth of paid time off, forced him back to work despite illness. At other labour-intensive jobs, he says he’s ended up having to treat his own wounds.
But it was a role in customer support that pushed him too far. His job, which paid less than $13 (£9.40) an hour, involved verifying whether peoples’ dependents qualified for health-care insurance. He says he would have been fired if he had given callers certain helpful information he was not authorised to disclose, like how much time they had to submit their paperwork.
“There were people literally begging for their lives on the phone, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” he says. “That broke me to a point where I realised that absolutely nothing in this system is working… It’s the lack of empathy and human kindness. I’m not sure how that went missing.”
Two years into the pandemic, employees across the globe are tired. Poor mental health and burnout are common, particularly among low-wage and essential workers. This prolonged period of uncertainty has made many re-examine the role their employers play in making matters worse; record numbers of workers are leaving jobs in search of better options.
But some people are going further, wondering aloud if there’s purpose to their work – or the economic system itself. These people are part of the ‘anti-work’ movement, which seeks to do away with the economic order that underpins the modern workplace. Anti-work, which has roots in anarchist and socialist economic critique, argues that the bulk of today’s jobs aren’t necessary; instead, they enforce wage slavery and deprive workers of the full value of their output.
That doesn’t mean there would be no work, however. Supporters of the anti-work movement believe people should self-organise and labour only as much as needed, rather than working longer hours to create excess capital or goods. READ MORE...
Living in Fear
Feras Fayyad (above) misses his home in Syria desperately. He's been living in Berlin for six years now, one of more than 800,000 Syrian refugees in Germany. But he rarely visits Sonnenallee, the predominantly Arab district of his adopted city that's become known as "Little Syria", even though it's full of restaurants and shisha cafes that remind him of home.
"It's a bit scary to walk here for a person who is known as a member of the opposition to the regime," he says during a rare excursion to the area. "This is why I don't come here."
What Feras fears is other Syrians who might still be affiliated with Bashar al-Assad's government and could be acting as the eyes and ears of the state overseas. Back home Feras - an award-winning documentary director whose films describe the systematic bombing of the civilian population by the Syrian military - was arrested and tortured by the state security service.
He eventually managed to escape - but even here in Europe he doesn't feel safe among other expat Syrians.
"It's difficult to know who is [a member of] the intelligence services," he says. "They open stores or they have a business here - and they are still working as spies.
"You don't know when you're going to bump into somebody who was involved in your torture or involved in hurting you inside Syria."
Feras may sound paranoid, but there's a firm basis for his fears. Bill Wiley, who runs the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an NGO that builds cases against the Syrian government using their own official state documents retrieved from the war zone, agrees that the Syrian diaspora in Europe is a fertile recruiting ground for Syrian spies.
He says some are paid to spy while others do so in exchange for their families' safety back in Syria. "There's various means to recruit people - we know they're doing it and I would be shocked if they weren't doing it," he says. READ MORE...
Saturday, January 29
Preventing Our Universe From Collapsing
The Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that lends other particles their mass, could have kept our universe from collapsing. And its properties might be a clue that we live in a multiverse of parallel worlds, a wild new theory suggests.
That theory, in which different regions of the universe have different sets of physical laws, would suggest that only worlds in which the Higgs boson is tiny would survive.
If true, the new model would entail the creation of new particles, which in turn would explain why the strong force — which ultimately keeps atoms from collapsing — seems to obey certain symmetries. And along the way, it could help reveal the nature of dark matter — the elusive substance that makes up most matter.
That theory, in which different regions of the universe have different sets of physical laws, would suggest that only worlds in which the Higgs boson is tiny would survive.
If true, the new model would entail the creation of new particles, which in turn would explain why the strong force — which ultimately keeps atoms from collapsing — seems to obey certain symmetries. And along the way, it could help reveal the nature of dark matter — the elusive substance that makes up most matter.
A tale of two Higgs
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider achieved a truly monumental feat; this underground particle accelerator along the French-Swiss border detected for the first time the Higgs boson, a particle that had eluded physicists for decades. The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model; this particle gives other particles their mass and creates the distinction between the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force.
But with the good news came some bad. The Higgs had a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which was orders of magnitude smaller than what physicists had thought it should be.
To be perfectly clear, the framework physicists use to describe the zoo of subatomic particles, known as the Standard Model, doesn't actually predict the value of the Higgs mass. For that theory to work, the number has to be derived experimentally. But back-of-the-envelope calculations made physicists guess that the Higgs would have an incredibly large mass. So once the champagne was opened and the Nobel prizes were handed out, the question loomed: Why does the Higgs have such a low mass? READ MORE...
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider achieved a truly monumental feat; this underground particle accelerator along the French-Swiss border detected for the first time the Higgs boson, a particle that had eluded physicists for decades. The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model; this particle gives other particles their mass and creates the distinction between the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force.
But with the good news came some bad. The Higgs had a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), which was orders of magnitude smaller than what physicists had thought it should be.
To be perfectly clear, the framework physicists use to describe the zoo of subatomic particles, known as the Standard Model, doesn't actually predict the value of the Higgs mass. For that theory to work, the number has to be derived experimentally. But back-of-the-envelope calculations made physicists guess that the Higgs would have an incredibly large mass. So once the champagne was opened and the Nobel prizes were handed out, the question loomed: Why does the Higgs have such a low mass? READ MORE...
From the Dawn of Time
The particle was produced inside the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
Physicists at the world's largest atom smasher have detected a mysterious, primordial particle from the dawn of time.
About 100 of the short-lived "X" particles — so named because of their unknown structures — were spotted for the first time amid trillions of other particles inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, located near Geneva at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research).
These X particles, which likely existed in the tiniest fractions of a second after the Big Bang, were detected inside a roiling broth of elementary particles called a quark-gluon plasma, formed in the LHC by smashing together lead ions. By studying the primordial X particles in more detail, scientists hope to build the most accurate picture yet of the origins of the universe. They published their findings Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
wie X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce."
Scientists trace the origins of X particles to just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, back when the universe was a superheated trillion-degree plasma soup teeming with quarks and gluons — elementary particles that soon cooled and combined into the more stable protons and neutrons we know today.
Just before this rapid cooling, a tiny fraction of the gluons and the quarks collided, sticking together to form very short-lived X particles. The researchers don't know how elementary particles configure themselves to form the X particle's structure. But if the scientists can figure that out, they will have a much better understanding of the types of particles that were abundant during the universe's earliest moments. READ MORE...
wie X particle's internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce."
Scientists trace the origins of X particles to just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, back when the universe was a superheated trillion-degree plasma soup teeming with quarks and gluons — elementary particles that soon cooled and combined into the more stable protons and neutrons we know today.
Just before this rapid cooling, a tiny fraction of the gluons and the quarks collided, sticking together to form very short-lived X particles. The researchers don't know how elementary particles configure themselves to form the X particle's structure. But if the scientists can figure that out, they will have a much better understanding of the types of particles that were abundant during the universe's earliest moments. READ MORE...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)