Thursday, October 29, 2020

Muslims have 'right to punish' French, says Malaysia's Mahathir

 Muslims have 'right to punish' French, says Malaysia's Mahathir

Reuters Staff

2-3 minutes

OCTOBER 29, 20205:32 PMUPDATED 27 MINUTES AGO

In a blog post Mahathir, 95, a respected leader in the Muslim world, said he believed in freedom of expression but that it should not be used to insult others.

“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past. But by and large the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t,” Mahathir said in a blog post, which he also posted on Twitter.

“Since you have blamed all Muslims and the Muslims’ religion for what was done by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French,” he said.

Twitter said the message violated its rules and it had removed the tweet.

Several Muslim-majority countries have denounced remarks by French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, defending the use of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a French school classroom. The caricatures are seen as blasphemous by Muslims.

The dispute flared after a French teacher who showed his pupils satirical cartoons of the Prophet during a civics lesson was later beheaded in the street by an attacker of Chechen origin.

French officials said the killing was an attack on the core French value of freedom of expression and defended the right to publish the cartoons. Macron has also said he would redouble efforts to stop conservative Islamic beliefs subverting French values.


Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi; Editing by Jon Boyle and Toby Chopra

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police

 www.nytimes.com /2020/10/16/world/europe/france-decapitate-beheading.html

By Adam Nossiter

7-9 minutes

The victim was immediately depicted as a martyr to freedom of expression. France’s antiterrorism prosecutors are investigating the attack, which took place in a suburb north of Paris.

Police officers near the scene north of Paris where a man decapitated a schoolteacher.

Credit...Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Published Oct. 16, 2020Updated Oct. 20, 2020

PARIS — A knife-wielding man decapitated a teacher near a school in a suburb north of Paris on Friday afternoon and was later shot dead by the police, officials said, abruptly hitting France with a national trauma that revived memories of recent terrorist attacks.

A police officer and parents with knowledge of the attack confirmed French media reports that the victim was a history teacher at the school who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression, which had incited anger among some Muslim families.

The teacher, still unidentified by Friday evening, was immediately depicted as a martyr to freedom of expression across the political spectrum. Representatives in France’s Parliament rose to their feet to “honor the victim’s memory,” as the president of the session, parliamentary deputy Hugues Renson, declared. And President Emmanuel Macron hurried to the scene of the attack Friday night.

“This was an attempt to strike down the republic,” Mr. Macron said.

Seizing on the symbolic nature of an attack against a schoolteacher, and reprising anti-Islamist themes he has lately emphasized, Mr. Macron said the teacher had been “the victim of a terrorist, Islamist attack.”

The teacher was struck down “because he taught, because he taught the liberty of expression, the liberty to believe and not believe,” the French president said in a brief televised address.

France’s antiterrorism prosecutors immediately took over the investigation of the attack, which happened at the junction of two adjoining Paris suburbs, Eragny and Conflans-Sainte-Honorine.

Much remained obscure Friday night in the absence of an official police narrative. But the underlying themes of what was known conjured up France’s recent history of terrorist attacks: an assailant carefully choosing a victim thought to symbolize an offense against Islam.

President Emmanuel Macron of France visited the scene and spoke with the press on Friday.

Turmoil at the school over the teacher’s method of instruction — Mr. Macron alluded to this in his remarks — had evidently preceded the killing. “We have seen the principal, who in these last weeks has withstood with remarkable courage a great deal of pressure,” Mr. Macron said.

In a video that widely circulated on YouTube before the attack, a Muslim parent at the teacher’s school, College du Bois-d’Aulne, expresses anger that an unidentified teacher had asked Muslims in the class of 13-year-olds to leave because “he was going to show a photo that would shock them.”

The parent asks on the video: “Why this hatred? Why does a history teacher act like this in front of 13-year-olds?”

The assailant is not known to have a connection to the school. French media reported that he was 18 and of Russian origin.

A police union official told the French television station BFM that witnesses had seen the assailant cutting the victim’s throat. The national police were called, officials said, and after having discovered the decapitated victim, confronted the assailant nearby, close to the school. Brandishing a large knife, he threatened the officers, and after refusing to surrender, was shot 10 times, they said.

French media, quoting witnesses, said the assailant was heard to yell “Allahu akbar” at the moment of the knife attack. A photograph of a corpse lying in the middle of a leafy suburban street appeared on French television not long afterward.

The attack came three weeks after a knife-wielding assailant wounded two people in Paris near the site of the former Charlie Hebdo office — the scene of a 2015 terrorist attack targeting the satirical newspaper for its caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

French officials of all political stripes rushed to denounce the teacher’s killing. The interior minister, in charge of the police, cut short an official trip to Morocco and flew home to Paris.

“The assassination of a history teacher is an attack on freedom of expression and the values of the republic,” the president of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand, said on Twitter. “To attack a teacher is to attack all French citizens and freedom.”

“Frightful. Huge emotion and anger in the face of this terrorist barbarism,” a leading Socialist parliamentarian, Boris Vallaud, wrote on Twitter.

“So this week, he allowed himself to tell them, the Muslims, Muslim students raise your hands,” the parents says. “So they raised their hands, and he said, ‘right, leave the class.’ So my daughter refused to leave and asked him, ‘why?’ And he said he was going to show a photo that would shock them. And then he showed them a naked man, telling them it was the prophet.”

Another parent, Carine Mendes, 41, whose child had attended the class, offered a more nuanced view of what happened. She called the teacher “a very sweet person, in his words, in his expressions.”

Ms. Mendes said the teacher had suggested to Muslim students who did not want to see the cartoon that they leave the classroom temporarily, and had asked those who remained not to tell their Muslim classmates about the cartoon in order not to offend their faith.

“He really tried to do things with respect, he didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said.

But in a second class where the teacher gave the course, a shocked student refused to leave the room and told her father about what happened. He was the father who later complained in the video posted online.

The next day, the teacher apologized to his students and the principal sent an email message to parents to try to clear up the situation. The teacher’s suggestion to leave the classroom, the principal said, had been insensitive.

“Without wanting to offend anyone, it turned out that by offering this possibility to the students, he still offended the student,” the principal’s email read.

Ms. Mendes said that what happened “was awful.”

“He was just giving a course on freedom of expression,” she said.

“A teacher was killed just for doing his job,” Sophie Venetitay, a teachers’ union official, told BFM.

Constant Méheut and Antonella Francini contributed reporting.


Adam Nossiter is the Paris bureau chief. Previously, he was a Paris correspondent, the West Africa bureau chief, and led the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 17, 2020, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Man Kills Teacher In Paris Suburb, Decapitating Him. Order Reprints | Today’s 

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder

www.scientificamerican.com /article/misinformation-has-created-a-new-world-disorder/
Claire Wardle
18-23 minutes
As someone who studies the impact of misinformation on society, I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially.

One of the most iconic images from that day shows a large clustering of New Yorkers staring upward. The power of the photograph is that we know the horror they're witnessing. It is easy to imagine that, today, almost everyone in that scene would be holding a smartphone. Some would be filming their observations and posting them to Twitter and Facebook. Powered by social media, rumors and misinformation would be rampant. Hate-filled posts aimed at the Muslim community would proliferate, the speculation and outrage boosted by algorithms responding to unprecedented levels of shares, comments and likes. Foreign agents of disinformation would amplify the division, driving wedges between communities and sowing chaos. Meanwhile those stranded on the tops of the towers would be livestreaming their final moments.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Hopes rise on coronavirus drug remdesivir

www.nature.com /articles/d41586-020-01295-8
Heidi Ledford
7-8 minutes
A patient at the intensive care unit receives treatment from two hospital workers in Hefei, China

Coronavirus causes severe respiratory illness in some people.Credit: Zhang Yazi/China News Service via Getty

An experimental drug — and one of the world’s best hopes against COVID-19 — could shorten the time to recovery from coronavirus infection, according to the largest and most rigorous clinical trial of the compound.

The experimental drug, called remdesivir, interferes with replication of some viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the current pandemic. On 29 April, Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), announced that a clinical trial of more than a thousand people showed that people taking remdesivir recovered in 11 days on average, compared to 15 days for those on a placebo.

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

A Nobel Laureate Said the New Coronavirus Was Made in a Lab. He's Wrong. - The Wire Science


22/04/2020
5-6 minutes
Luc Montagnier during the TV interview. Photo: YouTube.

...It is surprising to have a scientist of Montagnier’s stature utter such questionable statements – although Montagnier himself is a controversial figure. Among other causes, he has supported anti-vaxxers, homeopathy and a silly claim that DNA emits “electromagnetic waves”....

The 2008 Nobel Laureate for physiology or medicine from France, Luc Antoine Montagnier, caught the media’s attention when he recently endorsed a COVID-19 conspiracy theory – that the virus is human-made. His proclamation was subsequently magnified by various news outlets, including many in India (e.g., The Week, The Hindu Businessline, and Times of India).

Montagnier argued during a TV interview with a French TV channel that elements of the HIV-1 retrovirus, which he co-discovered in 1983, can be found in the genome of the new coronavirus. He also said elements of the “malaria germ” – the parasite Plasmodium falciparum – can also be seen in the virus’s genome.

His full quote: “We were not the first since a group of Indian researchers tried to publish a study which showed that the complete genome of this coronavirus [has] sequences of another virus, which is HIV.”

Friday, April 24, 2020

The Science behind How Coronavirus Tests Work


Jeffery DelViscio
8-10 minutes
From Scientific American
So you think you may have COVID-19, and you want to get tested.

Your first problem might be finding a test, depending on where you live and how sick you currently are.

A recent survey conducted with administrators from 323 hospitals across the United States found...

Quote: “Hospitals reported that severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff....”

Adding: “... they were unable to keep up with testing demands because they lacked complete kits and/or the individual components ... used to detect the virus.”

But let’s say that you can actually get a test for COVID-19.

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Will antibody tests for the coronavirus really change everything?



Smriti Mallapaty
10-13 minutes
COVID-19 coronavirus antibody test kits.
More at  www.nature.com /articles/d41586-020-01115-z
Antibody tests might be used to help stem the COVID-19 pandemic — but first must overcome several hurdles.Credit: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called them a ‘game changer’. Antibody tests have captured the world’s attention for their potential to help life return to normal by revealing who has been exposed, and might now be immune, to the new coronavirus.

Dozens of biotech companies and research laboratories have rushed to produce the blood tests. And governments around the world have bought millions of kits, in the hope that they could guide decisions on when to relax social-distancing measures and get people back to work. Some have even suggested that the tests could be used as an ‘immunity passport’, giving the owner clearance to interact with others again.

More Encouraging Signs for Remdesivir as COVID-19 Treatment


Alice Park
5-7 minutes
Comment from the owner: What a pitty TIME...
Researchers at University of Chicago reported promising results from a small study of remdesivir in treating people with COVID-19.

The findings were not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but revealed in an internal video discussion of the drug trial among University of Chicago faculty that was obtained by STAT.

The study included 125 people with COVID-19, all of whom were treated with the remdesivir, which is not currently approved in the U.S. for treating any disease. Of the 125 patients in the Chicago study, 113 had severe disease, meaning they had difficulty breathing. In the video discussion, Kathleen Mullane, a professor of medicine at the university who is overseeing the trial, said most of the patients taking the drug had improved enough to be discharged from the hospital, and only two died. Mullane was not available to discuss the results, but in a statement, a university spokesperson said “Partial data from an ongoing clinical trial is by definition incomplete and should never be used to draw conclusions about the safety or efficacy of a potential treatment that is under investigation. In this case, information from an internal forum for research colleagues concerning work in progress was released without authorization. Drawing any conclusions at this point is premature and scientifically unsound.”

Monday, April 13, 2020

COVID-19: What we must do to prevent a global depression


Klaus Schwab Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum
12-15 minutes

No diagrams & photos, original in the link.
Without a vaccine or effective COVID-19 treatment, we could face continued infections and death until at least the end of 2020.
To prevent further spread of coronavirus, we must monitor what fraction of the population has been in contact with the virus and is potentially immune.
To prevent an economic collapse, governments will need to take on large and unprecedented roles in securing business continuity and jobs.
A few months in, it is still hard to grasp the scale and scope of COVID-19’s global impact. A third of the world population is under some sort of “lockdown.” Over 200 countries are affected, and the number of new cases and deaths in many places are still growing exponentially. All the while, a second crisis, in the form of an economic recession, is underway.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

The COVID-19 vaccine development landscape

Stephen Mayhew
10-13 minutes
 (Figures and Tables ommited, for full article go here)
The genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, was published on 11 January 2020, triggering intense global R&D activity to develop a vaccine against the disease. The scale of the humanitarian and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is driving evaluation of next-generation vaccine technology platforms through novel paradigms to accelerate development, and the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate entered human clinical testing with unprecedented rapidity on 16 March 2020.

Η θορυβώδης αποκήρυξη των καλών τρόπων

Βασίλης Καραποστόλης
5-6 minutes
Αντίφωνο


Δεν θα έπρεπε να μας εκπλήσσει το γεγονός ότι σήμερα η αχαλίνωτη συμπεριφορά γίνεται συνήθεια ή και νόμος. Προστυχιές, χλευασμοί και βρισιές σε όλη την κλίμακα της χυδαιότητας ανταλλάσσονται με μια ευκολία που θα άφηνε άναυδο έναν άνθρωπο περασμένης εποχής, μιας εποχής από εκείνες όπου δεν είχε ακόμη διασυρθεί τόσο πολύ η λέξη «φραγμός».

Οι ρίζες του προβλήματος είναι βαθιές. Και μην πείτε ότι φταίει η κρίση, οι δυσκολίες που ενέσκηψαν και τα σμπαραλιασμένα νεύρα ολονών. Πάει πολύ πιο πίσω η υπόθεση και αν για μια στιγμή οι σκέψεις μας κατόρθωναν να βγουν έξω από τον καθημερινό κυκεώνα, θα επέτρεπαν να δούμε ότι δεν άνοιξαν από τη μια μέρα στην άλλη οι οχετοί. Είχε ήδη συντελεστεί μέσα στην οικογένεια, στα σχολεία και σ’ ολόκληρη την κοινωνία, μια θορυβώδης αποκήρυξη των «καλών τρόπων». Τους αποκάλεσαν «καθωσπρεπισμό» και νόμισαν ότι ξεμπέρδεψαν. Και δεν κατάλαβαν ότι ο τύπος ενός κανόνα όταν συγχέεται με το περιεχόμενό του παράγει εκτρώματα.

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Powerful antibiotics discovered using AI

Jo Marchant
5-6 minutes
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00018-3
Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of Escherichia coli bacteria (green) taken from the small intestine of a child.

Escherichia coli bacteria, coloured green, in a scanning electron micrograph.Credit: Stephanie Schuller/SPL

A pioneering machine-learning approach has identified powerful new types of antibiotic from a pool of more than 100 million molecules — including one that works against a wide range of bacteria, including tuberculosis and strains considered untreatable.