GAD assists development of UK spaceflight industry – GOV.UK

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The Government Actuarys Department (GAD) has been at the centre of helping set up the new spaceflight launch industry in the UK.

Experts from GAD have provided the UK Space Agency, Department for Transport (DfT) and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) with support in terms of setting insurance requirements and providing risk analysis for this new frontier.

The work has been carried out ahead of spaceflight launches which are set to take off from the UK in the early 2020s. In preparation for this, DfT, UK Space Agency and CAA have launched a consultation on legislation and insurance requirements associated with launch activity.

Safety is at the heart of the proposed regulatory regime under the Space Industry Act 2018. Launch from the UK is a new activity that presents new and different risks from those posed by traditional aviation.

Operators will be required to demonstrate that the risks their activities pose to the uninvolved general public are as low as reasonably practicable. They will also need to demonstrate that the residual risk is at a level that is acceptable to the regulator. If an accident does happen, insurance therefore provides an important resource to meet potential claims.

GAD has helped to develop the methodology to enable the spaceflight regulator to assess the amount of third-party liability insurance which spacecraft operators will have to buy to cover the unlikely event that a spaceflight accident impacts on third parties.

The UK government is proposing to use a Modelled Insurance Requirement (MIR) approach to assess the impacts of a range of accident scenarios to tailor the insurance required to the specific risks of each launch. The MIR calculation takes into account the following areas:

Nick Clitheroe, the GAD actuary who led the project said: We were asked to help UK Space Agency establish a set of financial values for each of these categories that could be applied in the MIR. While a similar approach is used in the USA, the MIR needed to reflect the UKs compensation system and different launch risk profile.

Given the inherent uncertainty about who or what might be impacted in an accident, the methodology needed to take a large range of variables into account. These helped the UK government to determine a single figure for each category.

The aim was to derive a robust figure that reduced the risks of over- or under insurance for operators and minimised the governments contingent liability.

This is important because the insurance market does not have sufficient capacity to cover all of the risk that may arise. Above an upper limit of insurance required for each launch, the government would take on the liability.

The UK Space Agency undertook the modelling of potential events leading to third party claims and GAD advised on the average payment that courts would likely award in the event of death, injury or property damage.

GAD built a detailed model which placed values based on the current level of earnings. We also worked out how much would be paid as a lump sum in the event of death or serious injury. The information and data came from the Office for National Statistics and from the Ogden tables.

GAD has been working with the UK Space Agency on the insurance and risk analysis as a way of further quantifying how much incidents may cost. As part of this, we devised an average payment for each incident and the UK Space Agency was able to apply that to their modelling.

The current consultation asks people to provide comments on the MIR approach and the approach to limiting operator liabilities. It lasts 4 weeks and will close on 10 November.

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GAD assists development of UK spaceflight industry - GOV.UK

Oceania – Wikitravel

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Oceania

Oceania is a vast, arbitrarily defined expanse of the world where the Pacific Ocean rather than land borders connects the nations. It is home to glistening white beaches, coconut palms swaying in the breeze, beautiful coral reefs, and rugged volcanic islands rising out of the blue ocean. Its diverse nations have both some of the world's most cosmopolitan and internationalised cities such as Melbourne, and some of its most remote and culturally isolated villages.

Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea are by far the largest countries on these lands that comprise southern Oceania, with the first two the most visited. Within Oceania are the vast island nation groupings of Polynesia to the far east, Melanesia to the west and Micronesia to the north.

Australia and New Zealand are both former British colonies. At one time it was envisaged that the two colonies would become a single country. In the past, Papua New Guinea was a United Nations trusteeship, administered by Australia. Various islands have been annexed by Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Australia and the United States.

The presence of all of these cultures has created an influence on aspects of culture norms and development. In many areas at least one, often more indigenous languages, and the languages of one or more of the colonial powers, are spoken by the majority as people have coexisted or joined with the influx of other cultures. This mix has influenced cuisine, architecture and other facets of culture.

Ecologically, Oceania also includes the eastern parts of Indonesia as far as Lombok and Sulawesi.

See the country articles for detailed information on how to Get in.

The major countries of Australia and New Zealand do of course offer connections from all continents, although there are few direct flights from South America. There are some other gateways offering other opportunities to get in to Oceania, and for interesting itineraries. Air France connects New Caledonia direct with Tokyo and Paris and also flies to Tahiti. Onward connections to Sydney and Auckland are possible. Fiji Airways connects Fiji with Los Angeles with connections through to Sydney, Auckland and Tahiti. Tahiti is connected to Los Angeles, and you can fly to the Cook Islands direct from there. Air New Zealand provides a service to Tonga and Samoa from Los Angeles and Auckland. The Los Angeles service is subsidized by the New Zealand government as a form of aid to the two countries. Manila, Guam and Honolulu offer a gateway to the many countries of Micronesia, mainly on Continental Airlines.

The smallest islands with less tourism present travel challenges. Many are entirely deserted, and some have restrictions on access. Others require specialized services you may hire.

A South Pacific cruise.

Without a yacht, or a lot of time, the only way for travellers to get around between the main destinations of Oceania is by plane. Sydney, Brisbane, Auckland, and Los Angeles have good connectivity to the region. It is usually possible to fly from the west coast of the United States through to Sydney or Auckland via Hawaii, Tahiti, Fiji or even the Cook Islands.

However, air routes tend to come and go depending on whether the airlines find them profitable or not. Much of Micronesia, having been under US Administration, is serviced by Continental Airlines. Much of English-speaking Polynesia receives regular flights from Air New Zealand. Melanesia is mainly serviced by national and Australian airlines. Don't expect daily flights. Patience is required.

Flying between Micronesia and the other two areas is problematic and may involve flying all the way to Honolulu or a complicated route through Manila, Sydney and Auckland. Continental Airlines has a weekly flight from Guam to Nadi in Fiji. United Airlines offers flights also.Aircalin has flights from Japan direct to New Caledonia

Some flight options within Oceania, amongst others, are:

There are some options for boats, cruise ships, private yachts, adventure cruises, and even cargo ships.

Consult the guide for the destination you are visiting.

All island groups are fascinating and with time and money you can spend months just travelling around. There are some stunningly beautiful islands (Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia), some fascinating cultures and festivals, some wonderful diving and totally deserted beaches. Check the individual country sections for details.

Skiing and snow sports. New Zealand has reliable winter snowfalls, mostly on the South Island in winter. The Snowy Mountains in New South Wales have the largest ski resorts in the southern hemisphere.

Although staple foods from outside the region, such as rice and flour, now have a firm foothold, the traditional staples of roots and tubers remain very important. The cheapest is usually cassava, which can be left in the ground for a long time. Sweet potato is a very important crop and is found in most parts of Oceania with the major producing area being the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Taro and yam are also widespread. The latter is the most valuable of the roots and tubers and there are many customs associated with its cultivation. In the Sepik area of Papua New Guinea, for example, relations between married couples are traditionally forbidden while the yams are growing. On the other hand, in the Trobriand Islands the yam harvest traditionally is a period of active relations within couples, and of sexual freedom in general.

Kava is a drink produced from the roots of a plant related to the pepper plant and found mainly in Polynesia as well as Fiji and Vanuatu. It has a mildly narcotic effect. Other names include 'awa (Hawai'i), 'ava (Samoa), yaqona (Fiji), and sakau (Pohnpei). Traditionally it is prepared by chewing, grinding or pounding the roots of the kava plant. In Tonga, chewing traditionally had to be done by female virgins. Pounding is done in a large stone with a small log. The product is then added to cold water and consumed as quickly as possible, invariably as part of a group of people sitting around and sharing the cup. Check before taking any out of the country, however, as importing or exporting kava can be illegal for travelers.

Usual travel precautions re: any socializing or involvement with local people apply, always, and take special care in remote areas and on remote islands. Prepare thoroughly for trips into remote areas. Do your research, be prepared, understand that wilderness areas are true wilderness.

Fiji, New Caledonia, the Cook Islands, Samoa and all other islands except those listed next are usually malaria free.

Vanuatu has no reported cases of malaria currently although it has existed. Islanders are recuperating from flood losses (2014), and attendant human and infrastructure damage in the Solomon Islands, with some people who have contracted malaria. The malaria risk has lessened in Papua New Guinea this decade. All mentioned have a regimen of larval control practices.

Check with the WHO for the latest statistics.

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Oceania - Wikitravel

Oceania | Definition, Population, & Facts | Britannica

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Oceania, collective name for the islands scattered throughout most of the Pacific Ocean. The term, in its widest sense, embraces the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas. A more common definition excludes the Ryukyu, Kuril, and Aleutian islands and the Japan archipelago. The most popular usage delimits Oceania further by eliminating Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines, because the peoples and cultures of those islands are more closely related historically to the Asian mainland. Oceania then, in its most restricted meaning, includes more than 10,000 islands, with a total land area (excluding Australia, but including Papua New Guinea and New Zealand) of approximately 317,700 square miles (822,800 square km).

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Alaska became the 50th U.S. state in 1949.

Oceania has traditionally been divided into four parts: Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. As recently as 33,000 years ago no human beings lived in the region, except in Australasia. Although disagreeing on details, scientists generally support a theory that calls for a Southeast Asian origin of island peoples. By 2000 about 12 million islanders lived in Oceania (excluding Australia), and many indigenous cultures were revolutionized by intensive contact with non-Oceanic groups who had intruded from various parts of the Western world. (The arts of the region are discussed in several articles; see art and architecture, Oceanic; music and dance, Oceanic; and Oceanic literature.) Pop. (2001 est.) including Australia, 31,377,000.

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Oceania | Definition, Population, & Facts | Britannica

S/pacific Islands: Some Reflections on Identity and Art in Contemporary Oceania – E-Flux

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The S/pacifics of Salt Water

Humanity emerged from the oceans, as did all life on this planet. Our bodies are 60 percent brinewe carry this marine heritage with us however far we travel from the sea, detached and diasporic as we may become. Perhaps we could even think of ourselves as self-contained mini-oceans teeming with fluid universes that have tragically lost their consciousness of shared oceanhood. While these poetic imaginations appeal to a collective human yearning for the sublime, the universal, and the utopian, such a metanarrative skips over the real lives, bodies, and territories of those people most intimate with the sea on islands and coastlines across the planet.

Specificity matters. Having grown up between the Marshall Islands, the United States, and Japan, I am concerned with a specific oceanthe Pacificand in it, the specific islands and communities of people, as well as the art in this part of the world. As my late friend and mentor Teresia Teaiwa, a scholar of Banaban and I-Kiribati heritage and one of Oceanias greatest minds, punned in her own writing, it is essential to emphasize the urgency of specific notionsor rather S/pacific n/oceansof Oceanian history and art: the specificities of genealogies, crossings, colonialisms, wars, struggles, and resilience of the people who live throughout the Great Ocean.1 It is in this spirit that I write this essay, which is not meant to be a curatorial text narrating a tidy story of which artists to watch from Oceania. Instead, I am interested in nudging this conversation beyond the ambiguities of the ocean to the specificities of Oceania, in order to foster more receptivity toward art and artists from this region.

I use Oceania in conversation with the influential and oft-quoted Tongan thinker Epeli Hauofa, who used that word to gesture toward an expanded and decolonized view of the Pacific Islands as the largest region on earth, and who described it as a sea of islands interconnected by ocean, rather than disparate and remote landmasses. But I find utility in both Oceania and Pacific, considering how the latter is a colonial term, a reminder of the embedded and entangled imperial forces that named and mapped this ocean, and that still need to be confronted. Increasingly, historians and curators from outside the region over-quote Hauofas landmark manifesto Our Sea of Islands with utopian and pan-Oceanian glee, thus making it seem as if decolonization is complete, while wallpapering over the immense differences between island topographies, Islander cultures, and contrasting colonial histories.2 After all, just as there are diverse islands, there are multiple Pacifics: competing imaginaries seen from different colonial vantage points. Western mappings of the Great Ocean created the legacy of the nesiasPolynesia, Melanesia, Micronesiabased purely on racialized perversions and fantasies of European explorers and colonists. Mapmakers romanticized Polynesians as noble savages, termed Melanesians solely for the darkness of their skin and a perception of them as being murderous barbarians (simply because they successfully fought white invaders away for so long), and coined Micronesia as a belittling term to cover all the miscellaneous scraps and leftover islands of the equatorial and northern Pacific that didnt fit into the prior two categories. And from these Western biases emerged hierarchieswith Polynesia at the top, leading to a sense even today of a privileging of Polynesia as metonym for the entire region at the exclusion of all other places, cultures, and histories, sometimes referred to as Polycentrism.

Japan, too, had its own imaginary of Oceania, which it called Nanya vague and broad frontier originating in Micronesia and eventually including all of the island Pacific and Southeast Asia. (Nany simply means The Southfrom a Japanese perspective.) In the twentieth century, Japan would attempt, and mostly succeed, to subsume this entire southern frontier, until it was wrested away by the United States and its allies and mostly reborn in the form of the postwar American Empire.

This essay says nothing new, at least in terms of what scholars and artists in and around Oceania often talk about. Rather, I want to propose an understanding of Oceania as a verb and not a noun, as dynamic rather than static, an open-ended conversation, sentence, question, and to recenter Oceania, to demand its centrality in the Middle of Now and Here as opposed to the middle of nowhere.3 As Teresia Teaiwa poignantly wrote, We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.4 She meant this not as a universalist call to all humanity, but rather as an affirmation of a shared Pacific Islander identity and heritage in the context of decolonizing history, with an investment in the larger project of trans-indigenous solidarity. I would reverse that paradigm as well, to suggest that the ocean itself is made up of the blood and sweat and tears of countless generations of Islanders who have struggled and persevered there, against incredible colonial and environmental adversity. We must remember, too, that humans cannot survive in water; we live on land, and landespecially in the Pacific Islandsis part of the fabric of ones very being. It is flesh. In many Austronesian languages, for example, the word for land (whenua in Mori, fenua in Tahitian, fanua in Samoan) is the same word used for placenta, which is typically buried in the land. As many Pacific writers have emphasized, landthe island itselfis thus also a mother.5

My own connection to Oceania is not as an Islander, but as a person who grew up riding the currents of colonialism. I am a fourth-generation European American, descended from the combined Atlantic crossings and subsequent struggles and romances of Jewish, Romanian, Italian, Czech, Dutch, and other immigrants to the United States. I am also a first-generation immigrant and a twenty-year permanent resident of Japan, where I live most of my life speaking Japanese and working as a university professor in Tokyo. But most importantly, though I am not indigenous to it, I consider Oceania my first home. In the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War, my fatheran earnest, peace-loving systems engineer who worked for a major American defense companybrought my mother and one-year-old me with him to the Marshall Islands, where for nearly eight years he would help to test intercontinental ballistic missiles (minus their nuclear warheads) at Kwajalein, the largest coral atoll in the world.

Kwajalein Atoll is a vast and beautiful ring of land and lagoon that has been inhabited by brave and resilient Marshall Islanders for thousands of years. Along with much of the surrounding islands of Micronesia, after hundreds of years loosely under Spanish domination, it was colonized by Germany (18851919) and Japan (19191947).6 The United States colonized the Marshalls even longer, beginning with its so-called liberation of these islands from the Japanese government in the 1940s, followed by sixty-seven devastating nuclear tests conducted at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958, and then by its ongoing missile-testing and space defense projects at Kwajalein Atoll, which began in 1964 and continue through to the present day, even after the formation of the sovereign Republic of the Marshall Islands in the mid-1980s. This is a proud S/pacific nation that symbolizes the perseverance and optimism of Islanders over the horrors of colonial and military violence and climate change; yet it rarely is mentioned in Western descriptions of the Pacific, which tend to favor fantasies of tropical pleasure and escape rather than the bitter truths of conquest and domination.

As a teacher, artist, and curator working with Islander colleagues between Japan and Pacific places, I situate my own story here to invite others like me with non-Pacific heritage to realize and acknowledge their own indebtedness to Oceania and the violent histories of colonial exploitation. As a child, in my privileged position derived from legacies of stealing Marshallese land for the sake of American security and wealth, I lived and breathed the military settler colonialism hidden in plain sight all around me. Had it not been for Islander teachers and friends who patiently shared their stories with me, I might have completely ignored the deeper truths that Kwajalein wanted me to learn. Through them I would begin to unpack the horrors of imperial trespass and feel humbled by the incredible resilience, strength, wisdom, and agency of Pacific Islanders.

Outside of the Pacific Islands, most of us are indeed beholden to these histories, and yet our imaginary of this Great Ocean is oddly vague and romantic. I often ask new students to draw the Pacific. 99.9 percent of their illustrations are mapstypically rendered as if looking down at earth from space or the heavens, the ubiquitous Gods eye view that most Google Maps users take for granted today as reality. They draw a political/economic map that emphasizes the contours of important countries that border the Great Ocean, and in the middle of the map is always little more than a vast and undefined stretch of bluea void, sometimes peppered with little dots that are supposed to represent islands, sometimes not. Sometimes the islands are labeledat most, the Hawaiian Islands, Aotearoa-New Zealand, perhaps Fiji or Papua New Guinea. This is an imperial worldview, an overview that audaciously and even violently attempts to encompass the wholeness of the largest region on earth and reduce it to remote specks in blue vagueness. Zoom in on Google Earth on any of these ill-defined dots, however, and you will soon discover that even the smallest islands can take a human being days to traverse by foot in the hot sun.

A more S/pacific view invites us to look at how an ocean wayfinder, a navigator, would visualize Oceania, if they even privileged the visual in the first place. True navigators in the distant islands of Micronesia, like Mau Piailugthe influential Satawalese teacher of wayfindingcould feel with their bodies the rhythm and the texture of the ocean, the subtle echoes of waves and surges and currents crashing against and flowing around islands. Chants passed down through generations and perpetuated in hula and other Islander oral traditions gesture toward specific markers on the surface and depths of ocean, even the smells of seaweed, of places and islandsas Chamorro-Pohnpeian scholar Vince Diaz writes, the olfactory map of the Pacific is also rich and nuanced.7 And so, a S/pacific perspective demands that we remember the contexts, the relativity of size to one human body, and the importance of place and environment. If it is even worth drawing the Pacific to begin with, at the very least it is essential to realize that at sea level, from an island-based visual perspective, one might not sketch out a map but rather a single unbroken line dividing the expanses of sky and water, what Westerners commonly refer to as the horizon.

Nearing the edge of the reef, Ishigaki Island, Okinawa, August 2020. Photo: Greg Dvorak. Courtesy of the author.

Triangulating across and between horizons helps Islanders navigate Oceania and the current crises of our world. Even in my own triangulations between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands, I find a deeper sense of located-ness amidst the complexity of coral and concrete. These two substances are rich metaphors that can help to narrate S/pacific histories in helpful ways that facilitate more humility and interaction between islands, oceans, and people in relation to each other while being mindful of power and inequality.8 Oceanias culture and geography is all about connections between islands, maintained through the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next through stories and the genealogical bonds of family (not necessarily blood relations as much as kinship through shared affinity and commitment). Coral is like thisorganic, migratory, relational, ancestral, rhizomatic. But we must also call out the abuse of power and violenceto identify the aggressors who literally and figuratively crushed those coral reefs and mixed them into concrete to pour for their imperial endeavors. Amidst the turbulence of globalization, climate change, militarism, and even the Covid pandemic, Oceania is the site of an ongoing competition between coralthe little histories of real human livespitted against concretethe big histories of empires and wars.9 In the grander scheme of things, despite the imperial or military pretense of concrete permanence, it is always the coralline collective struggles and creative ingenuity of individuals formed into communities which overcome and survive across generations.

Coral is a microorganism that spawns annually, coral polyps projecting their eggs and sperm onto the ocean currents, which become baby polyps that navigate the seas on epic journeys to find hospitable new sites where they can attach and build new reefs. Coral thus builds a genealogical structure out of diverse and disparate journeys, making sense of chaos, growing in deep time over thousands of years, literally transforming from the microscopic to the macroscopic. I liken the crossings of people to coral. It is estimated that Austronesian people left their homelands in or around present-day Taiwan about five to six thousand years ago, voyaging and wayfinding across tremendous distances in waves of outmigration as they developed better and better maritime technology and knowledge, settling different corners of island Oceania from west to east. These progressive crossings and layerings gave birth to diverse but interconnected island cultures and transoceanic trade routes, languages, heritages. But I include in my metaphor of coral the other crossings of ordinary peopleof castaways and people who drifted off course, of missionaries, of people captured and forced away from their families, of the later flows of settlers like laborers and prisoners, of the migrations of soldiers and colonists.

The coral image doesnt condone the horrifically violent encounters that happened along the way as a result of these migrations; rather, it as an allegory for an inventory of all of these contradictory influences, an inclusive metaphor for the sloppy but strangely elegant sedimenting of diverse truths into complicated reefs. In English, it is said that coral colonizes, but in fact coral actually decolonizes: reclaiming, resistant, dynamic, strong. And reefs embody how colonial encounters always entail resistance, nuance, and peril; for coral can be soft, colorful, and beautiful, but also messy, harsh, fragile, sharp, and jagged. The reef can sink a ship; coral can infect a wound and kill. Coral is built upon the bones of those who came before, simultaneously life and death, sometimes strong as rock and sometimes frail as flower petals. Coral is thus the embodiment of resistance to all that would attempt to flatten, essentialize, or appropriate it into a singular narrative of domination.

In contrast to the complexity and resistance of coral, concrete is the stuff of oversimplification: imperial contrivance, the farce of permanence, the lie that the people who came before were somehow complicit and submissive in their own colonization. Before and after the Pacific War, Japanese and Americans both literally dredged up the Marshallese coral reef ancestral fishing grounds that surrounded the main island in Kwajalein Atoll, pulverized it, and mixed it with cement to make airstrips and fortifications in the service of empire and war. Bunkers, blockhouses, and bureaucracies: concrete is collective violence and oppressionit is orientalism, nationalism, and fascism. Concrete is war. It is ecocide. It is the wall that separates us and the sickening hubris of petty world leaders who boast of building walls. It is the output of general contractors who dump tons and tons of it onto islands and oceans. It is the giant blocks poured by the United States military at Henoko in Okinawa to coat the reef there and make yet another new and unnecessary Marine base. It is the gargantuan tetrapod objects heaped along the coasts of Japan in a triumphant (but futile) warning to the ocean that no tsunami shall wipe away the seaside infrastructure of capitalism, is if the waves would listen. Concrete is the rotting carcasses of Japanese war-era administrative buildings and bomb shelters buried deep in the jungles of Chuuk, Peleliu, Jaluit, Saipan, or Palawan, the aircraft carriers asleep on the bottoms of lagoons. It is also the golf courses and tourist infrastructure spread out across the Pacific today. They say that concrete has a lifespan of only a hundred years, which is really about the same as a human life, and yet empires praise it as if it were eternal.

Even if coral is bleaching because of our warming seas, its reefs will always stand as ruins and monuments to these incredible histories that far outlast concrete, and it is plausible that long after humanity has perished and oceans have cooled, coral will regenerate and continue its (de)colonizations. Over millions of years, coral reefs have built islands out of their migrations and interconnections. In the clockwise-flowing Kuroshio/Pacific Current along which I live alone, in this part of Northern Oceania, oceanographers know that the reefs of the Marshall Islands give birth to the reefs of Kosrae and Pohnpei, which in turn beget the islands and atolls to their west, all the way across to the Philippines and up across Okinawa and Amami, up to Kyushu and Honshu. This eternal cycle is overlaid with the millions of crossings of canoes and ships and airplanes, the landings and flights, the unions of individuals that result in children and their childrens children. We are deeply, deeply entangled with each other, but the concrete our nations pour can make some of us the inheritors of great privilege and others the inheritors of dispossession. In fact the coronavirus pandemic starkly reveals this: the biggest factors enabling mass infections among the poorest and most marginalized might well be our concrete cities and concrete barriers of capitalistic inequality. But it is also the coming together of disparate people for common causes that build new reefs of resistance, to fight for the health of Pacific Islanders and also to insist that black and brown lives matternot only in predominantly white places but everywhere, including in Oceania itself, such as in Indonesian-occupied West Papua, where Islanders are oppressed and killed simply for asserting their own identity.

The arrival of canoes from across Micronesia at the Festival of Pacific Arts in Guam, 2016. Photo: Greg Dvorak. Courtesy of the author.

It is the Western obsession with concrete that explains why Spain has already begun making a big fuss about the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, notwithstanding that 2021 also marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the European-led genocidal violence he initiated in Oceania. It was really only Magellans bad luck, ignorance, and the sheer enormity of the Great Ocean that enabled him to cross southeast to northwest without making landfall once until his crew, starving, exhausted, and bored, reached Guhan (Guam) in March 1521, having declared this ocean so uneventful and unimpressive that it earned the moniker pacificothe name Pacific stuck. Sailing into the bay of Humtak, Magellan proceeded to order the burning of the entire village and the murder of many innocent Chamoru people, after which his crew reportedly cannibalized these bodies to replenish their health. The first recorded European history of cannibalism in the Pacific was thus by white people eating natives, and not the other way around.

That was the gruesome beginning of Western consumption of The Pacific, and it has continued ever since. And since the trespasses of Magellan, James Cook, and many others like them, it has been fashionable for Outsiders to project their imperial fantasies of Paradise onto the Pacific Islands, erasing like the military airstrips and concrete resort hotels of Honolulu the lives of real people and the bitter truths of the very colonization they themselves and their forebears wrought upon those islands on behalf of various empires.10 Many artists, from Picasso to Gauguin, were particularly notorious for this in their pursuit of the primitive fantasy that they sought in Pacific Island cultures. Gauguin, for example, gladly invited himself to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where he spread syphilis and slept with teenage girls, all the while painting a vision of an eden that existed as if solely for the pleasure of European hetero-hungry men. And despite this, French tourists still seek out their dream of the Polynesian wahine dusky maiden, and Air Tahiti Nui has Gauguin paintings decorating the interior of its aircraft. And for all the fantasies of Pacific Paradise there are just as many nightmares of a Pacific Hell; for the Pacific Islands regularly show up in Western imaginationsincluding in journalism and contemporary art11as the condemned nuclear wastelands of the past or the doomed bleached reefs and submerged homelands of the future, often devoid of the Pacific Islanders for whom these places matter the most.

Thus, the Pacific has long been consumed in very concrete ways, absent its deeper coral histories and of S/pacific localities and local communities in all their diversity. So my hope here is to advocate against one-sided consumption and rather for a more equal conversation, collaboration, and engagement with Oceania and the artists of the Pacific Islands region. It is not my intention to attempt a history of art in Oceania, which would be audacious and inadequate, given that I am not an art historian, nor has that been my research specialization up until now. There are many meticulous art historians and curators, such as Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Sean Mallon, and their colleagues, who have done magnificent work in this arena with their Art in Oceania: A New History,12 and later, the Oceania exhibition in 201819 at the Royal Academy in London and Muse du Quai Branly in Paris. This show, which painstakingly pulled together hundreds of works by people all over Oceania from past centuries, gathered from European collections and mindfully chosen with regard to the integrity of their provenance, also included a substantial body of works from contemporary Pacific artists that were highly engaged with urgent questions over colonialism, militarism, racism, war, the environment, and globalization. Still, this exhibit was criticized, for example, by Native Hawaiian curator Noelle Kahanu, one of its advisors, who lamented that although these precious objects, many imbued with immense spiritual and ancestral significance, were presented in Europe, the show was also significant in that those [Pacific people] who would most benefit, who would most deserve to see that which is here, [were] absent.13 She added that it remained the task of the visitor to draw their own connections to realize the violent history that confined such collections to European audiences, far away from the Pacific Ocean, with the work of contemporary Islander artists asked to bear the burden of interpreting all of this, as is if it were an afterthought. This is a crucial critique that echoes those previously leveled against the Muse du Quai Branly itself, which anthropologist Margaret Jolly argued enables a forgetting of modern arts primitivist colonial collusion, concluding that if cultures are talking [there], it appears that only certain people are party to those conversations and empowered to talk.14 And so, although Oceania was a breathtaking exhibit that marked a turning point in the reframing of art made by Pacific Islanders, perhaps with a more coral-like attention to the lives of real communities and real artists with names, this was only the beginning of truly embracing indigenous art from Oceania on the global scene.

There has, nonetheless, been momentum building toward a fairer conversation and reclamation of agency by Pacific artists closer to home for many decades, and Pacific art is linking more and more with indigenous art around the world in fascinating and exciting ways, with the advance of social media and better communications facilitating more trans-indigenous and global connections with audiences worldwide and in the international art world. For over forty years, the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FESTPAC) has been held every four years to celebrate and perpetuate indigenous Pacific Islander art throughout the region, most recently in Guhan in 2016. Aotearoa-New Zealand has also long been a major, thriving center for Pacific art, as a gathering place of both Mori indigenous communities and the Pacific Islander diaspora in urban spaces like Auckland and Wellington, who have had to negotiate the tough tensions of settler colonialism and racism but have nurtured rich and meaningful government-sponsored protocols and indigenous arts support infrastructures that foster effective creative production and networking. More recently, however, indigenous art, especially from Oceania, has gained an international foothold, such as in the formation of the Honolulu Biennial or the latest iteration of the Sydney Biennale, which featured mainly indigenous and First Nations artists.15

But these kinds of spaces and movements are still few and far between, and are lacking in significant parts of the greater Pacific Ocean area, particularly in smaller islands and up in the northern hemisphere, such as in Japan, where art from Oceania still means dusty artifacts devoid of context or genealogy on display at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. Isolated showings of contemporary Pacific artists have been held from time to time, most recently in the 2015 Aichi Triennale or 2020 Yokohama Triennale,16 but these works have not been linked to larger conversations around decolonization or confrontation with Japans colonial pastnor has there yet been any meaningful curatorial project that brings Pacific Islanders into conversation with the indigenous communities of Japan, such as Ainu or Okinawans. Mayunkiki, a contemporary Ainu musical artist from the colonized northern lands of Ainu Moshir (commonly known as Japans Hokkaido), was invited to participate in the recent Sydney Biennale, but for the most part Ainu artists today are virtually unknown in Japaneven if, for example, Ainu cultural histories have been featured (or appropriated) in the work of Japanese artists, such as Nara Yoshitomo. Works by Okinawan artists, whose ancestral Ryky Kingdom was overthrown and annexed by Japan, have gained international attention in recent years, such as the art of Yamashiro Chikako or Miyagi Futoshi, both of whom reference the gritty realities of war and militarism in past and present Okinawa in their work. Okinawan Ishikawa Maos stunning oeuvre of photography and activist writing has for decades shown how Japanese public complicity in the Japanese-American military embrace perpetuates more racism, base construction, and sexual violence against women and girls in Okinawa; yet her workwhich is, in fact, highly nuanced and conscious of interisland tensionsis almost impossible to show in Tokyo. As recently as 2019, when Ishikawa was granted a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Photographic Society of Japan, a photo of hers was censored from the accompanying exhibitionan image depicting a likeness of prime minister Shinzo Abe being crushed by one of the huge concrete blocks used to cover the reef and build the new base in Henoko.

I remember being with Samoan/Rarotongan/Tahitian artist Michel Tuffery in Kanaky (the indigenous name for New Caledonia) many years ago, marveling at the exhibition Kanak: LArt est une Parole, a show which was curated by Emmanuel Kasarhrou and shared between the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea and Muse du Quai Branly (a rare example of art collected in Europe being shared back in its place of origin). As we walked through this exhibition, the first of its kind to gather intricate carvings and sculptures, masks, and other creations of centuries of Kanak heritage, I remember looking at Michel, who stood silent, seemingly awestruck. He was not beholding these items as artifacts in glass cases mounted on plinths but rather conversing, it seemed, with their ancestral creatorshuman beings who could have been ancestors along the Great Migration, people who had encoded messages and knowledge and wisdom into these treasures. Visibly moved, he looked up at me and said, You can just feel the mana leaping out at you, cant you?

Mana is a Polynesian word, which has some equivalents in other Pacific languages as well, meaning something along the lines of power, a life force or energy that can flow through all humans and objects and places, and can be cultivated. More importantly, it is appreciated and respected. There is also the Polynesian notion of tapu, which basically means sacred and is where the adapted English word taboo comes from, mainly because tapu can essentially mean so sacred that it is off-limits to ordinary people. This is similar to the Marshallese concept (which would commonly be thought of as Micronesian) of mo, which also imbues places and people and things with a sacredness and energy, similar to mana, that only chiefs and other powerful people can access.17 As the authors of the book Art in Oceania emphasize, art from these communities has thus been not only about aesthetics but also about transmitting power and purpose through carvings, intricate tattoos, weavings, barkcloth, paintings, drawings, sculptures, performances, songs, dances, and other creations that communicate and convey this kind of mana or energy for the community and for other generations.18 As is true for most indigenous communities, art often belongs to a space of ritual and even sacredness.

Mana can be felt in the work of Mori artist Lisa Reihanawho represented New Zealand in the 2017 Venice Biennale with her phenomenal and epic multimedia piece In Pursuit of Venus Infected (part of an installation entitled Emissaries)which imbues her work with a ceremonial consciousness and multiple perspectives that embrace the diversity and collective trauma of transoceanic and transcolonial encounter in the Pacific Islands. Focusing on the expeditions of James Cook in Polynesia, whose mission was in part to observe the transit of Venus from the South Pacific while also discovering and claiming Australia for Britain, Reihanas work digitally hijacks the eighteenth-century decorative wallpaper designed by Joseph Dufour based on painter Jean-Gabriel Charvets romantic and orientalist vision of a Polynesian utopia. Animating this wallpaper with meticulously rendered live-action reenactments of the violence, resistance, wretchedness, and messiness of these encounters between specific Islander communities and white colonists, Reihana subverts (infects) this paradise with Oceanian agency. The artist, who has pointed out that POV can stand for both pursuit of Venus and point of view,19 reconfigures the narratives of first contact that are common throughout the islands colonized by British Empire, defying the hackneyed trope of Cooks heroism that runs through so much of Western versions of Pacific history. Reihana explained to me that the inclusion of scenes of contact with Aboriginal Australians, who suffered enormously as a result of Cooks conquests, in the final iteration of the work were a way of bringing the story around full circle and honoring the very first migrants to the greater Pacific (the first Aboriginal people likely arrived nearly sixty thousand years ago in what we call Australia today) and the last migrations of Pacific Islanders to Aotearoa to become Mori (over seven hundred years ago). In the scrolling, we see seamless scenes and audioscapes, moments of confusion, despair, rape, and murder, disease and dispossession of Islandersbut we also see the boredom, sickness, and discontent of the white settlers, the extensive gifting of objects and knowledge by Islander elders to Joseph Banks and others in Cooks crew, the fluidity of faaffine third-gender Samoans, the angry responses of chiefs, the myriad rituals of mourning and war, and the ritual return of Cooks dismembered remains to the British after he has been killed in Hawaii. While her work critiques a Cook-centric narrative arc that deals mainly with the southern hemisphere and a story that is most familiar to Polynesians, it is a project that resonates powerfully with indigenous and colonized, marginalized people all over Oceania and everywhere else. Her art speaks on its own terms to collections of indigenous art and compels curators to rethink how and what they exhibit with respect to real people and the communities they belong to.20 It broadcasts mana across horizons in ways that help to fuel a trans-indigenous conversation about decolonization. It is coral infecting concrete: creating space to ritually acknowledge these trespasses and reclaim stolen narratives.

Creating space for conversation, respect, and ritual is perhaps one of the most central elementsboth in practice and outcomeof art from Oceania. We see this even in the work of emerging artists from the region, such as Auckland-based young urban Pacific Islander artist collective FAFSWAG, who see themselves as navigating together as a family around core values of mutual respect for each other and for their communities, while also holding space for marginalized queer indigenous and Pacific Islander youth.21 Functioning together as a group and also as individual artists, their projects have crisscrossed interactive filmmaking initiatives, online spaces, Instagram-driven drag vignettes, vogue ball events and sites,22 and reconfigurations of postcolonial gender and sexuality, drawing on tradition and bravely tackling missionary and other Western influences to carve out a queer and gender-nonconforming genealogy of their own that is built on support and care. As artists Elyssia Wilson-Heti and Tanu Gago point out, their collective navigation is also an important model for artist support in the predominantly white world of contemporary global arthow to move through space and how to define success on their own terms.23

Increasingly aware of this honoring of space, family, community, process, and agency, the Asia Pacific Triennial, held by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia, has embraced more and more art from Oceania in its recent iterations, learning from its mistakes and using more grassroots approaches to engage on equal terms with local practitioners. Ritual matters in all encounters in Oceaniaan asking for permission to enter, the granting of that permission, the mindfulness that one is on someone elses land, and some form of ritual to bless this new connection and relationship, or the return of people who have come back. The opening ceremonies for the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT9) in 2018 were not only emblematic of this kind of respect for ones hosts and the ceremonies of joining and gathering; they were, in fact, also a fundamental part of activating and blessing the art itself and bringing people together. The Welcome to Country, led by representatives of the different indigenous custodial communities of the land where the gallery sits, began with a number of protocols in which all artists and visitors were invited to participate, together with brief speeches, songs, chants, and words of welcome. In return, artists from different indigenous communities were invited to respond with their own gifts and performances. Watching these rituals unfold, as artists from Kiribati, Bougainville, and Aotearoa shared their responses, it was clear that space was being made for connection, that something was being opened in the true sense. Ishikawa Mao, whose early photographs were on exhibit, explained to me that she was impressed by the solidarity between marginalized groups and the honoring of ancestral land, having never seen anything like this in Japanwhere she has always felt like an outsider to the scene.

Curator Sana Balai (center, with microphone) and members of Womens Wealth at the opening of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, November 2018.Photo: Greg Dvorak. Courtesy of the author.

Womens Wealth, an exhibition within APT9, cocurated by Sana Balai, together with at least twenty women artists, is a stellar example of how Pacific art can be conceived and exhibited in ways that are beneficial to local places and communities while also facilitating further connections. Emphasizing an onsite intensive weeklong workshop in Bougainville, a matrilineal society that has been heavily colonized by mining and strained by years of civil war, the project emphasized and celebrated womens ingenuity and resilience and encouraged them to share and create together. Exhibited together with Habitat, 2018, a powerful video work by Bougainvillean/Australian artist Taloi Havini that compassionately helped to contextualize the trauma of capitalism and patriarchal power around the Panguna region, while articulating the many intricate works made by these womenmost of whom were present for the opening in Australiathis was a showing of Pacific art in the truest sense: grounded in both tradition and contemporary social engagement. It was also grounded in a larger conversation that had more to do with a living, breathing community and land than with the air-conditioned white cube.

Approaching its thirtieth iteration, I am humbled to be able to work as cocurator with Ruth McDougall and Ruha Fifita for the next (10th) Asia Pacific Triennial to be held in late 2021, for which I am helping to facilitate a similarly workshopped and collaborative curatorial process together with Micronesian counterparts in Northern Oceania.24 As part of this, I have been fortunate to team up with Marshallese artist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and observe her process, which is also deeply imbued with a consciousness for ritual. Jetnil-Kijiner, who has become known globally for her influential climate change activism and charismatic spoken-word art, is keenly aware of the challenges of nuclear testing and ecological disaster her country faces. Setting aside the important but repetitive quotes and statistics that render Marshallese people as victims of military and ecological colonialism, her work enacts and channels a deeper sense of indigenous spirituality, drawing on legends and chants to stand up to the horror of atomic catastrophe and displacement, while opening space to grieve and express anger. She expresses her fury passionately and evocatively, rightfully calling out the abuses of the past and present but simultaneously and gracefully rising above them. One example of this is how in her video work Anointed (2018), conceived in collaboration with cinematographer Dan Lin, Kathy voyaged to the former nuclear testing site of Enewetak Atoll, where local communities returned to live after American soldiers in the 1970sin an inadequate gesture of compensationburied tons of irradiated surface soil (only a fraction of the horrific amount of waste generated) under a colossal concrete cap. Standing atop this domeknown by local Islanders as the Tombshe places coral stones atop the concrete, a ritual gesture of mourning and purification. This work, like all of Kathys art, is simultaneously a call to action, a lament, and an act of healing that summons local knowledge and projects it defiantly, resistantly, throughout the world. It is fluent, literally and figuratively, in the language of coral, honoring living and dying and the endurance of culture and identity via the resilient reef.25

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner holding a basket of coral stones on the concrete dome of Runit Island, which houses radioactive waste from nuclear testing at Enewetak Atoll, from her video work Anointed,2018 (HD digital video, 6 min). Photograph and cinematography by Dan Lin.Image courtesy of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.

The international art world seems more concerned with concrete than with coral. It is a world that moves and functions primarily in terms of material culture and money, in the logistics of transporting and exhibiting, buying and borrowing physical objects, and privileges those histories of Things over the ephemeral, the microscopic, the ritual, the coralline, the contradictory. But opening up to coral and what it offers us in terms of deep time, deep connections with origins, compassion, care, may be the shift that is needed in these challenging times. Art from Oceania, and art grounded in indigenous thinking in general, provides hints for how to do this.

And in considering the ocean, I return to where I began in saying that valuing and opening minds to ocean space requires us to value the intimate and specific passages, traversings, and encounters of real people who connect the dots and link these islands together across that ocean space. As with the Indian, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Arctic, Oceanian space is a space of turbulence, violence, and changenothing truly pacific at all. I argue for S/pacificity, for the awareness that the ocean is no voidit is inhabited and alive and loved, and it has much to teach us. Sensing the entirety of the ocean is one thing, but what truly matters is to learn from those who know how to navigate, weather, resist, and ride its waves.

Greg Dvorak is Professor of Pacific and Asian History and Cultural Studies in Tokyos Waseda University (Graduate School of Culture and Communication Studies / School of International Liberal Studies). Having grown up in the Marshall Islands, the United States, and Japan, he specializes mainly in themes of postcolonial memory, gender, militarism, resistance, and art in the Oceania region. Founder of the grassroots art/academic network Project Sango, he serves as cocurator for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Art and other exhibitions. Among other publications, he is the author of Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands (University of Hawaii Press, 2018).

2020 e-flux and the author

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S/pacific Islands: Some Reflections on Identity and Art in Contemporary Oceania - E-Flux

New Zealand’s NBL will return next month with ’18in18′ campaign – FIBA

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Photo from:canterburywildcats.com

AUCKLAND (New Zealand) - Oceania basketball is starting to spring back to life with the scheduled opener of the SALs National Basketball League (NBL) "18IN18" next month in Auckland, New Zealand following the slated Australias Womens National Basketball League (WNBL) also in November.

Basketball New Zealand announced the development in cooperation with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), Auckland Council, and NBL led by General Manager Justin Nelson.

The upcoming tournament will play 18 straight days featuring 18 straight games including regular-season games and playoffs among six NBL teams at the Pullman Arena in south Auckland.

Elite women squads Etco Auckland Dream, Capital Swish, Alloyfold Canterbury Wildcats, Platinum Homes Harbour Breeze, Firebrand Otago Gold Rush and Waikato Wizards are the participating clubs slugging it out for the prestigious SALs NBL 18IN18 starting 19 November to 6 December.

All games will be broadcasted live on Sky Sport.

Were delighted to be staging another premium basketball event in Auckland. Not only is Auckland home to a fantastic basketball community but, when it comes to staging events and welcoming people into their city, Auckland does it so exceptionally well. That was evident at the recent Sals NBL Showdown earlier this year, said Nelson.

We cant wait to call Pulman Arena our home for the event, its an outstanding facility for players and supporters. It is a sporting hub for the community and we very much want to enjoy our time in and around the south Auckland community.

The Auckland hosting of Sals NBL 18IN18 is the second major tourney in the bustling city after the 2019 FIBA Olympic Qualifiers in West Auckland that featured Sky Sport Tall Ferns, China, South Korea, and the Philippines.

But more than basketball, this big event is being seen as a major boost to the tourism and economy of the region amid the grappling effects of the pandemic.

There is a real appetite for live sporting content and this competition will provide Aucklanders the chance to watch the countrys best in action," added ATEED Head of Major Events Richard Clarke.

Basketball is a great spectacle from the stands and on television, and were delighted that south Auckland will be the hub for the season. Not only will it showcase one of our best sporting venues, but also our region as a top destination for events."

Earlier this month, Basketball Australia also announced that its 2020 Chemist Warehouse Womens National Basketball League (WNBL) will push through as planned in the north Queensland, making a strong signal that Oceania basketball could be back to good, old days sooner than later.

FIBA

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Aus business growth in Asia in the slow lane – BlueNotes

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With the China crisis yet again drawing attention to Australias heavy dependence on the export of commodities to Asia, calls for more on the ground investment to facilitate services exports have been growing. The argument goes that commodities can often by exported with little investment on the ground but taking Australian services to the emerging middle-class markets requires people and infrastructure to be physically present.

The new ABS data appear to suggest there is a greater correlation between offshore affiliates and services exports than goods exports, although it is hard to disaggregate goods and services produced on the ground by the affiliates and those brought in from Australia.

Nevertheless, the offshore affiliates sold $A89 billion of services which is equivalent to 90 per cent of Australias official services export value compared with $A123 billion of goods exports which is only 32 per cent of Australias total goods exports.

While Australia has an obvious comparative advantage in commodities exports, services exports are seen as having stronger long-term growth as Asian economies mature away from infrastructure construction and manufacturing. These figures suggest investment will be a necessary driver of services export success.

It is often noted how private businesses small and large seem to have more appetite for the risks involved in Asian investment than the big publicly listed companies that face fund manager demands for quick and regular quarterly profits. But these data suggest the pacesetters in Asian investment are the Australian subsidiaries of foreign owned multinationals (MNCs) which are using Australia as a base for Asian investment.

Almost 700 of the Australian affiliates operating abroad are owned by MNCs. But 80 per cent of these businesses are operating in Asia or Oceania (largely New Zealand), whereas only 29 per cent of fully Australian owned offshore affiliates are operating in Asia or Oceania. This is perhaps not surprising since it is unlikely an Australian MNC subsidiary would be investing in the US or Europe from where these multinationals typically come. And this investment trend was apparent back in 2003.

The little understood importance of Australian-based MNCs in leading Asian investment is better revealed in unpublished analysis of these data by Austrade economist Divya Skene which shows those MNC affiliates in Asia are performing much better than fully Australian-owned subsidiaries.

Her calculations show return on equity (ROE) for the MNC affiliates in Asia was 16 per cent compared with 5 per cent for the Australian-owned businesses. The margin was even greater in Southeast Asia where the MNC businesses earnt 20 per cent compared with 3 per cent for the Australian owned ones.

This is quite a stunning finding for Australian based companies but it is positive for the periodic government campaigns to promote Australia as a base for MNC regional operations. A new industry group recently launched to pitch this idea to foreign companies planning to exit Hong Kong due to concerns about increased Chinese control.

The finding means Australian expertise and products may be making their way to Asia via the little appreciated backdoor of MNC investment. But this is not so good for soft power projection because on the ground it is likely this business engagement will be seen as coming from the MNCs home country rather than Australia.

Greg Earl is the editor of Asia Society Australia's monthly publication Briefing Monthly and was a former south east Asia correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.

This article draws on articles published by Asia Society Australias Briefing Monthly and the Lowy Institutes The Interpreter.

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VATICAN World Missionary Sunday: Mission ‘never stops’ and calls everyone – AsiaNews

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Catholics number 1.328.993.000, 17.73 % of the global population. Archbishop Rugambwa: "The mission touches and transforms all sectors and areas of life in order to save humanity and creation". Msgr. Dal Toso: the fund to help local Churches cope with this period of pandemic to date has financed 250 projects for a total of 1, 299, 700 US Dollars and 473,410 Euros.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Catholics number 1,328,993,000, 17.73 % of the world population, and have increased by 15,716,000. The data, released today with reference to the year-end 2018, on the one hand confirms the vitality of Catholicism, but on the other it indicates that there is still a need for people ready to bring the teaching of Jesus to the world.

It is a mission that "never stops" and calls "each of us to bring God's love to everyone and especially to the most needy," observed Msgr. Protase Rugambwa, secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, speaking at the Vatican at the presentation of the World Mission Sunday which is celebrated on Sunday 18 October on the theme "Here I am, send me".

" The mission must touch and transform all sectors and areas of life in order to save humanity and creation: families, jobs, factories, schools, politics, the environment, etc. (seeLk1:38). We are invited to respond to Gods call, in a free and conscious manner and to be available for the Lord to send us. This is the mission: Who will I send? Here I am, send me!. Together with the Pope, he continued, We want, today with him too, to invite all the faithful to reconfirm their willingness and their active participation in the Churchs ever more necessary and urgent mission of evangelisation. In what way? Through prayer, sacrifice, reflection, and material aid for the important purpose of helping and supporting the missionary work that is carried out, in the name of the Pope, by the Pontifical Mission Societies. ".

In this regard, Msgr. Giampietro Dal Toso, president of the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMS) spoke about the universal fund for the missions, to which, he recalled, the hurches from all over the world collaborate in the universal fund. It is not merely aid from north to south, but a criterion for communication and circularity, where everyone contributes for the good of all. It is an all but unique example of this form of sharing, also economic, between Churches. .

Mons. Dal Toso also stressed that It is the task of the Pontifical Mission Societies to finance pastoral projects, and it is therefore inherent to the life of the Church which gradually establishes its structures throughout the world. This too is a specific element. Although the financial issue is neither the first nor the most important for the Pontifical Mission Societies, money is however a necessity, just as every soul needs a body. In this regard I would like to add a word on the fund instituted on behalf of the Holy Father to assist the local Churches in facing this period of the pandemic. Up to the present, 250 projects have been approved and financed, for a total of 1,299,700 US dollars, and 473,410 Euros. The funds originate from collections carried out in various countries thanks to our national directorates, a total of around 120.

Among the initiatives carried out, he also indicated "support for Christian families in Bangladesh, a tiny and extremely poor minority in a country often tried by natural cataclysms".

Returning to the statistics on the Catholic Church, presented by "Fides", the increase in the number of Catholics in the world - and it is the third consecutive year - is more marked in Africa (+9.208.000) and in America (+4.458.000) followed by Asia (+1.779.000) and Oceania (+177.000).

However, priests continue to decrease: they are 414,065 (-517). A substantial decrease is recorded in Europe (-2.675) added to which is America (-104). The increases are recorded in Africa (+1.391), Asia (+823) and Oceania (+48).

On the other hand, the number of permanent deacons is again growing (+610), reaching the number of 47,504. The most consistent increase is confirmed in America (+293), followed by Europe (+271), Oceania (+25), Africa (+13) and Asia (+8).

Non-priest religious decreased (-594), reaching the number of 50,941 and women religious (-7,249) who are now 641,661. For both, Asia is in countertrend: religious (+87) and religious (+1,218) are increasing.

On the other hand, the number of lay missionaries has increased to 376,188 (+20,388) and the major seminarians, diocesan and religious (+552), now reaching 115,880. The increases are recorded in Africa (+964), Asia (+354) and Oceania (+52). They decrease in Europe (-696) and in America (-122).

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VATICAN World Missionary Sunday: Mission 'never stops' and calls everyone - AsiaNews

Automotive Seats Market worth $60.0 billion by 2025 – Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets – PRNewswire

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CHICAGO, Oct. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report"Automotive Seats Marketby Type & Technology (Heated-Powered, Heated-Ventilated, Heated-Memory, Heated-Ventilated-Memory, Heated-Ventilated-Memory-Massage), Trim & Frame Material, Component, Vehicle (ICE, Electric, OHV) and Region - Global Forecast to 2025",published by MarketsandMarkets, the Automotive Seats Market is projected to grow to USD 60.0 billion by 2025 from USD 51.9 billion in 2020, at a CAGR of 2.9%. Factors such as Inclination of consumers towards more comfort and luxury features would drive the automotive seat market.

Browsein-depth TOC on"Automotive Seats Market"

164 Tables59 Figures224 Pages

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Passenger Car Segment is estimated to hold the largest share in Automotive Seat Market

Owing to the higher production of passenger cars compared to all vehicle types, automotive seats in this segment lead the market. The trend of automotive seats is different in each region. For instance, Asia Oceania, which contributes ~54% to the total passenger car segment, is dominated by the small/economy car segment since the second row of these cars is equipped with bench seats due to their compactness. As consumers in this segment in this region are price-sensitive, the adoption of innovative seating technology is limited here compared to the Americas and Europe.

Powered and combination of powered & heated seat

While traditionally, powered seats were installed only in premium vehicles, currently, they are also being installed in most mid-end SUVs. Demand for SUVs is increasing in Asia Oceania, especially in China, Japan, India, and South Korea. OEMs in India are launching compact SUVs in the mid-price range, which is expected to create a positive outlook for powered seats.

The hot climate in Asia Oceania results in minimal demand for heated sets in the region. Most cars sold in North America and Europe are SUVs. Therefore, the application of powered seats in these regions is expected to be higher. The adoption rate of powered & heated seats is higher in North America due to the cold climatic condition. These two are the largest markets for heated & powered seats due to the willingness of customers to pay for comfort & luxury.

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Asia Pacific: The largest automotive seat market

Owing to the large-scale production of vehicles, Asia Oceania is the largest market for automotive seats and accounted for ~50% of the market in 2019. India, Indonesia, and Thailand logged an annual growth of approximately 3%, 7%, and 6% in vehicle production between 2017 to 2018. The demand for SUVs has significantly increased, especially in China, owing to the improving economic environment, low crude oil prices, and rising per capita income. OEMs in India are launching cost-effective, compact SUVs in the mid-price range to attract buyers. This increasing demand for SUVs will lead to demand for various combinations such as 60/40, 40/20, 40/20/40 for second/third row seating. SUVs are equipped with powered, memory, massage, and heated seats to provide comfort to the passenger and driver. In terms of material, synthetic leather is more widely used since it is more flexible in terms of configuration, is available in more colors, and is cheaper than genuine leather. Therefore, it is the preferred choice of OEMs, especially in Asia Oceania.

The Automotive Seats Market is dominated by global players and comprises several regional players as well. The key players in the automotive seat industry are Adient Plc (US), Lear Corporation (US), Faurecia (France), Toyota Boshoku Corporation (Japan), and Magna International (Canada).

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Automotive Upholstery Marketby Application (Carpets, Dashboards, Roof Liners, Seat Covers, Sun Visors & Trunk Liners), Upholstery Materials, Fabric Type (Non-woven & Woven), Integrated Technology, Vehicle Type, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

Plastics for Electric Vehicle MarketBy Plastic Type (ABS, PU, PA, PC, PVB, PP, PVC, PMMA, HDPE, LDPE, PBT), Application & Component (Dashboard, Seat, Trim, Bumper, Body, Battery, Engine, Lighting, Wiring), EV Type and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

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Automotive Seats Market worth $60.0 billion by 2025 - Exclusive Report by MarketsandMarkets - PRNewswire

World’s largest sailing cats return to Whangrei – New Zealand Herald

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Mouse Trap arriving in Whangrei Harbour with fenders placed, ready for docking. Photo / Jodi Bryant.

One of the world's largest sailing catamarans has arrived in Whangrei Harbour to undergo a major refit.

Mouse Trap, a 34m superyacht, has returned to Oceania Marine Refit Services for the second time in a year to undergo three months of maintenance, a full paint job and new teak decks.

Built in 2012, Mouse Trap, which sleeps eight and with a crew of six, has been based in the South Pacific for the last three years and has returned to Whangrei for servicing, Oceania Marine Refit Services client liaison and marketing manager Jim Loynes said.

"She's been going between there and us for around three years. We looked after them last time so the plan was always that they would return."

He said Mouse Trap had been "one of the lucky ones" - one of six, he believes, to be let into the country with a border exemption for refit work.

The process involved Covid-testing before departure, two weeks' quarantine carried out both during the voyage and upon arrival, followed by another test before both crew and vessel left the dock.

The luxury vessel, which reaches a top speed of 12 knots, boasts a dining area with a 360-degree view over the ocean, an entertainment and relaxation area, a spa pool and sun loungers. An additional exterior salon has a sun lounge and bar.

Mouse Trap is one of two of the world's largest cruising catamarans to return to Oceania Marine Refit Services within a year. Douce France which is 42m and currently in French Polynesia, is set to return as well.

One of the most famous sailing yachts in the world, Douce France is secretly known as "the gentle giant" and said to also be one of the most prestigious offerings in the luxury-crewed yacht charter market today.

It has a unique 250-bottle wine cellar, with a selection of the world's most famous wines on board.

Last month two luxury vessels left Port Nikau after being worked on in Whangrei.

They were Odyssey, belonging to New Zealand's richest man, Graeme Hart, and Imagine, an (approximate) 44m luxury performance/cruising yacht.

Odyssey had been undergoing a refit - its second maintenance visit to Whangrei in the past year, while it is believed Imagine had the mast removed before heading to Auckland for maintenance and returning to Whangrei to have the mast refitted.

Whangrei's growing marine industry has increasingly been attracting luxurious yachts, with the impressive line-up visible at Port Nikau from across the harbour at Onerahi.

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World's largest sailing cats return to Whangrei - New Zealand Herald

Our Movement Is Strongest When We Aim HighAnd Work in Current Reality – Filter

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Criminal justice reform has made significant advances during my time in the movement. But the continuing influence of the carceral lobby has also inflicted severe setbacks. As we work to create a more just system and society, we have to account and plan not just for the endgame, but for whats occurring in the moment.

As a speaker for the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and its current chair, let me first underline our opposition to police violence and our support for the resulting wave of nonviolent protests across the country.

These reactions to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbury and others create opportunities to transform policing. Whats largely missing are the strategic plans that could achieve not only that transformation but one of the entire criminal justice systemby engaging and convincing a majority of the population. Such strategies must anticipate the inevitable blowback from our opponents and those members of the public who support tough-on-crime policiespolicies that continue to be supported by the average Americans lack of understanding of the causes of crime.

Professor Patrick Sharkey made this point in a Washington Post piece about how defunding the police can work. He shared my concern that without adequately scaling and presenting model defunding programs, any ensuing rise in violence will see Americans of all races become more punitive, supporting harsher policing and criminal justice policies. Thats how we got to this point.

Crime data, often used selectively, can easily be deployed to fuel political rhetoric and maintain the status quo.

Because thats how the carceral lobby has always successfully driven home its message. They wont lack opportunity. Just last week, the Washington Post published another article, describing how crime rose unevenly when stay-at-home order lifted. Crime data, often used selectively, can easily be deployed to fuel political rhetoric and maintain the status quo.

There are many recent examples of how pro-carceral groups use the fear of crime to push back against reform. Take California, and the backlash against Proposition 47an initiative, approved by voters in 2014, that was designed to reduce incarceration while reallocating fiscal resources away from police and back into communities to make them safer. Despite the research reflecting that the backlash is unfounded, organizations like Keep California Safe have waged a public campaign against successful criminal reform. The result was the placement of a ballot initiative this election that would roll back gains made since the passage of Proposition 47.

Its not just California. You only need to look at the bail reform rollbacks or the fight to shield police disciplinary records in New York to understand the power and influence of the Police Benevolent Association and police unions across the nation.

Connected with an understanding of the formidable forces ranged against us, we also need to appreciate the reality of where public opinion currently standsand the many nuanced factors that inform these views.

Polling conducted since the death of George Floyd on how Americans feel about defunding the police, including Gallup and the latest Monmouth poll on race relations, reflects these complexities. The political data site 538 averaged four national polls conducted in mid-June, at the height of the protests, finding 31 percent in favor of defunding the police and 58 percent opposed.

In addition to asking the question on defunding, the Gallup poll also found:

When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans61%want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all US adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say theyd like them to spend less time there (19%).

For sure, there are many valid counterpoints to such findings. Public opinion can changesupport for defunding, while well short of a majority, is much higher than in the pastand public opposition should not stop our advocating for whats right. The historical trajectory of public support for marijuana legalization, which rose from 25 percent in the late 1990s to 66 percent today, is a perfect example of how advocacy can change minds.

It may jar with our worldview, but denying that current reality doesnt help us.

We should work optimistically and think big, but I offer two cautions. First, that public support for reforms can go down as well as upjust as approval for marijuana legalization, having peaked at 28 percent in 1977 (according to Pew), fell off as the War on Drugs kicked in, then took two decades to recover to that level. And second, that we do need to do the hard work of persuading people.

It may jar with our worldview that even communities marginalized by systemic racism and policing practices just want good policing, not police abolition or defunding, but denying that current reality doesnt help us. Successful advocacy may take many years. If that proves to be the case with the national-scale establishment of non-law enforcement responses to crime, it is imperative that we achieve other things in the meantime.

We can both develop and advocate for sweeping policy changes, while simultaneously recognizing that even incremental reforms have made and can make crucial differences in peoples lives.

My own work in harm reduction and drug policy reflects this dynamic tension between how we plan for the ideal future while also addressing immediate needs of our communities by working within the politics of now. Reform is not linear, transforming an entrenched system rooted in punishment will not happen overnight, and we ignore public opinion at our peril.

How can we convince people who may fear the radical transformations we envisage? One important way is by demonstrating to them how unthreatening steps in this direction can beby designing and implementing policies that scale up non-law enforcement first responder resources while scaling down police budgets and reach. Proven successes of such measures, including enhanced community safety, can become winning arguments as we seek to advance further.

Change of this nature will require deconstructing the current system piece by piece, and starting in the areas where we already have consensus is logical.

We have to take the public with us every step of the wayby seeking inclusive community input on central questions like What are the Police for? and by developing consensus on the meaning of public safety and who should be responsible for it. I would suggest framing this by adopting the term community-led health and safetya concept that views crime reduction through a multi-disciplinary lens, centering the interdependence of social, cultural and socioeconomic factors on health and opportunity, as well as crime.

The dismantling and rebuilding of policing and its alternatives around community values and under community leadershipin ways that invest in people, not a system of punishment and abandonmentis a clear but complex goal, and one whose outcomes will look different in different contexts. Change of this nature will require deconstructing the current system piece by piece, and starting in the areas where we already have consensus is logical.

One area in which Americans have widely agreed for years is the failure of our drug policy. A 2012 Angus Reid poll found that only 10% of respondents believe that the War on Drugs has been a success, while 66% deem it a failure. Majorities of Democrats (63%), Republicans (63%) and Independents (69%) alike agree with the notion that the War on Drugs has not been fruitful. A 2014 Pew Poll showed that 67 percent favored treatment not jail for heroin and cocaine use. And a 2019 CATO poll reflected that 55 percent favor decriminalizing all drugs.

Defunding the drug war is clearly an action that will help us to dismantle policing practices that subvert our constitutional rights, entrench structural racism, corrupt police themselves and destroy the prospects of establishing community-led health and safety structures.

Despite advances like marijuana legalization, sentencing reform, Good Samaritan laws or Oregons current ballot measure to decriminalize drug possession, many politicians have been slow to respond to the public will to pull apart the drug war. Organizations like my own, the Drug Policy Alliance*, the National Harm Reduction Coalition and many others have worked to win these victories and speed these changes. But one program that has for years been making a real difference in the lives of people who use drugs, actually preventing them from being criminalized, is Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD).

LEAD essentially works by diverting eligible people who come into contact with police to social services, rather than jail and criminal charges. I have often written about LEAD, admiring the way it has worked, since 2011, within the reality of our current structures to help thousands of criminalized people right now, rather than postponing intervention until we can get laws changed.

I have always recognized it as a forward step, rather than an end goal, and one that should keep evolving.

LEAD is embedded within the very system that we want to changealbeit that is exactly where great harms can be preventedand initially focused on people who use drugs, rather than casting a wider net to include many other marginalized and criminalized groups. For these reasons, I have always recognized it as a forward step, rather than an end goal, and one that should keep evolving.

The architects of LEAD have always recognized this too.

The LEAD framework is all about reducing harm and shifting the paradigm through which our society has responded to marginalized people and vulnerable populations for decades, Chief Brendan Cox, director of policing strategies for the LEAD National Support Bureau and a LEAP speaker, told me. While police were the portal through which enormous numbers were detained and punished, change had to interrupt that flow of people to prisons and courtrooms. Not engaging the police would have abandoned those people.

The evolution that was always anticipated is happening. It has never made sense to condition access to high-quality care on police contact, and LEAD has always been structured to reduce police involvement, Cox said. LEAD has evolved, through partnership with communities across the country, from pre-booking police diversion, to police-centered pre-arrest social contact referrals, to the newly established Let Everyone Advance with Dignity, which allows community members to make direct referrals without any police involvement or approval. Public safety transformation can not happen overnight, yet through this continued shift, LEAD continues to further de-center the criminal legal systems role in providing life changing services to those most in need.

As we continue to reallocate law enforcement resources back to communities and to reduce the gatekeeping role of the police, I would suggest that LEADabove all in its emerging community referrals-based guiseshould eventually replace problematic drug courts, non-coercively offering services to a wide range of people in need.

But above all, were it not for LEAD, countless more lives would have been ruined by convictions, incarceration and criminal records.

So this is where I differ from some, though not all, of the views expressed by Filters Helen Redmond in her recent piece about LEAD. She described LEAD advocates belief in the potential for reconciliation and healing in police-community relations as naive. Yet to pin all our hopes on the rapid implementation of radical structural reform that doesnt currently enjoy majority public support, passing up chances to reduce the harms of the system in the interim, could be described similarly.

Kevin Sabet, the prominent opponent of marijuana legalization, likes to claim that legalizers promised legalization would end racial disparities in arrests. Only, we never said that. Racial disparities in marijuana arrests have sadly continued in many jurisdictions post-legalizationending racism, like transforming the criminal justice system, is a long haul, despite its urgency.

But what legalization has done is greatly reduce overall numbers of arrests, removing the harms of criminalization for many people, including, in absolute numbers, people of color. We havent reached our destination, but we have advanced.

Similar charges are sometimes leveled at LEAD, including by sources quoted in the Filter piece. It is right to note with concern that LEADs exclusion criteria regarding past convictions disproportionately affect people of color because of the systemic racism baked into the criminal justice system and wider society. That must be addressed. But did LEAD ever claim it would end racism in the system? It did not.

Keith Brown, a former LEAD project director, told Filter, All LEAD can do is mitigate or otherwise reduce the harms of racial disparities. It was a criticism of the program, but equally reflects some of what it can achieve: nowhere near everything we want, but still a meaningful difference to many peoples lives.

Neither does the existence of LEAD in any way hold back other forms of progress. I would argue the reverse. The programs role in changing the drug policy conversationincluding within the culture of law enforcement, with all the impact that may have on skeptical members of the publicshould not be underestimated. Examples include calls and support by law enforcement for the decriminalization of simple possession of drugs here and abroad, the need for a safe drug supply, safe consumption sites, drug checking services, the discussion of the failure of drug courts and incarceration, as well as the introduction of social contact referrals, moving people away from the justice system and toward community health and social services.

Helping people now, in whatever ways we can, is just as valid as thinking longer-term.

Many people in the harm reduction community express important concerns about every kind of incremental or imperfect reform. I do, too. It is vital that we air these criticisms, that programs are scrutinized with a view to improvement, and that we never lose sight of our ultimate goals.

But to frame radical and incremental reformsin the context of public opinion and our hard-earned experience of what it takes to winas enemies, rather than different points on the spectrum of positive change, is counterproductive and wrong.

Helping people now, in whatever ways we can, is just as valid as thinking longer-term. By viewing these approaches as complementary and mutually compatible, our movement becomes stronger and does more real-world good.

*The Drug Policy Alliance previously provided a restricted grant to The Influence Foundation, which operates Filter, to support a Drug War Journalism Diversity Fellowship. LEAP was previously the fiscal sponsor of The Influence Foundation.

Image by neo tam from Pixabay

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This November, Oregon can spark a withdrawal from the War on Drugs – Statesman Journal

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Dr. Jeffrey Singer, Guest Opinion Published 4:55 p.m. PT Oct. 16, 2020

Catch up on any news you may have missed. Wochit

If voters approve it, Measure 110 - the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative - will reduce possession of all Schedule I through IV controlled substances to Class E violations, punished by a $100 fine.

To qualify as a Class E violation, the amount of a drug an individual may possess cannot be greater than for personal use. Drug dealing or manufacturing would still be punishable.

This is a good start, but Oregonians should look to Portugal for an even better example.

In 2001, Portugal led the European Union in drug overdose deaths. Realizing that treating substance use as a crime was filling jails, fueling corruption, and failing to stop overdose deaths and disease spread, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. Resources for law enforcement were redirected toward harm reduction while drug dealing and manufacturing remain criminal offenses.

In the years since Portugals rate of HIV plunged, drug-related crimes plummeted, and Portugals drug overdose rate is among the lowest in the developed world. Today, a country that decriminalized all drugs nearly 20 years ago reports overdose deaths per million at less than one-thirtieth that of the United States. And while overall drug use by adults mirrors most of the European continent, teen drug use in Portugal has decreased relative to other EU countries.

Election 2020: Oregon's Measure 110 would decriminalize drug possession, expand treatment

Speaking before the Rhode Island General Assembly this past January, Dr. Jaoa Goulao, the architect of Portugals drug policy, explained that the program works because people with substance use disorder are not treated as criminals: If I smoke cigarettes and I get lung cancer, no one puts me in jail. Ill be offered treatment. Ill be treated with dignity even if it comes from my wrong behavior.

He also noted that law enforcement efficiency improved as police were freed fromtasks that were not reducing drug use. Drug users on the street now seek help from officers, who refer them to treatment programs.

Election 2020: Oregon's Measure 110 would decriminalize drug possession, expand treatment

Of course, not every illicit drug user has a substance use disorder. In fact, only 10 to 20%of adults over age 25 who use addictive drugs get hooked. It is perhaps with this insight that Initiative Petition 44 provides the option of a completed health assessment in lieu of a fine. This provides those who want help with an incentive to obtain it. Whats more, it directs expected taxpayer savings resulting from prisons no longer being filled with drug offenders to help fund treatment programs.

There is reason, however, to worry about what kind of programs will be offered.

Another view: Measure 110 would take away addiction treatment and cost lives

Policymakers often overemphasize abstinence-based programs, which have a disappointing track record and dont prioritize treatment with methadone and buprenorphine, which are much more effective.

Dr. Jeffrey Singer(Photo: Courtesy of the CATO Institute)

Oregon has a history of sparking nationwide changes. The Oregon Plan led to the 17th Amendment to the Constitution and the direct election of senators. Voting by mail began in Oregon in 1981. And while a small step in the right direction, this initiative may trigger the end of the destructive War on Drugs.

Jeffrey A. Singer, MD practices general surgery in Phoenix, Arizona, and is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He can be reached atjsinger@cato.org

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This November, Oregon can spark a withdrawal from the War on Drugs - Statesman Journal

Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties – Reason

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During his ABC "town hall" last night, responding to a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed that it was a "mistake" to "support" the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. At the same time, he defended parts of the law, including the Violence Against Women Act, funding to support "community policing" by hiring more officers, and the now-expired federal ban on "assault weapons." He also implied that the real problem was not so much the law itself but the way that states responded to it. "The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally," he said.

Both the question and the answer were highly misleading. First, Biden did not merely "support" the 1994 law; hewrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called "the 1994 Biden Crime Bill." Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law's penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden's long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. "Every major crime bill since 1976 that's come out of this Congressevery minor crime billhas had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden," he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

"Things have changed drastically" since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that "the Black Caucus voted" for the crime bill, and "every black mayor supported it." In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (DN.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden's leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

"The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences except for two things," Biden said. He mentioned the law's "three strikes and you're out" provision, which required a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other felonies, one of which can be a drug offense. He said he "voted against" that provision, which is not exactly true. While he did express concern that the provision was not focused narrowly enough on serious violent crimes, he voted for it as part of the broader bill.

In any case, Biden did not just go along with the crime bill's punitive provisions; he crowed about them. Like a crass car salesman hawking a new model with more of everything, he touted "70 additional enhancements of penalties" and "60 new death penaltiesbrand new60." He denounced as "poppycock" the notion, which would later be defensively deployed by Bill Clinton and Biden himself, that "somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher." Biden bragged that he had conferred with "the cops" instead of some namby-pamby "liberal confab" while writing the bill.

As for "what the states did locally," the law was designed to increase incarceration. It provided $10 billion in subsidies for state prison construction, contingent on passage of "truth in sentencing" laws that limited or abolished parole. "What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems," Biden said last night. But that is simply not true. As FactCheck.org noted last year, "Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill."

Despite Biden's implication that he was not a fan of mandatory minimums, he zealously supported them in previous legislation, including the AntiDrug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988. The latter law included a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone caught with five grams of crack cocaine, whether or not he was involved in distribution.

As Biden explained it on the Senate floor in 1991 while holding up a quarter, "we said crack cocaine is such a bad deal that if you find someone with this much of ita quarter's worth, not in value, but in sizefive years in jail." To be clear: Biden was not marveling at the blatant injustice of that punishment. He was touting his anti-drug bona fides.

Biden also supported a sentencing policy that treated crack cocaine as if it were 100 times worse than cocaine powder, even though these are simply two different ways of consuming the same drug. Under the 1986 law, possessing five grams of crack with intent to distribute it triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of cocaine powder; likewise, the 10-year mandatory minimum required five kilograms of cocaine powder but only 50 grams of crack.

Because federal crack offenders were overwhelmingly black, while cocaine powder offenders were more likely to be white or Hispanic, the rule Biden supported meant that darker-skinned defendants received substantially heavier penalties than lighter-skinned defendants for essentially the same offenses. "We may not have gotten it right," Biden conceded 16 years after he helped establish the 100-to-1 rule. Five years later, during an unsuccessful bid for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, he introduced a bill that would have equalized crack and cocaine powder sentences.

The distinction between smoked and snorted cocaine "was a big mistake when it was made," Biden admitted in a speech he gave just before entering the presidential race in 2019, nine years after Congress approved a law that shrank but did not eliminate the sentencing gap. "We thought we were told by the experts that crackwas somehow fundamentally different. It's not different." The misconception, he added, "trapped an entire generation."

These are just a few examples of Biden's enthusiasm for coming down hard on people who dare to defy the government's arbitrary pharmacological decrees. You can read more about that here.

Nowadays, Biden opposes the mandatory minimums and death penalties he championed for decades. But his current position still reflects his commitment to using force against people engaged in peaceful conduct that violates no one's rights.

"I don't believe anybody should be going to jail for drug use," Biden said last night. "They should be going into mandatory rehabilitation. We should be building rehab centers to have these people housed."

While Biden considers that approach enlightened and humane, there is no moral justification for foisting "treatment" on people who do not want it and may not even be addicted. That policy strips people of their liberty, dignity, and moral agency simply because they consume psychoactive substances that politicians do not like. Biden, who in the late 1980s was saying "we have to hold every drug user accountable," now wants to lock drug users in "rehab centers" rather than prisons. If that looks like an improvement, it is only because Biden's prior record is so appalling.

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Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties - Reason

Mexico’s Ex-Defense Secretary Charged With Helping Cartel Ship Drugs – The Maritime Executive

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Gen. Cienfuegos, right, visiting the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Washington, 2013 (U.S. Army)

By The Maritime Executive 10-19-2020 05:28:24

Mexico's former secretary of defense has been arrested in Los Angeles and charged with using his official post to assist the little-known H-2 Cartel with smuggling, including acting as a maritime shipping agent for narcotics.

The defendant, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, was Mexico's defense secretary from 2012-2018. Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York contend that Cienfuegos accepted bribes from the H-2 Cartel in exchange for a broad range of services, including "locating maritime transportation for drug shipments."

Cienfuegos also allegedly provided high-level cover, ensuring that no Mexican military operations were launched against H-2, using the military to target H-2's rivals, helping H-2 to expand its territory in Sinaloa and giving the cartel inside intelligence about American investigations into its activities. This intelligence included information about a suspected mole, and it "ultimately resulted in the murder of a member of the H-2 Cartel that the [cartel's] senior leadership incorrectly believed was assisting U.S. law enforcement authorities," prosecutors alleged.

H-2 was a remnant of the larger and better-known Beltran-Leyva Organization (BLO). The leader of H-2,Juan Francisco Patron Sanchez, was killed in a Mexican Navyraid involving ahelicopter gunshipin 2017;the cartel is now believed to be substantially defunct, like BLO.

"Due in part to the defendants corrupt assistance, the H-2 Cartelconducted its criminal activity in Mexico without significant interference from the Mexican military and imported thousands of kilograms of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana into the United States," asserted acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Seth D. DuCharme.

American investigators based their charges against Cienfuegos on a trove of thousands of Blackberry messages that allegedly contain conversations with members of the cartel. The discussions include evidence regarding other high-level Mexican officials that Cienfuegos allegedly put into contact with H-2's leaders.

The arrest raises significant questions about the integrity of Mexico's armed services, which are seen within the country as the least corrupt and most effective national institutions. Given the challenges facing Mexico'scivilian agencies, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has leaned heavily on the military to pursue his agenda, putting military engineers in charge of building a new airport for Mexico City, leaving the army in charge of the long-running war on drugs, and even proposing to transfer control of the nation's major seaports to military leaders.

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Mexico's Ex-Defense Secretary Charged With Helping Cartel Ship Drugs - The Maritime Executive

How marijuana legalization advocates across the U.S. are fighting to end the war on cannabis – Yahoo Lifestyle

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Almost 50 years ago, the so-called war on drugs nearly destroyed marginalized communities in the United States.

When President Nixon declared the war in 1971, it not only further stigmatized certain illegal substances, it also created a deeper tension between Black communities and law enforcement through the increased presence of federal drug control agencies and measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

Since the inception of these systemically racist policies, Black and brown people in America have faced disproportionately higher incarceration rates for nonviolent drug offenses.

Fast forward to 2020 and we find that there has been some progress in decriminalizing certainsubstances however, racism and unequal treatment under the law are problems that remain unsolved.

Yahoo Life spoke with some power players in the cannabis industry who are working to dismantle oppressive systems meant to incarcerate people of color and prohibit them from finding success in what is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

Alex Todd, Saucey Farms & Extracts co-founder; Jim Jones, hip-hop artist and Saucey Farms & Extracts co-founder; Jessica Jackson, chief advocacy officer of the Reform Alliance; and Cedric Haynes, director of public policy and partnerships for Weedmaps sat down with Yahoo Life to discuss how to reform the cannabis industry.

Watch the full video above to learn about their efforts.

Video produced by Kelly Matousek.

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How marijuana legalization advocates across the U.S. are fighting to end the war on cannabis - Yahoo Lifestyle

‘The public deserves to know’: County Commission complaint against Tony Riley was filed after six weeks of research – Savannah Morning News

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Carry Smith wanted to do her own research on a few local candidates before casting her ballot, but what she found upended the race for District 2 county commissioner.

Smith, a political scientist and former Savannah State University professor, found that Tony Riley, the Democratic candidate for District 2, had a felony conviction on his record which he finished serving time for less than 10 years ago.

Under Georgia law, that disqualifies him as a candidate.

These developments come amid a tumultuous week in the County Commissions District 2 election, after the Board of Elections narrowly voted Oct. 12 to challenge Rileys qualification based on Smiths complaint, submitted the day before. Her research revealed a 1995 felony conviction on his record for conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Hodge Letter by savannahnow.com

Smith said she believes the public should know who theyre voting for. Thats why she took her findings to Chatham County Board of Elections Chairman Tom Mahoney and Board Member Debbie Rauers around six weeks after she started researching the race.

Additionally, Smith said, if Rileys ineligibility was discovered after the election, it could lead to criminal charges.

"I think it's better to hold somebody accountable before they get elected, and before they take the oath, so it does not disqualify them in the future," Smith said.

Smith says she has endured many contentious conversations with upset Democrats since last week. Smith, who considers herself an Independent, said she didnt expect to be called by name at the Oct. 12 meeting.

"When I submitted that to Mr. Mahoney and Miss Rauers, I had no idea that my name would be brought up in the meeting," Smith said. "But as a political scientist, I think that everyone deserves to be heard."

Riley has vowed to "fight" and alleged he was being "bamboozled" by the board.

"This is the Lord's way of testing my faith," Riley said of his candidacy challenge, while characterizing himself as a victim of the War on Drugs and mass-incarceration policies that he says led to his 1995 drug bust and 16-year sentence. "I accidentally stumbled into it because of an addiction. ... Yes, I have a record. Twenty-five years ago, I made a mistake."

Nonetheless, Riley said that efforts to disqualify him this late in the election cycle are part of an ongoing effort by Republicans to suppress Democratic Black leaders, which he calls "high-tech Jim Crow foolishness."

Smith said she agrees with Riley on the topic of systemic racism and sympathizes with him but that the public still deserves to know the answers to two questions: Did he know he was ineligible, and if so, why did he choose to run anyway?

"I understand how he feels, because there is clear systemic racism going on in the United States. It does happen," Smith said. "Here's the man defending himself, but why does the public still not have answers to these questions?"

Riley and the local Democratic Party appealed and will argue their case to allow the race to go forward at a disqualification hearing set for Oct. 27.

"He has a right to a hearing. He has a right to speak out," Smith said. "That is his constitutional right, his freedom of speech."

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'The public deserves to know': County Commission complaint against Tony Riley was filed after six weeks of research - Savannah Morning News

The cannabis industry could be a big winner on Election Day – CNBC

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A customer lights a joint at Lowell Farms, America's first official Cannabis Cafe offering farm-to-table dining and smoking of cannabis in West Hollywood, California, October 1, 2019.

Mike Blake | Reuters

New Jersey is expected to approve a ballot initiative to legalize adult-use (aka recreational) marijuana on Election Day next month. Aside from stoking up the 61% of likely Garden State voters in favor of the measure, its passage is projected to generate up to $400 million in adult-use sales in its first year and $950 million by 2024, translating then to nearly $63 million in annual state tax revenue and an additional $19 million in local taxes, as estimated by Marijuana Business Daily. In an economy shattered by the coronavirus pandemic, legal weed looks like a great idea.

That may not be the only good news for legalization proponents after Nov. 3. They're hoping New Jersey's pro-pot vote will trigger a domino effect in neighboring states considering similar efforts. "Once New Jersey goes, it's going to set off an arms race along the East Coast, putting New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania on the clock," said DeVaughn Ward, senior legislative counsel for the Marijuana Policy Project, a cannabis advocacy group in Hartford.

Those three states already permit medicinal marijuana sales and have been moving toward legalizing adult-use for several years, considering tax revenue, job creation and the will of the majority of residents in favor of full legalization. The legislative stars appeared aligned following the 2018 midterm elections' blue wave, yet ultimately there weren't enough yea votes in the respective state houses last year. Then the pandemic hit in March, keeping legalization bills in lockdown until next year.

Three additional states Arizona, South Dakota and Montana have adult-use legalization initiatives on their November ballots, and Mississippians will vote on a bill allowing medicinal sales. If all five measures pass, medicinal marijuana will be legal in 38 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and adult-use in 14 of those, plus D.C.

Legalization is another leg on the long, strange trip the U.S. cannabis industry is experiencing in the Year of Covid. Marijuana sales have gone up during the pandemic, thanks to stay-at-home orders and federal stimulus money. And the prospects for continued growth are high.

Total cannabis sales in the U.S. this year are projected to reach $15.8 billion, according to Arcview Market Research/BDSA, up from $12.1 billion in 2019. In adult-use states, the numbers are eye-popping. Illinois, for instance, recently reported its fifth straight month of record-breaking marijuana sales, which hit $67 million in September. Oregon has seen adult-use sales rise 30% above forecast since the pandemic began, averaging $100 million a month over the summer.

"As a whole, the industry is doing fairly well," said Chris Walsh, CEO of Marijuana Business Daily. "Some companies have struggled, but in general we haven't seen an overwhelming number of layoffs or companies going out of business." A big boost, he added, was that most states deemed cannabis businesses as essential during the pandemic. "They were able to stay open while the economy virtually came to a grinding halt," Walsh said.

A customer holding a cannabis product gestures while leaving the Natural Vibe store after legal recreational marijuana went on sale in St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada October 17, 2018.

Chris Wattie | Reuters

Even so, because marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, the industry was ineligible for funds distributed through the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program. "It's just another irony on top of irony about how the country handles cannabis in general," Walsh said. House Democrats have included the industry in previous and proposed Covid stimulus packages, but to no avail.

Depending on the outcome of next month's presidential and Congressional elections, the likelihood of full federal legalization which means removing it from its highly restrictive Schedule I drug classification under the Controlled Substances Act could be greater than ever. What's more, there's a good chance that the rampant injustices inflicted during the nation's nearly century-old cannabis prohibition, disproportionately upon people of color, may be overcome.

The Trump administration has had an enigmatic relationship with cannabis. It rescinded an Obama-era policy that prevented federal prosecutions for marijuana offenses and made immigrants ineligible for citizenship if they consume marijuana or work in the cannabis industry. Yet Trump has previously favored states' rights to legalize pot and signed the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp, its non-intoxicating variety. He's running for reelection on a law-and-order platform and has never promoted federal legalization, so even if Congress turns solid blue, it's hard to predict where he might come down on the issue.

Trump's Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, has a complicated history with cannabis, too. As a senator, he championed the 1994 crime bill that sent tens of thousands of minor drug offenders to prison. Yet while serving as Obama's vice president, the administration issued the Cole memo, which cleared the way for state-legal marijuana businesses to operate largely without federal interference. Biden and running mate Senator Kamala Harris support adult-use marijuana decriminalization, moderate rescheduling, federal medicinal legalization, allowing states to set their own laws and expunging prior cannabis convictions though not federal legalization.

Harris and Rep. Jerry Nadler were co-sponsors last year of the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, which would remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act and eliminate criminal penalties under federal law. The MORE Act also would expedite expungements, impose a 5% tax on cannabis products to fund criminal and social reforms and prohibit the denial of any federal public benefits based on marijuana use. Congress was scheduled to vote on the bill in September, but it was delayed, probably until next year.

Alongside tax revenue and job creation, social justice reform is the strongest argument for legalization, on both the federal and state levels. Dating back to the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, criminalization and incarceration, especially of minorities, have been foundational to drug laws. "The war on drugs has historically and continues to disproportionately target communities of color," said David Abernathy, vice president of research and consulting for Arcview Group, an Oakland-based firm that matches cannabis businesses and investors, who also is on the board of the Minority Cannabis Business Association.

While decriminalization and expungement are paramount to legalization, providing business opportunities for minorities in legal cannabis is equally vital, Abernathy said. "It's harder for communities of color to participate in the industry as it gets better capitalized and folks from other industries move into it with their connections," he said. That's why there's been pushback in some state initiatives that disqualify individuals with drug convictions from working with cannabis.

On the investment side of the equation, Abernathy noted that even before Covid, there was a significantly slower capital market than in recent years. But with the industry's uptick during the pandemic, for some investors it's been "a good place to put money in this volatile time," he said. Next year, especially if legalization initiatives pass, "we expect this growth trend to continue."

Another positive trend is the increasing sophistication of cannabis businesses, with publicly-traded companies such as Tilray, Cronos Group, Aurora Cannabis, GW Pharmaceuticals and Canopy Growth as prime examples. They are among start-ups involved in medicinals, CBDs, edibles, vaping and smokable products, as well as cannabis cultivation and distribution, where allowed in the U.S. and other countries. If and when marijuana becomes federally legal in the U.S., those endemic players are likely to be joined by conventional food, beverage, tobacco and other consumer product companies that for years have been anticipating a multi-billion-dollar global cannabis market.

Additionally, the industry has the potential for significant job growth, said Aaron Smith, executive director of the National Cannabis Industry Association in Washington. There are already nearly 244,000 people working full-time in legal cannabis, according to a report by Leafly earlier this year, "but with new states coming on board and [possible] federal legalization, that could turn into tens of millions of jobs," Smith said. "Given the state of the economy, policy makers and voters ought to look to this industry for its economic potential."

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The cannabis industry could be a big winner on Election Day - CNBC

Measure 110 would replace drug criminalization with treatment – Herald and News

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No matter where on the political spectrum they fall, most Oregonians agree that the state is going through an addiction crisis.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, about one in 10 Oregonians over the age of 18 had substance use disorder in 2018 the fourth-highest rate in the nation. Last year, nearly 600 people died of drug overdoses in the state.

Research beginning in the 1970s suggested that criminalizing addiction might deter people from ever trying drugs, but that theory is being called into question in light of substance use rates that have largely worsened since the War on Drugs era began. The petitioners of Measure 110 on this years ballot believe theres a better approach to fight addiction: treat it as a health crisis instead.

The measure would create a new system for handling addiction that would divert low-level drug offenders away from incarceration and toward addiction treatment. Instead of arresting and charging someone caught with a small amount of an illegal substance, law enforcement would give them a $100 fine that could be waived if they seek treatment. Called a civil violation, the infraction is similar to a speeding or parking ticket. Possession of a larger amount of drugs would be considered a misdemeanor and more serious drug-related crimes, like producing or dealing substances, would remain felonies.

Proponents of the measure say decriminalizing addiction will help reduce the stigma associated with treatment and save people from having their criminal records permanently marred by low-level drug charges that can prevent them from getting jobs or housing.

The American Psychological Society considers addiction a mental illness, and Measure 110s authors believe that illness should be treated, not criminalized. If it passes, Oregon would be the first state in the U.S. to decriminalize drug use.

Drug addiction treatment is more effective than criminal records that ruin peoples lives, said Peter Zuckerman, campaign manager for Yes on 110.

The campaign points to Portugal, which decriminalized drug use and invested in measures that would help people use drugs more safely and created a widespread treatment program to fight addiction. After ending an expensive, decades-long law enforcement crackdown similar to the U.S.s War on Drugs, the number of people seeking treatment in the country increased by more than 60% between 1998 and 2011. And unlike incarceration, a health-based approach is more likely to actually heal those struggling with addiction.

The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission estimates that Measure 110 would result in around 90% fewer drug possession-related charges.

In addition to decriminalizing drug use, Measure 110 would direct funding to treatment services throughout the state. It would start by designating 16 addiction recovery centers, at least one in each Coordinated Care Organization, as go-to points for people struggling with addiction. The centers wouldnt provide long-term treatment but would instead focus on health assessments, triage, peer support and connecting people to treatment. The measure would also provide grants to existing organizations that provide addiction treatment and harm reduction services.

All that money will come from two sources. First are the funds the justice system could save from not having to arrest, adjudicate and incarcerate people committing low-level drug crimes. That exact amount will be determined after decriminalization goes into effect, but is estimated to be between $12 million and $59.3 million per year, according to estimates made by Oregons Secretary of State and financial consulting firm ECONorthwest.

The second pot is a reallocation of marijuana tax revenue that exceeds $45 million per year. When marijuana was legalized, the state estimated that tax revenues would only reach $40 million, but last year sales brought in more than $102 million. Measure 110 would basically allocate the difference to addiction recovery services through the Oregon Health Authority.

The measure also establishes an oversight and accountability council made up of physicians, addiction survivors, social workers and various addiction treatment service providers that will determine funding distribution. Audits will occur at least every two years to assess the measures finances and performance. Because the current system is managed by law enforcement with little to no oversight, addiction treatment outcomes are unknown.

Measure 110 has endorsements from more than 100 organizations concerned with addiction recovery, public safety and social justice, including the American College of Physicians Oregon Chapter, the Oregon School Psychologists Association, the Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Coalition of Communities of Color.

Oregon Recovers, an addiction recovery advocacy group, and the Oregon Council for Behavioral Health, which focuses on mental health and substance use treatment, oppose the measure. While they agree that addiction should be decriminalized, they expressed concerns with the measures funding re-allocation and its possible impacts on minors. In an op-ed in The Oregonian, leaders of both organizations said the measure will take away $56 million from addiction treatment and prevention and $90 million from schools over the next several years because of the marijuana tax revenue adjustments.

While thats true, Zuckerman said the lost addiction treatment funding would ultimately be used for the same purposes through the measure, and the approximately $9 billion school budget is fully funded for at least the next year from other sources.

Where schools get money from will be adjusted, Zuckerman said.

Finally, The Oregonian op-ed stated that the measures text doesnt require the creation of any actual treatment services. Zuckerman said thats a misunderstanding of the text, which doesnt necessarily create any new facilities but instead provides more grant funding to existing organizations that operate such facilities.

BestCare, which operates an addiction treatment facility in Klamath Falls, cant take a position on the measure, but Rick Treleaven, its CEO, said hes concerned the language doesnt go far enough to fund an expansion of the states treatment capacity.

While I believe that the sponsors of 110 have their heart in the right place, a close reading of the measure suggests it may not deliver what it intends, Treleaven said.

Zuckerman said the ambiguity in how much funding goes to treatment versus the addiction recovery centers exists because a one-size fits all approach is ineffective with treatment. Because different areas of the state may have different needs, the oversight council will benefit from the fundings flexibility and will have the authority to direct grants to where theyre most needed in each of Oregons communities.

Dr. Ralph Eccles, a retired physician in Klamath Falls, said while he agrees that Measure 110 has some shortcomings, its a far better approach to Oregons addiction crisis than the current model of criminalization.

If we dont pass this, weve got the status quo, which means the person picked up with six ounces of pot can still be processed as a felon, Eccles said. Wouldnt it be better to process that person as an addiction problem?

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Measure 110 would replace drug criminalization with treatment - Herald and News

The body fires ‘blobs of fat’ packed with toxic proteins to fight bacteria – Live Science

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The human body uses many tactics to fight invaders. Scientists just found another weapon in its arsenal: tiny fat blobs packed with toxic proteins that are fired at the enemy.

Complex organisms including fungi, plants and animals are made up of eukaryotic cells that contain subcellular structures called organelles. These organelles all work together to keep the cells functioning; the nucleus, for example, is the brain of the cell and lipid droplets (LDs) are teeny blobs of fat that store and provide fuel for the cell when needed.

Lipid droplets are usually attached to the mitochondria an organelle that generates most of the cell's energy and serve as a source of fuel when needed. Previous research has found that certain parasites, viruses and bacteria steal these droplets and also use them to fuel growth. So until now, scientists thought that these lipid droplets supported infection, the authors wrote in a new study published Oct. 15 in the journal Science.

Related: 5 ways gut bacteria affect your health

"It was previously thought that bacteria were merely using the lipid droplets to feed on, but we have discovered these fatty droplets are involved in the battle between the pathogens and our cells," co-author Robert Parton, head of the cell biology and molecular medicine division of the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience in Australia, said in a statement. Previously, scientists found that exposing fruit flies to a microbe induced formation of lipid droplets with antimicrobial activity, according to an accompanying commentary in the journal Science.

Parton and his team wanted to see whether this strange battle technique also existed in mammalian cells. They injected mice with lipopolysaccharide, a toxin that's produced by bacteria. The toxin spurred threatened cells in the mice's liver to produce more lipid droplets and increase the size of existing ones, according to the study.

In cells infected with the toxin, threatened cells packed lipid droplets with hundreds of antiviral and antibacterial proteins.The scientists also found that the droplets detached from the mitochondria and moved toward the bacterial toxin.

"Fat is part of the cell's arsenal cells manufacture toxic proteins, package them into the lipid droplets, then fire them at the intruders," Parton said. "This is a new way that cells are protecting themselves, using fats as a covert weapon, and giving us new insights into ways of fighting infection."

The researchers also saw a similar response when they exposed human macrophages a type of white blood cell that helps detect and destroy pathogens and problem cells to the bacterial toxin in the lab. Now, Parton and his team hope to figure out how the lipid droplets actually target the bacteria, he said in the statement. "By understanding the body's natural defenses, we can develop new therapies that don't rely on antibiotics to fight drug-resistant infections."

Though scientists are just discovering this defense strategy now, these droplets were first discovered more than 130 years ago, and they are present in all types of eukaryotic cells, according to the commentary.

"There is great and justifiable excitement regarding the functions of LDs and other membraneless organelles," and how they change in many cellular processes, Douglas Green, the chair of the immunology department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee, wrote in the accompanying commentary. "We have much to learn about these drops of oil in cells."

Originally published on Live Science.

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The body fires 'blobs of fat' packed with toxic proteins to fight bacteria - Live Science

Study shows a molecular dance that keeps your heart beating – WSU News

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A microscope photograph of a heart muscle cell. The regular green patterns show stained actin filaments.

By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture

It might look like a little game at the molecular scale.

Filament-like proteins in heart muscle cells have to be exactly the same length so that they can coordinate perfectly to make the heart beat.

Another protein decides when the filament is the right size and puts a wee little cap on it. But, if that protein makes a mistake and puts the cap on too early, another protein, leiomodin, comes along and knocks the cap out of the way.

This little dance at the molecular scale might sound insignificant, but it plays a critical role in the development of healthy heart and other muscles. Reporting in the journal, Plos Biology,a WSU research team has proven for the first time how the mechanism works.

The finding could someday lead to improved diagnostics and medical treatments for serious and sometimes devastating hereditary heart conditions that come about from genetic mutations in the proteins. One of these conditions, cardiomyopathy, affects as many as one in 500 people around the world and can often be fatal or have lifetime health consequences. A similar condition called nemaline myopathy affects skeletal muscles throughout the body with often devastating consequences.

Mutations in these proteins are found in patients with myopathy, saidAlla Kostyukova, associate professor in the Gene and LindaVoiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineeringand leader of the project. Our work is to prove that these mutations cause these problems and to propose strategies for treatment.

Heart muscle is made of tiny thick and thin filaments of proteins. With the help of electrical signals, the rope-like filaments bind and unbind in an intricate and precise architecture, allowing heart muscle to contract and beat.

The thin filaments are made of actin, the most abundant protein in the human body. Tropomysin, another protein, wraps itself around the actin filaments. Tropomyosin together with two other proteins, tropomodulin and leiomodin, at the end of the actin filaments act as a sort of cap and determine the filament length.

Its beautifully designed, said Kostyukova, whose research is focused on understanding protein structures.

And, tightly regulated.

To keep heart muscle healthy, the actin filaments, which are about a micron long, all have to be the exact same length. In families with cardiomyopathy, genetic mutations result in formation of filaments that are either too short or too long. Those affected can have significant heart problems that cause disability, illness and death.

In a project that spanned seven years, the researchers proved that leiomodin attaches to the end of the actin filament and kicks out the other protein, tropomodulin, to assure the actin filaments proper length.

This is the first time that this has been shown with the atomic-level precision, said Dmitri Tolkatchev, research assistant professor in the Voiland School and lead author on the paper. Previously, several laboratories attempted to solve this problem with very little success. With our data we finally have a direct proof.

The researchers used state-of-the-art approaches to make the key proteins and study them at the molecular and cellular level. The work entailed designing the molecules, constructing them at the gene level in a plasmid, and then producing them into bacterial or cardiac cells. The researchers used nuclear magnetic resonance, which works on the same physical principle as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs), to understand the proteins binding at the atomic level. They also used molecular dynamic simulation to model them.

The probability of being able to show this mechanism was not high, but the impact of the discovery is, said Tolkatchev, an expert in nuclear magnetic resonance. This was a very important problem to study and could have a significant impact in the field of muscle mechanics.

The researchers hope to continue the work, identifying additional components and molecular mechanisms that regulate thin filament architecture, whether diseased or healthy.

The multidisciplinary group included researchers from the University of Arizona led by Carol Gregorio, director of the Cellular and Molecular Medicine Department. WSUs group has expertise in protein structure, structural biochemistry, and properties of actin filaments and regulatory proteins, and UAs group has expertise in molecular, cellular and developmental biology of muscle assembly. The collaborative work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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Study shows a molecular dance that keeps your heart beating - WSU News

Researchers Unravel the Network of Molecules That Influence COVID-19 Severity – SciTechDaily

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Evgenia Shishkova, assistant staff scientist from the Coon Lab. Credit: Morgridge Institute for Research

While most COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic or mild, severe complications associated with acute respiratory distress have led to more than one million deaths worldwide in just several months.

Researchers from the Morgridge Institute for Research, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Albany Medical College sought to better understand the molecular factors that drive the severity of COVID-19, and offer insight into treatment options for those with advanced disease.

The collaborative study published online in Cell Systems identified more than 200 molecular features that strongly correlate with COVID-19 severity.

To my knowledge, this the largest outcome study, says Dr. Ariel Jaitovich, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Albany Medical Center. I know that there are some large studies focused on the diagnostics (infected versus non-infected). We have a large group of just COVID patients, but with a very granular difference in terms of severitythat is something that I hadnt seen.

The team analyzed 102 blood samples from patients diagnosed with COVID-19, and 26 samples from patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) but negative for COVID-19 as controls.

I felt like we had a unique opportunity with Ariels cohort that he had recruited. It was very early in the COVID epidemic here in the United States, so he was really out on the forefront of getting these types of samples from the clinic, says Josh Coon, Morgridge metabolism investigator and professor of biomolecular chemistry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

Using methods in mass spectrometry, RNA sequencing, and machine learning, the researchers explored a database of more than 17,000 different proteins, metabolites, lipids, and RNA transcripts associated with clinical outcomes.

They identified 219 molecules and genes that influence blood coagulation, vessel damage, inflammation, and other biological process reported to play a role in severe disease.

We had to think hard about how to actually compare it to the existing data, says Ron Stewart, Morgridge investigator and associate director of bioinformatics whose team was tasked with analyzing the transcriptome data. What weve largely found is we recapitulated prior work, which is good.

One particularly unique aspect to the study, which contributed to the robust dataset, was the teams use of plasma samples.

Most of the research done in proteomics, the blood samples use the serum fraction that doesnt have the clotting factors, says Jaitovich. This is very important because patients with COVID-19 have accelerated clotting activity.

A metabolite called citrate is used as a therapeutic anticoagulant to decrease the likelihood of developing clotting. Yet the study revealed that the presence of metabolic citrate decreased as patients presented with more severe illness.

The fact that citrate is reduced in these patients will potentially indicate that the reduction facilitates the hypercoagulation phenotype that we found in these patients, says Jaitovich.

Another molecule possibly contributing to hypercoagulation in severe COVID-19 is a protein called gelsolin, which is normally released as a response to inflammation due to cellular injury or infection. Gelsolin was also reduced in the plasma samples from people with severe disease.

In addition to biomarkers associated with hypercoagulation, the team also identified a cluster of proteins involved with blood vessel damage, with higher abundance in severe COVID-19 samples.

There are all these factors upstream of the process that are actually being changed, that you need to address as much as just the process of clotting in order to manage this phenotype, says Evgenia Shishkova, assistant staff scientist in the Coon Lab.

The analysis also revealed increased levels of proteins and upregulated genes involved in neutrophil degranulation, which has been associated inflammation, thrombosis, and the development of ARDS.

So it seems like theres this really strong interplay between the inflammatory response and probably these thrombotic events, which are also being seen in the COVID patients, saysKatie Overmyer, associate director of theLaboratory for Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry at UW-Madison.

Finally, the multi-omic analysis revealed a network of high-density lipoproteinsthe proteins APOA1 and APOA2, and a group of lipids known as plasmalogens which act as antioxidants were all lower in the severe COVID-19 cases.

These aspects were not on our radar, says Jaitovich. The ability to merge these dimensions in one single unifying narrative allowed us to make sense of stuff that was completely obscured to us.

And by identifying these various molecules, it opens up the potential for developing targeted therapeutics that may help alleviate disease.

We can offer hard data for people who are specialists in all these different areas to go and maybe learn about the prospects that what theyre thinking might have an impact on COVID, says Coon.

The researchers made the data publicly available through an interactive web tool, covid-omics.app, where the scientific community has been comparing and analyzing the data along with their own workflows.

Coon adds, I think weve tried to do our best to highlight vignettes that we think are important, but the bigger impact is probably going to come from the community being able to dig into this.

Reference: Large-scale Multi-omic Analysis of COVID-19 Severity by Katherine A Overmyer, Evgenia Shishkova, Ian Miller, Joseph Balnis, Matthew N. Bernstein, Trenton M. Peters-Clarke, Jesse G. Meyer, Qiuwen Quan, Laura K. Muehlbauer, Edna A. Trujillo, Yuchen He, Amit Chopra, Hau Chieng, Anupama Tiwari, Marc A. Judson, Brett Paulson, Dain R. Brademan, Yunyun Zhu, Lia R. Serrano, Vanessa Linke, Lisa A. Drake, Alejandro P. Adam, Bradford S. Schwartz, Harold A. Singer, Scott Swanson, Deane F. Mosher, Ron Stewart, Joshua J. Coon and Ariel Jaitovich, Accepted 5 October 2020, Cell Systems.DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2020.10.003

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Researchers Unravel the Network of Molecules That Influence COVID-19 Severity - SciTechDaily