Why Shame Will Not Solve The Coronavirus Pandemic : Short Wave – NPR

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Representative Rosa DeLauro holds a photograph from the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri on Memorial Day Weekend, during a June 4 hearing on Capitol Hill. Tasos Katopodis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Representative Rosa DeLauro holds a photograph from the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri on Memorial Day Weekend, during a June 4 hearing on Capitol Hill.

So much of dealing with the pandemic is about how each of us behaves in public. And it's easy to get mad when we see people not following public health guidelines, especially when it looks like they're having fun.

But Julia Marcus of Harvard Medical School says there are pitfalls to focusing only on what we can see, and more empathetic ways to create new social norms.

Julia's written about that for The Atlantic. Here's some of her recent work.

Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Brent Baughman, fact-checked by Rebecca Ramirez, and edited by Deb George.

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Why Shame Will Not Solve The Coronavirus Pandemic : Short Wave - NPR

Weir: Burgess remembers Dr. Benjy Brooks, woman pioneer in Texas – The Cross Timbers Gazette

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Why do we spend any time learning about history? After all, whats past is past; so, why is it necessary for our future? Well, suppose you could go back into your earlier life. Is there anything you would do differently? Perhaps. But, inasmuch as you cant go back, are there things you did wrong in your past that youve learned not to do in your current stage of life? In the same way, the history of our country can educate us about the way things used to be, so we can ensure that they never happen again. Thus, history is not merely a chronological record of significant events; it is a lesson plan for the future. Whether its the atrocity of slavery, with all its future impact on an entire race of people; or, the centuries long oppression of women, which held them in a de facto form of servitude; knowing the past can be a positive roadmap going forward.

With that in mind, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. August 26, 1920, is the day women gained the right to vote in this country.Congressman Michael Burgess (R-26th District-Texas) wants to reflect on this momentous occasion by highlighting one of the women pioneers from the district he represents. Dr. Benjy Frances Brooks was born in Lewisville, Texas and grew up in neighboring Flower Mound. Dr. Brooks became the first female pediatric surgeon in Texas.She was a mentor and I carry around the words she gave me at the beginning of my medical career children are not just smaller versions of adults treating them is more complex than scaling down the size of the problem. It requires a whole host of separate tools and knowledge, and that is why this program is so important, recalls Rep. Burgess.

Having been born in Lewisville and raised in Flower Mound, both of which are in my North Texas district, Dr. Brooks, even as a four-year old, dreamed of becoming a doctor while she operated on dolls with manicure scissors. She received a bachelors and masters degrees from the North Texas State Teachers College and went to medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1944, where she received her medical degree in 1948. Dr. Brooks became one of the first women to enter the department of surgery at Harvard, where she completed her pediatric surgical training, said Dr. Burgess.

Eventually she returned home to Texas to practice pediatric surgery at Texas Childrens Hospital. She was the first female pediatric surgeon in the state and went on to teach at Baylor College of Medicine and, at the time, the newly established University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where she established and led the pediatric surgery division, Burgess added.

Benjy Frances Brooks, August 10, 1918 April 2, 1998, received theHoratio Alger Awardin 1983. She was inducted into theTexas Womens Hall of Famein 1985. The Benjy Brooks Foundation for Children was erected in her honor by the parents of one of her patients to continue her legacy. Legislation named after Brooks was passed in Texas in 2018. Obviously, a precocious child, she learned to read before she started school and always seemed to be ahead of the other kids. Dr. Brooks once spoke about an incident in which her fifth-grade teacher told her mother that Brooks was mentally retarded. I didnt really fit into the sausage mill, to come out a little sausage like everyone else. Unfortunately, thats what our educational system does to children. At times, it takes away their creativeness and the fact that they are different, Brooks explained.

Nineteen years old when she earned a bachelors degree atNorth Texas Teachers College, Brooks stayed at the school for another two years to complete a masters degree. She was a high school teacher for four years before she enrolled in medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas. She pursued pediatric surgery, completing postgraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Medical School and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, Scotland. While at Harvard Medical School in 1953, Brooks, along with two other physicians, discovered a treatment for jaundice using gamma globulin.

In the video, Dr. Burgess talks about the career of Dr. Brooks and how she influenced his medical career.

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Weir: Burgess remembers Dr. Benjy Brooks, woman pioneer in Texas - The Cross Timbers Gazette

I have never had a harder column to write – Las Cruces Sun-News

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Gabriel Rochelle, Path of the Spirit Published 2:40 a.m. MT July 19, 2020

Fr. Gabe Rochelle(Photo: Courtesy photo)

I think of liberalism as the mutual sharing of opinions in a democratic process. I think of liberalism as engaging in common labor in the hope that government might be able, with the least amount of intervention, to work for the betterment of all people, especially economically.

My liberalism is grounded in the belief that most people would rather work together for common cause than be at constant strife. My liberalism explores each social issue that arises on its own merits, based on an ethical position that is not merely pragmatic or politically motivated.

My liberalism affirms freedom of religion and of the press. My liberal views grew out of my Christian commitment and, because of that, I invested time, effort and money in civil rights and other movements, including opening our house as a shelter for victims of domestic violence in a community which had none. It fueled involvement in bicycle programs meant to aid marginal people where Ive lived.

That was decades ago. Seems like a lifetime, some days.

Our society moves toward further polarization. Depending on which crowd you happen to find yourself in at any given moment, it is now dangerous to express opinions and beliefs that do not coincide with the politically correct views of either the right or the left. Extremism has become the new norm; debate and dialogue are ground into the dirt. Welcome to the era when the self-appointed leaders of social movements push us to conform or suffer the consequences.

That freedom of religion thing I mentioned a few paragraphs back? Thats going off the table as more and more Christians believe they are forced underground or into silence. I know of people in university settings who fear for their jobs, should they make clear public statements about, say, their opposition to abortion on Christian grounds. The thought police are alive and well, seeking adherence to a list of proper behaviors and attitudes.

I am reminded of the classic statement of German Lutheran Bishop Martin Niemller about the Nazi regime: First they came for the Jews, but I wasnt a Jew; then they came for the communists, but I was not a communist You know the rest: by the time they came for me, there was no one left.

Rod Dreher, a conservative Christian critic, wrote a popular book called The Benedict Option. This recalls the move made by Benedict of Nursia way back at the turn of the sixth Century; namely, to reimagine and reinvent society by establishing a community of shared belief. St. Benedict envisioned his community as a school as well as a center for prayer. This new Option would be, therefore, not monasticism straightforward, but rather the gathering of intentional communities in which the principle story of the faith and its implications for all of life reigns supreme.

To some extent, we might compare such communities with the Amish and old order Mennonites, the Hutterite and Bruderhof movements, and the conservative end of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. All these movements sought, and continue to seek, ways to negotiate their relationship with the larger society that allow them to remain free to exercise their faith and, perhaps more importantly, their behavior and ethics in a society which largely rejects them.

In, but not of the world: thats the long-standing word among Christians in every time, in every culture. We dont belong to the world or a particular culture. Never did. Never will. As the first letter of Peter says, we are resident aliens, strangers in a strange land. Its time to stop pretending we are anything other than that.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is pastor of St Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Mission, Las Cruces. The church web site is http://www.stanthonylc.org. We welcome folks in ordinary times. Send an email if youd like to learn more.

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Protest to abolish ICE scheduled for Saturday in Woodstock – Northwest Herald

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A protest calling for the abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the U.S., as well as the ending of ICE's contract with McHenry County, is scheduled for this Saturday in Woodstock.

At the rally, set for 2 p.m. in the historic Woodstock Square, several speakers will inform the public about immigration, detention centers and human rights violations, according to a news release.

Organizers are asking people to wear masks and bring signs, and also call McHenry County Board Chairman Jack Franks and ask him to bring the county's ICE contract to a vote.

Through an agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service, McHenry County earns $95 a day for each ICE detainee housed at the jail.

Why would I want to contribute to a culture of us and them?" Alli Carroll, one of the protest organizers, said in a statement. The ICE presence does not reflect the views of our community and is an unwelcome presence. We can no longer profit off of human fear and misery.

In a news release, organizers said the U.S. "has created a vehicle for fear, racism, xenophobia, and internal terrorism" in ICE.

Sandia Davila, who also is part of the movement to eliminate ICE, said friends of hers have been deported.

It makes me wonder whos next? It could be a student who stops attending school; it could be a neighbor," Davila said. "Because of the intentional invisibility of the immigrant community, people just go missing. This is not public safety. The immigrant community should not live in fear.

Protest organizers argue that money the federal government gives to ICE could be used for different purposes, such as improving schools, establishing cleaner and more efficient public transportation systems, offering public services for the poor, lowering the cost of post-secondary education and providing small-business loans.

We have so many needs in our community, protest organizer Tony Bradburn said.

As previously reported by the Northwest Herald, McHenry County Board member Carlos Acosta pointed out during a July 16 County Board meeting that the number of ICE detainees in the McHenry County Jail has been declining recently.

When we accept ICE inmates or detainees, thats up to ICE, we have no influence on the number thats coming or going, McHenry County Sheriffs Deputy Sandra Rogers said. The assumption is, during this pandemic, that theyre not moving around as often.

Sponsoring organizations of Saturday's protest include Activists for Racial Equity (Crystal Lake and Surrounding Communities), Elgin in Solidarity with Black Lives, Standing up Against Racism (Woodstock), McHenry Direct Action, Warp Corps of Woodstock and Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist: Social Justice.

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Protest to abolish ICE scheduled for Saturday in Woodstock - Northwest Herald

Journeying Together will focus on churchs engagement with young people – The Record

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Young adults from the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn., and the Diocese of Bismarck, N.D., attend Mass with U.S. bishops at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome Jan. 15, 2020. The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

WASHINGTON The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25.

Called Journeying Together, the initiative aims to explore the Catholic Churchs engagement with young people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and mobilize U.S. Catholics on issues and concerns related to culture and race in the United States, according to a July 22 news release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCBs Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church is leading the initiative, with the involvement of several USCCB secretariats Catholic Education, Evangelization and Catechesis, and Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. They will be joined by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Due to health concerns created by the novel coronavirus, the initiative will primarily take place online from July through next May. Plans call for a live gathering to take place next summer, pending health and safety directives.

It is based on Pope Francis call for encounter and dialogue in his 2019 apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit, (Christ Lives) on the 2018 Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment.

The pope urged parishes and dioceses to rethink their young and young adult programs and to make changes based on what young people themselves say they want and need. Youth ministry cannot be elitist or focused only on the teens and young adults already active in the churchs life, he said.

He also called on Catholic youth to reach out to other young people, to not be afraid to mention Jesus and to invite friends to church or a church-sponsored activity.

The Journeying Together process will feature intracultural and intercultural digital gatherings and conversations with young adult delegates and key ministry leaders from different cultural communities, including African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, European Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as immigrant groups, migrants and refugees.

Delegates, who include bishops, young adults and local ministry leaders, will seek to involve their peers in the dialogue and mobilization aspects of this yearlong experience, the news release said.

The conversations will be facilitated by young adults in response to Pope Francis encouraging young people to be protagonists in the churchs mission of evangelization.

This dialogue comes at an incredibly important time in our nations history where we find ourselves engaged in a serious conversation about race and racism, with calls for meaningful and lasting social reform, a movement led in large part by young people across the country and around the world, said Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Perez, chairman of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church.

The COVID-19 pandemic also has affected communities of color most significantly, he said in a statement. Over the course of the next year, it is my hope that we can have honest conversations on these and other issues impacting young people and on how we can move ahead on the important questions of race, culture and community.

Organizers of the initiative have been very intentional about making sure every cultural family has their voice represented and a seat at the table as we journey together, he added. The bishops are looking forward to learning from the young people and those who accompany them.

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Journeying Together will focus on churchs engagement with young people - The Record

UMD addresses African vulture poisoning with global disease and biodiversity implications – Science Codex

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University of Maryland (UMD) researchers across multiple colleges collaborated with other international leaders in wildlife conservation to produce an expert assessment and recommendations for vulture poisoning control efforts in Southern Africa. Vultures act as nature's most critical scavengers, working as ecosystem garbage disposals and disinfectors to maintain animal, environmental, and human health alike. With global vulture populations declining, diseases that have previously been under control can potentially reemerge as threats and contribute to the spread of global disease (a top-of-mind issue during the COVID-19 pandemic), while also negatively impacting overall biodiversity. To address rapidly declining African vulture populations, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC, funded by the National Science Foundation through UMD) has gathered an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists with the goal of saving Africa's vultures. Findings from their latest publication highlight the issue of illegal vulture poisonings in Southern Africa from a conservation and criminology perspective, recommending a more coordinated and holistic approach to regulation, education, and enforcement to engage local communities and maximize conservation efforts.

"This work is vital," says William Bowerman, chair of Environmental Science and Technology in the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources (AGNR) at UMD and a lead organizer for the SESYNC effort. "We could lose African vultures completely in just a few years. But we have faculty from across UMD and Cornell University, Birdlife International, the Peregrine Fund, Endangered Wildlife Trust, and many others working to solve this international problem collaboratively. We have issues of chemical poisoning, but also lead and other contaminants, habitat loss, poaching and vulture trade for belief and medicinal use, and other factors that contribute to why populations are declining so quickly and why we need so many different experts."

Focusing on vulture poisoning with this new paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, the team at UMD includes faculty members in Environmental Science and Technology, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Anthropology, and a new faculty member in Geographical Sciences (College of Behavioral & Social Sciences, BSOS). Meredith Gore, currently with Michigan State University, is the lead author on this paper and will officially join UMD in August. "I call myself a conservation social scientist - humans are my species, and my habit is to collaborate," says Gore. "When I was invited to work on this SESYNC project, I had no previous exposure to vultures, but I do a lot of work in Africa, and the human factors in vulture conservation are very complex and dynamic. As a group of experts, we could really leverage our diversity to think about this problem in a different way."

While expert elicitation and "desk assessment" exercises like this paper are common practices in both criminology and conservation, these thought processes had never before been combined and applied in the context of African vulture poisoning to try to make recommendations and ultimately improve control and conservation efforts.

"The use of a criminology framework is relatively new for conservation," says Jen Shaffer, assistant professor in Anthropology, BSOS. "Conservation policies have long focused on identifying direct causes for species loss, culminating in the creation of protected areas for species, as well as policies with incentives and punishments. More recently, there have been efforts to assess and address indirect or underlying causes of species loss, such as poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to necessary resources. In our research, we captured both direct and indirect causes of African vulture loss, but extended this work to identify a wider range of cultural and physical factors in the environment that promote poisoning. This allowed our group to identify specific tactics that would discourage people from participating in the crime of vulture poisoning."

"We formulated a range of strategies and tactics to prevent poisoning from occurring in the first place, along with limiting the impacts if a poisoning event occurred," adds Jennifer Mullinax, assistant professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR. "For example, we suggested an education campaign on the human health risks from the common poisons used, and a Wildlife Poisoning Response Planning and Training intervention. This effort is a great example of having a large stakeholder group, including local constituents, come up with simple to complex ideas that could be implemented by local agencies or non-profits to directly impact vulture poisoning."

The need for more coordinated education and training efforts was a key finding from the study, since according to Gore, many people, particularly locals, don't always see poisoning as a crime. Often, this is done to protect livestock from larger animals and predators, with the poison not even intended for vultures. However, intentional poisoning by poachers can also be a factor.

"Bringing vulture population declines from intentional poisoning to light in the scientific community raises a heightened awareness of poaching, not only from the targeted animals (such as elephants) that are killed, but the secondary impact on other species such as vultures, and how all that impacts the socio-ecological-economic health of many peoples and nations," says Reggie Harrell, professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR.

In addition to bringing awareness and recommendations to the scientific community, the information from this paper is already on the ground and in the hands of those who can use it, says Gore, being disseminated by Andre Botha, co-author and Vultures for Africa program manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, also a major organizer of the SESYNC initiative. "A key finding from this work is that there are a lot of existing solutions on the ground, they just aren't being combined, coordinated, or used holistically to maximize the benefit. In addition to thinking about ways we can incentivize and enable compliance, for example by restricting access to chemicals being used illegally while still providing access to those who need them for legal reasons, we were able to help identify the places where resources could be implemented first and make recommendations on how to prioritize existing efforts."

Given the complicated nature of vulture poisonings in Africa, combining criminology with community engagement was paramount to this work, Gore adds. "Criminology uses situational crime prevention to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes and riots in sports stadiums. We used those same situational crime techniques and applied them to vulture conservation. However, we added an additional dimension - engaging communities - based on participatory action research and conservation, which we know and do really well at land grant universities."

Gore and the team emphasize the importance of this information being adapted to local communities and used on the ground for real change. "At the end of the day, we're just experts," says Gore. "That's important, but we look at problems differently than local people do, so the work that we did needs to be interpreted on the ground in a local context."

Shaffer adds, "From an anthropological perspective, I think that our findings underscore how sustainable strategies to reduce and eliminate wildlife crime require local cultural context and community involvement. Our work also serves as a model of how the problem of African vulture poisoning can be addressed elsewhere on the African continent."

"This is a really serious problem," stresses Gore. "Vultures are ecosystem engineers, and as their population decreases, the second order impacts can harm ecosystems and people. It's urgent, dynamic, and also really complex. Why should people in Maryland care about what's happening in Southern Africa? Because it all relates to environmental health. And socio-environmental health relates to socio-environmental security. And global security is national security as the [COVID-19] pandemic has shown us. What starts someplace else impacts us here in the U.S. and in Maryland."

However, Gore and the team are inspired by the collaborative nature of the work, with all team members emphasizing the power of and role of collaborative team science in addressing these major global concerns. "I do think there is a role for scientists to play," says Gore. "We do have something to offer here, and we should be engaging on global issues the way we are through SESYNC."

Lars Olson, professor in Agricultural & Resource Economics, AGNR, adds, "This project is an excellent example of how interdisciplinary team science can produce collaborations that are greater than the sum of the parts and help address the conservation of endangered species subject to multiple threats."

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Johnson Financial Group growing, still hiring on its 50th anniversary year – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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The Johnson Financial Group has locations throughout southern Wisconsin, including this bank location in Kenosha.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

Talk about humble beginnings.

What was to become the Johnson Financial Group started out 50 years ago as a bank with three employees working in a double-wide trailer.

The company has since grown into a financial services firm that employs 1,200 and offers banking, wealth management and insurance services through its Johnson Bank, Johnson Wealth Inc. and Johnson Insurance Services, LLC.

And, in 2020, the companylanded on the list of Top Workplaces for the first time.

The growth and the recognition as a Top Workplace comes from staying true to its founding values, said Jim Popp, Johnson Financial Group CEO.

Jim Popp is CEO of Johnson Financial Group.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

"Fifty years ago, our founder, Sam Johnson, envisioned a bank with stronger capabilities than the small banks, while maintaining a more personal and truly local feel than the large banks," Popp said. "Today, were the largest privately held bank in Wisconsin, but that value proposition remains the same.

"We strive to do whats best for our customers, our associates and the communities we serve."

A group of workers at Johnson Financial Group are shown during an employee appreciation event at the company's headquarters in Racine.(Photo: Johnson Financial Group)

Popp joined Johnson Financial Group in 2017 as president of Johnson Bank, taking over as CEO in January 2018. Prior to joining Johnson Financial Group, Popp worked for nearly 30 years at JP Morgan Chase & Co. where he led teams throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Johnson Financial Group has $12 billion in assets under administration and annually makes $2 million in charitable contributions.

The company is headed by Helen Johnson-Leipold, who is chairman and a member of the fifth generation of the Johnson family.

Johnson Financial Group competes in a world of giant banks and financial services companies.

Helen Johnson-Leipold, Johnson Outdoors(Photo: Johnson Outdoors)

That suits Popp just fine.

"We like to say we know Wisconsin businesses because we are one," he said. "Our roots are here, our focus is here, our decisions are made here. We have a vested interest in having Wisconsin be as strong and vibrant as possible for our business and our families."

Local, private ownership has its advantages.

"As a well-capitalized, privately held bank, we can make decisions with a long-term view," Popp said. "That allows us to be very intentional and focused as we invest in our people, facilities, technology and the communities we serve."

That local, private ownership has also allowed the company to position itself as a destination employer and Top Workplace.

"We continue to hire and make ourselves an employer of choice for prospective candidates," Popp said.

Despite a tight pre-pandemic job market, the company continued to hire.

"We have been very fortunate to be able to attract some very strong talent in all of our businesses in the past few years," Popp said. "Our size, scope of service, private ownership and commitment to local communities has been a compelling recruiting tool."

Despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company remains on a growth trajectory.

"We continue to add new associates across all of our businesses and markets," Popp said. "Our business has grown nicely."

Despite job losses across some sectors of the economyas a result of the pandemic, JFG is looking for people.

"In fact, it feels like we are managing our hiring process similarly now as before the pandemic," Popp said. "We are constantly evaluating our business needs to ensure that we have the people with the right skills and talent needed to meet the needs of those businesses.

"Were connecting with candidates by phone, through virtual interviews and conference calls with a focus on flexible scheduling," he added.

Popp said the company is well-positioned to continue growing.

"As we celebrate our 50th year, were certainly proud of the company that we have become," he said. "When we look to the future, we see great opportunity to grow our banking, wealth and insurance businesses in the state of Wisconsin."

Contact Joe Taschler at (414) 224-2554or jtaschler@gannett.com. Followhimon Twitter at @JoeTaschler orFacebook atfacebook.com/joe.taschler.1.

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Archbishop Perez calls for ‘honest conversations’ with youth on race, culture – CatholicPhilly.com

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Archbishop Perez chats with missionaries from FOCUS after a July 19 Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. In a July 22 U.S. bishops announcement on Journeying Together, a new pastoral initiative to engage youth, Archbishop Perez called for honest conversations on race and culture with young people from diverse backgrounds. (Photo by Sarah Webb)

By Catholic News Service Posted July 23, 2020

WASHINGTON (CNS) The U.S. Catholic Church will convene a yearlong intercultural process with young adults and ministry leaders July 25.

Called Journeying Together, the initiative aims to explore the Catholic Churchs engagement with young people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and mobilize U.S. Catholics on issues and concerns related to culture and race in the United States, according to a July 22 news release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCBs Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church is leading the initiative, with the involvement of several USCCB secretariats Catholic Education, Evangelization and Catechesis, and Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. They will be joined by the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Due to health concerns created by the novel coronavirus, the initiative will primarily take place online from July through next May. Plans call for a live gathering to take place next summer, pending health and safety directives.

It is based on Pope Francis call for encounter and dialogue in his 2019 apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit, (Christ Lives) on the 2018 Synod of Bishops on young people, the faith and vocational discernment.

The pope urged parishes and dioceses to rethink their young and young adult programs and to make changes based on what young people themselves say they want and need. Youth ministry cannot be elitist or focused only on the teens and young adults already active in the churchs life, he said.

He also called on Catholic youth to reach out to other young people, to not be afraid to mention Jesus and to invite friends to church or a church-sponsored activity.

The Journeying Together process will feature intracultural and intercultural digital gatherings and conversations with young adult delegates and key ministry leaders from different cultural communities, including African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, European Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans, as well as immigrant groups, migrants and refugees.

Delegates, who include bishops, young adults and local ministry leaders, will seek to involve their peers in the dialogue and mobilization aspects of this yearlong experience, the news release said.

The conversations will be facilitated by young adults in response to Pope Francis encouraging young people to be protagonists in the churchs mission of evangelization.

This dialogue comes at an incredibly important time in our nations history where we find ourselves engaged in a serious conversation about race and racism, with calls for meaningful and lasting social reform, a movement led in large part by young people across the country and around the world, said Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson J. Perez, chairman of the Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church.

The COVID-19 pandemic also has affected communities of color most significantly, he said in a statement. Over the course of the next year, it is my hope that we can have honest conversations on these and other issues impacting young people and on how we can move ahead on the important questions of race, culture and community.

Organizers of the initiative have been very intentional about making sure every cultural family has their voice represented and a seat at the table as we journey together, he added. The bishops are looking forward to learning from the young people and those who accompany them.

***

For more information about Journeying Together, visitwww.usccb.org/journey2020.

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Bank First lobby to reopen Monday after extensive remodel – Greater Milwaukee Today

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CEDARBURG Bank First has announced the completion of the remodel at its office in historic district Cedarburg. A remodel of the facility, located at W61N529 Washington Ave., began in October of 2019 and the official reopening date is set for Monday. Bank First established itself in the Cedarburg community with the acquisition of Partnership Bank in July 2019. We are extremely pleased with the outcome of the Cedarburg project, said Mike Molepske, chief executive officer of Bank First.

Cedarburg is a beautiful community, rich in history. We were very intentional with our plans for the office and sought to preserve the historic and artistic aspect of the downtown district while emulating the style of other recently renovated and constructed Bank First offices.

Bank First is committed to the communities it serves, not only providing beneficial financial solutions, but also developing meaningful relationships with its customers and community members.

We are grateful to our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve them in Cedarburg and the surrounding area. We value the relationships we have built and look forward to better serving our customers as we continue to grow, said Vince Cameranesi, senior vice president - business banking.

As with recently updated Bank First offices, the Cedarburg office will also feature creative works from local artists. Members of the community are welcome to stop by during next week to view the works and celebrate the grand reopening with special offerings. Bank First will also host a ribbon cutting ceremony with the Cedarburg Chamber of Commerce on Monday at 11 a.m.

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Bank First lobby to reopen Monday after extensive remodel - Greater Milwaukee Today

Terms Like ‘Slave’ and ‘Master’ Finally Have Their Reckoning. It’s Good, but It’s Not Enough. – Built In

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Throughout his long career in tech, Blacks In Technology executive director Peter Beasley heard programmers use the terms master and slave to refer to development branches or databases many times.

Did I, Peter Beasley, start a movement or make a big deal about it? No, I didnt do that. But I personally tried not to use those words, he said. I would never use them.

Did that make his job harder?

Im going to say yes, he said. Not the words themselves, but the fabric theyre a part of.

A Black technologist could work, thrive, and even lead at an organization that uses those terms, Beasley said. But the presence of words like whitelist, blacklist, master and slave would serve as constant reminders and reinforcers of the racist structures that make a workplace less welcoming for Black people.

Many technologists like Beasley are fed up with both the words and the fabric they represent. In the wake of the most recent wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests against police violence and systemic racism, some notable companies and open-source projects announced the decommissioning of terms with offensive connotations.

I personally tried not to use those words. I would never use them.

Some of these efforts like the decision by the Jenkins governance board to replace three terms came from the top down. Others came from engineers themselves. Twitter developer Regynald Augustin, along with his colleague Kevin Oliver, successfully lobbied to replace a variety of terms, including man hours, grandfathered, dummy value and sanity check.

Linux, GitHub, Apple and Google Chrome and Go are among the other projects that recently announced terminology deprecations.

The problem of racist terminology in the workplace isnt new. But the commitments from large companies and projects may signal shifting dynamics for developers, both in and outside the codebase.

More on Tech and RaceWhy Racial Bias Still Haunts Speech-Recognition AI

Terminology changes have met mixed reactions.

Many replies to Augustins Twitter announcement were vitriolic. A note from Go developer Filippo Valsorda on the commit to replace whitelist/blacklist and master/slave acknowledges ongoing arguments about the changes:

Im not trying to have yet another debate, Valsorda wrote. Its clear that there are people who are hurt by [the terms] and who are made to feel unwelcome by their use due not to technical reasons but to their historical and social context. That's simply enough reason to replace them.

Others, like writer and actor Kerry Coddett, criticized the broader pattern of name changes in response to #BlackLivesMatter.

Yall removing racist symbols when were asking to remove racist systems, she tweeted. We are not having the same conversation right now.

But just because the impact of language changes isnt immediately clear doesnt mean those changes arent significant, Peta Hoyes said. Hoyes is COO and a partner at Tag1 Consulting, a firm that helps optimize websites built with the open-source Drupal framework.

I agree wholeheartedly that we should address the issues, not just the words but the words are still important because they have real effects, she said.

She thought of tennis star Serena Williams, who in 2015 was named Sports Illustrateds Sportsperson of the Year. The honor sparked a social media debate over which contender deserved the award more: Williams or American Pharoah, a Triple-Crown-winning horse.

The argument was absurd. But the dehumanizing language sports enthusiasts used to discuss Williams performance had seeded the racist debate long before it flared up, Hoyes said.

As a Black woman who exists in that air, there are a lot of things I shove to the side because I dont have that time in the day. I have to pick my battles.

By themselves, words are symbols. But you cant divorce words from their contexts, Hoyes said. If technology organizations are homogeneously white and male, that context may be lost on many. But as spaces become increasingly diverse, some language hits differently. Tech workers should take the time to listen to their peers and examine the historical and cultural contexts of the language they use, she added.

This is the air we breathe, for all intents and purposes. When your diversity starts to reflect the actual population, people start to realize, This air works for me, but it might not work for other people, Hoyes said. As a Black woman who exists in that air, there are a lot of things I shove to the side because I dont have that time in the day. I have to pick my battles.

Hoyes said that Black employees, especially Black women, face constant decisions about whether or not to address racism in the workplace, weighing their time, energy and security against the severity of the incident. Thats what makes it especially important for white colleagues to think critically about language at work, as well as interactions, protocols and systems.

In that sense, terminology changes are indeed small because theyre the tip of an iceberg.

Some technical terminology changes are coming from project leadership; others happen when developers like Augustin push for new company-wide language.

But not all are the result of organized efforts. Some changes happen line by line, merge by merge.

For instance, Python officially deprecated master/slave from its codebase in 2018. But before that happened, community members were already chipping away at terms they found offensive.

In 2017, Python core developer Mariatta Wijaya found herself helping out with a GitHub bot that flagged pull requests from accounts that hadnt signed the projects Contributor License Agreement. Since some pull requests come from automated processes, they needed a way to exempt those requests and prevent them from being flagged Wijaya was asked, via a GitHub issue, to create a whitelist.

When I implemented the bot, I made a conscious decision, Wijaya said. I didnt want to use the term whitelist.

So, she did a Google search for alternatives and settled on allowlist instead.

When she implemented the feature, she didnt call attention to the terminology swap. The developer whod opened the issue accepted her contribution, and nothing more came of it.

I dont know if he noticed. I never asked him about it, she said.

When I implemented the bot, I made a conscious decision. I didnt want to use the term whitelist.

In that way, Wijaya changed the terminology in one project quietly and unilaterally. For huge codebases such as Python, that approach to project-wide change would, admittedly, be slow going. But, particularly in open-source communities, more sweeping changes can lead to stronger blowback.

When a Python developer opened an issue the following year requesting that all instances of master/slave be replaced, that request was eventually accepted. But it also prompted ideological and personal attacks. The core developer involved with that change asked that Wijaya not share his name.

It harks back to a common critique of open-source communities: The anonymity, written messages and no-holds-barred technical debates enable abusive speech. Thats why the Contributor Convent, a document outlining the bounds of acceptable behavior in open source, exists. Many projects have adopted the Covenant. But for some people, both the Covenant and recent terminology changes are unwelcome signs of shifting demographics and the tightening of unlimited speech.

When discussions about terminology changes surfaced in the Linux community in early July, for example, some detractors directed death threats at Coraline Ehmke, the author of the Contributor Covenant, even though she wasnt directly involved in the changes, Ehmke told Built In.

While the removal of terms like master/slave specifically targets anti-Black racism, these terminology changes are part of a larger effort to make open-source spaces more inclusive. In a 2017 GitHub survey of open-source contributors the sole formal source for data on open-source participation 16 percent of respondents identified as racial or ethnic minorities. Three percent identified as women. Those imbalances have led to a variety of programs, including internships and mentorship programsaimed at boosting participation from people in underrepresented groups.

Wijaya herself became a Python core developer after being mentored by the languages creator, Guido Van Rossum. Her hope is that by increasing access to mentors and removing barriers to entry, open-source communities will continue to diversify.

It takes individuals [in the community] making an effort themselves, she said. But if the leadership sets an example, people at the bottom who admire the leaders start doing the same.

Alex Earlis a member of the Jenkins governance board, which helps guide the project and make important decisions.

After George Floyds death at the hands of police made national news, the board decided it was time to move forward with terminology changes theyd been considering for years, Earlsaid. Theyd started the process of removing slave back in 2016, but since then, contributors had reached out with concerns about other terms master, whitelist and blacklist.

They started a thread in Google groups to poll the community on the best replacement terms. Contributors spent two weeks throwing out suggestions.

I encourage Jenkins contributors to participate in this effort, one wrote. It is not something we could change in a minute, but we could do a gradual cleanup and improve the overall documentation while doing so.

I personally think without the slave context, master is pretty accurate, another weighed in. To be absolutely honest, if it has more syllables than the current, people are super likely to stick with the existing wording.

Next, the governance board will collect the proposed replacement terms and list them in an online poll for the community to rank. The board will use those rankings to determine the final replacements.

We can go in and make pull requests to their code to update those terms, but it is a long process.

According to Earl, the considerations are many. Jenkins is an international community, so the replacement terms will need to work well in English as well as other languages. Theyll also have to make sense contextually some terms may need one replacement for web interfaces and another for server applications, for instance.

Then comes implementing the changes. Editing the user interface and documentation are as simple as executing a find-and-replace. But replacing terms in the source code itself creates challenges. New class names may interact poorly with older versions of Jenkins or with the projects 1,500 user-created plug-ins, Earlsaid. And the creators of those plug-ins could continue using the old terms, if they chose.

We have to find ways to encourage those people to make the changes, he added. We can go in and make pull requests to their code to update those terms, which is something weve done with the replacement of the term slave over the past few years. But it is a long process.

Words matter. Language constructs our reality, as Beasley and Hoyes noted. Whether or not we notice it, its the air we breathe.

Does that mean that codebase changes will translate into better representation and more opportunities for Black developers?

No, Earlsaid. Is it going to solve all the worlds issues that we changed a term from slave to agent? Absolutely not. People have to actually get up and do something. We should be consistently looking for ways to include contributors from all different walks of life. And if we can help specifically some of these groups who are marginalized and oppressed, I think that's awesome.

Is it going to solve all the worlds issues that we changed a term from slave to agent? Absolutely not. People have to actually get up and do something.

Terminology isnt enough companies and projects must purposefully diversify, Earlsaid. But efforts shouldnt stop there, either. Whats equally important as bringing in more minority participants, Beasley noted, is making sure theyre supported once they arrive.

Its great that theres a focus on terminology and coding, but who gets promoted when two people walk in the room? he asked. How do we treat differences and diversity and allow all ideas to come forward?

Beasley and Hoyes shared some ways they believe individual developers can build on codebase changes to fight racism and create more opportunities for Black technologists:

Black founders are frequently passed over for venture funding. That leads to fewer Black founders and more white founders recruiting from their personal and professional networks, which often include people who look like themselves.

Thats systemic racism, Beasley said it goes beyond any single person, interaction or institution. To counteract it, the industry must work from the top, with who gets venture funding, as well as the bottom, with who gets invited to interview.

Hoyes described an incident when a client seemed visibly threatened by her presence and authority. Her white colleagues witnessed the interaction, and commented on it later.

Sometimes, its best to call out racist interactions in the moment. (We call out peoples behavior when it affects clients, Hoyes said. Why not when it affects people of color?)

Other times, its better to debrief about the behavior after the fact, Hoyes said. Black employees shouldnt have to wonder if anyone else noticed what happened.

Its very comforting when someone says, I saw what that person did, she said. Thats half of it, bothering to acknowledge it. That makes my environment so much more hospitable. You cant put it on people of color to point it out all the time.

Everyone has implicit bias. But some people exhibit intentional bias in the workplace when they say racist things, harass Black employees, prevent them from earning promotions or leading projects or knowingly allow others to do the same.

Those people should lose their jobs, Beasley said. Campaigns against sexual harassment and assault have led to many public changes in company leadership, he added a real anti-racist movement would likely do the same.

Its not cool to allow those secrets to persist, because they will just keep going on, he said. We have to be okay talking about race. We have to get intentional. We have to out the bad people.

Its great that theres a focus on terminology and coding, but who gets promoted when two people walk in the room?

When Black employees show up ready to do their best after racist violence occurs in your city, state or country, thats a testament to their excellent job performance, Hoyes said. Dont let them start the day without acknowledging what happened in your companycommunications.

Pay close attention to who gets to talk and who tends to jump in.

Leaders at Blacks In Technology consistently hear from companies that say they want to hire more Black people, Beasley said. But the conversation cant end there. Do those new Black employees feel supported enough to stay at the company? Do they get promoted?

Blacks In Technology has an onboarding program for companies senior leaders, in which new executives meet with a roundtable of Blacks In Technology representatives to discuss some of the challenges Black employees experience in the workplace. It also has a mentorship program that connects young people of color with professional mentors from the organizations network.

They may feel isolated, they may feel alone, they may not feel comfortable talking to the HR department, Beasley said. They may not feel the solidarity of others saying, Youre not alone, baby girl, its happened to me too.

More on Tech and RaceThe Advertising Industry Cant Stay This White

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Terms Like 'Slave' and 'Master' Finally Have Their Reckoning. It's Good, but It's Not Enough. - Built In

Commentary: Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs lessons from the pandemic – Press Herald

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The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned an infodemic, a vast and complicated mix of information, misinformation and disinformation.In this environment, false narratives the virus was planned, that it originated as a bioweapon, that COVID-19 symptoms are caused by 5G wireless communications technology have spread like wildfire across social media and other communication platforms. Some of these bogus narratives play a role in disinformation campaigns.The notion of disinformation often brings to mind easy-to-spot propaganda peddled by totalitarian states, but the reality is much more complex. Though disinformation does serve an agenda, it is often camouflaged in facts and advanced by innocent and often well-meaning individuals.As a researcher who studies how communications technologies are used during crises, Ive found that this mix of information types makes it difficult for people, including those who build and run online platforms, to distinguish an organic rumor from an organized disinformation campaign. And this challenge is not getting any easier as efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19 get caught up in the political machinations of this years presidential election.Rumors, misinformation and disinformationRumors are, and have always been, common during crisis events. Crises are often accompanied by uncertainty about the event and anxiety about its impacts and how people should respond. People naturally want to resolve that uncertainty and anxiety, and often attempt to do so through collective sensemaking. Its a process of coming together to gather information and theorize about the unfolding event. Rumors are a natural byproduct.Rumors arent necessarily bad. But the same conditions that produce rumors also make people vulnerable to disinformation, which is more insidious. Unlike rumors and misinformation, which may or may not be intentional, disinformation is false or misleading information spread for a particular objective, often a political or financial aim.Disinformation has its roots in the practice of dezinformatsiya used by the Soviet Unions intelligence agencies to attempt to change how people understood and interpreted events in the world. Its useful to think of disinformation not as a single piece of information or even a single narrative, but as a campaign, a set of actions and narratives produced and spread to deceive for political purpose.Lawrence Martin-Bittman, a former Soviet intelligence officer who defected from what was then Czechoslovakia and later became a professor of disinformation, described how effective disinformation campaigns are often built around a true or plausible core. They exploit existing biases, divisions and inconsistencies in a targeted group or society. And they often employ unwitting agents to spread their content and advance their objectives.Regardless of the perpetrator, disinformation functions on multiple levels and scales. While a single disinformation campaign may have a specific objective for instance, changing public opinion about a political candidate or policy pervasive disinformation works at a more profound level to undermine democratic societies.The case of the Plandemic videoDistinguishing between unintentional misinformation and intentional disinformation is a critical challenge. Intent is often hard to infer, especially in online spaces where the original source of information can be obscured. In addition, disinformation can be spread by people who believe it to be true. And unintentional misinformation can be strategically amplified as part of a disinformation campaign. Definitions and distinctions get messy, fast.Consider the case of the Plandemic video that blazed across social media platforms in May 2020. The video contained a range of false claims and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Problematically, it advocated against wearing masks, claiming they would activate the virus, and laid the foundations for eventual refusal of a COVID-19 vaccine.Though many of these false narratives had emerged elsewhere online, the Plandemic video brought them together in a single, slickly produced 26-minute video. Before being removed by the platforms for containing harmful medical misinformation, the video propagated widely on Facebook and received millions of YouTube views.As it spread, it was actively promoted and amplified by public groups on Facebook and networked communities on Twitter associated with the anti-vaccine movement, the QAnon conspiracy theory community and pro-Trump political activism.But was this a case of misinformation or disinformation? The answer lies in understanding how and inferring a little about why the video went viral.The videos protagonist was Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who had previously advocated for several false theories in the medical domain for example, claiming that vaccines cause autism. In the lead-up to the videos release, she was promoting a new book, which featured many of the narratives that appeared in the Plandemic video.One of those narratives was an accusation against Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the time, Fauci was a focus of criticism for promoting social distancing measures that some conservatives viewed as harmful to the economy. Public comments from Mikovits and her associates suggest that damaging Faucis reputation was a specific goal of their campaign.In the weeks leading up to the release of the Plandemic video, a concerted effort to lift Mikovits profile took shape across several social media platforms. A new Twitter account was started in her name, quickly accumulating thousands of followers. She appeared in interviews with hyperpartisan news outlets such as The Epoch Times and True Pundit. Back on Twitter, Mikovits greeted her new followers with the message: Soon, Dr Fauci, everyone will know who you really are.This background suggests that Mikovits and her collaborators had several objectives beyond simply sharing her misinformed theories about COVID-19. These include financial, political and reputational motives. However, it is also possible that Mikovits is a sincere believer of the information that she was sharing, as were millions of people who shared and retweeted her content online.Whats aheadIn the United States, as COVID-19 blurs into the presidential election, were likely to continue to see disinformation campaigns employed for political, financial and reputational gain. Domestic activist groups will use these techniques to produce and spread false and misleading narratives about the disease and about the election. Foreign agents will attempt to join the conversation, often by infiltrating existing groups and attempting to steer them towards their goals.For example, there will likely be attempts to use the threat of COVID-19 to frighten people away from the polls. Along with those direct attacks on election integrity, there are likely to also be indirect effects on peoples perceptions of election integrity from both sincere activists and agents of disinformation campaigns.Efforts to shape attitudes and policies around voting are already in motion. These include work to draw attention to voter suppression and attempts to frame mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud. Some of this rhetoric stems from sincere criticism meant to inspire action to make the electoral systems stronger. Other narratives, for example unsupported claims of voter fraud, seem to serve the primary aim of undermining trust in those systems.History teaches that this blending of activism and active measures, of foreign and domestic actors, and of witting and unwitting agents, is nothing new. And certainly the difficulty of distinguishing between these is not made any easier in the connected era. But better understanding these intersections can help researchers, journalists, communications platform designers, policymakers and society at large develop strategies for mitigating the impacts of disinformation during this challenging moment.

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

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Commentary: Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs lessons from the pandemic - Press Herald

Rosewood Trafficking Worsens in the Gambia – Earth Island Journal

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China could play a pivotal role in halting trade in trees crucial for West African ecosystems made more fragile by climate change.

In 2019, the Gambia Africas smallest country was the third largest source of highly prized hongmu, a group of rosewood species used in China to make antique-style furniture and art. Yet the endangered rosewood species Pterocarpus erinaceus, native to West and Central Africa, has been nearly extinct in the Gambia since 2011.

It was an open secret that most of this rosewood timber, known locally as keno, is in fact illegally harvested and smuggled from neighboring Senegal. An investigation by NGO the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has shed new light on the scale and workings of the shadowy trade.

Its Cashing-in on Chaos report, published in June, revealed that the Gambia exported approximately 1.6 million rosewood trees between June 2012 and April 2020. According to EIAs findings, most of these exports are in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), under which P. erinaceus has been listed since 2017.

Our three-year investigation brings unprecedented evidence to show how extensive the crisis is and the magnitude of the illegal trade between Senegal and the Gambia, says Kidan Araya, Africa program campaigner at EIA Global, based in Washington DC.

The trafficking has already contributed to political instability in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, where the illegal logging has been concentrated.

EIAs undercover interviews with traffickers confirmed rumors that rebels from the armed separatist group, the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC), derive most of their income from the illegal trade. Tens of thousands of people have been internally displaced by the long-running conflict for independence.

The Senegambia rosewood trade is on a par with conflict diamonds, says Naomi Basik Treanor, a senior manager of NGO Forest Trends. The nature of the conflict in Senegal and the very porous borders makes this trade very hard to contain, she adds.

Addressing the rosewood crisis was a diplomatic priority for the Gambias current president Adama Barrow when he came to power in January 2017. His predecessor, the notoriously corrupt and ruthless dictator Yahya Jammeh, had controlled the rosewood re-export trade through a parastatal company, Westwood Gambia Limited, through which tens of millions of dollars worth of keno was shipped to China, reports EIA.

Barrow imposed a re-export ban in February 2017 and agreed to a joint enforcement initiative to combat the trafficking with the president of Senegal, Macky Sall, in 2018.

However, EIAs investigation shows that despite these measures, imports have increased. Between February 2017 and April 2020, China imported 329,351 tons of rosewood from the Gambia. This is more than China imported in 2015 and 2016 (241,254), during the last two years of Jammehs regime, when rosewood trafficking was a well-known matter of state, says the report.

Observers in Casamance and Gambia agreed with EIAs findings. Immediately after the departure of Yahya Jammeh and for the first year after the Gambias ban, the trafficking really reduced, but now it is back in full force, says Ansumana Sanneh of NGO United Purpose (UP), which works with partner organizations in the Casamance on community projects to protect the forests.

Musa Mballo, chair of one of UPs partners in Velingara department, Casamance, says the traffickers are now not only MFDC rebels, but are coming from Gambia and across Senegal, basing themselves within forest communities and preying on the lack of economic opportunities, especially for youths, to involve people in the trade.

The natural resources belong to everybody, but then part of the community is profiting, others see they are making quick money and feel disadvantaged. It may be only three or four people who are doing it, but the destruction is huge, he adds.

The environmental impacts of the deforestation are already being felt. Before this phenomenon, you always had shade in the forest, but now the sun and wind have a lot of negative effects. Now the forest fruits people used to eat are not growing, adds Mballo.

P. erinaceus or keno is embedded in the regions savannah and semi-arid forests, says conservationist William Dumeno at the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana. It is one of the few species that can survive in these conditions, supporting the wildlife and socio-economic activities. If you remove it, then youre tampering with the stability of the fragile ecosystems.

Since 2015, the trees have been relentlessly targeted by traffickers, as West Africa has taken over from Southeast Asia as the worlds top hongmu-producing region, notes EIAs report.

Over-exploitation will have long-term consequences, says Dumeno, who is currently researching causal links between illegal rosewood logging in Ghana and climate change.

Southern Senegal is quite a dry, savannah atmosphere. A large area of landscape has been depleted. People are going to experience rising temperature and drying up of river bodies from loss of tree cover. You can see from aerial images this is a land thats going to suffer a lot from exposure because of the removal of these trees, he adds.

Despite growing awareness of these issues, cross-border trafficking continues apace, with bribes greasing palms at the many military and police checkpoints along the route, sources told China Dialogue.

In the Gambia, the situation is very secretive, says Seeku Janku, chair of the All Gambia Forestry Platform. They use big trucks like refrigerated containers to smuggle the timber in at night and put it into a warehouse.

Janku is part of a network of civil society organizations across Senegal and the Gambia campaigning against illegal logging and rosewood trafficking. Activism is risky, the government will distance themselves from you. To get information from them is really difficult, and the traders recruit boys who will attack you, he says.

EIAs investigation exposes how Gambias current administration has been unable to decisively break with the systemic corruption of the past regime.

Some of the old schemes that were established during Jammehs time have been either revived or are still existing and are being used by politicians. This investigation found that a main avenue to smuggle the timber is through parastatal companies, says Araya.

Westwood Gambia Ltd, which is expected to be investigated for war crimes by NGO Trial International, has been succeeded by another Gambian company named Jagne Narr Procurement and Agency Services that is used to smuggle the wood, which is shipped from the port of Banjul to China.

EIAs investigations found that the CITES export permits required to prove that the timber has been legally and sustainably sourced were also fraudulently issued in Gambia or not issued at all. Lamin Dibba, the minister of environment, climate change and natural resources (MECCNAR) was named by multiple traffickers as a key figure in the scheme. Dibba did not respond to EIAs inquiries.

The report also highlights a significant discrepancy of $471 million between Gambias reported timber exports and imports declared by trading partners from 2010 and 2018. Its intentional because China is receiving this and they know its rosewood. Theres massive underreporting, says Araya.

EIA is calling for the Gambia to suspend rosewood trade totally. There have been multiple statements from Barrow, but corruption is overpowering any political will to try to ban rosewood exports, she adds.

China, as the largest importer of West African hongmu, could play a pivotal role in halting the trafficking and EIA has called on China to seize all containers of Gambian rosewood landing in its ports in line with the recently adopted Chinese Forest Code. We hope that the Chinese authorities take our evidence and use it to stop the illegal trade, says Araya.

Unlike most countries that are importing timber, China does not yet have in place measures to prohibit or exclude the import of illegal timber, explains Basik Treanor.

She hopes that China will use its recently revised forestry law, which includes a nationwide ban on processing illegally sourced domestic timber, to apply to imported timber as well. That ultimately is what China needs to do at scale to really confront this crisis, she says.

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Universe is 13.77 Billion Years Old, Astronomers Say | Astronomy – Sci-News.com

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Astronomers using NSFs Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in our Universe. Their new observations suggest that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years. This estimate matches the one provided by the Standard Model of the Universe and measurements of the same light made by ESAs Planck satellite.

This new picture of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the oldest light in the Universe, was taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This covers a swath of the sky 50 times as wide as the Moon, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. The light, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, varies in polarization (represented here by redder or bluer colors). Image credit: ACT Collaboration.

The Standard Model, the one behind Jim Peebles Nobel Prize, comes through with flying colors, said Professor Lyman Page, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who was the ACTs principal investigator from 2004 to 2014.

This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, said Dr. Simone Aiola, a researcher at Flatiron Institute and Princeton University.

In 2019, astronomers measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the Universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the Universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

Now weve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree. It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable, Dr. Aiola said.

The age of the Universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant.

The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 km per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc).

This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 km/s/Mpc by the Planck satellite team, but its slower than the 74 km/s/Mpc inferred from the measurements of galaxies.

We dont know if the tension is due to systematic effects or to something new that we have not figured out. Cosmology is as exciting as ever, Professor Page said.

I didnt have a particular preference for any specific value it was going to be interesting one way or another, said Dr. Steve Choi, a scientist at Cornell University and Princeton University.

We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the Universes oldest light.

The close agreement between the ACT and Planck results and the Standard Cosmological Model is bittersweet, Dr. Aiola said.

Its good to know that our model right now is robust, but it would have been nice to see a hint of something new.

Still, the disagreement with the 2019 study of the motions of galaxies maintains the possibility that unknown physics may be at play.

The Planck satellite measured the same light, but by measuring its polarization in higher fidelity, the new picture from ACT reveals more of the oldest patterns weve ever seen, said ACT principal investigator Professor Suzanne Staggs, of Princeton University.

The findings were published in a series of papers on the arXiv.org preprint server.

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Simone Aiola et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 Maps and Cosmological Parameters. arXiv: 2007.07288

Steve K. Choi et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz. arXiv: 2007.07289

Sigurd Naess et al. 2020. The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: arcminute-resolution maps of 18,000 square degrees of the microwave sky from ACT 2008-2018 data combined with Planck. arXiv: 2007.07290

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Universe is 13.77 Billion Years Old, Astronomers Say | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

Vanderbilt, The Ohio State University are joint Founding Members of satellite mission Twinkle to find potentially habitable worlds around nearby stars…

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Astronomers are preparing to further study the atmospheres of planets discovered through NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, to identify the most promising exoplanetsplanets in solar systems beyond our own for habitability and signs of life.

Set to launch in late 2023, Twinkle is a space mission that will deliver unprecedented data via satellite telescope to astronomers about the elemental composition of exoplanet atmospheres. Vanderbilt and The Ohio State University have become Founding Members of the mission and will play a leading role in shaping the missions directives, targets, and survey operations.

We already have a decent estimate of the number of Earth-like planets with similar size, mass and bulk composition in our galaxy, but what we dont yet know is how common atmospheres like ours are on these planets, said Keivan Stassun, Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, who will lead Vanderbilts Team Twinkle. The Twinkle mission can bring answers to this burning question. The measurements that we will take will help us identify planets with atmospheres, and of those, which are breathable and livable.

Finding Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars with oxygen-rich atmospheres and an ozone layer in the upper atmosphere to protect life from being mutated by UV rays, like what we have on this planet, is no small feat. As a co-investigator of the TESS mission, Stassun has spent the last eight years developing, designing, launching and running the program. Following several successful discoveries of potentially habitable planets during the TESS mission, Stassun and his team are cautiously optimistic about the opportunity presented by Twinkle.

Stassun, together with the Twinkles other Founding Members, The Ohio State Universitys Scott Gaudi, Thomas Jefferson Professor for Discovery and Space Exploration and Ji Wang, assistant professor of astronomy, are assembling a hit list of target planets to study until the satellites launch. Once the satellite is in its sun-synchronous, low-Earth polar orbit, the team will collect and calibrate data, sitting at the computer screen with bated breath for the first signs of breathable atmospheres. The full data analysis will take a few years to process and will identify exciting opportunities for further science during the missions extended seven-year lifetime.

Twinkle is nimble, so we will be able to observe many candidates with multiple visits to the same target, said Wang. We also have a very competitive team here at Ohio State that can leverage NASAs James Webb Space Telescope mission to focus on a handful of the most promising targets identified for biosignature detection. Finding biosignatures on exoplanets represents one of our best chances of finding signs of life elsewhere.

With a core group of faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students and undergraduates all engaged in cutting-edge research, the departments of astronomy at Ohio State and Vanderbilt have worked together to establish themselves as leaders in the study of exoplanets planets orbiting other stars and the search for life on these worlds, said Gaudi. As founding members of the Twinkle mission with our colleagues at Vanderbilt, we will further cement our departments as centers for the study and characterization of exoplanets.

Stassun, also director of the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation, is building his team that will be working on data visualization and analysis to include neurodiverse students through the Centers autism internship program. I have been convinced that applying the full diversity of the human mind is how were going to make progress and solve these exciting open questions, he commented.

In addition to atmospheric research of exoplanets, Twinkles broad-wavelength spectroscopic capabilities will also enable astronomers to study the surfaces of asteroids and nuclei of comets in our solar system. Beyond these core science cases, scientists can use Twinkle to monitor stellar activity and variability, observe protoplanetary disks around stars in various stages of planet formation, study brown dwarfs and shed new light on the planets and moons in our solar system.

Twinkle is the inaugural mission of Blue Skies Space Ltd., a company incorporated in England and Wales. Blue Skies Space was co-founded by Marcell Tessenyi, Giovanna Tinetti and Jonathan Tennyson, all academics working at University College London, to deliver independent satellites that address the global scientific communitys need for high-quality data from space.

Vanderbilts participation in the Twinkle Mission is funded through the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics (VIDA). Blue Skies Space is funded by a combination of private and public sources including the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and European Space Agency (ESA) which support the development of this innovative new model for delivering space science missions. The Ohio State Universitys participation is funded through the Universitys Thomas Jefferson Chair for Discovery and Space Exploration endowment.

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Vanderbilt, The Ohio State University are joint Founding Members of satellite mission Twinkle to find potentially habitable worlds around nearby stars...

Pastor-astronomer: Recent solar events are gifts of awe – Suburbanite

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"The heavens declare the glory"

NORTH CANTON July has been an auspicious month for stargazers like the Rev. David Ross, a lifelong of student of astronomy.

Hes been watching the Comet NEOWISE, which can be seen unaided in Northeast Ohio, just prior to sunrise. It will not return for 6,800 years.

On Sunday, the full moon, Jupiter and Saturn will align. On July 29, the Southern Delta Aquariids meteor shower will occur in the northeast skies.

"Theres always something interesting going on up there," he said.

Ross, a retired minister who co-pastors Simpson United Methodist Church in Plain Township with his wife, Barb, said the stars are a gift of Gods creation to provide humans with a sense of awe and wonder.

"I grew up in the 60s when the space program was all the rage," he said. "That just kind of stoked my interest over the years. Ive been able to enjoy building a telescope and taking pictures of comets, like Hale-Bopp."

In past years, Ross has done presentations on the Bethlehem Star.

"Certainly the Gospel mentions the Star of Bethlehem," he said. "Over the years, Ive come to appreciate, in terms of faith, the wonder of the world around us."

Ross cites theologians such as William Brown, who have noted that the Bibles "wisdom" literature - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job and others - contributes to the formation of character through extolling natures wonders.

"If youre able to open yourself up through the gift of creation and the strange things which humble us, thats an important element for building character," he said. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

Ross recalls being in awe during the last solar eclipse, which he saw in Nashville.

"Its an uncanny feeling to see that. To think that people in earlier times and ages must have wondered what this is all about," he said. "In 2024, its going to be the full megillah. The line goes through Wooster and Cleveland, so we dont have to travel very far."

He noted that ancient people viewed comets as a bad omen. Prior to Comet NEOWISE, there were two others in March and April.

"I think the Lords trying to tell us something," he laughed. "Of course, hes always trying to tell us something. If it takes a comet to do that..."

Ross said he thinks the current pushback against science is a result of institutions being buffeted by scandals.

"So many institutions and authority figures have been undermined," he said. "Everybody seems to think they can go their own way and be their own authority. With the virus, I would have thought the science behind how we stay well would have been one the place where we put some trust.

"In church we pray for people who are sick, but hope the doctors do their best. Some challenge is appropriate, but we see what can happen if everything becomes a matter of opinion. It happened in Bible times when the prophets said, `Everyone went their own way. Its a recipe for chaos."

Ross said his favorite Scripture regarding astronomy is Psalm 19:

"The heavens declare the glory of God."

"C.S. Lewis said he thought those lines were some of the most beautiful written in the English language," he said. "Hes someone who had a real sense of how the stars and sky through the ages have spoken to religious people and nonreligious people."

Lewis "Narnia" series, he noted, makes use of stars and planets in their plots.

In 2014, the Star of Bethlehem Conference observed its 400th anniversary at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The group was founded by Johannes Kepler, who wrote a theory contending there was an alignment of the planets.

"For me, its less the scientific search than the wonder," Ross said. "I got interested in Bethlehem Star from `Its a Wonderful Life."

The film opens on an image of a group of galaxies known as Stephans Quintet.

"(Director) Frank Capra had a lifelong interest in astronomy," Ross said. "He studied at what became Cal Tech. At the time, those galaxies were the definition of things to wonder about. Its key element of the storyline."

Last year, Ross spoke at festival in Seneca Falls, N.Y., which honors the film.

"Its not until George (Bailey) changes his perspective, its after that hes able to see the stars," Ross said. "Its after he comes back from the bridge that hes able to see the stars again."

Ross urges people to visit Stark County Wilderness Center Education Director Robin Gills Facebook page, which features information on stargazing.

"It doesnt take a group or gathering to enjoy astronomy," he said.

Reach Charita at 330-580-8313 or charita.goshay@cantonrep.com

On Twitter: @cgoshayREP

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Pastor-astronomer: Recent solar events are gifts of awe - Suburbanite

Astronomy: Probe, rover, helicopter to head to Mars this month – The Columbus Dispatch

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July is a busy month for missions to Mars. Earth and Mars are now close enough in their orbits that a launch window is open. Three missions to Mars, one from NASA, one from China, and one from the United Arab Emirates, are to blast off soon.

The UAE space probe called Hope is to go first, on Monday, after bad weather scuttled last weeks launch dates. The probe is to be propelled on top of a Japanese H-IIA rocket built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The goal is to put a weather satellite in orbit around Mars to study its atmosphere in hopes of finding the reason for the atmospheres large changes over the past millennia. Long ago, Mars could sustain liquid water on its surface. Today, it has a thin, dry atmosphere. The UAE has partnered with several universities in the U.S. to design a multi-wavelength spectrometer to study the seasonal weather cycles over several years.

China has divulged little about its plan to send up a rover and an orbiter in late July or early August in a mission named Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven.

Also in late July, NASA is to launch a new rover called Perseverance using an Atlas rocket. This rover will be the size of a small car, much larger than the little rovers sent many years ago and similar in size to the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012. Whats new is that Perseverance will have a drill that can cut into a rock to remove a core sample about the size of a pen. It will take the rock samples to a drop-off spot for possible retrieval by a future mission to Mars. A campaign has been started jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency to plan a mission to bring those samples back to Earth for analysis.

Now for the really cool part. Along with Perseverance, a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which has carbon-fiber blades and weighs about 4 pounds, will be sent to Mars. It will just be a technology demonstration, but if Ingenuity succeeds in flying, it will be the first drone to fly on another planet. The Martian air is thin. so the blades need to be long about 4 feet and will spin about eight times faster than those on a helicopter on Earth.

One problem is that, due to the time lag of several minutes in communications from Earth to Mars, Ingenuity must fly itself, using an onboard computer. When flying, it wont be controlled by a human but will rely on instructions programmed into its computer. Ingenuity has a wireless connection to Perseverance, which in turn communicates with an orbiting satellite that gets radio commands from Earth. Ingenuity also has a camera, enabling it to take overhead pictures that can be relayed back to us.

The goal of these missions is to find out whether microbial life once flourished on Mars. Clear evidence of past life on Mars has eluded us.

Ken Hicks is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University in Athens.

hicks@ohio.edu

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Reopening The Doors Of Perception: The Psychedelics Renaissance In Canada – Cannabis & Hemp – Canada – Mondaq News Alerts

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While cannabis takes a breather from the capital markets rollercoaster ride that has characterized that sector lately,psychedelics are in the news lately and all the rage in thecapital markets. Junior pharmaceutical companies, specializedclinics and Caribbean retreats are common water-cooler topics ofconversation these days among capital markets investors andobservers alike. To be sure, momentum is building and publicperception is changing in Canada and in some parts of the UnitedStates toward reducing barriers to access for psychedelics. Lowenforcement priorities in Denver, Oakland and Santa Cruz, as wellas Oregon's proposed laws to regulate cultivation,manufacture and sale of psilocybin products for medical purposes,broadens the discussion. Today's momentum has been a longtime coming particularly as a viable new option for mentalhealth treatment.

Psychedelics, entheogens, entactogens and dissociativeanesthetics are a broad group of substances that are intenselypsychoactive, with effects including visual and other illusions,mystical-type experiences, synesthesia, intensified emotionalstates and other disorienting effects. Duration of these effectsmay range from 15 minutes or less to more than 24 hours. The termsfor these compounds and the plants or fungi they are sourced fromvary depending on the perspective and context. For simplicity, weuse the term familiar to most psychedelics as ablanket term for psychedelics, entheogens, entactogens anddissociative anesthetics.

Psychedelics are not illegal. That said, many psychedelics arescheduled in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (theCDSA), making them controlled substances and unless otherwiseauthorized, possession and manufacture of any controlled substanceis prohibited. Most psychedelics that are controlled substances arewithin a certain class of controlled substances calledrestricted drugs. Investigators for clinical trials,preclinical studies and other researchers may possess restricteddrugs through exemptions issued under the CDSA. Authorization tomanufacture, compound, package and otherwise work with restricteddrugs is available through a dealer's licence issued underthe Food and Drug Regulations (the FDR).

Like any drug substance, a drug product including a psychedelicsubstance as an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) is saleableunder the FDR once a drug identification number (DIN) is issued byHealth Canada for use of the drug product in association with agiven therapeutic indication. Clinical evidence establishing safetyof a drug product and efficacy for treating a given condition isrequired for Health Canada to issue a DIN for the drug product. AnMDMA drug product is on track to receive a DIN for use in treatmentof post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the equivalentregulatory approval in the United States within the next two tofour years. A psilocybin drug product for treatment-resistantdepression appears to be close behind.

Administration and application of psychedelic drugs divergesfrom previous approaches to the use of medication for treatment ofmental health disorders. This point of divergence changes theeconomics of cost recovery for clinical trial expenses after beingissued a DIN. Drug products traditionally used in treatment ofmental health conditions are taken daily and unsupervised at dosageranges intended to suppress symptoms of mental illness and tominimize overtly psychoactive effects. In contrast, in clinicaltrials MDMA and psilocybin are typically administered a smallnumber of times at strongly psychoactive flood doses in asupervised therapy setting. Similar approaches will be followed inapplications using flood doses of LSD, and for use of MDMA andpsilocybin for other therapeutic indications. Clinics thatcurrently administer racemic ketamine off-label for treatment ofdepression follow a similar model.1

The long duration of the effects resulting from a flood dose ofmost psychedelics increases the time required from therapists,often in specialized clinic settings designed to maximize thebenefits of the psychoactive effects of psychedelics. Compared withprevious approaches to management of mental health conditions,psychedelic assisted therapy uses a lower amount of drug substanceand involves a greater amount of time spent with therapists. As aresult, a much greater portion of the value chain foradministration of a psychedelic drug product is captured bytherapists relative to the manufacturer of the drug product.Microdosing psychedelics, which is generally definedas taking about five to ten per cent the dosage of a flood dose,presents a potential commercialization pathway for a drug productto be taken regularly and without supervision.

Mental health is a serious problem globally. This problem islikely exacerbated by the current global pandemic. Based onscientific evidence, psychedelics are likely to play a significantrole in correcting this problem. Particularly in the last ten yearsor so, there has been growing attention on psychedelics and theirpotential therapeutic applications. World-class academicinstitutions and sophisticated, well-financed public companies arestudying the potential benefits of LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaineand DMT for indications including end of life depression, treatmentresistant depression, PTSD, eating disorders, Alzheimer'sdisease, substance use disorder and others. Commercializationefforts are underway and we can expect to see MDMA, psilocybin andpotentially other psychedelics used as APIs in drug productsholding a DIN.

While it is natural to draw a comparison to cannabis,psychedelics are not the next cannabis. Cannabisproducts are a commodity-based and highly regulated category ofconsumer packaged goods (CPG). Cannabis has a well-definedadult use market that was built on a multi-participant commercialmedical cannabis industry. Cannabis is also commonly used on adaily basis. Robust consumer demand for cannabis products supportsan industry including cultivation, processing, retail sale and allthe picks and shovels needed to maintain consumeraccess to cannabis products.

In contrast to cannabis, there is no psychedelics industry at least not today. Rather, psychedelics are a disruptorfor health care delivery and pharmaceuticals. Cannabis is a singleheterogeneous commodity in high demand for manufacture of CPGs. Incontrast, psychedelics are a diverse group of chemicals that varywidely in their effects.2 Also contrasting with acommodity-based CPG industry, psychedelics for use in a therapeuticcontext are typically used sparingly and can currently becommercialized only as drug products regulated under the FDR.

There is plenty of noise circulating around psychedelics. Whiledrug products holding a DIN and including a psychedelic substanceAPI are likely to disrupt how therapy is delivered, there is nomedical access program in Canada similar to the Marihuana forMedical Purposes Regulations for any psychedelics and theremay never be. We believe that the market, and the strengths thatdistinguish the leaders, will be very different for psychedelicscompared with cannabis.

BordenLadner Gervais LLP's Cannabis Industry Focus Group has aproven track record of helping companies in the cannabis ecosystemachieve their goals. We have leading regulatory, capital markets,intellectual property, corporate and commercial subject matterexperts in the cannabis industry. Our focus group is national inscope and includes professionals across many disciplines.

We work with leading processors, retailers, technologycompanies, cultivators and others in the cannabis industry. Wecarry significant technical expertise alongside our legalexperience. We understand the cannabis industry and are passionateabout helping the legislative purpose of the Cannabis Actsucceed.

Psychedelics are not cannabis. That said, overlapping legal andtechnical expertise positions our Cannabis Industry Focus Group forsuccess in supporting clients working with psychedelics.BLG's entrepreneurial and leading approach to legal practiceis a perfect match for working with clients operating in thepsychedelics space. Our Cannabis Industry Focus Group has developeda strong practice advising clients focused on innovation, finance,drug substance and precursor manufacture, clinical work and dataanalysis in relation to psychedelics. We are also representingclients on key pro bono efforts to broaden access to psychedelicsfor medical purposes.

If you are considering directly entering, investing in,partnering into or otherwise pursuing a business plan that includespsychedelics, we would be pleased to speak with you to assess howour expertise can benefit your project.

Footnotes

1.Spravato (esketamine) is a drug productinitially approved in Canada on May 19, 2020 that includes a nasalspray formulation of esketamine for treatment of depression. Asindicated in the Spravato product monograph, and analogouslyto off-label administration of racemic ketamine by health carepractitioners to patients suffering from depression,self-administration of the Spravato product by patientssuffering from depression is intended to be completed only underthe direct supervision of a healthcare professional withpost-administration monitoring.

2.Examples include LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT,harmaline, salvinorin A, mescaline, 2C-B and other 2,5 substitutedphenethylamines, DOM and other ring-substituted amphetamines,ketamine, mitragynine, ibogaine and many others.

About BLG

The content of this article is intended to provide a generalguide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be soughtabout your specific circumstances.

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Reopening The Doors Of Perception: The Psychedelics Renaissance In Canada - Cannabis & Hemp - Canada - Mondaq News Alerts

Tesla is like a SpaceX rocket to stock investors, but the car makers bond holders are down to earth – MarketWatch

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Tesla's TSLA, -5.00% market capitalization is nearing $300 billion. Its now the largest car maker in the world, even larger than Toyota Motor Corp. TM, -0.31%, which produced almost 9 million cars in 2019 and has a market capitalization of around $175 billion.

Tesla stock is trading at 45 times very rosy and improbable 2024 earnings. Teslas market cap implies that investors believe that production will go up more than 20-fold from the 400,000 cars a year it currently produces to 10 million cars.

Bondholders take a decidedly different view of Tesla. As the stock-market valuation of Tesla races to the moon, its debt rating is earthbound. Tesla, the worlds largest automaker, gets a Caa1 rating from Moodys Investors Service for its senior unsecured debt, while S&P Global gives Tesla a B- credit rating. Put simply, Teslas bonds are considered junk. (By comparison, Toyota is rated A+, GM GM, -1.83% is rated BBB).

Read: Teslas stock is forming a bubble and new buyers should buckle up for a crash

Plus: 7 risks for Teslas stock that Robinhood traders would be wise to heed

When I wrote a 37-page serieson Tesla I opened it with this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. An analysis of Tesla and the automotive industry today requires holding a lot of opposing ideas.

I have made the analogy that the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) cars to electric motors is akin to the transition from dumbphones to smartphones. Its a domain shift. So maybe this will bring higher margins for Tesla, as happened for Apple AAPL, +0.02% with the iPhone. Unlike other car makers, Tesla is vertically integrated: It manufactures most of the components that go into its cars (including seats); thus it gains from the economies of scale.

Also, software plays a bigger role in a Tesla than in a traditional car. There is self-driving, over-the-air updates, and an iPad-like interface that powers all the controls, for starters. So if advanced software helps Tesla get higher margins than traditional car companies, it in fact may not have to make as many cars to get to Toyotas profitability. Bulls would even argue that self-driving alone may send Teslas margins soaring. Ill pour cold water on that argument: Full autonomous driving is a good decade away.

It will take years, maybe even a decade, for Tesla to produce enough cars to justify its valuation.

Most importantly, going from 400,000 cars to many millions a year is neither easy nor cheap. The market confuses Tesla with Silicon Valley tech companies. Yes, Tesla is much more a technology company than your typical ICE car company is. It creates its own software and even the microprocessor that powers self-driving, but it still cannot escape the reality that it has to bend a lot of metal to produce its electric cars.

Unlike Facebook FB, -0.53% , which a decade ago could increase its user base 10- or- 20-fold by spending a few hundred million dollars on data centers, Tesla will require an incredible amount of capital to increase production many-fold. To produce fewer than half a million cars, as it does today, Tesla needed a $25 billion investment in property, plants, and equipment. This is where bits meet atoms and face financial gravity. Tesla is barely breaking even today and will need to raise and invest hundreds of billions of dollars to increase production enough to grow into its current valuation.

Then there is an element of time. Tesla has been stuck at producing 90,000 cars for the last eight quarters. It can only blame the coronavirus for a quarter or two. Getting to an annual production of even a few million cars will require time a lot of time. A lot of dirt has to be moved, permits issued, equipment installed, people hired. It will take years, maybe even a decade, for Tesla to produce enough cars to justify its valuation. Todays market valuation assumes Tesla is already there that the capital has been raised and spent and that it cost nothing.

So, how does one invest in this overvalued market? Our strategy is spelled outin this fairly lengthyarticle.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is chief investment officer atInvestment Management Associatesin Denver, which owns Tesla put options in client portfolios. Katsenelson is the author ofThe Little Book of Sideways Markets(Wiley).

More: Longtime Elon Musk critic has a strong message for investors looking to bet against Tesla

Also read: Teslas earnings on tap: Will a loss end its blowout stock rally?

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Tesla is like a SpaceX rocket to stock investors, but the car makers bond holders are down to earth - MarketWatch

Science News Roundup: SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts slated for August 2 return; Mexican cave artifacts show earlier arrival of humans in…

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Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts slated for August 2 return

The NASA astronauts who traveled to the International Space Station in SpaceX's first crewed flight in May are expected to return to Earth on Aug. 2 after spending two months in orbit, a NASA spokesman said on Friday. U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will gear up for the final benchmark test of SpaceX's so-called Demo-2 mission: a coordinated splashdown somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that will cap NASA's first crewed mission from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.

Mexican cave artifacts show earlier arrival of humans in North America

Stone tools unearthed in a cave in central Mexico and other evidence from 42 far-flung archeological sites indicate people arrived in North America - a milestone in human history - earlier than previously known, upwards of 30,000 years ago. Scientists said on Wednesday they had found 1,930 limestone tools, including small flakes and fine blades that may have been used for cutting meat and small points that may have been used as spear tips, indicating human presence at the Chiquihuite Cave in a mountainous region of Mexico's Zacatecas state.

China launches independent, unmanned Mars mission

China launched an unmanned probe to Mars on Thursday in its first independent mission to visit another planet, a bid for global leadership in space and display of its technological prowess and ambition. At 12:41 p.m. (0441 GMT), China's largest carrier rocket, the Long March 5 Y-4, blasted off with the probe from Wenchang Space Launch Centre on the southern island province of Hainan.

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How bots helped take $8 million from Ethereums biggest DeFi app – Decrypt

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When the worlds financial markets collapsed on March 12, the Ethereum networks congestion allowed some of MakerDAO users to buy out over $8 million worth of crypto for free. Today, data firm Blocknative has published a report that suggests an army of bots might be responsible.

And the implications are quite big. The decentralized finance (DeFi) sector has ballooned to over $3 billion locked up in itmoney thats at stake if something goes wrong. And if this strategy is effective, then it could put further applications and more money at risk.

This is strong evidence of a new class of attack that all DeFi users (in fact, all blockchain users) will need to be aware of, tweeted Dan Elitzer, a venture capitalist at IDEOVC.

MakerDAO is a novel blockchain project that is responsible for the stablecoin DAI. The DAI stablecoin is a cryptocurrency with its value pegged to the US dollar. But its not kept pegged by someone keeping a stash of banknotes in a vault, instead, users lock up other cryptocurrencies as collateral. And in case the value of the collateral drops, they make sure to keep enough locked up to accommodate that.

But obviously, this carries risk. If the value of the collateral dropped below the amount of the DAI (I.e. if there was less than $1 of collateral per 1 DAI), then there would be a big problem.

There is a mechanism to solve this if the value does drop significantly. The collateral is put up for auction, and anyone can buy itusually at a nice discount.

But what happened on March 12 is that a lot of collateral went up for auction. And someone managed to buy it for free! This shouldnt have happened. So, Blocknative went digging and they found out how this occurred.

According to the report, an army of so-called hammerbots was unleashed on Ethereum, spamming nodes with high numbers of transactions. This slowed down the network, creating a long queue of stuck transactions.

The congestion on the Ethereum network allowed some userspotentially who were behind the attack or otherwiseto bid $0 on auctions without competition. By offering higher transaction fees, they incentivized miners to process their transactions before everyone else. And anyone else trying to bid with low transaction fees, just added to the chaos.

And so, over $8.32 million worth of cryptocurrency was auctioned off for nothing. DeFi may be growing, but the risks are growing too.

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How bots helped take $8 million from Ethereums biggest DeFi app - Decrypt