This Guy Took a Photo of the ISS from His Backyard

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This guy took a relatively clear, awesome photograph of the ISS — the International Space Station — right from his backyard.

Sharp Shooter

A sharpshooter on Reddit posted a pretty incredible snapshot to the Space subreddit over the weekend: The International Space Station, as seen from his backyard on Saturday night.

Eye in the Sky

The user, who goes by 120decibel, explained that he nabbed the shot using what sounds like a relatively expensive telescoping rig (upwards of $7,000, according to another user’s estimate), and manually tracked the ISS in the night sky with a viewfinder (as it moves a a pretty fast clip — at about 17,500 MPH).

Cash Me Outside

You might not have a $7,000 telescoping rig and enough experience to nail thing thing in a viewfinder tonight, but according to another user on the same post, it’s not impossible to see it with the naked eye, explaining that it “looks like a bright star about 30 degrees above the horizon that crosses about a quarter of the sky” and lasts for two minutes.

They go on: “It can very easily be missed or mistaken for a plane. Good passes can be brighter than… any other planet or star in the night sky and just barely below the limit to see during the day.”

If you want to give it a shot yourself, they pointed us to Heavens Above, where you can find a list of visible ISS passes for the next few weeks, here.

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“Immunity Passports” Could Help Society Get Back to Normal

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German researchers are suggesting that “immunity passports” could be given out to workers who have already caught the coronavirus — meaning they’re now immune — in a bid to get them back to work and help speed up the return to normal society.

A mass study being planned by Germany’s public health body and a number of research groups and hospitals, The Guardian reports, will involve testing blood samples from 100,000 people for coronavirus antibodies, starting in mid-April.

The presence of antibodies in the blood indicates that the body is capable of fighting the virus — and is likely indicative that a subject was once a carrier. Such a test is inherently different than those being used right now to tell if somebody has the virus at the time of testing or not.

The idea is to give those who have these antibodies an “immunity passport” and allow them to get back to work. Once “herd immunity” is achieved in certain areas, governments could start easing restrictions in larger swathes of the country.

But before the government can start handing these passes out, there’s still one key question that needs to be answered: once a patient has successfully fought off the virus, are they really immune in the long term? As The Guardian points out, contracting SARS didn’t guarantee immunity beyond approximately a year after infection.

But experts are hopeful.

“It could be that this coronavirus causes a pretty robust immune response, which is durable and protective for much longer, maybe a year or even five years, but we don’t know because it’s a new virus,” a member of the UK government’s respiratory virus threats advisory group told The Guardian.

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The Coronavirus Has Now Killed More Americans Than September 11

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In a grim milestone, the coronavirus has now taken more American lives than Al Qaeda did on the September 11 terror attack in 2001.

According to the latest figures from CNN, the coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 3,000 people in the United States.

That’s a grim milestone, because it means the virus’s death toll has now exceeded that of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, which took the lives of 2,977.

Although the significance of the two are incomparable, and stretches far beyond their death tolls, the impact the coronavirus pandemic will have on society will be immense. Estimates show the coronavirus could still be taking lives for months — or even years — and so the full extent of its tragedy is still unknown.

In the long view, the virus seems likely to take many more American lives than Al Qaeda and ISIS combined — not to mention the virus’s global reach, which has killed more than 38,000 people around the world.

At the same time, September 11 casts such a long shadow on the national psyche that it’s been invoked repeatedly during the coronavirus pandemic. And, to be fair, there are strong resonances between the two tragedies.

Both resulted in an approval ratings bump for national leaders, for one, but over time, the historical record demonstrated profound failures of intelligence and leadership at the White House.

In the case of September 11, it gradually emerged that the Bush administration had dismissed CIA warnings that Osama Bin Laden had been intent on carrying out an attack on US soil.

And now, with the US healthcare system struggling under the weight of more confirmed coronavirus cases than any other nation on Earth, damning evidence is emerging that the Trump administration squandered the crucial six-week period after experts became convinced that the virus was going to wreak havoc in America — a window it could have used to corral medical resources and crack down on the first domestic cases to prevent them from spreading.

But perhaps the most significant parallel — and one that, in the case of the coronavirus, remains unwritten — is the story of how the nation will respond to the tragedy.

September 11 led to a pair of brutal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have dragged on to this day, alongside related regional conflicts, and have claimed the lives of what some experts estimate to be nearly half a million people. The effort has been extraordinarily expensive for US taxpayers, according to an estimate last year, costing something on the order of $6.4 trillion. And after all that, it’s hazy whether the War on Terror has even accomplished very much for national security.

The US might have stumbled in its initial response to the coronavirus, but the opportunity is still there to change course and do better. At the end of a gloomy investigation into how the pandemic is likely to play out, for instance, Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong abruptly changes tone, imagining a future in which public health investments and international cooperation craft a world that’s prepared for the next outbreak.

“In 2030, SARS-CoV-3 emerges from nowhere,” Yong wrote, in an unforgettable final line, “and is brought to heel within a month.”

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New App Attempts to Detect Signs of COVID-19 Using Voice Analysis

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A team at Carnegie Mellon University has released an app that they say can determine whether you likely have COVID-19 — just by listening to your voice.

A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions have released an early version of an app that they claim can determine whether you might have COVID-19, just by analyzing your voice.

“I’ve seen a lot of competition for the cheapest, fastest diagnosis you can have,” said Benjamin Striner, a Carnegie Mellon graduate student who worked on the project, in an interview with Futurism. “And there are some pretty good ones that are actually really cheap and pretty accurate, but nothing’s ever going to be as cheap and as easy as speaking into a phone.”

That’s a provocative claim in the face of the global coronavirus outbreak, and particularly the widespread shortages of testing kits. But Striner believes that the team’s algorithm, even though it’s still highly experimental, could be a valuable tool in tracking the spread of the virus, especially as the team continues to refine its accuracy by collecting more data.

You can use the COVID Voice Detector now to analyze your own voice for signs of infection, though it comes with a hefty disclaimer that it’s “not a diagnostic system,” not approved by the FDA or CDC, and shouldn’t be used as a substitute for a medical test or examination.

The researchers behind the project emphasize that the app is a work in progress.

“What we are attempting to do is to develop a voice-based solution, which, based on preliminary experiments and prior expertise, we believe is possible. The app’s results are preliminary and untested,” said Bhiksha Raj, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who also worked on the project. “The score the app currently shows is an indicator of how much the signatures in your voice match those of other COVID patients whose voices we have tested. This is not medical advice. The primary objective of our effort/website at this point of time is to collect large numbers of voice recordings that we could use to refine the algorithm into something we — and the medical community — are confident about.”

“If the app is to be put out as a public service, it, and our results, will have to be verified by medical professionals, and attested by an agency such as the CDC,” Raj added. “Until that happens, its still very much an experimental and untrustworthy system. I urge people not to make healthcare decisions based on the scores we give you. You could be endangering yourself and those around you.”

And at the end of the day, it’s unlikely the app will ever be as accurate as a laboratory test.

“In terms of diagnostics, of course, it’s never going to be as as accurate as taking a swab and putting it on some agar and waiting for it to grow,” said Striner, who has been working around the clock to prepare the app for release. “But in terms of very easily monitoring a ton of people daily, weekly, whatever, monitoring on a very large scale, it gives you a way to handle and track health outbreaks.”

If you have a smartphone or a computer with a microphone, using the app is simple. Users are prompted to cough several times and record a number of vowel sounds, as well as reciting the alphabet. Then it provides a score, expressed as a download-style progress bar, representing how likely the algorithm believes it is that the user has COVID-19.

Also working on the project is Rita Singh, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who for years has been creating algorithms that identify micro-signatures in the human voice that she believes reveal psychological, physiological, and even medical data about an individual subject.

“The cough of a COVID patient is very distinctive,” Singh said. “It affects the lungs so badly that breathing patterns and several other vital parameters are affected, and those are likely to have very strong signatures in voice.”

A challenge for Singh and Striner’s team of ten Carnegie Mellon researchers — who have all been working on the app from home, the campus is shut down due to the pandemic — has been gathering enough audio from confirmed COVID-19 patients, in order to train the algorithm.

To gather that data, the team reached out to colleagues around the world. Those colleagues didn’t just help them gather audio from COVID-19 patients, but also patients with other viruses, so that they could teach the algorithm to spot the differences. They even pored over news videos to find interviews with patients, and add those to the dataset as well.

“You have samples of people that are healthy, you have samples of people that might just have the flu,” Striner said. “And you have all those different recordings of all the different types of coughs, like what are all the coughs that are out there? And then that allows you to kind of spot the differences.”

It’s difficult to quantify the current version of the app’s accuracy, and both Striner and Singh reiterated that its output shouldn’t be treated as medical advice.

“Its accuracy cannot be tested currently because we don’t have the verified test instances we need,” Singh said, adding that the more people who use the app — healthy or otherwise — the more data they will have to better train the algorithm. “If it comes from a healthy person, we then have examples of what ‘healthy’ sounds like. If it comes from a person who has some known respiratory condition, we then know what that condition sounds like. The system will use all that data as counterexamples, and for disambiguating COVID signatures from those of other confusing conditions.”

Ashwin Vasan, a professor at Columbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the Carnegie Mellon research, expressed reservations about releasing the app during a moment of global health crisis.

“Despite what could be a well-intentioned attempt by a bunch of engineers to help during this crisis, this is not exactly the messaging we want to be out there,” he cautioned. “That somehow there is a nifty new tool we can use to diagnose coronavirus, in absence of the things we really need much more of, actual test kits, serologic testing, PPE for frontline healthcare workers, and ventilators for critically ill patients.”

“Let’s keep the focus on that, especially when our leaders in Washington seem unable to meet those most basic needs,” he added. “Anything else is just a distraction.”

For their part, the Carnegie Mellon team says they’re grappling with the public health implications of the app. Striner said that they’ve consulted with colleagues in the medical research community, and that they carefully considered how to fine-tune the app’s sensitivity.

“We would probably side more towards having some false positives then false negatives, if that make sense,” Striner said. “If you give someone a false negative on COVID, then they walk around and get a bunch of people sick, versus a couple extra false positives, maybe some people get tests they don’t need.”

Editor’s note March 31: This story has been updated with additional remarks from Dr. Bhiksha Raj.

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GE Workers Protest: We Want To Build Ventilators, Let Us Build Ventilators

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On Monday, General Electric factory workers staged a mass walk-off to compel the company to start mass-producing medical ventilators.

Mass Protest

On Monday, General Electric workers staged a mass protest and walked off the job.

Their demands for the company: stop going about business as usual and start mass-producing ventilators for coronavirus patients, according to The Independent. Ventilators are in extremely short supply, especially in cities hit hardest by the pandemic, so the GE workers reasonably posit that the country needs them more than their usual output of jet engines right now.

War Effort

President Trump has invoked but not actually used the Defense Production Act, which grants him the authority to compel manufactures like General Motors and General Electric to manufacture whatever is needed in a crisis. In this case, that would be medical ventilators and other supplies for overburdened hospitals.

Meanwhile, GE, which The Independent reports stands to benefit from the government’s $2 trillion bailout, recently announced that it was laying off 2,600 factory workers and half of its maintenance staff in a bid to save money — an unfortunate display of priorities in the face of a global crisis.

All Hands

“If GE trusts us to build, maintain and test engines which go on a variety of aircraft where millions of lives are at stake, why wouldn’t they trust us to build ventilators?” union leader Jake Aguanaga said during a press conference, per The Independent.

It’s reassuring to know that the nation’s factory workers are ready and willing to get to work manufacturing the supplies hospitals need, but equally unfortunate that the company’s leadership still hasn’t gotten on board.

READ MORE: Coronavirus: GE workers walk off the job and demand they build ventilators [The Independent]

More on ventilators: Experts Say Putting Multiple Patients on one Ventilator Is Unsafe

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5 Ways an Electric Bike Will Change Your Life

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You may not realize it, but electric bikes are having a bit of a moment. Ebike sales skyrocketed by 91% from 2017 to 2018, and some experts expect 130 million electric bikes to be motoring around the U.S. by 2023—far outpacing the number of electric cars and trucks projected to be on the roads by then. If you’re not already part of the crew who’s figured out how electric bikes can transform your life, we’ve rounded up the reasons why you can’t afford not to ride (pun intended) the wave. 

You’ll save money.

Swapping out drives for ebike rides is one of the quickest and healthiest ways to make giant dents in your budget. One estimate from Rad Power Bikes shows how switching your commute from car to ebike can save as much as $7,409 in a single year. 

You know your budget best. Think about your transportation costs, from Uber rides to gas money to subway fares to car maintenance, and do the quick math to see how much you can save by working an ebike into your lifestyle. 

It will revolutionize your commute. 

There’s the fantasy of a conventional bike ride into work (showing up fresh as a daisy, right on time) and the reality of a standard bike commute (harried sprints upon realizing you’re not the Tour de France biker you thought you were, trying to hide your sweaty pits from your boss). 

But a commute on an electric bike turns that fantasy into a reality. Along with shaving time off your ride—just how much will depend on your distance and terrain, but an ebike optimized for commutes can slash a 27-minute standard ride down to 15 minutes—that speed and the ease of the ride allow you to show up without looking like you need a shower and a Gatorade.

Plus, with accessories like baskets and child seats, you can ditch the car and make errands like daycare drop off and Target runs all part of your electric ride to work. 

It will help you bring a whole new meaning to weekend warrior.

But ebikes aren’t all work, no play. They’re great tools for making the most of the free time you have to explore the great outdoors, since they allow you to travel farther, faster. Easy to rack to the back of a car or to fold into the trunk or an RV, they’re mobile enough to trot out for a quick Saturday spin but long-lasting enough to get you through an entire weekend of camping trip rides.

Ebikes with fat tires can help you tackle terrain that a conventional bike can’t, while an ultra-quiet but mighty hunting bike can be an affordable way to trek through mud, sand, or snow to stake out a spot that other hunters won’t find. 

It’s not the ‘lazy’ option you might think it is.

Ebikes get dismissed as the lazy version of biking. And while it’s true that rides can sometimes seem effortless, your body is still getting the benefits of exercise. One study tracked previously sedentary adults who took up ebiking. After a month, they had greater aerobic fitness, better blood sugar control, a trend towards lowering their body fat, and, importantly, the desire to keep on riding despite other forms of exercise never enticing them before. 

Plus, there are people for whom less physically taxing rides can be a game changer. The balance and motor functions required to ride a bike can help to alleviate the symptoms of diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in aging populations. And doing it on an ebike can help seniors get all those benefits without physically exhausting themselves, making rides a great way to stay active and healthy with older relatives and friends.

You’ll be doing your part to help the planet.

Scaling back your driving miles by 5,000 per year can slash your carbon footprint by 15%, and contribute to your physical and mental wellbeing in the process. There’s never been a more critical time to start making the sacrifices that will help keep Earth healthy. So why not make a switch to electric that feels like anything but a sacrifice?

Interested in uncovering even more reasons you can benefit from an ebike? Rad Power Bikes is offering Futurism readers a free add-on accessory of up to a $100 value when you buy an ebike. Just add the promo code “FUTURISM” at checkout and get ready for the ride that will change your life. Offer expires 4/10/20 at 11:30 PDT and cannot be combined with other discounts or promotions. U.S. only.

Futurism fans: To create this content, a non-editorial team worked with RadPower Bikes, who sponsored this post. They help us keep the lights on. This post does not reflect the views or the endorsement of the Futurism.com editorial staff.

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Scientists: Astronauts Could Build Moon Base Using Human Urine

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In an experiment, a team of European researchers attempted to use the main compound in human urine and lunar regolith to create a resilient concrete.

In cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), a team of European researchers have conducted a… strange experiment. They mixed urea — the main compound found in mammalian urine — with materials, including Moon rocks, to test if we could one day use astronaut pee to build a lunar base.

The urea itself acted as a “plasticizer” — stuff that allows us to shape other harder materials into different forms. In their unusual experiment, the team used an analog of lunar regolith, or loose Moon rock, and mixed it with the urea.

The big advantage: using local materials is a lot easier — and dramatically cheaper — than lugging heavy construction supplies from Earth.

“To make geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is already there: regolith and the water from the ice present in some areas,” Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, Spain, and co-author of the study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production last month, said in a statement.

“But moreover, with this study, we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used,” Pamies explained. “The two main components of urine are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures.”

Using a 3D printer, the team squeezed out Playdough-like shapes out of the urine concrete. 3D printing has become one of the most promising ways to build structures on distant planets including the Moon and Mars.

After heating them up to a temperature of 80 degrees C (176 Fahrenheit), they found that the resulting structures could support heavy weights — even after eight freeze-thaw cycles that simulated several day and night cycles on the lunar surface.

But there’s still one minor hurdle to overcome before we decide to build Urinetown on the face of the Moon. “We have not yet investigated how the urea would be extracted from the urine, as we are assessing whether this would really be necessary, because perhaps its other components could also be used to form the geopolymer concrete,” co-author Anna-Lena Kjøniksen, professor at Østfold University College, said in the statement.

READ MORE: Astronauts could use their own urine to build moon bases one day [Space.com]

More on 3D printing on the Moon: Russia is Planning to 3D Print a Moon Base

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SpaceX Starship “User Guide” Details Private Cabins, Common Areas

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SpaceX has released an early version of a user manual for its Starship, a rocket that's meant to one day ferry up to 100 passengers to the Moon and beyond.

Starship Guide

Elon Musk-led space company SpaceX has released an early version of a user manual for its Starship, a massive stainless steel rocket that’s meant to one day ferry up to 100 passengers to the Moon and even Mars.

The five-page PDF details some of the ambitious plans the company has for its rocket, including a roomy interior for passengers to enjoy the ride.

“The crew configuration of Starship includes private cabins, large common areas, centralized storage, solar storm shelters and a viewing gallery,” it reads.

Cargo Carrier

The user manual also advertises the rocket’s utility for “rapid point-to-point Earth transport.” Intercontinental space-based long distance travel aboard a Starship was a key proponent of the company’s plans from the very start.

A massive capacity of 100 tons also means that a single Starship could launch three “geosynchronous telecom satellites” in one go — or a full constellation of smaller satellites. It could even repair satellites in space by capturing them, similarly to NASA’s retired Space Shuttle.

The manual also mentions the possibility of carrying an “in-space demonstration spacecraft” that would stay attached to the Starship to run experiments before heading back to Earth.

READ MORE: SpaceX’s Starship user guide details how it could replace the Space Shuttle and offer comfy passenger flights [TechCrunch]

More on Starship: Elon Musk Was Pretty Pissed When His Starship Prototype Exploded

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Scientists Debut System to Translate Thoughts Directly Into Text

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Researchers say they've built a system that can translate brain signals directly into text — allow users to think text directly into a computer.

Brain Reader

Researchers say they’ve built a system that can translate brain signals directly into text — a promising step toward a “speech prosthesis” that could effectively allow you to think text directly into a computer.

“We are not there yet,” University of California researcher Joseph Makin told The Guardian, “but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis.”

AI Power

Makin and his collaborators described the new system in a paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Basically, they recruited four epilepsy patients who had already had electrode arrays implanted into their brains for monitoring purposes. They asked the participants to repeatedly read sentences aloud, while collecting neural information — a dataset they then used to train an algorithm to interpret the signals even when the subjects weren’t reading out loud.

Locked In

The system still has weaknesses — most notably that it works best on sentences it’s already been trained on. But its accuracy is impressive, The Guardian reports, with an error rate of only about three percent, which is slightly lower than that of human transcribers.

According to the newspaper, the researchers behind the system hope it could be used as the basis for a communication device for people who are unable to type or speak due to locked in syndrome or similar conditions.

READ MORE: Scientists develop AI that can turn brain activity into text [The Guardian]

More on brain-computer interfaces: Facebook Just Bought a Brain-Computer Interface Startup

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Elon Musk is Shipping Free Ventilators to Hospitals Worldwide

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Elon Musk announced his renewed efforts to supply hospitals around the country — and internationally — with ventilators amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Free of Charge

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has announced renewed efforts to supply hospitals around the country — and internationally — with life-saving equipment amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“We have extra FDA-approved ventilators,” he tweeted. “Will ship to hospitals worldwide within Tesla delivery regions. Device and shipping cost are free.”

He did, however, have one caveat: the ventilators need to be put to use immediately: “Only requirement is that the vents are needed immediately for patients, not stored in a warehouse.”

“Heroic Effort”

The news comes after Musk sourced some 1,255 ventilators from Chinese manufacturers and donated them to hospitals in the Los Angeles area last week. “If you want a free ventilator installed, please let us know!” he tweeted at the time.

California governor Gavin Newsom praised the move at the time, calling it a “heroic effort,” according to Bloomberg.

Vent Rush

Hospitals across the country are quickly running out of ventilators, machines that play a crucial role in providing care for a growing number of COVID-19 patients. Healthcare practitioners now have an awful decision to make: which patients get access to a limited number of ventilators?

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump used the Defense Production Act to encourage companies including General Motors to produce ventilators. Despite severe shortages in the US, Trump announced plans yesterday to send excess ventilators to Europe.

READ MORE: Tesla offers ventilators free of cost to hospitals, Musk says [The Hill]

More on Musk: “Heroic Effort”: Elon Musk Donates 1,250 Ventilators to Hospitals

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Poison in the Hearts of Stars Can Make Them Explode

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New research on a bizarre nuclear reaction could explain why some stars explode like gigantic stellar thermonuclear bombs.

Big Kaboom

Stars with a certain deadly elemental cocktail in their cores could be doomed to suffer an early demise.

If a star forms enough neon, a rare and poorly-understood chemical reaction can trigger a star-killing thermonuclear blast, Gizmodo reports. The unusual phenomenon can explain why some stars detonate and collapse into white dwarves — instead of continuing to live.

Nuclear Exchange

If a star has a core rich with neon, magnesium, and oxygen, the neon atoms can sometimes gobble up extra elections, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This triggers a nuclear reaction that detonates all of the core’s oxygen, turning the entire star into a gigantic nuclear bomb.

“What’s remarkable is that it’s a singular nuclear transition, and a very rare transition that you normally neglect,” lead researcher, Oliver Kirsebom of Dalhousie University, told Gizmodo. “Under the specific conditions in these stars, it could have a profound effect on the evolution.”

Critical Timing

What Kirsebom means by that is that these explosions can happen before a star grows and develops the intense, crushing density normally associated with the end of its stellar life cycle.

That may explain why younger, smaller stars sometimes detonate and turn into white dwarves before their time — and instead of becoming the neutron stars that usually originate from a supernova.

READ MORE: How Neon Can Make a Star Destroy Itself [Gizmodo]

More on stars: Scientists Just Found a Dead Star Lodged Inside Another Star

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MIT Professor: Guidelines to Stay Six Feet Apart Aren’t Enough

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That public health guideline to stay six feet apart from others is based on 90-year-old-reseach. We now know viruses can spread much farther.

By now, “stay six feet away from others” is practically a mantra for people trying to stay healthy during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s been widely accepted as a healthy, science-backed way to slow the spread of the coronavirus as much as possible.

“If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say,” The New York Times wrote last month, “the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.”

But while physically distancing ourselves from others is a crucial part of slowing the virus, six feet may not be far enough, MIT disease transmission researcher Lydia Bourouiba argued in the journal JAMA last week. In fact, the science that the six-foot rule is based on came out nearly 90 years ago.

It goes without saying that our understanding of disease transmission has progressed a great deal since then — but public health guidelines have lagged behind to a terrifying extent.

“Although such social distancing strategies are critical in the current time of pandemic,” Bourouiba wrote, “it may seem surprising that the current understanding of the routes of host-to-host transmission in respiratory infectious diseases are predicated on a model of disease transmission developed in the 1930s that, by modern standards, seems overly simplified.”

There are two main problems that Bourouiba’s research — which investigates the fluid dynamics of people coughing and sneezing — has uncovered with the existing guidelines. The first problem, The Boston Globe reports, is that people can expel viruses through regular exhalations. They don’t need to have sneezed to be spreading the pandemic.

The second is that the virus can be spread through gas clouds people expel when they cough or sneeze, not just the visible droplets that the six-foot rule seeks to avoid. And those gas clouds can send a virus as far as 27 feet under optimal conditions.

“When possible, if it’s a confined space, then maintaining larger distances would be wise,” Bourouiba told the Globe.

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This Startup’s Computer Chips Are Powered by Human Neurons

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Australian startup Cortical Labs is building tiny artificial intelligence-powered computer chips that use biological neurons extracted from mice.

Australian startup Cortical Labs is building computer chips that use biological neurons extracted from mice and humans, Fortune reports.

The goal is to dramatically lower the amount of power current artificial intelligence systems need to operate by mimicking the way the human brain.

According to Cortical Labs’ announcement, the company is planning to “build technology that harnesses the power of synthetic biology and the full potential of the human brain” in order to create a “new class” of AI that could solve “society’s greatest challenges.”

The mouse neurons are extracted from embryos, according to Fortune, but the human ones are created by turning skin cells back into stem cells and then into neurons.

The idea of using biological neurons to power computers isn’t new. Cortical Labs’ announcement comes one week after a group of European researchers managed to turn on a working neural network that allows biological and silicon-based brain cells to communicate with each other over the internet.

Researchers at MIT have also attempted to use bacteria, not neurons, to  build a computing system in 2016.

As of right now, Cortical’s mini-brains have less processing power than a dragonfly brain. The company is looking to get its mouse-neuron-powered chips to be capable of playing a game of “Pong,” as CEO Hon Weng Chong told Fortune, following the footsteps of AI company DeepMind, which used the game to test the power of its AI algorithms back in 2013.

“What we are trying to do is show we can shape the behavior of these neurons,” Chong told Fortune.

READ MORE: A startup is building computer chips using human neurons [Fortune]

More on neurons: Artificial and Biological Neurons Just Talked Over the Internet

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Secret U.S. Intelligence Report: China Hid The Size of the Pandemic

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Anonymous intelligence officials say that there's evidence China systematically downplayed the size and severity of its coronavirus outbreak.

The U.S. intelligence community seems to be increasingly convinced that China downplayed the severity of its coronavirus outbreak — and that it continues to do so.

A classified report that intelligence agencies sent to the White House allegedly concludes that China’s official tally of coronavirus cases and deaths doesn’t tell the whole story, three anonymous officials told Bloomberg. If they’re right, it’s bad news for other countries that have depended on China’s data and insight to craft their own responses to COVID-19.

“The medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist, said at a Tuesday news conference, according to Bloomberg. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”

Of course, there’s reason to be skeptical of this particular narrative — the Trump administration has increasingly blamed China for the global pandemic, arguably to draw attention away from its own failures, and dubiously-sourced reports that China deliberately hid how bad things were would be politically convenient.

But ever since the outbreak began last year, dissidents in China have accused the government of censorship, downplaying the risks and severity of the coronavirus, and punishing those who spoke up.

Last week, China made headlines when the epicenter city of Wuhan reported no new cases for several days in a row. Its rapidly-built emergency hospitals have even started to close down as they become unnecessary.

Now the intelligence community is calling that success story into question — and along with it much of what we’ve learned about the viral outbreak.

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Bill Gates: US “Missed the Opportunity” to Prevent Catastrophe

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In a Tuesday Washington Post opinion piece, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued that the US “missed the opportunity to get ahead of the coronavirus.”

But that doesn’t mean the ship has sailed and the country is doomed to lose between 100,000 and 240,000 people, as the White House projected in a Tuesday briefing.

For Gates, the approach is simple: first, “we need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down,” he wrote in the opinion piece.

People still traveling and going to restaurants across the country “is a recipe for disaster.” What we need is a clear message from leaders: “Shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere.”

Secondly, testing should also be far more effective and widespread than it has been so far. Despite the recent progress, the more tests healthcare workers conduct, the better we understand the spread; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Healthcare workers need to get tested first, then those who experience symptoms.

Third, Gates also argued that running “rapid trials involving various candidates” for possible vaccines is the best way to find an effective treatment — and avoid a situation in which people hoard lifesaving drugs and keep them away from those who need it most.

And we shouldn’t wait for a vaccine — a process that could take up to 18 long months. We should build facilities now that could “manufacture buildings of doses,” according to Gates.

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Today’s COVID-19 Data Will be Tomorrow’s Tools of Oppression – The Daily Beast

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Getting on top of COVID-19 is a stress test for governments globally. One of their key strategies for containing the virus is tracking cases. On a national and global scale, that is impossible, unless you have a lot of health data.

Luckily for public health officials, theres no shortage of health surveillance in the U.S. In the spirit of flattening the curve, privacy watchdogs and surveillance skeptics increasingly are debating if heightened tracking might be an appropriate approach to safeguarding public health under the exceptional circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic has created.

But even at a time when the benefits of these public health tools is clear, their privacy impact are uncertain and pose long-term risks to American citizens. For example, we simply cannot fathom how the information we collect to combat todays emergency will be repurposed tomorrow.

Everything becomes health data

In order to expand government and corporate surveillance in the name of public health, we are enlarging what counts as health data. It was an ambiguous term before coronavirus became a household name, but now the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) iscontact tracingtravelers movements with the help ofairline passenger manifests. Social media check-ins where users post their location to Facebook and other platforms, now are a tool for monitoring transmission sites. Suddenly, what movies you watch, where you travel, how you commute to work, and where you eat go from being consumer data into a metric of your COVID-19 exposure. This may, ultimately, inform whether we can work in the office, attend school, access mass transit or, indeed, see a doctor.

There are certainly cases in which this method has proved helpful. After the deadly spread ofsevere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002, Taiwan implemented travel monitoring systems that proved helpful in combatting COVID-19. Usingcustoms, immigration, and other travel records, officials were able to quickly identify individuals who had come into contact with the virus, conducting rapid testing and quarantine measures. Unlike in the U.S., this health surveillance has informed strict policies, ranging from total lock-downs to the rapid deployment of tests and other government-funded public health interventions. This type of evidence-based policy making is currently absent on American shores.

COVID-19 data can be re-used for oppression

In the U.S., COVID-19 has us rapidly developing new and invasive data collection practices that go far beyond what is needed to protect public health in the long-term. This weekend, for instance, the Wall Street Journal reported a previously undisclosed partnership by federal, state, and local agencies to monitor social distancing in over 500 cities using cellphone location data. This endangers democratic systems in the process. It should come as no surprise that the very same data that helps public health authorities to carry out contact tracing in the context of COVID-19 can easily be repurposed to monitor political movements, religious minorities, and other historically marginalized communities.

There are few restrictions on how much of the data being collected by the CDC. Private health-monitoring firms can be used by federal law enforcement, local police, or even ICE. Many of these records are subject to the third-party doctrine, the long-standing Supreme Court doctrine that holds that information provided to a commercial third party (e.g., a bank, a credit card company, etc.) often can be obtained without a warrant.

Some types of location tracking, such as the prolonged use of cellphone tower data, have recently been held to require a warrant, but nearly identical forms of tracking (such as automated license plate readers, GPS-based cell phone applications, and facial recognition), have yet to be addressed by the high court.

Bad laws stick, good laws are needed

In the U.S. there currently is nearly no legal guidance on how tracking and surveillance data should be treated in the public health context. History shows us that the American people are unlikely to get a nuanced response to that situation and face the danger of seeing a new law hastily passed that gives a free hand to the government, ignoring the risks to historically over-surveilled communities.

Notably, COVID-19 tracking sees these risks now crossing class lines: as of last week, New Yorkers who can afford to flee the city must pass traffic check points and enter mandatory quarantines. And while the outcry now is significant, it should have been from the get-go. Even though it remains to be seen how all Big Apple refugees will be monitored, we have to understand that we all face the risk that surveillance will turn state borders into 21st-century Iron Curtains, raising constitutional conundrums that would have been unthinkable just days ago.

For proof of the danger, one need only look at the aftermath of September 11th. When Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act, just a few weeks after the deadly attacks, the fear of terrorism blinded lawmakers to the threat of broad-based, suspicionless surveillance.Decades later, those same provisions, many ofwhich were supposed to sunset in 2005, were still being renewed as recently asthis week. If we pass hastily drafted measures to address the privacy impact of COVID-19 surveillance, there is no reason to think their impact would fade any sooner.

We need laws that protect citizens from the new privacy risks posed by COVID-19-induced data exploitation. This is even more crucial when we're including profit-motivated entities. Days ago, President Trump announced a larger private sector partnership as part of the White Houses COVID-19 response that included large-scale collaborations with Google, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and others. New legal frameworks need to impose clear limits on how health data from the COVID-19 response can be exploited for other business lines.

To protect our democratic institutions inand aftertimes of crisis and trauma, we need these frameworks fast, but we also need them to be resilient. We have all the information, tools and experts we need. We should get to work now.

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Today's COVID-19 Data Will be Tomorrow's Tools of Oppression - The Daily Beast

‘It’s a place where they try to destroy you’: why concentration camps are still with us – The Guardian

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At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China, political education camps designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by a high-tech surveillance system. In Syria, a prison complex dedicated to the torture and mass execution of civilians. In north-east India, a detention centre capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural encampments where thousands of people are being forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On small islands and in deserts at the edges of wealthy regions Greeces Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Ocean near Australia, the southern Mediterranean coastline various types of large holding centres for would-be migrants.

The scale and purpose of these places vary considerably, as do the political regimes that have created them, but they share certain things in common. Most were established as temporary or emergency measures, but have outgrown their original stated purpose and become seemingly permanent. Most exist thanks to a mix of legal ambiguity detention centres operating outside the regular prison system, for instance and physical isolation. And most, if not all, have at times been described by their critics as concentration camps.

We tend to associate the idea of concentration camps with their most extreme instances the Nazi Holocaust, and the Soviet Gulag system; genocide in Cambodia and Bosnia. But the disturbing truth is that concentration camps have been widespread throughout recent history, used to intern civilians that a state considers hostile, to control the movement of people in transit and to extract forced labour. The author Andrea Pitzer, in One Long Night, her recent history of concentration camps, estimates that at least one such camp has existed somewhere on Earth throughout the past 100 years.

The definition of a concentration camp is sometimes fuzzy, but at root, such camps represent a combination of physical and legal power. They are a way for modern states to segregate groups of civilians by placing them in a closed or isolated location via special rules that are distinct from a countrys main system of rights and punishments. Many have been set up under military jurisdiction by the British during the Boer war, for instance while others, such as the Soviet gulags, have been used in peacetime to deal with social undesirables.

Cruelty and the abuse of power have existed throughout human history, but concentration camps have not. They are little more than a century old. The earliest began as wartime measures, but on numerous occasions since then they have become lasting features. They are a product of technologically advanced societies with sophisticated legal and political systems and have been made possible by a range of modern inventions. Military technologies such as automatic weapons or barbed wire made it easier for small groups of officials to hold much larger groups of people captive. Advanced bureaucracy and surveillance techniques enabled states to watch, count and categorise civilians in ways they couldnt have done in earlier eras. As Pitzer writes, such camps belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence.

This innovation haunts the political imagination of liberal democracies. The concentration camp is a symbol of everything such societies are supposed to stand against: the arbitrary use of power and the stripping of peoples rights, the systematic removal of liberty; dehumanisation, abuse, torture, murder and genocide. When it is used to refer to contemporary places, the term concentration camp is often reserved for the locations of the most serious human rights abuses, as when Amnesty International used it in a 2017 report estimating that 13,000 people had been murdered by Syrias Assad regime in the Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus. But politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among them, have also used the term to describe camps such as the ones the Trump administration has been running on the US border with Mexico.

To some, these comparisons minimise the use of concentration camps by Nazi Germany in its effort to exterminate Jews. For others, the comparisons are a necessary warning, not least because one kind of camp can easily transform into another. Pitzer gives the example of a refugee camp: if people are not allowed to leave, and are systematically denied their rights, then it starts to resemble more sinister creations. As authoritarians and rightwing populists reach positions of power in various parts of the world, liberals are voicing fears that history is repeating itself.

Surveying what he called a century of camps in the mid-90s, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned that the temptation for governments to use them would always be strong when certain humans are declared redundant or forced into a superfluous condition. There is no shortage of threats in the current century from environmental catastrophe to the unfolding coronavirus pandemic that are creating such conditions. The question is how to ensure that the concentration camp is not the states inevitable response.

It is tempting to regard the concentration camp as an anomaly, but for some observers, such camps are a grim reflection of the way modern states work. After the second world war, as knowledge of the Holocaust became widespread, leading theorists sought to offer explanations for the genocide that had taken place, and the methods used to carry it out. Writing in 1950, the Martiniquan poet and politician Aim Csaire argued that the Holocaust applied to Europe colonialist procedures that until then had been reserved exclusively for people of colour.

Concentration camps were indeed colonial in origin. Their earliest uses came at the turn of the 20th century by the Spanish in 1896 to put down a rebellion in Cuba, by the US in 1899 to do similar in the Philippines, and by the British empire in southern Africa during the Boer war of 1899-1902. The first use of concentration camps for a deliberate policy of extermination was not in Europe but in German South West Africa modern-day Namibia between 1904 and 1907. (Germany only recently officially acknowledged its treatment of the Herero and Nama tribes as genocide.)

For Csaire, the appearance of camps in Europe itself was a direct result of the way in which Europeans had attempted to dehumanise their colonial subjects in order to exploit them, but ended up dehumanising themselves. Colonisation, he wrote, works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism.

The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt also turned her attention to camps after the war. Like Csaire, Arendt drew links between the behaviour of European powers in their colonies and their conduct at home, but she also highlighted how some of the tools wielded by authoritarians had been put in place by democracies before the rise of fascism. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt pointed out that when France was occupied by Nazi Germany, for instance, the Gestapo was able to make use of draconian police powers already in existence to round up and detain civilians. These existed because France, like many other states in Europe, had been unable to deal with the mass displacement of people in the aftermath of the first world war and had instituted harsh measures to deal with unwanted migrants.

In 1940, Arendt had her own direct experience of this relatively novel form of containment. After fleeing Germany for France, she was placed in an internment camp at Gurs, near the Pyrenees. The camp had been established a few years earlier to detain republican refugees from the Spanish civil war; it was repurposed in 1939 for enemy aliens a practice instigated by the British in the first world war and subsequently copied by many countries. The inmates had to endure overcrowding, disease and insufficient food rations, and were made to live together regardless of the fact that some were Nazi party members and others, like Arendt, were Jewish refugees. It was partly the memory of this that led Arendt to place internment on a continuum with the Soviet gulags and the Nazi death camps as she saw it, the Hades, Purgatory and Hell of state violence.

That the British, Americans, Spanish, French and Germans, among other nations, had all used concentration camps led some thinkers to ask whether such camps were inevitable features of the modern state. Perhaps the most provocative answer comes from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose ideas have grown in prominence in the past two decades. For Agamben, the existence of the concentration camp reveals something fundamental about power who holds it, and what gives them the authority to wield it. His work is dense, ranging across ancient Greek and Roman law, Biblical texts and Renaissance literature, but it has been influential on a generation of scholars and activists in the past two decades particularly among those who wanted to understand the camp established by the US at Guantnamo Bay, under an emergency policy after 9/11, or the growing phenomenon of immigration detention at the borders of the rich world.

Sovereignty, as Agamben sees it, is founded on absolute power over human life, and has been since ancient times. The sovereign has the power not only to kill, but to strip people of rights through forms of banishment, reducing them to a state of what he calls bare life. In the past, sovereignty would have been concentrated in the figure of the monarch; modern states are supposed to have improved upon monarchy by restraining the arbitrary use of power through democratic checks and balances. But, according to Agamben, the tendency to banish and dehumanise keeps on coming back in the form of the concentration camp: a space where people are outside the law, yet more subject to its power than anywhere else.

For Agamben, this reveals the basis on which power is exercised by modern states. In his words, the concentration camp is the nomos or fundamental principle of modern societies, the hidden matrix of politics in our age. While they may only sometimes use it, governments retain the power to declare emergency measures a state of exception in Agambens words to strip us of rights, and confine us to spaces in which we live a kind of exile. The camps logic, he implies, pervades seemingly free societies through modern state techniques of surveillance, bureaucracy, violence and other forms of coercion.

Grand theories such as those of Csaire, Arendt and Agamben are valuable, but risky. By seeking to identify common patterns across specific societies, at different moments in history, they warn that all modern states have the potential to set up concentration camps. Misconstrued, however, they can end up obscuring crucial differences such as the distinction between camps used in a deliberate policy of extermination, and those where people die through neglect. Holocaust deniers, for instance, or people who seek to downplay the severity of colonial massacres, often try to muddy these distinctions.

When theory becomes dogma, it can also limit our understanding of the present. Agambens own recent trajectory offers a cautionary tale: in late February 2020, he published a short essay in the leftwing Italian newspaper Il Manifesto criticising his governments draconian restrictions on public freedoms aimed at halting the spread of the coronavirus. The piece referred to the invention of an epidemic, and went further than merely questioning the long-term impact of these restrictions; it condemned them as frenetic, irrational, and entirely unfounded, arguing the virus was not too different from the normal flu. The piece has been widely criticised, and provoked a retort from the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that had he listened to Agambens advice not to have a heart operation 30 years ago, he would now be dead.

Agamben is hardly the only person to have underestimated the threat posed by the coronavirus in recent months. As more governments pass emergency laws to deal with the pandemic, in some cases including draconian surveillance measures and the establishment of segregated quarantine camps, it is right to ask where these might lead, and whether states will be willing to give up their new powers once the immediate danger to public health has passed. But that shouldnt obscure the fact that some emergencies are real: in these situations, the most important question is whether societies can respond to them without permanently destroying peoples rights.

Concentration camps are uniquely dangerous spaces. Their effects may vary considerably, from the horror of Auschwitz to the more mundane misery that Arendt experienced in Gurs, but the people caught up in them almost always end up being treated as less than human. And if the political and technological innovations of the late 19th century made them possible, does the 21st century make them any more likely?

In 2014, the Chinese government launched an initiative it called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism, focused on the province of Xinjiang, in the countrys far west. In the English-speaking world, details of the programme remained scarce until 2017, when reports started to filter through that thousands of people from Xinjiangs ethnic Uighur population, most of whom are Muslims, were being detained. The following year, researchers who trawled through Chinese government procurement documents and satellite imagery pointed to the existence of a vast, newly constructed complex of internment camps, which they estimated had the capacity to hold anywhere between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million people. Former inmates have given testimony to journalists and researchers that they were forced into education programmes, made to eat pork and drink alcohol, and given compulsory sterilisation and abortions.

This is just one example of how globalisation and technology have added a new dimension to an old problem. China has a long history of running camps the political re-education programme launched by Mao in the 50s was one of the worlds most extensive gulag networks. But the latest crackdown has new features. First, the Xinjiang camps are backed up by state-of-the-art digital surveillance methods provided by leaders in the global tech industry: a computerised CCTV network developed by a state-run defence manufacturer, designed to apply the ideas of military cybersystems to civilian public security, which tracks individuals and analyses their behaviour to anticipate potential crime; a tracking app that visitors to Xinjiang are obliged to install on their smartphones; DNA analysis equipment partly supplied by US biotech firms. Second, China has justified its crackdown to the rest of the world by adopting the same rhetoric that the US and its allies used after 9/11. In 2014, the Communist party launched its so-called peoples war on terror in Xinjiang. Chinas methods may be extreme, but it is by no means the first country to have introduced policies that subject Muslims to collective suspicion and punishment, in response to violent Islamic fundamentalist groups.

What else could tempt states to open camps? In her 2014 book Expulsions, the sociologist Saskia Sassen argues that the particular form of globalisation the world has experienced in recent decades driven by a new form of laissez-faire economics has unleashed a dangerous new dynamic that excludes large numbers of people from economic and social life. The global shift to privatisations, deregulation and open borders for some has brutally punished the vulnerable and accelerated environmental destruction.

In richer countries, Sassen argues, this leads to low-income workers being forced out of established welfare and healthcare programmes into more punitive systems (such as the UKs universal credit scheme), the impoverishment of sections of the middle class through austerity policies, and more and more people being locked up in prison. In poorer parts of the world, this means mass displacement and the warehousing of migrants as they try to move elsewhere.

One result of these global pressures has been the rise of political movements that promise to shore up national, religious or ethnic identities. But identities are ambiguous, and when governments start using the tools of state power to reinforce the line between insider and outsider, there are always large numbers of people who get caught in between. In India, the government of Narendra Modi has been trying to reshape the country along Hindu nationalist lines, undermining the secular and pluralist principles that have held sway since independence. The emerging camps in Assam, a north-eastern state on the border with Bangladesh, are a result: they target thousands of mainly Muslim residents who may have lived in India for decades, but because they originally came from across the border in Bangladesh a legacy of partition have never been registered as citizens.

The understandable response when confronted with injustice is to look for someone to blame. Its easier to do so when oppression is perpetrated by villainous leaders, or in other peoples societies. But particularly in liberal democracies, the chains of responsibility can be complex. Who, for instance, is responsible for the arbitrary imprisonment, torture and slave-labour conditions that migrants and refugees in Libya are subjected to? The immediate answer seems fairly simple: the state officials and local militias, some linked to trafficking networks, who run the detention centres. Thousands of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are imprisoned in a network of these centres where they are regularly subjected to starvation, disease, torture, rape, and forced labour.

But the reason those detention centres exist is because a range of European governments have been trying to get Libya to act as a block on unwanted migration across the Mediterranean for almost 20 years. The system was built with European support, both from national governments and at EU level first through agreements with the government of Muammar Gaddafi, then, as the country collapsed after he was overthrown by a Nato-backed uprising, a patchwork of arrangements with state officials and local militias.

There is no shortage of information about what happens in Libyan detention centres and European governments frequently profess their horror at the atrocities committed there. Yet the system persists, because those governments broadly agree that the goal of limiting migration is more important than dismantling Libyas detention system. The political consensus in most European countries, including the UK, is that limiting unwanted migration is a reasonable and desirable aim, and large numbers of their citizens have voted in support of it.

When Zygmunt Bauman turned his attention to camps in the 90s, he argued that what characterises violence in our age is distance not just the physical or geographical distance that technology allows, but the social and psychological distance produced by complex systems in which it seems everybody and nobody is complicit. This, for Bauman, works on three levels. First, actions are carried out by a long chain of performers, in which people are both givers and takers of orders. Second, everybody involved has a specific, focused job to perform. And third, the people affected hardly ever appear fully human to those within the system. Modernity did not make people more cruel, Bauman wrote, it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people.

When something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute. If camps arent being used to exterminate people, as they have been in their worst instances, then the comparison is frequently condemned as inappropriate. But condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself.

In 2018, Donald Trumps government responded to a rise in the number of undocumented migrants many of whom were asylum-seekers fleeing violence in Central America crossing the US-Mexico border by drastically increasing the use of long-term immigration detention. Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents. In June 2019, amid the outcry from opponents of this policy, congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez recorded a video for her Instagram followers: The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, she stated, and that is exactly what they are I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that never again means something.

This was a political intervention intended to shock people into challenging the Trump governments immigration policy and in the row that ensued, some commentators objected that Ocasio-Cortezs reference to concentration camps and her use of the phrase never again was an inappropriate Holocaust analogy. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt commented, something can be horrible and not be like the Holocaust.

But much of the response from Ocasio-Cortezs Republican opponents was to downplay the extent of abuses happening as a result of Trumps policies, or to portray what was happening as normal and routine. Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under Barack Obama. These sorts of equivocations have accompanied the use of camps from their inception, and they always try to give the same impression: that whats being done is normal and legitimate, that criticisms are overblown, marginal and extreme; and that states have the right to behave this way.

The story of Britains concentration camps during the Boer war illustrates how a society that thinks of itself as liberal can make excuses for a mass crime. In 1899, when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people. At first the camps were justified as protection for Boer civilians who had signed an oath of loyalty; later, they were used to imprison Boer undesirables who had not signed the oath, as well as black South Africans who the British forced off their land to make them act as lookouts for troops. Due to poor sanitation, meagre food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28,000 white people and 20,000 black people were killed by this system in just a few years.

The two most prominent critics of Britains camps the feminist campaigners Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett both had to struggle against political and public opinion that initially saw the camps as a wartime necessity, and both fought hard to alleviate suffering. But the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as the author Vron Ware has recently argued. Fawcett, who visited South Africa with the governments approval to produce a report on the camps, saw her concern for the welfare of vulnerable civilians as compatible with the wider aims of the camps. Saving the children, for her, was as true a service to the country as that which men were rendering by going into the armies to serve in the field. But for Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.

Hobhouse, who in her day was derided in sexist terms as a mad old lady, is now largely forgotten, while it is safe to say that Britains concentration camps are not well remembered: last year the Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg defended their use on an episode of Question Time, erroneously claiming that their mortality rate was only the same as that of Glasgows at the time. But without Hobhouses radical critique, it would have been harder to oppose the harm done by Britains camps a century ago, and would be harder to understand why camps still appear in the world today.

The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations no two events in history are identical but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power. Not everyone, for instance, reacted with outrage to Ocasio-Cortezs comments last year. While she drew criticism from some Jewish organisations, including a rebuke from the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, the row also energised a US protest movement against Trumps immigration policy led by leftwing Jewish activists. The movement calls itself Never Again Action, explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution.

In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, the Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on. The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he thought, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it. Violence, he wrote, is there before our eyes it only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates) to organise it, legalise it, declare it necessary and mandatory and so contaminate the world.

If the state as we know it is here to stay, then what can people do when governments start building camps? The history of the concentration camp has also been a history of peoples resistance to camps, from both inside and out. Even in the most seemingly hopeless situations there are stories of people who have fought back against their treatment. The uprisings in the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka are among the most famous; and the Soviet Gulag system was beset by strikes and revolts. On their own, these may not have been enough, but camps work by enforcing a rigid distinction between people on opposite sides of the barbed-wire fence. Those inside are kept silent and invisible, while those outside are encouraged to ignore or accept what is happening. Successful resistance aims at breaking down this distinction: governments know this, and even states that operate relatively mild forms of mass detention make significant efforts to obscure the conditions inside, and to deter their own citizens from prying too closely.

One evening in February this year, I watched the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani give a talk by video link to an audience at Birkbeck, University of London. Boochani, who currently lives in New Zealand, spent four years in Australias regional offshore processing centre for asylum-seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Australia has pioneered a type of long-term detention for unwanted migrants that is now becoming more common elsewhere in the world. Boochani and his fellow detainees were not merely being held for processing, but in harsh conditions intended to act as a deterrent to future travellers. The Australian government forbade journalists to report on the full extent of these conditions, which included the beating and abuse of detainees, and introduced a law threatening doctors and social workers with up to two years in prison if they spoke in public about what they had witnessed.

Boochani, however, smuggled out accounts of life in detention, via text messages sent to his translator by WhatsApp, that were turned into articles for the Guardian and other outlets as well as a memoir, No Friend But the Mountains. Boochani explained to us how he saw his detention as part of Australias and Britains longer history of treating non-white people as disposable. Its worse than a prison, he said of the Manus camp. Its a place where they take your identity and freedom from you, and try to destroy you. Detainees were given numbers, he said, which the guards used instead of their names; his was MEG45.

The camp on Manus Island was eventually shut down by the Australian government, after widespread public criticism, although its broader asylum policies remain largely the same. For Boochani, writing was not simply a way to expose his conditions and link up with campaigners against detention on the outside, but to challenge the very basis on which the treatment of people like him was justified. I never use the language and the words that the [Australian] government use, he said. I say systematic torture, I say political prisoner. One of the things that gave him hope in confinement, he said, was the fact that animals could wander in and out of the spaces where human freedom was limited a reminder that the structure which held him was built by people, and could therefore also be dismantled. Nature, he said, always tried to reimpose itself on the prison.

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'It's a place where they try to destroy you': why concentration camps are still with us - The Guardian

Palestinians all too familiar with oppression of lockdowns – The Arab Daily News

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If you think the coronavirus pandemic is the worst thing you have experienced, you havent experienced the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has been far more brutal and lethal than any virus could ever be.

I was in occupied Palestine during the First Intifada, writing on the resilience and strength of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli military oppression. My family lives in East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Beit Jala, Beit Hanina and Beit Sahour. I know what they are forced to experience every day by Israels oppressive government.

For many, the words and phrases most associated with the coronavirus outbreak lockdown, stay at home, and shelter in place may be new, but they arent to the Palestinians. They have lived with curfews, lockdowns and severe restrictions, and often been unable to buy groceries, get medical attention or even visit relatives for more than 70 years. They know what it is like to go without food, without schooling, without celebrations or events.

Israel has adopted more than 65 laws that discriminate against the Palestinian people simply because they are Christian and Muslim, rather than Jewish. One of the first grants immediate citizenship to any Jew from any country around the world and of any nationality or origin, but denies that same privilege to the Palestinians, who have been living on that land since time immemorial.

My family name, Hanania, is a Hebrew Word not Israeli, by the way. It means God has been gracious. My family, we believe, originated from the Hebrews and converted to Christianity in the first century, while even some converted to Islam in the seventh century. We have Christian, Muslim and Jewish relatives, so our history and rights are clear to everyone, except the Israelis. As heavily armed Israeli soldiers wandered through Palestinian cities and villages, we hunkered down eating mujaddara, the rice and lentil dish that became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israels brutality.

As I watch Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urge unity with his political rivals, I wonder where that has been in the countrys dealings with the Palestinians.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them

Ray Hanania

So far, there have been more than 420,000 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and there have been about 19,000 deaths. But those numbers continue to change so, by the time you read this, they will be less than what is reality. And yet the Palestinians have seen even worse statistics that continue to increase daily. The deaths have been staggering over the years. Tens of thousands died during the war of 1947-49. More than 20,000 were killed during the Israeli assault on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, including the civilians massacred under Ariel Sharons terrorist direction in Sabra and Shatila. Another 2,000 Palestinians were killed during the First Intifada, during which I secretly walked the streets at night with my cousins, collecting rubber bullets that were in reality lethal metal balls covered in a thin plastic coating. More than 2,300 were killed during Israels invasion of Gaza in 2014.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them. Palestinian deaths are little more than numbers in a news report, usually presented in such a way as to defend Israels extremist government. But those deaths are dwarfed by the injuries to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, maybe even millions.

This week, Israels government and the Palestinian Authority it controls issued orders to lock down citizens, block immigration and travel, and close all cultural and educational activities and events to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. But, when it is over, life will return to normal for the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis will be free to live a fantasy life of happiness, blocking the trauma they cause from their eyesight with an 8-meter-high concrete wall. The Palestinians will return to being oppressed, brutally beaten, and arrested by Israeli soldiers and the Shin Bet. They will continue to scramble for food, any work, and see power outages, restrictions on their movement, and punishments that range from beatings to killings for actions involving protest and militancy, which Israel labels as terrorism.

Pandemics are not as bad as occupation. If you want to know how to survive this coronavirus pandemic, take a look at how the Palestinians have managed to survive Israeli brutality. And why not take a minute to eat a plate of mujaddara with your family to show some solidarity.

What Palestinians have been forced to go through over the years under Israels oppression is no different than what the world is now going through as a result of the coronavirus. Although the truth is that Israels oppression has been far worse and there still is no antidote for that virus.

Ray Hanania is an award-winning former Chicago City Hall political reporter and columnist. He can be reached on his personal website at http://www.Hanania.com. Twitter: @RayHanania

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Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.

Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published The National Arab American Times newspaper (2004-2007).

Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Awards for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named Best Ethnic American Columnist by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.

His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.

Click here to send Ray Hanania email.

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Palestinians all too familiar with oppression of lockdowns - The Arab Daily News

Paul Theroux Recalls a Fear-Filled Lockdown – The New York Times

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In this season of infection, the stock market little more than a twitching corpse, in an atmosphere of alarm and despondency, I am reminded of the enlightenments of the strict curfew Uganda endured in 1966. It was, for all its miseries, an episode of life lessons, as well as monotonous moralizing (because most crises enliven bores and provoke sententiousness). I would not have missed it for anything.

That curfew evoked like today the world turned upside-down. This peculiarity that we are now experiencing, the nearest thing to a world war, is the key theme in many of Shakespeares plays and Jacobean dramas, of old ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality tales. It is the essence of tragedy and an occasion for license or retribution. As Hamlet says to his fathers ghost, Time is out of joint.

In Uganda, the palace of the king of Buganda, the Kabaka, Mutesa II also known as King Freddie had been attacked by government troops on the orders of the prime minister, Milton Obote. From my office window at Makerere University, where I was a lecturer in English in the Extra Mural department, I heard the volleys of heavy artillery, and saw smoke rising from the royal enclosure on Mengo Hill. The assault, led by Gen. Idi Amin, resulted in many deaths. But the king eluded capture; he escaped the country in disguise and fled to Britain. The period that followed was one of oppression and confusion, marked by the enforced isolation of a dusk-to-dawn curfew. But, given the disorder and uncertainty, most people seldom dared to leave home at all.

The curfew was a period of fear, bad advice, arbitrary searches, intimidation and the nastiness common in most civil unrest, people taking advantage of chaos to settle scores. Uganda had a sizable Indian population, and Indian people were casually mugged, their shops ransacked and other minorities victimized or sidelined. It was also an interlude of hoarding, and of drunkenness, lawlessness and licentiousness, born of boredom and anarchy.

Kifugo! I heard again and again of the curfew a Swahili word, because it was the lingua franca there. Imprisonment! Yes, it was enforced confinement, but I also felt privileged to be a witness: I had never seen anything like it. I experienced the stages of the coup, the suspension of the constitution, the panic buying and the effects of the emergency. My clearest memory is of the retailing of rumors outrageous, frightening, seemingly improbable but who could dispute them? Our saying then was, Dont believe anything you hear until the government officially denies it.

Speaking for myself, as a traveler, any great crisis war, famine, natural disaster or outrage ought to be an occasion to bear witness, even if it means leaving the safety of home. The fact that it was the manipulative monster Chairman Mao who said, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience, does not make the apothegm less true. It is or should be the subtext for all travelers chronicles.

The curfew three years into my time in Africa was my initiation into the misuse of power, of greed, cowardice and selfishness; as well as, also, their opposites compassion, bravery, mutual aid and generosity. Even at the time, 24-years-old and fairly callow, I felt I was lucky in some way to be witnessing this convulsion. It was not just that it helped me to understand Africa better; it offered me insights into crowds and power and civil unrest generally, allowing me to observe in extreme conditions the nuances of human nature.

I kept a journal. In times of crisis we should all be diarists and documentarians. Were bound to wail and complain, but its also useful to record the particularities of our plight. We know the progress of Englands Great plague of 1665 because Samuel Pepys anatomized it in his diary. On April 30 he wrote: Great fears of the sickness here in the City it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all! Later, on June 25, The plague increases mightily. And by July 26: The Sicknesse is got into our parish this week; and is endeed everywhere.

A month later he notes the contraction of business: To the Exchange, which I have not been a great while. But Lord how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change, jealous of every door that one sees shut up lest it should be the plague and about us, two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.

In that outbreak of bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, a quarter of Londons population died.

My diary these days sounds a lot like Pepys, though without the womanizing, snobbery or name dropping. The progress of the Covid 19 pandemic is remarkably similar to that of the plague year, the same upside-down-ness and the dizziness it produces, the muddle of daily life, the collapse of commerce, the darkness at noon, a haunting paranoia in the sudden proximity to death. And so much of what concerned me as important in the earlier pages of my diary now seems mawkish, trivial or beneath notice. This virus has halted the routine of the day to day and impelled us, in a rare reflex from our usual hustling, to seek purification.

Still writing gives order to the day and helps inform history. In my journal of the Ugandan curfew I made lists of the rumors and tried to estimate the rate at which they traveled; I noted the instances of panic and distraction there were many more car crashes than usual, as drivers minds were on other things. Ordinary life was suspended, so we had more excuses to do as we pleased.

My parents habits were formed during the Great Depression, which this present crisis much resembles. They were ever after frugal, cautious and scornful of wasters: My father developed a habit of saving string, paper bags, nails and screws that he pried out of old boards. The Depression made them distrustful of the stock market, regarding it as a casino. They were believers in education, yet their enduring memory was of highly educated people rendered destitute college graduates selling apples on street corners in Boston! My mother became a recycler and a mender, patching clothes, socking money away. This pandemic will likely make us a nation of habitual hand-washers and doorknob avoiders.

In the Great Depression, Americans like my parents saw the country fail and though it rose and became vibrant once more, they fully expected to witness another bust in their lifetime. Generally speaking, we have known prosperity in the United States since the end of World War II. But the same cannot be said for other countries, and this, of course, is something many travelers know, because travel often allows us glimpses of upheaval or political strife, epidemics or revolution. Uganda evolved after the curfew into a dictatorship, and then Idi Amin took over and governed sadistically.

But Id lived in the dictatorship and thuggery of the Malawi of Dr. Hastings Banda (Ngwazi the Conqueror), so Ugandas oppression was not a shock. And these experiences in Africa helped me deconstruct the gaudy dictatorship of Saparmurat Niyazov, who styled himself Tukmenbashi Great Head of the Turks when, years later, I traveled through Turkmenistan; the Mongolia of Jambyn Batmnkh, the Syria of Hafiz Assad, the muddy dispirited China of Maos chosen successor, Hua Guo Feng. As for plague, there have been recent outbreaks of bubonic plague in Madagascar, Congo, Mongolia and China, producing national moods of blame-shifting and paranoia, not much different from that of Albert Camuss The Plague.

Were told not to travel right now, and its probably good advice, though there are people who say that this ban on travel limits our freedom. But in fact, travel produces its own peculiar sorts of confinement.

The freedom that most travelers feel is often a delusion, for there is as much confinement in travel as liberation. This is not the case in the United States, where I have felt nothing but fresh air on road trips. It is possible to travel in the United States without making onward plans. But I cant think of any other country where you can get into a car and be certain at the end of the day of finding a place to sleep (though it might be scruffy) or something to eat (and it might be junk food). For my last book, I managed a road trip in Mexico but with hiccups (bowel-shattering meals, extortionate police, bed bugs). But the improvisational journey is very difficult elsewhere, even in Europe, and is next to impossible in Africa. It is only by careful planning that a traveler experiences a degree of freedom, but he or she will have to stick to the itinerary, nagged by instructions, which is a sort of confinement.

In fact, most travel is a reminder of boundaries and limits. For example, millions of travelers go to Bangkok or Los Cabos, but of them, a great number head for a posh hotel and rarely leave: The hotel is the destination, not the city. The same can be said for many other places, where the guest in the resort or spa essentially a gated and guarded palace luxuriates in splendid isolation.

The most enlightening trips Ive taken have been the riskiest, the most crisis-ridden, in countries gripped by turmoil, enlarging my vision, offering glimpses of the future elsewhere. We are living in just such a moment of risk; and it is global. This crisis makes me want to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. It would be a great shame if it were not somehow witnessed and documented.

Paul Therouxs latest book, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, was published in 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.

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Paul Theroux Recalls a Fear-Filled Lockdown - The New York Times

China’s Government Lies: Tiananmen Square and Mao’s Great Leap – Science 2.0

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Donald Trump has been roundly criticized for calling the virus that causes Covid-19 a "Chinese virus" it has been said that using a term invented by Chinese state media the "Wuhan Virus" is also racist. He is trying to rebut the propaganda and lies of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party which has said via official channels that they think it came from an American serviceman who visited Wuhan China. That it was developed by the US Army to use against China. That is a lie on the order of stating that the Great Leap Forward was a huge success and the Tiananmen Square protest never occurred. It must be rebutted with all available force. However, Asian Americans have suffered "racist" xenophobic and discriminatory attacks because of this. That said, a stern lesson from history shows why we cannot simply concede to the language chosen by the Chinese Communist Party in the name of not being called racist. To criticize this party is to stand up for over one billion Chinese people who cannot dare speak out. According to the Chinese communist party the Tiananmen square massacre never occurred. That is a lie,a huge lie.Compared to that lie a bit of propaganda about a virus is nothing.

Asian Americans, Casualties of a Propaganda Battle.

East Asians are a smaller group here in the US who have a complex relationship to racism. Suffering greatly yet also being thought of as an treated as a "model minority". Accepted in some context yet rejected in others. Thought of as smarter than the other students and so not needing as much help YET being no more able than any other students. As a result, they may struggle latter on in school unless they study hard on their own. This virus has reminded people that both sides of that status are rooted in the idea of Asians as "other" than white. No it is not quite the same as that which was done to Africans the world over. We were as Robin DiAngleo describes it treated as the ultimate racial other. (Chinese and Japanese people got the exclusion acts black people were property.) This makes it hard for some people to see this discrimination for how bad it is even if it does not rise to the level of something like chattel slavery or the holocaust. Yet it is a great evil and can lead to such thing if unchecked.Asian Americans have suffered hundreds of xenophobic attacks in the last few weeks as foolish people think that a virus originating in China means that all Asian people are responsible. Those people are the same kind who when told bleach will kill the virus might drink a cup of bleach.

It is a very real problem that fighting this propaganda battle with the CCP will cause as a casualty suffering for Asian Americans. The blame for that lies on the fools and bigots who firstly cannot see the difference between people from China VS Vietnam VS Japan VS Korea. The same ignorant people, and even many who think themselves enlightened cannot see that the Chinese Communist Party is not of by or for the Chinese people.

The story of the tank man. In 1989 students in Beijing China created a protest camp in Tiananmen square. It started out as mourning a communist party official who had died and evolved in time into a pro-democracy movement. The military was called in once and backed off. Then they came one night with tanks and live ammo and cleared Tiananmen square with deadly force. To this day if you try to discuss it on the internet or in public in the Peoples republic of China you may be disappeared.

The great leap forward was portrayed as a huge success by the CCP. This economic program of Maos lead to approximately 45-50 million deaths due to famine. He had the children of city people shipped to the country to work on collective farms called peoples communes. He had people who lived on the communes try to produce steel in back yard furnaces. Both agricultural production and steel production were lied about. The deaths due to starvation were lied about. Then the whole thing was covered up. Mao was out and free years latter to launch a cultural revolution which would devastate traditional Chinese culture.

Beware of Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Not Random Asian People You Meet.

The Chinese Communist Party whose propaganda has been unwittingly spread by western media and social media is the greatest oppressor of Asian people inside and outside of China in history. They have killed millions via their inability to punish the incompetence of party members including their paramount leaders. They have made criminal their negligence by refusing to acknowledge even that mistakes were made. In the covid-19 situation their same old pattern has repeated.

The largest country by population on Earth is China to hate China is to hate a large fraction of humanity. To love Chinese people is not to love the Chinese government. To equate China or Chinese people with all Asians is ignorant. To attack Asian people in America for a situation that is, at worst, due to the mismanagement of a government they never had anything to do with is criminally stupid.

The only thing worst is to mindlessly parrot the CCP propaganda and to prolong, even slightly, the brutal oppression of over 1.4 Billion people. Including the specific oppression of minorities in Tibet, Uighurs of Xinjiang in concentration camps, and the repression of Falun Gong practitioners. In all cases chiefly for having a cultural identity that is not in lock step with that of the Han Chinese dominated CCP. That is an evil that must be opposed right along with our own domestic racism.

We in the west can and must do both.

Do not believe anything the CCP says about this virus. Do protect the rights and lives of Asian Americans.

More reading on this.

"Coronavirus Is More Fodder for Chinese Propaganda" By Jonah Goldberg, National Review

"Life in China Has Not Returned to Normal, Despite What the Government Says" Charlie Campbell Time.

The Comprehensive Timeline of Chinas COVID-19 Lies By Jim Geragthy, National Review

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China's Government Lies: Tiananmen Square and Mao's Great Leap - Science 2.0