Facial Recognition Market 2020 Size, Share Growth, Trend, Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 – Latest Herald

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Global Facial Recognition Market Report concentrates on the strong analysis of the present state of Facial Recognition Market which will help the readers to develop innovative strategies that will act as a catalyst for the overall growth of their industry. This research report segments the Facial Recognition Market according to Type, Application and regions. It highlights the information about the industries and market, technologies, and abilities over the trends and the developments of the industries.

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A report added to the rich database of Adroit Market Research, titled Global Facial Recognition Market by Product Type, Market, Players and Regions-Forecast to 2025, provides a 360-degree overview of the worldwide market. Approximations associated with the market values over the forecast period are based on empirical research and data collected through both primary and secondary sources. The authentic processes followed to exhibit various aspects of the market makes the data reliable in context to particular time period and industry.

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Key Facial Recognition Market players

Major vendors in the global market include NEC (Japan), Aware (US), Gemalto (Netherlands), Ayonix Face Technologies (Japan), Cognitec Systems GmbH (Germany), NVISO SA (Switzerland), Daon (US), StereoVision Imaging (US), Techno Brain (Kenya), Neurotechnology (Lithuania), Innovatrics (Slovakia), id3 Technologies (France), IDEMIA (France), Animetrics (US), and MEGVII (China).

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NEC (Japan) offers integrated solutions, components, services, and integrated solutions for computing and communications applications. NEC develops and markets its facial recognition offerings under the products segment public safety, and offers 2 solutions, namely, NeoFace Watch and NeoFace Reveal.

Facial Recognition Market is research report of comprehensive nature which entails information in relation with major regional markets, current scenarios. This includes key regional areas such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, etc. and the foremost countries such as United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, India and China.

The Facial Recognition Market report attempts to build familiarity of the market through sharing basic information associated with the aspects such as definitions, classifications, applications and market overview, product specifications, manufacturing processes, cost structures, raw materials and more. Furthermore, it strives to analyze the crucial regional markets, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate. It also discusses forecast for the same. The report concludes with new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.

In addition, this report identifies pin-point analysis of competitive dashboard and helps readers to develop competitive edge over others. It delivers a noteworthy data and insights associated with factors driving or preventing the growth of the market. It brings a nine-year forecast evaluated on the basis of how the market is expected to perform.

It assists readers in understanding the key product sections and their future. Its counsels in taking well-versed business decisions by giving complete intuitions of the market and by forming a comprehensive analysis of market subdivisions. To sum up, it also provides confident graphics and personalized SWOT analysis of foremost market subdivisions.

This statistical surveying report presents comprehensive assessment of the Global market for Facial Recognition Market, discussing several market verticals such as the production capacity, product pricing, the dynamics of demand and supply, sales volume, revenue, growth rate and more.

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Table of Content:

Global Facial Recognition Market Research Report 2019-2025

Chapter 1: Industry Overview

Chapter 2: Facial Recognition Market International Market Analysis

Chapter 3: Environment Analysis of Facial Recognition Market

Chapter 4: Analysis of Revenue by Classifications

Chapter 5: Analysis of Revenue by Regions and Applications

Chapter 6: Analysis of Facial Recognition Market Revenue Market Status.

Chapter 7: Analysis of Facial Recognition Market Industry Key Manufacturers

Chapter 8: Sales Price and Gross Margin Analysis

Chapter 9: Marketing Trader or Distributor Analysis of Facial Recognition Market

Chapter 10: Development Trend of Facial Recognition Market Industry 2019-2025

Chapter 11: Industry Chain Suppliers of Facial Recognition Market with Contact Information

Chapter 12: New Project Investment Feasibility Analysis of Facial Recognition Market

Chapter 13: Conclusion of the Global Facial Recognition Market Research Report

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Facial Recognition Market 2020 Size, Share Growth, Trend, Industry Analysis and Forecast to 2025 - Latest Herald

Supercomputer-Powered Text Mining Tool Combs Through COVID-19 Studies – HPCwire

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The COVID-19 pandemic is producing massive amounts of data and that data is producing a positive avalanche of academic literature. To help sift through those tens of thousands of research papers and synthesize COVID-19 knowledge, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have produced a text mining tool powered by supercomputing and machine learning.

The tool, called COVIDScholar, uses natural language processing (NLP) to scan academic papers on COVID-19 and make the results easily searchable. It was developed following the White House Office of Science and Technology Policys mid-March call to action on AI tools for data and text mining against COVID-19. Within a week, the Berkeley Lab researchers had an early version of the tool operational.

Our objective is to do information extraction so that people can find non-obvious information and relationships, said Gerbrand Ceder, a Berkeley Lab scientist who is helping to lead the project, in an interview with Berkeley Lab. Thats the whole idea of machine learning and natural language processing that will be applied on these datasets.

Smart big data analysis tools like these are necessary to make sense of the COVID-19 literature, which quickly reached overwhelming levels. Theres no doubt we cant keep up with the literature, as scientists, Kristin Persson, another Berkeley Lab scientist leading the project. We need help to find the relevant papers quickly and to build correlations between papers that may not, on the surface, look like theyre talking about the same thing.

Within a month, the team had collected over 61,000 research papers in the field, with around 200 more appearing every day. COVIDScholar incorporates automated scripts that pull those papers, standardize them and index them for searching. Within 15 minutes of the paper appearing online, it will be on our website, said Amalie Trewartha, one of the lead developers of the tool.

On the surface, COVIDScholar is an advanced search engine: it returns results, sorted into subcategories, and recommends similar articles. But soon, its functionality will run much deeper. Were ready to make big progress in terms of the natural language processing for automated science, said John Dagdelen, another of the lead developers. You can use the generated representations for concepts from the machine learning models to find similarities between things that dont actually occur together in the literature, so you can find things that should be connected but havent been yet.

To run COVIDScholar, the researchers turned to supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). NERSCs current flagship supercomputer is Cori, a Cray XC40 system rated at 14 Linpack petflops. (Edison, its previous XC30-based flagship, was retired around this time last year.)

It couldnt have happened somewhere else, Trewartha said. Were making progress much faster than wouldve been possible elsewhere. Its the story of Berkeley Lab really. Working with our colleagues at NERSC, in Biosciences, at UC Berkeley, were able to iterate on our ideas quickly.

To access COVIDScholar, click here.

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Supercomputer-Powered Text Mining Tool Combs Through COVID-19 Studies - HPCwire

ORNL’s Summit Ranks on Graph500 List Using Only a Fraction of its Computing Power – HPCwire

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April 30, 2020 For the first time ever and using only a fraction of its processing power, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer has entered the Graph500 ranking, a list published twice a year that benchmarks the speed at which a computer performs graph operations.

The Summit supercomputer, located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at ORNLplaced fourth in the ranking as announced during the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC19).

Graphs are present in everything we do, said Ramki Kannan, team lead for Computational Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division (CSMD) and one of the researchers working on the benchmark. Relationships between the elements of transportation systems, the reach certain people can have in social networks, and the steps involved in commercial transactions are all examples of graph problems that are part of our daily lives, he said.

Graph theory is also applicable to many other areas, such as in the mapping of biological networks of viruses and bacteria. An example of this would be using graphs to help understand the spread of COVID-19 by contact-tracing.

Fewer resources, big results

To enter the ranking, supercomputers must solve a specific type of synthetically generated graph, called a Kroneckergraph. The graphs generated by this model satisfy many of the properties found in real-world networks, including networks that are hierarchically organized into communities. In Kronecker graphs, every node is described by a sequence of attributes, and the probability of a relationship between them depends on such characteristics.

The graph Summit had to resolve to rank on Graph500 included over 1 trillion vertices with approximately 16 trillion relationships among them.

ORNLs Summit used a total of 86,016 CPU cores to solve the problem, which amounts to 45 percent of its CPU computing power, which is a far smaller fraction of its total compute power because GPUs were not used for this benchmark.

In contrast, the supercomputer that ranked first in solving this taskChinas Sunway TaihuLightused 10,599,680 CPU cores to make the same solution happen.

According to the ORNL Graph500 teamwhich also included scientists Hao Lu of the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), Kamesh Madduri and Piyush Sao of CSMD, and visualization specialist Michael Matheson and software engineer Drew Schmid of NCCSthe result achieved by Summit is a good example of computing power used efficiently.

Most teams look at this ranking and think How can we optimize and grow our systems to rank first? But we looked at it from a different perspective. We wanted to know how fast we could solve this graph problem by using fewer resources. The fact that we made it in fourth place under that philosophy is a truly remarkable thing, Kannan said.

Although other teams had been preparing to submit their metrics for years, the ORNL researchers had only 9 months to measure and submit Summits performance.

Summits place in the ranking is based on a metric called Giga Traversal Edges Per Second (GTEPS), but the system ranks first in other common metrics such as GTEPS per node, Mega TEPS per core, and GTEPS to peaknode memory bandwidth, according to observers of the ranking.

Graph500 complements the Top500 list, a biannual ranking of the worlds fastest supercomputers. Summit has placed first in the Top500 since June 2018.

About Oak Ridge National Laboratory

UT-Battelle LLC manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for DOEs Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOEs Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visithttps://energy.gov/science.

Source: Andrea Schneibel, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)

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ORNL's Summit Ranks on Graph500 List Using Only a Fraction of its Computing Power - HPCwire

University of Delaware Biologists Are Using Supercomputer Simulations to Analyze the Coronavirus – HPCwire

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April 28, 2020 Two University of Delawareresearchers have been awarded aNational Science Foundationgrant to study the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Theyre using the kinds of high-tech supercomputing tools that previously led them to new insights into other viruses, such as those that cause AIDS and Hepatitis B.

Juan Perilla and Jodi Hadden-Perilla were funded through NSFs Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program.

The researchers will use computer simulations to analyze the molecular structure of the virus that has led to the current pandemic. Learning more about the structure is essential to understanding viral entry into and infection of human cells, a first step in developing novel drugs and vaccines to combat the disease, Perilla and Hadden-Perilla said.

If you understand how something works, you can understand how to make it stop working, Hadden-Perilla said of the need to analyze how the virus functions and how it infects people. We need to know the atomic structure so researchers can determine ways to target it as they work to develop treatments and vaccines.

Using an infrastructure that connects them to their lab computers and supercomputing resources, the researchers are focusing on using supercomputers to perform molecular simulations at the atomic level.

These simulations allow scientists to study the way molecules move to learn how they carry out their functions. Computer simulations are the only method that can reveal the motion of molecular systems down to the atomic level; theyre sometimes referred to as computational microscopes.

Viruses arent static, Perilla noted, so simulations of the coronavirus are key to understanding its components and functions.

Perilla and Hadden-Perilla said their teams work could have an immediate impact on the pandemic. To enhance that potential, the researchers plan to disseminate their results broadly and quickly, estimating that they could have the basics of their model a first step in the process in place within a few weeks.

About The National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2019, its budget is $8.1 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.

Source: The National Science Foundation

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University of Delaware Biologists Are Using Supercomputer Simulations to Analyze the Coronavirus - HPCwire

LUMI: the EuroHPC pre-exascale system of the North – insideHPC

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Tomasz Malkiewicz from CSC

In this video from Supercomputer Frontiers Europe 2020, Tomasz Malkiewicz from CSC presents: LUMI: the EuroHPC pre-exascale system of the North.

The EuroHPC initiative is a joint effort by the European Commission and 31 countries to establish a world-class ecosystem in supercomputing to Europe (read more at https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/). One of its first concrete efforts is to install the first three precursor to exascale #supercomputers. Finland, together with 8 other countries from the Nordics and central Europe, will collaboratively host one of these systems in Kajaani, Finland. This system, LUMI, will be the one of the most powerful and advanced computing systems on the planet at the time of its installation. The vast consortium of countries with an established tradition in scientific computing and strong national computing centers will be a key asset for the successful infrastructure. In this talk we will discuss the LUMI infrastructure and its great value and potential for the research community.

LUMI supercomputer highlights:

Timeline:

Machine room construction: September 2019 October 2020System procurement: November 2019 July 2020System installations: Q4/2020Operations: Q1/2021-Q4/2026

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‘I love you’: How a badly-coded computer virus caused billions in damage and exposed vulnerabilities which remain 20 years on – CNN

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Skinny, with a mop of black hair falling to his eyebrows, he appeared to barely register the journalists' shouted questions, his only movement the occasional dabbing of sweat from his face with a white towel. Seated to his right, de Guzman's lawyer Rolando Quimbo had to lean in close to hear the 23-year-old's mumbled response, which he then repeated in English for the waiting press.

"He is not really aware that the acts imputed to him were indeed done by him," the lawyer said. "So if you ask me whether or not he was aware of the consequences I would say that he is not aware."

Twenty years on, the ILOVEYOU virus remains one of the farthest reaching ever. Tens of millions of computers around the world were affected. The fight to contain the malware and track down its author was front page news globally, waking up a largely complacent public to the dangers posed by malicious cyber actors. It also exposed vulnerabilities which we are still dealing with to this day, despite two decades of advances in computer security and technology.

This account of the virus is based on interviews with law enforcement and investigators involved in the original case, contemporaneous CNN reporting and reports by the FBI, Philippines police and the Pentagon.

On the afternoon of May 4, 2000, Michael Gazeley was in his office at Star Computer City, a warren of IT companies and shops selling electronics and gadgets overlooking Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor.

That connectivity cut both ways, however, as Gazeley was reminded of that afternoon.

All the phones in his office started ringing at once. First were his clients, then came non-customers, all calling frantically in the hope that Network Box could help stop a virus that was screaming through their systems, destroying and corrupting data as it went.

They all told the same story: Someone in the office had received an email with the subject "ILOVEYOU" and the message, "kindly check the attached LOVELETTER coming from me." When they opened what appeared to be a text file actually an executable program masquerading as one the virus quickly took control, sending copies of itself to everyone in their email address book. Those recipients, thinking the email was either some weird joke or a serious declaration of love, opened the attachment in turn, spreading it even further.

Office email servers were soon clogged as thousands of love letters went back and forth, disseminating the virus to more people. It turned out to be much worse than just a self-propelling chain letter. At the same time as it was replicating itself, the ILOVEYOU virus destroyed much of the victim's hard drive, renaming and deleting thousands of files.

Many of the increasingly panicked callers Gazeley was fielding inquiries from did not have backups, and he had the awkward job of explaining to them that many of their files everything from spreadsheets and financial records to photos and mp3s were likely lost for good.

"This wasn't something that people were used to as a concept, they didn't realize that email could be so dangerous," said Gazeley, recounting the first calls.

Two years earlier, Hollywood star Meg Ryan asked "is it infidelity if you're involved with somebody on email?" as the movie "You've Got Mail" introduced people to the idea of cyber-romance and that email could be used for something other than boring office work.

From Hong Kong, where the virus crippled the communications and ravaged file systems of investment banks, public relations firms and the Dow Jones newswire, the love bug spread westward as the May 4 workday started.

Graham Cluley was on stage at a security conference in Stockholm, Sweden, when the virus hit Europe. He had just finished describing an unrelated virus which targeted a now-defunct operating system, hijacking users' accounts to broadcast messages to their coworkers, including "Friday I'm in LOVE." This, Cluley cracked, was likely to cause severe embarrassment for most people, but could potentially lead to some office romance.

As the conference broke for coffee, attendees' mobile phones and pagers began going off wildly. Several guests approached Cluley, asking if the virus he'd described was spread via email. He assured them it wasn't and, anyway, it was limited to a niche system that most people didn't use.

"They said, Well, that's weird because we're suddenly getting loads of emails with the subject line 'I love you,'" Cluley said in an interview from his home in the United Kingdom.

When Cluley turned on his own phone, he was bombarded with notifications of missed calls, voice mails and text messages. Back home, Cluley's employer, the anti-virus firm Sophos, had been getting "absolutely hammered" with phone calls from clients begging for help and journalists trying to understand what the hell was going on.

Cluley raced to the airport to catch a flight to London, and even traded phone batteries with a generous taxi driver as the constant stream of messages drained his Nokia cellphone of power. When he landed in the United Kingdom, a car was waiting to whisk him to a TV studio to discuss what had by now become one of the biggest tech stories in the world.

Unlike today, when many email services are run via centralized servers think Outlook.com or Gmail companies in 2000 were running email off the same servers on which they hosted their website. This could be janky, slow and startling insecure.

Back then, Cluley said, "many companies didn't have in place filters their email gateways to try and stop spam, let alone viruses."

From there, almost every major military base in the country barring a handful that didn't use Outlook watched as their email services were crippled and forced offline for hours as the problem was fixed.

Across the Potomac River, at the FBI's Washington, DC, headquarters, Michael Vatis was scrambling to get a handle on the crisis.

As anti-virus companies slowly began rolling out patches, stemming the damage and enabling companies to come back online, attention within the FBI turned to tracking down those responsible. The investigation was led by the New York field office, which soon found evidence pointing back east, beyond Hong Kong, to the Philippines.

"In a very short period of time, we ended up identifying individuals in the Philippines and seeking the assistance of Philippine law enforcement," said Vatis, now a partner at the New York law firm Steptoe. "And a very short time after that, the Philippine authorities ultimately made an arrest."

Both the technical fix and first break in the case came so fast because, for all its rapid dissemination around the world, the ILOVEYOU virus was clumsily coded and startlingly unsophisticated. It mashed together several existing pieces of malware and did little to hide its workings.

"Every single victim of the love bug got a copy of the love bug's code, the actual source code," said Cluley, the Sophos analyst. "So it was simple to write an antidote. It was no more complex than any of the other thousands and thousands of viruses we'd seen that day. But of course, this one was particularly successful at spreading itself."

As well as containing the blueprint for defeating it, the code also included some lines pointing to the identity of its author. It contained two email addresses spyder@super.net.ph and mailme@super.net.ph both of which were based in the Philippines. There was also a reference to GRAMMERSoft Group, which it said was based in the country's capital.

Without the servers to send information to and it appears the virus's author was never able to access what was sent to the server, or at least act upon it ILOVEYOU became purely an engine of chaos and destruction. It churned through email inboxes around the world and deleted files, while not actually serving the apparent original purpose of scraping passwords.

Ramones, a curly-haired 27-year-old who worked at a local bank, seemed like an unlikely computer hacker, and investigators wondered if they had arrested the wrong guy. Attention turned to the apartment's two other residents: Ramones' girlfriend, Irene de Guzman, and her brother, Onel.

Onel de Guzman who was not in the apartment when it was raided, and could not be found was a student at AMA Computer College. The college was home to a self-described hacking group, the now-defunct GRAMMERSoft, which specialized in helping other students cheat on their homework. While police could not prove initially that de Guzman was a member, officials at the school shared with them a rejected final thesis he had written, which contained the code for a program bearing a startling resemblance to ILOVEYOU.

In the draft thesis, de Guzman wrote that the goal of his proposed program was to "get Windows passwords" and "steal and retrieve internet accounts [from] the victim's computer." At the time, dial-up internet access in the Philippines was paid for by the minute, in contrast to the blanket-use fees in much of Europe and the United States. De Guzman's idea was that users in the developing world could piggyback on the connections of those in richer countries and "spend more time on [the] internet without paying."

Reading his proposal, de Guzman's teacher was outraged, and wrote "we don't produce burglars" and "this is illegal" in the margins. But while the thesis would cost de Guzman his degree, his teacher's argument about illegality would be proven incorrect.

After several days out of the public eye, de Guzman appeared at the press conference in Quezon, flanked by his lawyer and sister. Asked whether he might have been responsible for the virus, he responded through his lawyer: "It is possible."

"He did not even know that the actions on his part would really come to the results which have been reported," his lawyer said. To a ripple of laughter from reporters, the lawyer added, after a mumbled consultation with de Guzman: "The internet is supposed to be educational so it should be free."

Asked what he felt about the damage caused by the virus, de Guzman said "nothing, nothing."

While Philippines lawmakers did rush through a law criminalizing computer hacking soon after the ILOVEYOU incident, it could not be applied retroactively.

Two decades on, this reaction still annoys Cluley, the Sophos investigator. "It's the kind of thing that has you thumping your head against a wall in frustration," he said. "This was when malware was just beginning to get a little nastier and a little more malicious and more financially motivated."

"This wasn't the message we wanted to give young people, that this was all right."

"It had an enormous effect," said Vatis, the former NIPC director. "It was really worldwide front page news for at least several days in a way that computer attacks had not been in the past."

While previous attacks had caused more direct damage, and those in the future would be more sophisticated and far more effective in their goal, they were also much more limited in scope. Other viruses have targeted specific locations, businesses or governments. ILOVEYOU could affect just about anyone running Windows Outlook.

"It hit home in a way that other previous attacks did not," Vatis said. "It made people aware that this is not just something that happens to defense agencies or owners of websites, this is something that can happen to any Joe or Jane sitting at home on the computer or in the office, and it can shut you down and really disrupt your ability to operate."

And while email clients have gotten better at filtering out malicious-seeming messages, the main weakness that ILOVEYOU exploited remains impossible to fix.

"You can update your operating systems or you can have the best email filters in the world, but you can't patch the human brain," said Cluley.

"Humans are always the weak link," Vatis said. "It's almost always easier to exploit a human through some social engineering gambit than it is to crack, you know, some technological defensive measure."

One thing that has changed somewhat since ILOVEYOU is how prepared most companies are for such an incident. Most at least have some kind of anti-virus protection, and back up their data. But all the experts who tackled ILOVEYOU two decades ago agreed that there remains a startling degree of complacency over potentially devastating cyber attacks.

"What's frightening is that 20 years after, there are still plenty of organizations who don't take this seriously until they are hit," said Gazeley, the Hong Kong cybersecurity expert. "So many people still don't plan ahead."

What largely prevents such an attack is that most companies and individuals outsource running email servers to those who know how to do it best primarily Microsoft and Google and rely on them to filter incoming messages, cut out spam and warn of potential attacks.

Were a worm like ILOVEYOU to find a way past those filters, and spread fast enough to prevent the companies rolling out a patch, the possibility of it doing major damage remains. There is no reason to expect that the average user has grown any less complacent today. With email providers doing most of the work in spotting dodgy messages, they may actually be more so.

Vatis said that the potential effect on online communications of such a worm could be "devastating," as could the knock on the global economy as companies go offline or lose business all at once. He compared the situation to people who avoid getting vaccinated for the flu every year.

"That's not a problem for society as a whole until the vaccination rate drops below a certain percentage," he said. "And then you have a lot of people getting really sick."

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'I love you': How a badly-coded computer virus caused billions in damage and exposed vulnerabilities which remain 20 years on - CNN

Atos engages in the fight against Covid-19 – insideHPC

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An effective response to COVID-19 requires global action and collaboration between public and private actors, said Elie Girard, Atos CEO. We are proud to be helping those working intensively on the frontline in an effort to counteract the pandemic by sharing our resources and solutions. We are now in uncharted territory, but Atos commitment and willingness to help citizens live and work sustainably and confidently in a changing digital landscape during the pandemic and in the long term, remain intact.

Helping local authorities contain the spread of the virus

The increasing mobility of the population makes containment of diseases harder and the need to act quickly and effectively is essential at every level.

Leveraging its public sector and healthcare experience, Atos has designed EpiSYS, an Epidemic Management System (EMS) which gives healthcare professionals a precise overview of an epidemiological situation by storing and managing all patient data and data related to the virus, including tracking and tracing patient incident reports, in real-time.EpiSYS was adopted in Austriain early March to help control the spread of Covid-19 and take strategic decisions in the current crisis.

Mobilizing supercomputers and machine learning to speed up research

Atos high-performance computers can count thousands of times faster than standard computers. Whether they are used for simulation, to build predictive models, analyze the progress of the disease or develop new treatments, these powerful machines are performing very demanding calculations that prove to be essential intodays race againstthe clock.

Atos supercomputers are at work around the world. Two of the most powerful supercomputersin France, Joliot-Curie, operated at the CEAs supercomputing center (TGCC), and Occigen, operated at CPUs supercomputing center (CINES), areprovidingurgent computing access to large computer resourcesto European research teams involved in the fight against COVID-19.

In theUK, Atos BullSequana supercomputer at theHartree Centreis providing computing power to run simulations of Covid-19 protein behavior. In addition, the JADE national AI supercomputing facility provided and managed by Atos is being used by UK researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton working in the area of biomolecular simulations. This supercomputer, owned by Oxford University and hosted at the Hartree Centre, part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), contributes towards efforts in the development of a vaccine against SARS-COV2, anti-viral drugs and to better understand the molecular architecture of the virus and how it functions.

Similarly, Atos supercomputers inBraziland theCzech Republicare also driving research around Covid-19.

Providing business continuity with safe and flexible digital environments

Atos technologies also play a critical role in preserving business continuity amid the pandemic. To answer the challenges that organizations are facing with home office becoming the norm, Atos has built and adapted acomprehensive workplace servicesofferingand delivers end-to-end solutions, from remote management to wireless technology, whileensuring the security of any enterprise environment.

It is also essential to ensure government and public authorities are able to continue to supply basic daily needs for every citizens life. In the past weeks, Atos has been able to guarantee service continuity with QoS (Quality of Service) for power utilities and water supplies, likeScottish Water,in various countries thanks to an unwavering commitment and expertise in these industries.

Sharing our data science skills with the research community

Atos is taking part in the Covid19 Dataset Challenge,an international competition launched by the White House, asking AI researchers to apply machine learning tools and techniques to help provide answer to key questions about the disease. Atos has a dedicated team of 10 experts working on the project.

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Pete Lau on the wonders of 5G – Fortune India

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Where would the smartphone be 10 years down the line?

The smartphone of the futurewhatever the devicewill be one touch-point of many. And each person will have an account, which is unique. People ask: Will the phone be the centre of the future or the smart display? And my answer is its the account which lives in the cloud and functions on the cloud, and is, therefore, your connection for interaction with everything. So, your personal supercomputer and your super assistant is that account functionality in combination with the cloud.

What about privacy?

Everything will be cloud-based. Security will also be cloud-based or cloud-centric. It [security] would be a challenge, but privacy would be the biggest challenge, as you have so many touch points and incredible computing power. It is not just a challenge for the smartphone industry but also for the entire technology or mobile Internet industry of connectivity. If we look at, for example, in China, transactions fora store or a hotel can be done through a smartphone by using facial recognition. That is an example of something that is not even device-based, but actually cloud database-powered face recognition. And then in the here and now, the future will only consist of more of such things. So, privacy gets the highest priority.

There are no set standards for 5G technology among companies and countries. Is that a challenge?

I believe working out a common standard would be inevitable, even though I am not an expert in network technology.

How will you develop the 5G ecosystem? Whats your plan for India in light of the current situation in the telecom sector?

To answer the second question first, what we see in India is that the carriers, the government, and the relationship, and what is evolving, it is behind some markets. But globally, 5G transition is moving forward; for example, at the flagship level for chipset offerings, there arent any that are not 5G. So, this sort of transition is going to be brought forward and I believe India would be able to follow quickly. We saw this in 2014 when we were starting in the Indian market with 4G and the quick transition into 4G in India. Regarding the 5G ecosystem, One Plus is not just looking to build an ecosystem, but is focussing on the foundation of a seamlessly connected user experience; it is really about getting the platform right for whatever we do and whatever we create.

How will the consumption of data change because of 5G? How will data change the behaviour of users?

I see data consumption in the next five years going up significantly. With the realisation of seamless connectivity, peoples behaviour, and their consciousness of data consumption will decline or perhaps move quickly to the point of something that people dont even care about. Seamless connectivity will also enable data consumption to perhaps be 10-100 times of what it is now in the next five years. Theres not so much a specific consciousness of the fact that you are consuming so much data. Its just the reality of the way things will be.

So consuming data would become part of the system?

Indeed. Because people wont have that focus or care or concern for data; perhaps children born in 2020 would never know what data or the concept of data consumption actually is.

Why should a customer move to 5G?

I see it as the human pursuit of speedsomething thats unending. Many think 4G LTE speed is good enough. But there will be a transition when the current speeds wont be enough. For instance, we could compare 4G LTE to what was available 10years ago: services available now [say, video streaming on mobile phones] versus the technology available then. As a joke, you can say it will make people lazy. But the thing is, it [5G] will allow people to focus on what matters most to them. A whole lot of things can be handled by the super assistant we talked about. For example, a business trip. The whole process of planning, tickets, check-ins, locations, and timeall of that can be taken care of by it. Life for humanity will be more convenient.

What are the industries 5G would disrupt? Or will it disrupt the way a human functions?

From my perspective, its definitely impacting everything. We can already see that with the transition to 4G, the number of industries impacted was significant. Some of the reports looking at the impact of 5G across industries are also showcasing what the technology would become in 5-10 years.

You recently completed six years in India. How has the countrys smartphone market changed, and how have you helped change it?

Six years ago, when we came to India, there were many brands in the marketboth local and international. But if we look at the number of brands now, it is fewer. In 2014, the average price of a device sold was under $100, from what I remember. And 4G was not very well dispersed. For most new players, the takeaway was to launch a product that hits that price point of $100 or less, maybe around 5,000. But we were launching a product that was already over 20,000. People would ask: Who are you selling that to? The results show demand, from the users perspective, for that type of product was there, and will continue to be there. Six years later weve seen tremendous change. Brands are much more focussed and the average quality of the offering is much higher. If you look at our contribution to the industry, it would be around quality standards. By consistently following this higher standard of quality, we created confidence in the industry that with a quality product, users will know, and understand, and rally behind that product.

(This interview was originally published in the March 2020 issue of the magazine.)

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Pete Lau on the wonders of 5G - Fortune India

The International Order After COVID-19 – The Asean Post

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Running parallel to the global battle against the coronavirus pandemic is a tug of war between two competing narratives about how the world ought to be governed. Although addressing the pandemic is more urgent, which narrative prevails will have equally far-reaching consequences.

The first narrative is straightforward: a global health crisis has further demonstrated the need for multilateralism and exposed the fallacy of go-it-alone nationalism or isolationism. The second narrative offers the counterview: globalisation and open borders create vulnerabilities to viruses and other threats, and the current struggle for control of supply lines and life-saving equipment requires that each country first take care of its own. Those in the first camp regard the pandemic as proof that countries must come together to defeat common threats; those in the second see it as proof that countries are safer standing apart.

At first blush, COVID-19 seems likely to corroborate the argument for a more coordinated international approach. Given that the coronavirus does not stop at national borders, it stands to reason that the response should not be constrained by them either.

This makes perfect sense from a public-health perspective. If COVID-19 persists anywhere, it will remain an incipient threat everywhere, regardless of efforts to wall it off. The more widely that testing kits and, when discovered, treatments and vaccines, are distributed, the faster the pandemic will be vanquished. The more that scientific knowledge is shared, the faster those drugs will be developed. And, in the meantime, the more that governments coordinate on matters such as travel restrictions and social distancing, the smoother the exit from this crisis.

The pandemic also would seem to call for greater collective efforts to resolve deadly conflicts, and not only as a means of helping vulnerable local populations. Owing to the additional socioeconomic stress introduced by the pandemic, ongoing intra- or inter-state conflicts could lead to a further loss of governmental authority or even state collapse in countries already near the breaking point. Beyond the obvious human costs, this would create new and growing pockets where COVID-19 could spread unchecked; larger migration flows over less regulated borders; and greater opportunities for violent non-state actors to exploit the chaos, take root, and expand.

Finally, there is a clear economic rationale for pursuing international cooperation. By helping the hardest-hit countries, all countries can soften the blow they will experience from the looming global meltdown.

Yet the pandemic also strengthens the pull of the rival view. Crises tend to intensify and accelerate pre-existing trends and severe crises all the more so. The COVID-19 pandemic has coincided with a period of mounting populist and nativist resistance to globalism and the post-war international order, fuelled by inequities both within and between countries.

The global economic system that emerged following the end of the Cold War has benefited the few at the expense of the many, its detractors say, not without reason. Similarly, the United Nations (UN) has come to seem like a relic, favouring victors of a long-ago war, reflecting obsolete power relations, and denying a sufficient voice to countries of the global south, many of which had yet to achieve independence by the time the UN was founded in 1945. In parallel, and especially since the 2008 global financial crisis, socio-economic discontent has given rise to various forms of populism, nativism, and authoritarianism in countries ranging from Russia, Turkey, and Hungary to Brazil, Israel, and the United States (US).

These dynamics could well be strengthened by the COVID-19 crisis. One vision of the future looks like this: In the coming months and years, dire domestic needs will make international solidarity seem like an unaffordable luxury. As national economies contract, resources will shrink, and governments will struggle to provide for their own populations. Political leaders will find it exceedingly difficult to justify allocating funds to foreign development assistance, international health and relief organisations, refugees, or diplomatic initiatives. Mounting discontent at home will translate into even greater anger and disillusionment toward the international system.

Moreover, any remaining US claim to global leadership will have been battered, owing to the Trump administrations mishandling of the pandemic, the sense that it was unable to care for its own, let alone others, and the perception that it withdrew into itself when the chips were down. China, buoyed by its camera-friendly demonstrations of generosity at the height of the crisis, might step up to fill the leadership vacuum. But it also could find itself weighed down by its own botched handling of the outbreak, and by the domestic political implications of a profound economic contraction.

Regardless of who (if anybody) emerges on top, it is hard to believe that the socioeconomic despair caused by the pandemic will not prepare the ground for an even stronger nativist and xenophobic surge. In many countries, the scapegoating of foreigners and minorities has already begun.

Might a superior, stronger international order emerge at some point? Perhaps. Even before achieving victory in World War II, the Allied powers began to devise a post-war order designed to prevent the reoccurrence of another global conflagration. That order had profound weaknesses. Although it created the illusion of global governance, it could never be more effective than whatever the rival powers at its core would allow. For all its successes, one can also list monumental failures.

And yet, the system that arose from the 1940s was clearly preferable to what preceded it. In 2020, one can only begin to imagine what it would take to create a new, more sustainable order that addresses growing concerns about equality and in which more countries can find a voice. In the meantime, we may have to navigate a new world in which a free-for-all abruptly replaces existing arrangements. Even if the chaos proves temporary, it would be a sad, disruptive, and dangerous coda to the post-war era.

COVID-19 has laid bare the costs of confronting a global crisis with a flawed international system. The only worse outcome would be to confront the next crisis with no system at all.

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The International Order After COVID-19 - The Asean Post

Medical workers’ principle of mutual aid is a call to action for designers, too – CityMetric

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This article appears on CityMetric courtesy of Blueprint magazine.

This year, we entered what I was seeing as a decade of action. Along with much of the rest of the world, architecture and design as a discipline would come together to address some of the most pressing concerns of our time. We would take collective action in response to the climate emergency armed with science, data, and other tools to tackle and advance resiliency, adaptation, and sustainable practices in the built environment. We would catalyze a shift in dispositions rooted in consumption and growth by prioritizing the circular economy, the Green New Deal, affordability, and equity.

What we did not know is that as early as January we were watching the formation of the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives (a growing figure) and lay bare a number of critical gaps in our global systems. Breakdowns in these systems have required urgent responses at every level of government and leadership. International travel, exchanges, and supply chains that underlay the global economy and related socio-economic structures went from hard truths to open questions. And much of the globally coordinated action that might have been dedicated to problems with a 10-year timeline was channeled into the current crisis that appears to have immediately compressed response times to weeks or days wherever it has landed.

The near collapse and various kinds of safety netting thrown under the global economy has not only revealed its vulnerability and our personal dependencies, but also our interconnectedness. As we see the virus continue to spread across the United States, I do not have a perfect analogy to describe the series of actions connecting so many different people with so many different needs, but I can speak to its power fairly clearly having witnessed an interconnected and expanded form of mutual aid.

In the emergency medical services profession (as well as in activist circles) the mutual aid agreement is a common understanding that in moments of crisis the jurisdictional boundaries between practitioners, each with distinct expertise and knowledge, dissolve. The medical profession as whole unites around a common problem to work quickly to address urgent conditions and effectively manage contingency. Everyone comes together with their resources materials, skill, time, and effort to help in whatever way they can.

The Covid-19 crisis has placed enormous pressure, to a degree that much of the world has never seen, on the health care industry and its workers. Despite preparedness and selfless response efforts in hospitals and other health care centers, the crisis not only overwhelmed the system but also created a direct threat to the lives of both providers and the sick. Under the current conditions, the call for mutual aid is extended well beyond the health care industry. The industry cannot handle this crisis on its own. The crisis requires spatial and social practices to work in tandem with health care measures. Our situation demands the mobilization of resources and quick action from a broad range of perhaps unlikely disciplines to meet urgent needs by any means possible.

What we have learned from design practice and applied research is that with the most pressing issues, we often work best in collaboration with other disciplines that inform our work, and with new tools and new perspectives, be they from science, engineering, or the arts. Whether we could anticipate the many Covid-related needs that emerged quickly and urgently, I have recently found that as architects and designers we are primed for working together across boundaries toward a mutual benefit and, that this brings me a bit of optimism in these difficult times. Our willingness to act has opened many of our eyes and minds to what we as designers and global citizens have to offer.

To share a few examples, though there are many more there are designers at work on problems that are material and require pragmatic action, and simultaneously, those who are analyzing and calling out inequity as the virus affects those who face discrimination and have less access to care than others.

Operation PPE was sparked by a call from medical professionals at Weill Medical to faculty at Cornell University's College of Engineering, who then connected with Professor Jenny Sabin, director of the Matter Design Computation program at Cornell, who rebooted the recently vacated fabrication labs at AAP to produce 3D-printed personal protection equipment. Many of our alumni and students joined in producing PPE from an open source design file and designers utilized and modified as needed.

J. Meejin Yoon is dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. (Andy Ryan)

At the Harvard Wyss Institute and the Graduate School of Design, students, researchers, and faculty responded to an urgent need for personal isolation hoods that would keep patients and doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital safer as they fight the virus in infection wards and operating rooms. By coordinating ideas and action via a Slack channel, collaborators across the design and health disciplines initiated a completely horizontal creative process so that the strongest designs could be modified and added to in real time and advance to clinical testing and production in a matter of not months, but weeks.

Kimberly Dowdell, Chicago-based architect and president of the National Organization of Minority Architects recently responded to figures citing the tragically disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths among black and Latino people in New York City and Chicago. Dowdell highlights how all of our communities, particularly those still affected by discriminatory policies in our cities, now suffer greater challenges and losses in the face of this crisis.

There are other data and design ideas emerging that may impact the future of how a crisis of such magnitude might be handled.

In the past several weeks, designers and architects have assumed the agency and responsibility we share to engage new problems and offer meaningful service to a cause that asks us to reach far beyond disciplinary lines. We acted quickly and were able to do so by seeing past ourselves and our claims to authorship, by working across professional boundaries, and providing crucial help where needed. Many of us already have an eye on the long term and are asking important questions that I wonder if despite the holding pattern between worry and hope most of us share we can better understand in terms of what it will take to come together around a mutually beneficial plan for recovery, and for the future. A future where we enact our interconnectedness not as a shared vulnerability, but a strength extending the practice of mutual aid beyond the medical profession to coordinate action and contributions to shared problems in a shared world where design and planning have critical agency.

J. Meejin Yoon is the Gale and Ira Druckier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University.

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Medical workers' principle of mutual aid is a call to action for designers, too - CityMetric

COVID-19 Great Depression: Global Ecosocialism Is the Way Out – NEWS JUNKIE POST

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Suffering in numbers

The abstract science of mathematics is a language like music. But while music is in the realm of pure emotion, the language of mathematics only speaks to the mind not the heart. Numbers and equations do not lie. They are not, by essence, subjective. This being said, when the numbers are those of the dead, they can have the chilling emotional effect of a meat cleaver cutting through bones. While we have tried to stay away from the mainstream media litany of the death tolls, on April 25, 2020 we had passed 200,000 deaths globally. In the United States alone, by the end of April, the COVID-19 pandemic will have killed more people than the reported 58,220 US soldiers who died during the Vietnam war.

Neoliberal and populist war presidents?

Ironically, two political leaders who are supposed to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum have framed their COVID-19 crisis narrative as a war. One is French President Macron, a neoliberal globalist champion, and the other one is nationalist-populist US President Trump. Both, however, have a lot in common: they are proponents of global corporatism, are Commanders in Chief of their respective military but did not serve in the military. Trump was a reputed Vietnam war draft dodger, while Macron was born too late to have done the mandatory French military service. In either case, their war on COVID-19 is not going well. As matter of fact Trump and Macron are winning their war on COVID-19 like the US won in Vietnam or NATO won in Afghanistan. And incidentally, if the COVID-19 is a world war, both of these presidents and other world leaders should consider ordering a military draft.

The COVID-19 killing spree is not yet over, even in its first installment. It is hard to forecast, but in a month or two, once countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the entire African continent are computed in the tragic body count, we could globally reached 350,000 deaths. The worldwide government incompetence will continue and the litany of deaths will keep ticking away. Meanwhile human suffering is not a great concern for capitalisms ruling class, the economy and the financial markets are now their main focus.

Capitalisms callous imperatives

Never mind their countless failures and shortcomings through the crisis, what mostly concerns our callous and cynical political and business leaders is COVID-19s impact on the global economy. While the lockdown of half of humanity could have been beneficial for an extra couple of weeks from a healthcare stand point, the enforcers of the imperative of global capitalism do not care. As far as salvaging what can still be saved from the current economic collapse, the political technocrats who serve the billionaire class are perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of human lives. People are dying. Poor people are starving even in the so-called developed world and relying on food banks in places like Queens, New York; New Orleans; or Seine St. Denis, in Paris poor northern suburbs. But what truly matters for the worshippers of capitalism is the well being of their free-market God, a profane deity brought to its knees by the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanity is facing a time of reckoning. Despite what the global ruling class hopes for, the global economy has collapsed, and things will never return to normal.

The COVID-19 Great Depression

In just two months, the global economy was brought to a standstill. Airplanes are not flying; factories are not manufacturing, with the exception of face masks; oil has become worthless; three billion people are not consuming, at the exception of food products. The imposed hiatus for most global consumption and circulation of people and goods has blown a giant hole in the complex capitalist edifice. The main question now is will it recover. While the notion of a Great COVID-19 Depression has become accepted, governments worldwide are trying to give their citizens the idea that ultimately it will be okay again. As during the crash of 2008, worldwide national or supra-national banking institutions have followed the lead of the US Federal Reserve. Worldwide, the equivalent of about $7 trillion have been printed, and they are in the process of being injected in the financial markets. Without this, Wall Street and the other markets would already be worth as little as a barrel of US crude oil.

The oil war has come home to roost in the US

On April 21, the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) benchmark for US crude dropped below zero. As matter of fact, it was trading at -$4.29 a barrel. Needless to say, despite the federal money injection, the impact on the US economy energy sector will be catastrophic. This situation was completely predictable. It was years in the making, with one geopolitical blunder after another. After all, for decades the US and its Saudi allies have used oil price as a weapon. The oil war has come home to roost.

During the Clinton administration an oil price drop was used against Saddam Husseins Iraq; Bush Jr.s administration used it against Iran; and the Obama administration used it against Russia as a retaliation over Ukraine. The Trump administration has applied the same policies with regime change goals in Iran and Venezuela. Like his predecessors, the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin-Salman, has been fully on board for decades. The mechanics are simple: you try to achieve your regime change goals by bankrupting another countrys economy, especially if it mainly relies on oil extraction, as does Venezuela. But Maduro is still in place and the Iranians are holding on against all odds.

The Trump administration, despite its claim of being an America-First isolationist, has dutifully followed the post World War II US empires geopolitical strategy of asserting a worldwide dominance, even bigger than the Monroe doctrine, by engineering failed states. It is likely, however, that with 26 million unemployed, millions relying on food banks to eat, and an economy that has imploded, the US empire will have to scale back its ambitions. For global neoliberalisms prodigal son, Emmanuel Macron, the economic and social landscapes are equally grim.

Anger in France: la racaille & Gilets Jaunes new sans-culottes?

Despite the tough lockdown for more than six weeks in France, clashes have occurred between youths in poor French suburbs and the police. It started Saturday April 18 in Villeneuve La Garrenne with what appears to have been excessive police force against a motorcyclist. From there, it snowballed to the poor suburbs in other parts of Paris and elsewhere in France, specifically in Strasbourg, Roubaix and a Lyon suburb. In Strasbourg a police station was set on fire. The French far-right has done its best to capitalize on the incident, which involved mainly young French citizens of North African or African origin. The far-right populist leader of the Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen, called for a severe crackdown on the culprits of the social unrest. She made the racist claimed that la racaille (the human scum) had to be neutralized. Le Pen also attacked the Macron administration for doing something right, which was the release of 8,000 prisoners from prisons to avoid COVID-19 mass infections. This was to be expected from racist tough-on-crime Le Pen, but Eric Ciotti, a congressman from Les Republicains, a party that is supposed to be less Fascist than Le Pens, went a step further and called for Lintervention de larmee et un couvre feu (a deployment of the military and a curfew).

Most people understand that, without the work of the six million French citizens of North African or African origin, Frances confinement would be a lot more challenging. Just like in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles or New Orleans, the mothers and fathers of the angry youths in France are largely the ones who have kept the country going during the lockdown, day in and day out, often risking their lives, anonymously. They are the clerks in supermarkets, the truck drivers and other delivery persons, the janitors, the garbage collectors, the bus drivers and low-paid support staff in hospitals and nursing homes. Generation after generation, since the early 1960s, the largely North African immigrants have done the hard work that the Caucasian French no longer care to do. Former president Chirac called this social inequality a fracture sociale in the 1990s. So it was identified but never fixed, and the COVID-19 crisis has just made it more blatant. France will ease its lockdown after May 11. After this, if the social inequalities are not addressed by actions instead of only words, the angry youths of the poor suburbs could be joined by the Gilets Jaunes, whose movement just went underground.

Ecosocialism equation: climate crisis + COVID19 = systemic change

So far the central banks remedy quantitative easing, a euphemism for printing money, has been largely futile. The 3 trillion dollars and 1.5 trillion Euros injected are financial band-aids on our global economical Titanic. If this doomed ship represents our pre-COVID-19 mode of development, it should be cheerfully sacrificed along with the giant cargo ships and planes, which are the nervous system of a globalization that is chocking on itself. The unfolding COVID-19 crisis has fully exposed the failures of governance and socio-economic systems worldwide.

Beyond their short-term post-COVID-19 strategies, few policy makers or business leaders have any valid answers. The ruling class model of globalization, based on corporate imperialisms core principle of profit over people, is in ruins. In the middle of an unstoppable worldwide paradigm shift, so-called leaders and thinkers are in paradigm paralysis. They are trapped in a pre-COVID-19 reality bubble, unable to think outside the box.

As citizens of the world, we may look ahead possibly to a better future for the many. One critical systemic problem unlikely to survive COVID-19 is the extreme social inequality driven by hyper-capitalist wealth concentration. In a nutshell, the existential problem of capitalism that could cause its end is as follows: exactly 2,019 billionaires worldwide have more wealth than 60 percent of the world population. This is not only immoral but also unsustainable. Let us travel back in time to 1788 for a moment. In France absolute King Louis XVI, who presumably combined the power of Macron and the wealth of Frances richest man Bernard Arnault, thought he was firmly in power. But within a year he was swept away by the French Revolution. The motto of the revolution and subsequent French Republic was Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. These three notions still have power and value. If climate justice is added to them, this could be the foundation of an ecosocialist society.

While the Great Depression of 1929 unquestionably triggered the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, humanity cannot afford for that history to repeat itself. The COVID-19 Great Depression upon us might be capitalisms end game and the birth of a new global ecosocialist era based on social equality, real democracy with sound governance, zero economic growth, zero global military spending, and respectful harmony with what is left of the natural world.

Editors notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photograph one by Larry Goodwin; two from the archive of Urban Museum; three and five from the archive of The National Guard; four by David Shankbone; seven by Lanpernas; eight by Francisco Anzola; nine by Denisbin; ten and twelve by Gilbert Mercier; and eleven from the archive of Leigh Blackall.

Live interview on Gilbert Mercier with Bob Schlehuber and Jamarl Thomas of Radio Sputniks Political Misfits.

Live interview on Gilbert Mercier with Sean Blackmon and Jackie Luqman of Radio Sputniks By Any Means Necessary.

Live interview on Gilbert Mercier with Radio Sputniks Loud & Clear.

Live interview on Gilbert Mercier with Inayet Wadee of Salaamedia.

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COVID-19 Great Depression: Global Ecosocialism Is the Way Out - NEWS JUNKIE POST

Government Oppression in George Orwell’s 1984 …

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The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is an American classic which explores the human mind when it comes to power, corruption, control, and the ultimate utopian society. Orwell indirectly proposes that power given to the government will ultimately become corrupt and they will attempt to force all to conform to their one set standard. He also sets forth the idea that the corrupted government will attempt to destroy any and all mental and physical opposition to their beliefs, thus eliminating any opportunity for achieving an utopian society.

The novel shows how the government attempts to control the minds and bodies of it citizens, such as Winston Smith who does not subscribe to their beliefs, through a variety of methods. The first obvious example arises with the large posters with the caption of Big Brother is Watching You (page 5). These are the first pieces of evidence that the government is watching over its people. Shortly afterwards we learn of the Thought Police, who snoop in on conversations, always watching your every move, controlling the minds and thoughts of the people. (page 6). To the corrupted government, physical control is not good enough, however. The only way to completely eliminate physical opposition is to first eliminate any mental opposition. The government is trying to control our minds, as it says thought crime does not entail death; thought crime is death. (page 27). Later in the novel the government tries even more drastic methods of control. Big Brothers predictions in the Times are changed. The government is lying about production figures (pages 35-37). Even later in the novel, Symes name was left out on the Chess Committee list. He then essentially vanishes as though he had never truly existed (page 122). Though the methods and activities of the government seem rather extreme in Orwells novel, they may not be entirely too false. Nineteen Eighty-Four is to the disorders of the twentieth century what Leviathan was to those of the seventeenth. (Crick, 1980). In the novel, Winston Smith talks about the people not being human. He says that the only thing that can keep you human is to not allow the government to get inside you. (page 137). The corruption is not the only issue which Orwell presents, both directly and indirectly. He warns that absolute power in the hands of any government can lead to the deprival of basic freedoms and liberties for the people. Though he uses the Soviet Union as the basis of the novels example, he sets the story in England to show that any absolute power, whether in a Communist state or a Democratic one, can result in an autocratic and overbearing rule. When government lies become truths, and nobody will oppose, anything can simply become a fact. Through the control of the mind and body the government attempts, any hopes of achieving an utopian society are dashed. The peoples minds are essentially not theirs anymore. The government tells them how to think. Conformity and this unilateral thinking throughout the entire population can have disastrous results. Orwell also tells us it has become a world of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons. Warriors fighting, triumphing, persecuting 3 million people all with the same face. (page 64).

George Orwell was born in India and brought up with the British upper class beliefs of superiority over the lower castes and in general class pride. A theme very prevalent in his novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four certainly no exception, is this separation in the classes. The masses are disregarded by the Party. This is a theme which is fundamental to the novel, but not demonstrated as fully as the devastation of language and the elimination of the past. (Kazin, 1984). Kazin also states in his essay that:

Orwell thought the problem of domination by class or caste or race or political machine more atrocious than ever. It demands solution. Because he was from the upper middle class and knew from his own prejudices just how unreal the lower classes can be to upper-class radicals, a central theme in all his work is the separateness and loneliness of the upper-class observer, like his beloved Swift among the oppressed Irish. (Kazin, 1984).

This feeling of superiority somewhat provokes and leads to the aforementioned corruption of absolute power. As the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is not even so much that the rulers want to become corrupt, but they cannot grasp the idea of an absolute rule. They, as Kazin stated, cannot comprehend the differentiation within the system, and thus become corrupt. This ultimately prevents achieving an utopian society where the upper class people want to oppress and the lower class want to rebel.

Orwell had strong anti-totalitarianism points of view and greatly satires Socialism, even though he still insisted he was a Socialist in its pure form, in this novel and in Animal Farm. Many consider that Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually an extension of Animal Farm. In Animal Farm, Orwell

left out one element which occurs in all his other works of fiction, the individual rebel caught up in the machinery of the caste system. Not until Nineteen Eighty-Four did he elaborate on the rebels role in an Animal Farm carried to its monstrously logical conclusion. (Woodcock, 1966).

The two books primary connection is through the use of the totalitarian society and the rebel, and as stated some believe Nineteen Eighty-Four to simply be an extension of Animal Farm. Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, brings everything to an even more extreme but even scarier is the fact that is more realistic, such as in a Nazi Germany environment. Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered to have great pessimistic undertones, Orwells prophecy if you will. It is also not known whether it was intended as a last words, though it was his final work, as he collapsed and was bed-ridden for two years before he died. He did marry several months before his death saying it gave him new reason to live. Orwells creation of Winston Smith shows a character who is:

in struggle against the system, occasionally against himself, but rarely against other people. One thinks of Orwells having thrown his characters into a circular machine and then noting their struggle against the machine, their attempts to escape it or compromise themselves with it. (Karl, 1972).

Orwell writes more about the struggle as a piece of advice than anything else. This novel was widely considered prophetic, a warning of what could be to come if we did not take care. Orwells method was to introduce the questions, not propose solutions. Most likely he did not have the solution, but it was his solution to help bring about the awareness of the existing problem.

The corrupt government is trying to control the minds of their subjects, which in turn translates to control of their body. Orwell warns that absolute power in the hands of any government can deprive people of all basic freedoms. There are similar references in another of Orwells novels, Animal Farm, supporting the ideas of corruption and an unattainable utopian society which were presented here in Nineteen Eighty-Four. With this novel, Orwell also introduced the genre of the dystopic novel into the world of literature.

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Government Oppression in George Orwell's 1984 ...

Government oppression? Make it known

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The evolution of the dominant collectivist zeitgeist appears to be approaching a singularity:

20,000 BC - We cannot allow anyone to anger the volcano, or else the volcano might punish all of us.

5,000 BC - We cannot allow anyone to anger the gods, or else the gods might punish all of us.

1 AD - We cannot allow anyone to anger the Romans, or else the Romans might punish all of us.

1500 - We cannot allow anyone to anger God, or else God might punish all of us.

1900 - We cannot allow individualists into positions of influence.

1920 - We cannot allow just anyone to reproduce, or else they might pollute the gene pool.

1930 - We cannot allow anyone to be different, or else they might be subversive.

1935 - We will clean your gene pool for you.

1945 - We cannot allow genocide, slavery, invasion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid states, atrocities--all of it--Never Again.

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Government oppression? Make it known

Israel’s New Government Is Exploiting Pandemic to Annex 30 Percent of West Bank – Truthout

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After three indecisive elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent Benny Gantz agreed to form a unity government in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the central pillars of this new regime is the unlawful annexation of the Jordan Valley and illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. The annexation has the full backing of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Using the time when the world has been busy confronting the COVID-19 pandemic to commit more war crimes is immoral and poses new challenges for the rule of law and human rights, Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), told Truthout.

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The annexation, slated to begin in July, will ostensibly include about 30 percent of the occupied West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, and Jewish settlements containing over 620,000 settlers.

Both the United Nations and the European Union cautioned Israel that annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank would be illegal. Nickolay Mladenov, UN special Middle East envoy, said such action would constitute a serious violation of international law. Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief, noted that EU countries dont recognize Israels sovereignty over the Palestinian territory, adding it would continue to closely monitor the situation and its broader implications, and will act accordingly.

Moreover, the new deal requires that the U.S. government agree to Israels illegal annexation, making Trump complicit in the commission of Israels war crimes.

As an occupying power, Israel has transferred more than 600,000 Israelis into settlements in the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem. These actions are illegal. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies.

The International Court of Justice stated in a 2004 advisory opinion that the Israeli settlements have been established in breach of international law. The Court agreed with the United Nations Security Council that Israels establishment of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory constitutes a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Since 1967, Israel has maintained an illegal military occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel claims it acted in self-defense when it attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War and seized the Palestinian territories.

But Egypt, Syria and Jordan were neither poised to attack nor did they ultimately attack Israel. The initial assault was conducted by Israel in order to annihilate the Egyptian army and seize the West Bank.

Furthermore, it is well-established that territory cannot be lawfully acquired by war. Accordingly, in 1967, Security Council Resolution 242 enshrined the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. In 2016, the Council reiterated that language in Resolution 2334, which condemned Israel for building settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. Resolution 2334 states that Israels creation of settlements on Palestinian land has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.

Moreover, Israels establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory constitutes a war crime. The International Criminal Courts Rome Statute classifies an occupying powers direct or indirect transfer of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies as a war crime.

Trump is aiding and abetting Israels war crimes of annexation of Palestinian lands. In January, his administration unveiled its Deal of the Century, supposedly aimed at achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But the so-called deal, which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called the slap of the century, grants Israels wish list and promises to facilitate Israels repression of the Palestinians.

The Trump deal, fully supported by both Netanyahu and Gantz, formalizes the Netanyahu doctrine, which is based on the gradual and complete defeat of the Palestinian national movement and the subsequent achievement of Greater Israel through permanent occupation and annexation of land, Yaser Alashqar wrote at Mondoweiss.

BTselem, the Israeli human rights organization, warns that Trumps plan will lead to the permanent denial of Palestinians political rights and eternalize conditions similar to those of the Bantustans of South Africas Apartheid regime.

The Rome Statute provides for prosecution of an individual who aids, abets or otherwise assists in the commission or attempted commission of a crime including providing the means for its commission. By issuing his deal of the century advocating that Israel annex Palestinian territory, and ratifying Israels illegal annexation, Trump is assisting and thus aiding and abetting Israels war crimes.

Trumps approval is key to Israels ability to commit the war crime of annexation with impunity. The U.S. government bankrolls Israels illegal occupation to the tune of $3.8 billion annually. In fact, the Netanyahu-Gantz unity deal requires that Trump assent to its terms, which is all but certain.

Israel is the occupying power and thus has a legal duty to protect, not facilitate the oppression of, the occupied Palestinians.

As the World Health Organization stated, Israel, as occupying power, retains the primary responsibility to respect, protect and fulfill the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health in the occupied Palestinian territory, comprising the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, the Fourth Geneva Convention establishes Israels duty to provide medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.

Yet by April 24, there were more than 300 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the Israeli settlers, with government backing, have only increased their violent attacks on Palestinians throughout the West Bank.

PCHR issues weekly reports on Israels human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Its April 23-29, 2020 edition documents in detail Israels interference with Palestinian efforts to combat the coronavirus.

As he campaigns for the November presidential election, Trump is likely to support annexation in an appeal to his Evangelical base. Coronavirus or not this much is clear: Trump will greenlight the annexation to secure his Evangelical base going into the election, Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk tweeted.

Even liberal Zionist organizations oppose Israels annexation plan. The Israel lobby group J Street favors placing conditions on some of the billions of dollars the United States provides to Israel if it proceeds with annexation.

Annexation will turn Israel into an international pariah that perpetuates the occupation and the conflict with the Palestinians, and that thumbs its nose at international law and the international community, Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now said. Annexation will send a message to the citizens of Israel, the Palestinians and the entire world that Israel favors continuing its bloody conflict with the Palestinians and an apartheid-like reality in the West Bank over democracy and peace.

In a letter to Gantz, 220 former high-ranking Israeli security officers, including an ex-military chief, sounded the alarm. Unilateral annexation has the potential to ignite a serious conflagration, they wrote. Any partial annexation is likely to set in motion a chain reaction over which Israel will have no control, leading to the collapse of the Palestinian security agencies and of the Palestinian Authority. This, in turn, would require Israel to take full control over the entire West Bank.

There is opposition in Congress to Israels annexation of the West Bank. On December 6, 2019, in a bipartisan vote, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 326, which discourages steps by either side that would put a peaceful end to the conflict further out of reach, including unilateral annexation of territory.

On April 8, 11 Democratic Congress members released a statement invoking H.R. 326 and opposing Israels planned annexation. Amidst the current global health pandemic and financial crisis, they urged the new Israeli government not to create an additional crisis, by agreeing to move forward with unilateral annexation, the effects of which could yield additional catastrophic consequences for all parties in the region and beyond.

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Where coronavirus violence is more likely | TheHill – The Hill

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Armed groups in Libya attacked medical warehouses belonging to a hospital treating COVID-19 patients. Gender-based violence, cable theft and vandalism are on the rise in South Africa amid food shortages. In Burkina Faso, theres no safe haven from militants. People in Afghanistan, Venezuela and Brazil face extreme instability and could be the next to appear on our nightly news in unsettling images of violence.

Globally, acts of violence and coercion are occurring due to the impact of the novel coronavirus. In most places, however, stress and anxiety over the pandemic have not led to violence. For a virus that spreads globally and seems to show no mercy based upon wealth, lifestyle or the presence of insects and rodents, why are some people suffering the impact of violence and others not? And what lessons can we learn from these observations?

What Ive discovered over two decades studying the origins of violence is that violence emanates from a persons struggle for survival. Expected survival for self and kin is threatened during times of important scarcity, a topic that is uniquely front of mind for us today as we struggle under the oppression of COVID-19 uncertainty.

Governance provides security during times of scarcity. Humans engage in violence when facing a scarcity of resources. Scarcity, or fear of scarcity, triggers the human instinct for self-preservation. Without strong governance, from either the recognized government or other governing organizations, licit or illicit, violence will likely occur.

In many cases, scarcities right now will either keep tyrants in power, empower political entrepreneurs to consolidate power in weak states (the rise of more tyrants) or empower criminal networks to fill the gaps. If these do not occur, then people will organize and find their voices and power. Leaders will emerge and create new stronger institutions of civil society. In the absence of governance, we get violence.

The risk for violent outbreaks is significantly higher when a combination of scarce resources and weak governance is present. Thats one of the reasons why leaders are imposing stricter and harsher orders. North Korea, unsurprisingly, has not experienced outbreaks of violence. President Duterte of the Philippines gave a "shoot to kill order to police and military officials for anyone "who creates trouble" during the lockdown; so we dont see much trouble. Russia has instituted jail time for violating quarantine. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn essentially declared himself a temporary dictator. While the threat of violence is probably stifled under these iron fists, democracy is jeopardized.

In the absence of strong governmental authority, there is a power vacuum, and other groups like gang leaders, drug lords or militias assume that authority. For example, drug kingpins, who dont want their industry disrupted, will quell violence. Others will incite it. In Libya, as Carnegie reports, multiple armed groups are likely to weaponize the public health crisis to further their own political and social influence and could act as de facto police and enforce public hygiene as a pretext for increased power.

Similarly, the BBC predicted that coronavirus could be catastrophic for Venezuela, with its political chaos, hyperinflation and hospital shortages. Brazils president defied his own social distancing recommendations when he joined a protest in April, significantly weakening his leadership. In Latin America, drug cartels are turning these weaknesses into an opportunity, by distributing food and supplies to the people in order to increase their political capital, according to political scholar Nicola Morfini.

The U.S. is not exempt; we saw similar problems in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when an ineffective and corrupt police force led to lawlessness, looting and the formation of quasi-militia groups. But we have fewer shortages and have a combination of a strong local, state and federal government structure that makes pandemic-related violence unlikely here. Any violence we do experience will be due to a scarcity of livelihood the government-imposed shutdown that has thrown millions into economic distress.

On the other hand, governments can use a pandemic to strengthen their legitimacy if they respond capably. Were seeing less violence in the Palestinian territories, for example, where the Palestinian Authoritys president and Israels president cooperated to create a joint operations center for information sharing, coordination and delivery of scarce test kits. This competent initial reaction to COVID-19 seems to have brought some respite in the form of increased public support and decreased violence.

Studying violence in the time of COVID-19 gives us great insights. Political entrepreneurs will exploit real and perceived shortages to gain power, wealth and revenge where they perceive an opportunity. People living under strong-arm regimes will avoid violence, but they will live under coercion and corruption. People who live in places with weak institutions of governance will see the violence of this power grab. Our opportunity is to support civil society, encourage collaboration and empower the voices of the people. If we cannot avoid the violence, we can work to ensure the price was worth paying.

Gary M. Shiffman, Ph.D., is founder and CEO of Giant Oak, the creator of Giant Oak Search Technology (GOST) and the author of The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, March 2020). He teaches economic science and national security at Georgetown University.

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Where coronavirus violence is more likely | TheHill - The Hill

Serbs Bang Pots to Protest Government and Strict Coronavirus Measures – The New York Times

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BELGRADE For two nights, a cacophony of tin pans, drums, whistles, and horns has reverberated through much of Serbia as citizens, stuck at home under curfew, vent their anger at the government and its tough containment measures to curb the new coronavirus.

Serbia, which has reported 8,497 confirmed cases and 173 deaths from COVID-19, introduced stringent measures last month, including a state of emergency, closure of borders, daily curfew from 1600 GMT, and total lockdowns all weekend, including all four days of the Easter holiday.

The government has started to lift restrictions as the rate of infections slows, but said that a lockdown during the Labour Day holiday on May 1, a important celebration in Serbia, should remain in place.

The banging is due to continue on Wednesday evening, and recalls similar popular protests from 1996 to 1997 when Serbians rebelled against election fraud and the former strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

At the balcony of his apartment in Belgrade's Vracar neighbourhood, Dragan Djilas, the head of the opposition Alliance for Serbia, and a former leader of the student protests of the 1990s, used a wooden spoon to bang a pot.

"This energy (from the 1990s) has re-emerged as the people cannot endure any longer ... these lockdowns, these 80-hour incarcerations," Djilas told Reuters.

The protests also express many people's discontent with the policies of President Aleksandar Vucic, a former nationalist firebrand and former information minister under Milosevic who later adopted pro-European values, and with his Serbian Progressive Party.

PENT-UP DISCONTENT

Many in Serbia accuse Vucic and the ruling coalition of autocracy, oppression against political opponents, stifling of media freedoms, corruption, cronyism, and ties with organised crime. Both Vucic, in power since 2012, and his allies deny such accusations.

Most of Serbia's opposition parties, which are frequently divided and bickering, have boycotted parliament. They have said they will not take part in elections initially set for April and postponed until later in the year.

Bojan Klacar, the executive director of the Belgrade-based pollster CESID said the protest could damage the Serbian president and his allies, but added that a divided opposition was unable to tap into its energy. He added that heavy-handed handling of the crisis did not dent popularity of Vucic among his supporters.

From his window in a concrete, Communist-era building in the Novi Beograd neighbourhood, Dobrica Veselinovic, a prominent activist of the Ne Davimo Beograd (Do Not Drown Belgrade) rights group, played Bella Ciao, a song of Italian antifascist fighters during the World War II.

He also projected a banner reading "noise against dictatorship" and "raise your voice every evening from 2005" (1805 GMT) onto the wall of a nearby building.

"The most important thing is that people (who disagree with the government) realize that they are not alone.... We invited people to raise their voice against what is happening in society," Veselinovic said.

(This story corrects number of fatalities in paragraph 2 to 173 from 1,678)

(Additional reporting by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

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Amnesty International Warns of Human Rights Abuses Tied to COVID-19 – WTOP

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Human rights advocates are sounding the alarm about what they see as a growing number of human rights abuses tied

Human rights advocates are sounding the alarm about what they see as a growing number of human rights abuses tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[SEE: The Latest News on the Coronavirus Outbreak]

The novel coronavirus is being exploited as a pretext for oppression in nearly every region of the world, Amnesty International USA, the U.S.-based arm of the international rights group, said in a teleconference briefing on Wednesday. Leaders from South America to Southeast Asia are using the virus as an excuse to crack down on their opponents, the group said, while doing little to protect vulnerable populations such as prisoners, refugees and migrant workers.

More than 80 countries have declared states of emergency and there are growing reports of human rights abuses around the globe, said Joanne Lin, AIUSAs national director of advocacy and government affairs. Some world leaders are taking advantage of contagion in order to crack down on civilians in ways previously not seen pre-COVID-19.

The organization also raised concerns about governments that have tried to squash information about the virus, which has spread to all but one continent and killed more than 228,200 as of Thursday morning. In some cases, it said, governments have used jail time, harassment or other measures to silence media, doctors and other critics who have tried to shine light on the pandemic.

For many parts of the world still reeling from war, civil unrest, migration crises and other disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic adds yet another layer of emergency to which leaders may be unwilling or unable to respond, the group said.

While the threats to human rights vary by country, AIUSA said nearly every region of the world has cause for concern.

[MORE: The 10 Countries Seen to Care the Most About Human Rights]

Africa

Afrca, a continent of 1.3 billion people, recently saw a 43% jump in reported COVID-19 cases, according to Lin. The World Health Organization has warned that Africa could become an epicenter for the outbreak, but its health care system is already fragile, and a shortage of doctors make it even more ill-prepared for COVID-19, said Adotei Akwei, AIUSA deputy director for advocacy and government relations.

The pandemic could also cut Africas economic output in half, Akwei said, causing widespread food insecurity and putting people in extreme poverty at even greater risk.

In the meantime, Akwei expressed concern over how police across the continent are administering curfews. More than a dozen people have been killed by police enforcing curfews in both Kenya and Nigeria more than have died from the virus. In South Africa, he noted, there have been reports of police using rubber bullets, tear gas, water bombs and whips to enforce social distancing.

Asia and the Pacific

In Asia, where the virus was first detected, some officials are using the virus as a cover for oppression and disregard for human rights, said Francisco Bencosme, AIUSA Asia Pacific advocacy manager. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has given police shoot to kill orders for those who resist the lockdown. Amid calls to lessen jail overcrowding by freeing petty offenders, Sri Lankas government pardoned a notorious war criminal. In Bangladeshs refugee camps, where crowded conditions increase the risk of disease spread, older residents are left behind.

In some countries, such as India, Sri Lanka and Cambodia, discrimination against Muslims is also increasing as people begin to blame them for spreading the virus, Bencosme said. Some Muslims have had their businesses boycotted or have been denied medical care. In Sri Lanka, Muslim COVID-19 victims were cremated against family wishes.

Eurasia

As the virus moves east through Europe, some politicians are attacking the rule of law and using arrests and threats to silence critics, according to Daniel Balson, AIUSA advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia.

One of the most blatant examples is in Hungary, where the Parliament used the pandemic as justification to give Prime Minister Viktor Orban authority to rule by decree with no end date, Balson said. The government is also using the moment to pass controversial legislation, such as ending the legal recognition of trans people.

In Russia, a journalist received a death threat by the head of Chechnya after writing about the pandemic, Balson added. And in Azerbaijan, the government is using COVID-19 restrictions to justify a crackdown on opponents and critics.

Middle East and North Africa

Syria and Yemen, two countries plagued by ongoing conflicts, were in particularly dire straits before the pandemic, and the virus is likely to make the humanitarian situation in them even worse, according to Philippe Nassif, AIUSA advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

War has shattered Syrias health care system, he said. And in Yemen, 11 million people are already under the threat of famine.

Countries such as Syria, Libya and Egypt also have thousands of detainees and prisoners at risk of contracting the disease, Nassif said. Refugees from Syria and elsewhere are stuck in crowded camps with poor sanitation. The regions migrant workers, who often live in overcrowded and unsanitary accommodations, are also at greater risk of infection.

While its clear the virus has moved beyond Iran, the epicenter in the region, Nassif said Egypt had been less than forthcoming about the extent of its spread within the countrys borders.

[MORE: U.N. Official Warns of Excessive Use of Force in Latin America]

The Americas

Ongoing deportations from the U.S. to Latin America continue to be an issue for the region, as many migrants have spent time in U.S. deportation centers where its easy to acquire the disease, said Charanya Krishnaswami, AIUSA advocacy director for the Americas. Earlier in April Amnesty released a report stating that U.S. immigration officials are failing to provide detainees soap and sanitizer at detention centers, or introduce social distancing.

Prisoners in the region face the similar challenge of being confined to crowded jails, she added. One recent photo showed hundreds of inmates in El Salvador stripped and placed close together.

Several governments in the region have been dismissive of the virus or used it as a cover for oppression, Krishnaswami said. Brazils President Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed COVID-19 and, like U.S. President Donald Trump, speculated openly about unproven cures.

In Venezuela, the government of Nicols Maduro has cracked down on people trying to spread information about the virus because it doesnt want the public to know how bad things are, Krishnaswami said, adding, A global emergency is an authoritarians best friend.

On Wednesday, Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned of excessive use of force across Latin America against people seeking access to basic human rights during the pandemic. The former president of Chile said her office has received reports of arrests and detentions in various countries by police and the military while enforcing lockdowns.

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Amnesty International Warns of Human Rights Abuses Tied to COVID-19 originally appeared on usnews.com

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Amnesty International Warns of Human Rights Abuses Tied to COVID-19 - WTOP

Why Keir Starmer cosying up to Indias far-right government is utterly unacceptable – The Canary

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On 30 April, UK Labour leader Keir Starmer faced criticism for backtracking on the partys previous commitment to Kashmiri people living under Indian occupation. This comes amid rising far-right nationalism in India, and the erosion of the countrys democratic values.

Many Labour supporters of Indian heritage were clearly disappointed with Starmers decision to cosy up to Indias nationalist regime. Tribune, meanwhile, wrote that:

By folding to a pressure campaign orchestrated by the far-right BJP government, Keir Starmers statement on Kashmir today not only betrayed Labour members it abandoned a people living under brutal oppression.

On 5 August 2019, the people of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir awoke to find that their mobile phones were not working. Their streets were dotted with police and army personnel; a mass communications and internet blackout had taken place. The government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had made the highly controversial unilateral move to repeal Article 370 of Indias constitution, splitting the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union territories. Article 370 previously gave Indian-occupied Kashmir relative autonomy, allowing it to enact laws in all areas other than finance, defence, foreign affairs, and communications.

The same day that Article 370 was repealed, the Indian government placed Kashmir into a state of indefinite lockdown and mass-deployed troops. 4,000 Kashmiris were arrested, including some children; 200 politicians in the region were also arrested, including three former Chief-Ministers of the region; and hundreds of activists were arrested and detained without charge under the draconian Public Safety Act, which allows detentions of up to two years without charge.

Press freedom in Kashmir, long stifled by draconian laws, has been further muzzled in recent weeks. Independent Kashmiri photojournalist Masrat Zahra, and many others, are facing charges of anti-national activities under Indias Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Zahra faces these charges for one simple reason: she took photographs that exhibited the agonies faced by Kashmiri men, women and children under the Indian governments lockdown. She was kind enough to let me use one of her photos for this article. Indias increasingly authoritarian, far-right government will be using the photo as evidence against her with the aim of putting her behind bars for seven years.

India is facing an unprecedented rise in anti-Muslim lynchings and violence against minorities. And Islamophobic bigotry extends its arms into the modern Indian state. Indias chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, is a key example of this. In an undated video from 2014, he said that if [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, well take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, well kill 100 Muslims. He also stated in 2015 that he would (if given the chance) install Hindu idols in every Indian mosque.

The first portion of his hate speech in 2014 referred to love jihad, a concept he helped popularise in India which holds the belief that male Indian Muslims somehow secretively plot to seduce Hindu women with the aim of converting them to Islam. Conspiratorial claims such as these have no statistical backing but are widely considered among Indias political right and far right to be social norms. Adityanath has a history of contributing to communal tensions in Uttar Pradesh, with his followers once proclaiming their desire to exhume the graves of Muslim women and rape them at a mass rally.

As of April 2020, Subramanian Swamy a member of Modis governing Hindu nationalist BJP openly told VICE that he and his party see Muslims as not in an equal category to other Indian citizens under Article 14 of Indias constitution. The constitutional article right says that the State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India. Once a professor at Harvard, Swamys courses were dropped by the internationally renowned university after he published articles suggesting that Muslim Indians should have their right to vote revoked while simultaneously calling for the demolition of Muslim houses of worship.

Swamy and Adityanath continue to prosper as public figures despite their politics of hate.

As February was reaching its end just this year, a pogrom took place in Delhi. It saw Muslim men and women murdered, elderly Muslims burned alive by Hindu nationalists, and it saw arson against mosques. Qurans were defiled and burned. Muslim shops, from bakeries to clothing stores, were looted by rioters. Delhis police faced accusations of conspiring with Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) groups. And Hindu and Muslim journalists alike were harassed or attacked for trying to report on the violence. Hindutva goons even climbed atop a Delhi mosque as they set it ablaze and rooted a flag of a Hindu god (Hanuman) into its spire as a mark of intimidation.

It is not just Muslims who suffer in India, though. Christian persecution in India is also extreme. Indian Christians, like Indian Muslims, are often victims of what is termed Ghar Wapsi (home-coming) attacks by Hindu nationalists; facing violence and sometimes death for not returning to Hinduism after being pressured to leave their faith. In 2008, Indian Christians were victims of one of the worst pogroms in Indias recent history. In response to a pre-planned attack by Hindu radicals, 55,000 Christians fled the Kandhamal district of the state of Odisha. 5,600 houses and 415 villages were set ablaze; over 90 people were killed, and two women were raped. Scores of people were injured and permanently maimed. Churches and social activists reported on the destruction of almost 300 churches, as well as convents, schools and welfare facilities. The victims never found justice, just as the victims in Delhi have found no justice.

The far-right Hindu nationalism at the heart of modern Indian politics represents a potentially fatal erosion of Indias democracy. It is the greatest threat to the fabric of the countrys freedoms freedoms that are rapidly becoming more and more religiously and ethnically exclusive. And Keir Starmer should be ashamed of himself for cosying up to Modi and his anti-democratic regime.

Featured image via screenshot and Kashmiri photojournalist Masrat Zahra (with permission)

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Why Keir Starmer cosying up to Indias far-right government is utterly unacceptable - The Canary

The Virus Breaks the Camel’s Back – ChristianityToday.com

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The first confirmed coronavirus infection in Yemen was identified in a 60-year-old man on Good Friday. No additional cases have been reported since then, but that can hardly be for lack of transmission, for its difficult to imagine a country more ill-equipped to fight COVID-19s spread. This small Middle Eastern nation has endured five years of violence, blockade, starvation, and epidemic, and its medical system was ravaged before the pandemic began. The United Nations considers Yemens condition the worlds worst humanitarian crisisand its a crisis to which our government contributes.

Located at the southern edge of Saudi Arabia and bordering the Red Sea, Yemen is thought to be the home of the biblical queen of Sheba, and perhaps only biblical language can adequately convey its confluence of miseries. The prophets mournful condemnations of violence and oppression all find expression in Yemen: The combatants feet run to evil, and they rush to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and destruction are in their highways.The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths (Isa. 59:78, NRSV). Yemen illustrates all too well the way sin flows from sin (Ps. 7:1416) and how human and natural evil can conspire in our fallen world.

Yemen illustrates all too well the way sin flows from sin and how human and natural evil can conspire in our fallen world.

When Yemens civil war began in 2015, it was little noticed in the United States. Widely ignored too was the Obama administrations decision to support a coalition intervention led by Saudi Arabia to back the Yemeni government and oppose the Houthi rebels challenging its power. Then-President Barack Obama never obtained congressional authorization for US involvement in this war, as required by the Constitution, and President Donald Trump vetoed a bipartisan congressional resolution to end American involvement last year.

While neither administration permanently planted any significant number of US boots on the ground in Yemen, both backed the coalition even as it racked up credible accusations of war crimes. Washington sold the Saudi coalition weapons, including a bomb used in the Saudi school bus strike that killed 40 children. Our militarys intelligence sharing informed the coalitions air campaign as it bombed civilian targets like hospitals, schools, markets, refugee camps, weddings, funerals, food factories, and water treatment plants.

That damage to clean water sources fueled in Yemen the largest cholera outbreak on record in world history. Cholera is a waterborne disease in which diarrhea and vomiting cause catastrophic dehydration, and Yemeni cholera cases are estimated at more than 2 million in a population of 28 million. The same poor hygiene conditions that help cholera spread will spread COVID-19 too.

But the US-backed coalitions single most harmful tactic is its ongoing blockade of Yemens airports and seaports. Ostensibly intended to prevent the Houthis from obtaining weapons from Iran, it has produced famine conditions and severe shortages of medical supplies. Yemen is a desert nation that must import 90 percent of its food, so under siege, Yemen is starving. Photos of malnourished Yemeni children call to mind Holocaust victims. A Yemeni child of five years or younger dies of starvation and other preventable causes every 12 minutes.

Between war casualties, cholera, and starvation, Yemens medical system has long been overwhelmed. Only half its hospitals are functioning normally. Medicine and equipment are in short supply, and many doctors and nurses worked without pay until outside aid groups began to cover some salaries. There is no scenario in which Yemen can be prepared for the coronavirus. There is no scenario in which Yemeni COVID-19 patients will receive the care they need.

But there is a scenario in which the United States could stop adding to Yemens suffering: We could stop assisting the Saudi coalition. Politically, this should be an easy sell: It has bipartisan support in Congress and among Americans aware of the war. It would not jeopardize US securitythe Houthis have only local ambitions, and the power vacuum of civil war helps terrorist organizations rather than curbing them, most notably al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). (AQAP-linked fighters have even obtained American weapons and armored vehicles flowing into Yemen via coalition forces.)

US military withdrawal from Yemens conflict is no guarantor of peace. It will not rebuild hospitals or control epidemics. But it would make the coalition intervention impossible to continue, at least at its current scale. That could push Saudi Arabia and its allies to reach a peace deal or long-term ceasefire with the rebels after multiple failed negotiations. And it could well break the blockade, allowing in vital food and medical aid.

Open ports and a decline in violence in Yemen would give Christians an opportunity to serve the Yemeni people in ways that are now all but impossible. A NGO worker in Yemen told me few of the aid organizations that have managed to stay active in the country are affiliated with churches. That is partly because Yemen is a dangerous place for Christians, this worker emphasized. A mass shooting in 2016 included four nuns and a priest among its victims; international Christian aid workers were kidnapped and killed in 2009; and three Southern Baptist missionaries were martyred in Yemen in 2003. The Yemeni Christian population is extremely small and subject to persecution (conversion from Islam is prohibited). That likely wont change however the civil war concludes, as neither the Yemeni government nor the Houthi rebels respect religious freedom. Yemen needs spiritual care as much medical and economic aid.

In this pandemic and after, amid civil war and after, Yemen desperately needs the church. It needs Christians to imitate our God who will incline [his] ear to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed, so that those from earth may strike terror no more (Ps. 10:1718, NRSV). It needs us to embody Gods self-sacrificial care for the helpless. Yemen needs peace, and it needs our prayers.

Bonnie Kristian is a columnist at Christianity Today, a contributing editor at The Week, a fellow at Defense Priorities, and the author of A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (Hachette).

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World Press Freedom Day: The Dangers Journalists Have Faced Reporting On the Coronavirus Pandemic – Newsweek

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As the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, journalists have been tasked with a key role in helping to create awareness around the virus and inform communities on what their governments are doing to prevent its spread.

However, as press freedom advocacy groups mark World Press Freedom Day on Sunday, they are also using the day to raise awareness around the dangers and challenges journalists around the world, including in the U.S., have faced in reporting on the pandemic.

"Now more than ever, truth-tellers play a vital role in maintaining free expression and free societies," Summer Lopez, the senior director of free expression programs at PEN America, said in a statement.

Yet, she said, "increasingly, their lives are imperiled. We've seen reporters risk their own lives in emergency rooms in Queens, New York; face detention for reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in China; seen their work criminalized in Bolivia and Thailand.

In China, PEN America said in a press release, information about the coronavirus outbreak has been "suppressed" while the whereabouts of Chen Qiushia, a former human rights lawyer turned video journalist, and Fang Bin, a businessperson who began reporting on the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, are unknown after both disappeared in February after reporting on the Chinese government's handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Meanwhile, PEN America said, "reporters from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Voice of America, and TIME were expelled in March 2020."

Further, the organization said, "journalists in the Philippines, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Russia, Venezuela, and Haiti have been threatened, harassed, attacked, and arrested for their COVID-19 reporting."

"Journalism has never been more vital and has never been more at risk," Lopez said.

However, she said that while abuses were happening abroad, it was also important for Americans to "pay special attention to the threats here in the United States."

Nora Benavidez, PEN America's U.S. free expression director told Newsweek in an interview on Friday that part of that threat stems from the growing trend of government officials "at all levels of government" refusing to cooperate with journalists.

"Communities are wanting and turning to news more and governments are targeting news outlets and reporters in a growing fashion, including the president himself, who removes reporters from press briefings and denigrates reporters when he doesn't like them," Benavidez said.

Such behavior, Benavidez said, should be considered "deeply troubling". "It is not authoritarianism, but it is the kind of tactic we see that can lead to that kind of oppression," she said.

The PEN America U.S. free expression director also warned that local reporting in the U.S. has been hardhit by years of declining revenues.

That is why PEN America has launched a campaign on Capitol Hill seeking to include support for local reporting in future economic stimulus bills. The organization has further called on all 50 state governors and the mayor of the District of Columbia to also provide funding for local reporting initiatives.

"Local reporting has faced a cataclysm, now exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis," Lopez said in her own statement."And yet every day, journalists are plowing into the most serious health crisis of our lifetimes to provide truly life-saving work."

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World Press Freedom Day: The Dangers Journalists Have Faced Reporting On the Coronavirus Pandemic - Newsweek