Exclusive Von Storch: Turkey Should Be Removed from NATO Following Migrant Aggression – Breitbart

Posted on by

Deputy leader of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party Beatrix von Storch has slammed the Turkish government for opening its borders to Europe, demanding that the country be removed from the NATO military alliance.

Ms von Storch commented on the situation along the Greek border, where thousands of migrants have gathered, in an interview with Breitbart London this week, stating that President Recep Tayyip Erdogans government had committed an act of aggression by opening the border.

First of all, what is our approach to this situation? We stand with Greece. This is, I think, the bottom line. We have to strengthen the Greek border and border police and we should do everything we can to help them keep the border clear, von Storch said.

On the actions of President Erdogan, Ms von Storch said: Its an act of aggression, what he is proposing.Its the fight of an Islamic country against a small Christian country and he did it with purpose. He uses it as a weapon.

The AfD deputy leader went on to note the multiple times that Erdogan has threatened the European Union, including as recently as last December when he stated that migrants displaced by military activity in the Syrian province of Idlib could go on to Europe.

Von Storch also referenced threats by Erdogan to transport migrants into buses and ship them to the border. The Turkish government has been accused of bussing in migrants to the Greek border earlier this month as well as transporting them to the area by train.

Many have questioned the suitability of Turkey within the NATO alliance, of which Greece is also a member, following Erdogans latest action and Ms von Storch is no exception.

This is in our basic programme, we have included a passage that says Turkey shouldnt be a member of NATO. Turkey is not alongside all of our national interests and the interests of Western societies, she said.

[Erdogan] is not acting as a member, he is acting like a threat and an opponent of the NATO alliance, she added.

While Turkey has called for aid from NATO in recent weeks to help with the migrant crisis, not everyone within Erdogans own AKP party is supportive of the country remaining a NATO member.

In 2017, MPSamil Tayyar said Turkey should leave NATO, accusing the alliance of helping stage a military coup in the country in 1980 and adding that NATO has become a threat and is spreading terror organisations across the region.

Go here to see the original:

Exclusive Von Storch: Turkey Should Be Removed from NATO Following Migrant Aggression - Breitbart

Italy is not China but Must Change Pace with NATO Intervention – eTurboNews | Trends | Travel News

Posted on by

In news today, COVID-19 infections in Italy hit 10,149 more than anywhere else in the world except for China. The number of deaths from the coronavirus rose in Italy by 168 in just one day, from 463 to 631.

This is the point of view of Prof. F. Sisci, an Italian sinologist from Beijing, China:

So far, the government has chased the emergency, but in this way, Italy will be overwhelmed. We need a 3- to 6-month emergency government and NATO intervention.

Dear director, Italy must regain control of a situation that is getting out of hand and is in danger of blowing everything up as soon as possible.

Coronavirus can be overcome, but clarity is needed. The country needs a special 3 to 6-month government that will introduce martial law, to be agreed strictly with the allies, and specifically NATO, to defeat the virus and stop the collapse of the economy. It is, in fact, a situation of war.

China is an extremely conservative and prudent country. It sounded the alarm on January 23 after almost 2 months of waiting and quarantined, in fact, not only Wuhan and Hubei but the whole country. Now, perhaps in a couple of weeks, some cities will return to normal life.

So, beyond the official numbers provided, at some point, there was a real fear that if the epidemic had not been brought under control there would have been a massacre.

Lets look at some numbers. It is known that 13.8% of those infected get sick in serious conditions and are saved in most cases only if they go to intensive care. Otherwise, they die. So, the subtle point is to avoid the spread of the infected with coronavirus.

If the number of infected remains under control, mortality, due to that 14% who needs intensive care, is not dramatic in the end. The problem, on the other hand, is if the number of infected people goes out of control; in this case, hospitals are no longer able to offer intensive care to everyone.

If unchecked, the coronavirus could affect the entire Italian population, but lets say that in the end, only 30% become infected, about 20 million. If of these making a discount 10% goes into crisis, this means that without intensive care it is destined to succumb. It would be 2 million direct deaths, plus all indirect deaths resulting from a collapse of the health system and the resulting social and economic order.

During the plague, half of the deaths are due to evil, the other half to social unrest. Manzoni (Italian writer, 1785-1873) recalls that in the plague in Milan there were bloody attacks on the ovens; today riots have started in prisons. What will happen next?

As a comparison, just think that during the First World War there were 650,000 military casualties out of a population of 40 million. The disaster caused by the prospective coronavirus is worse than an armed conflict. This does not only concern Italy; this would require a NATO summit on health, safety, and economics. Is it an apocalypse scenario? Yes: it must frighten, but not panic, because it is not carved in stone.

It should be understood that if you dont prepare yourself, if you dont protect yourself, then it will be a massacre. But if, vice versa, and only if you really prepare and organize yourself, the dead can be almost those of a normal influence.

The cost to the economy is another chapter. It is like flying: if you do it by plane, it is safer than walking; if you try it by jumping from the tenth floor believing you have the wings of a bird, it is certain death. So, preparation is everything. We cannot choose the coercive method of China, which has blocked everything for 40 days. But even in that case, not everything is to be discarded.

Perhaps [we] can also learn from the more sophisticated method employed by Taiwanese democracy, which stopped the epidemic with a series of precise and capillary measures. In both cases, the active cooperation of the population, who trusted the government, was crucial.

In Italy, perhaps it is not the same thing. So, you need to change your pace, and, forgive me, maybe only you can do it, Mr. President Sergio Mattarella. The indecisions, alarmism, and optimism spread by alternating current, the leaks denied and not denied, like the last sensational one, which concerned the provision signed by the Prime Minister Conte Sunday night, reduced the government[s] credibility.

Britain, in the midst of the Battle of England, when the Nazis bombed London and threatened a landing, changed government, did not surrend[er] and won the war. Italy must change pace and must do so immediately before health care collapses and coronavirus deaths count in the thousands. From there to the millions, the step could be very short.

As transcribed by eTN Italy correspondent Mario Masciullo

Go here to read the rest:

Italy is not China but Must Change Pace with NATO Intervention - eTurboNews | Trends | Travel News

U.S., NATO and Russia engage in cat-and-mouse game during Arctic training – Eye on the Arctic

Posted on by

North American Aerospace Defence Command F-22s, CF-18s, supported by KC-135 Stratotanker and E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, intercepted two Russian Tu-142 maritime reconnaissance aircraft entering the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone on Monday, March 9, 2020. (NORAD)The United States and its NATO allies have been engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Russia on the opposite sides of the Arctic over the last week as each sides military tries to parry the others moves amid increasingly overt geopolitical competition in the region.

The commander of U.S. Northern Command told lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday that a pair ofRussian Tu-142 maritime reconnaissance aircraft intercepted by U.S. and Canadian jets in the international airspace off Alaskas northern coast two days earlier were sent to keep an eye on a U.S. submarine exercise known as ICEX.

The encounter with the Russian submarine hunters over the Beaufort Sea came only two days after Norway and Britain had to scramble their fighter jets to shadow another pair of Russian Tu-142s accompanied by a MiG-31 fighter jet and Il-78 tanker on a 13-hour flight over the Barents, Norwegian and Northern seas.

Video released by the Russian military shows the Russian Tu-142s being shadowed by Norwegian and British fighter jets.

Capt. Cameron Hillier, a spokesperson for the binational North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), said the Russian submarine hunter aircraft entered the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) on March 9 andremained within it for approximately four hours.

NORAD dispatched U.S. F-22 and Canadian CF-18 fighter jets, supported by KC-135 Stratotanker and E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft to shadow the Russian Tu-142s.

The Russian aircraft remained in international airspace over the Beaufort Sea, and came as close as 50 nautical miles (92 km) to the Alaskan coast, Hillier said. However, the Russian aircraft did not enter U.S. or Canadian sovereign airspace, he added.

A video posted by NORAD on its Twitter account shows the pair of Russian submarine hunters accompanied by U.S. and Canadian fighter jets flying over an ice camp set up by the U.S. military on the ice floe in the Beaufort Sea about 300 kilometres (190 miles) north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Terrence J. OShaughnessy, was quoted by The Military Times Wednesday telling U.S. lawmakers that theRussian aircraftwere operating in one of our ICEX exercises we had where submarines actually pop up out of the ice.

This year the three-week biennial ICEX exercise in the Arctic Ocean featured the construction of a temporary ice camp, Camp Seadragon, and two U.S. Navy submarines the Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN-22) and the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Toledo (SSN-769).

The U.S. submarines practised surfacing through the multi-year Arctic ice and operating under ice.

U.S. Naval War College associate professor Rebecca Pincus said the ICEX exercises demonstrate to the international community that U.S. Navy maintains top notch capabilities in the Arctic that even Russia would have a hard time matching.

I do think that the visibility of this exercise is a useful way for the Navy to remind the world that it is in fact operating in the Arctic Ocean, it can operate in the Arctic Ocean year around, its the most advanced and capable navy operating in the Arctic Ocean, Pincus said.

The Russian response to these exercises, which in this case is appears to be limited to sending out maritime surveillance patrols to shadow the U.S. forces, shows that the Russian submarine fleet has different priorities and probably different constraints, Pincus said.

The U.S. Navy does this publicly as a visible public signal of its war capability and if Russians were able to respond in kind, its pretty likely they would, because we know they respond to other kinds of demonstrations, Pincus said.

When there is a large NATO exercise, we often see some kind of Russian response that might be like a snap military drill or some other kind of in kind response.

Rob Huebert, a Canadian defence expert, said Russia dispatched the maritime surveillance aircraft to not only keep tabs on the American exercise but also to demonstrate its own ability to counter U.S. and NATO moves in the region.

They are probably listening, they probably have all sorts of electronic equipment set up to try to pick up on frequencies, behaviour, any indication that is going to give them a heads up if things go violent in the future, Huebert said. This is a very normal action that weve seen ever since the Russians resumed their activities [in the Arctic] in 2007.

The long history of ICEX exercises underline the fact that even at the height of the dtente between Russia and the U.S. following the collapse of the USSR, the two countries maintained their most important defensive capabilities in the Arctic.

I think what they do they provide us with a clear indication that even back in the days when we used to wish there was such a thing as Arctic exceptionalism, the reality is that both the Americans and the Russians were continuing to maintain their highest level of capability, the most important elements of their defensive forces their attack subs, their long-range bombers, Huebert said.

And weve had this dance going on since at least 2007. And the nature of these games became that much more serious in the current era.

Canada:Canada, U.S. must do more to check Russian military in the Arctic, says NORAD chief, CBC News

Finland:Finnish Defence Minister tells party leaders shrinking fighter fleet would be irresponsible, Yle News

Iceland:Iceland talks Arctic, Trumps ditching of climate accord, with U.S. Secretary of State, Eye on the Arctic

Norway:Russian jets led mock attack on Arctic Norway radar, intel director says, The Independent Barents Observer

Russia:Russia accuses Norway of northern military buildup, The Independent Barents Observer

Sweden:Arctic Sweden to welcome thousands of international troops for Northern Wind exercise, The Independent Barents Observer

United States:U.S. experts call for vigilance on Russian military buildup in Arctic, Alaska Public Media

See the original post here:

U.S., NATO and Russia engage in cat-and-mouse game during Arctic training - Eye on the Arctic

The EU Is Abandoning Italy During the Coronavirus Crisis – Foreign Policy

Posted on by

Italy is in lockdown. Schools and universities are closed, soccer games suspended, and restaurant visits banned amid a rapid spread of the novel coronavirus in the country. Just grocery stores and pharmacies are allowed to stay open, and only absolutely necessary travel is permitted. One might think that fellow European Union countries would count their blessings and send their Italian friends a few vital supplies, especially since the Italians have asked for it. They have sent nothing.

EU countries shameful lack of solidarity with the Italians points to a larger problem: What would European countries do if one of them faced an even greater crisis?

The Union Civil Protection Mechanism is the bland name under which the EUs crisis hubthe Emergency Response Coordination Centreoperates. It monitors natural and manmade disasters around the clock, and when an EU member state can no longer handle a crisis on its own it can turn to the crisis hub. The hub forwards the appeal to other member states, which can then volunteer assistance. (The assistance is later reimbursed by the recipient country.)

Two years ago, for example, with devastating forest fires spreading around the country, Sweden turned to the Emergency Response Coordination Centre, and Stockholms plea yielded a heartwarming response. Portugal sent two firefighting aircraft; Germany contributed five helicopters and 53 firefighters; Lithuania sent one helicopter and Norway eight. France dispatched 60 firefighters and two aircraft; Denmark sent 60 firefighters; Poland sent over 130 firefighters and more than 40 fire trucks. Italy, itself in a dangerous forest-fire season, sent two aircraft.

When the European helpers arrived in Sweden, locals greeted them with applause. It was a powerful illustration of a frequently forgotten reality: The European Union is about more than tedious financial transactions; its also about helping fellow European countries in need.

Last month, when COVID-19 began spreading rapidly in Italy, the country appealed for help via the Emergency Response Coordination Centre. We asked for supplies of medical equipment, and the European Commission forwarded the appeal to the member states, Italys permanent representative to the EU, Maurizio Massari, told me. But it didnt work.

So far, not a single EU member state has sent Italy the needed supplies. Thats tragic for a country with 21,157 coronavirus infections and 1,441 deaths as of March 14, and with medical staff working under severe shortages of supplies.

To be sure, all governments need to make sure they have enough supplies for their own hospitals, patients, and medical staff. But no European country is suffering remotely as badly as Italy. Spain and France have a high caseload, but as of March 14, Finland has just 225 cases, and Italys neighbor Austria only 655. Portugal has 169 cases; Ireland 90; Romania, 109; Poland, 93; Bulgaria, 37; and Hungary has 25 cases. Many of those countries have benefited greatly from European solidarity in the past; a number of them are net beneficiaries of the EU, meaning they get more money out of their membership than they pay into it. The United Kingdom, no longer a member of the European Union, has 1,140 coronavirus casesand it, too, has failed to help the Italians.

In the meantime, a partial and flawed savior has arrived. Close to midnight on March 12, a Chinese aircraft landed in Rome carrying nine medical experts and 31 tons of medical supplies including intensive care unit equipment, medical protective equipment, and antiviral drugs. Around the same time, a Chinese truck arrived in Italy bringing more than 230 boxes of medical equipment. It was less than Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi had promised Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio of Italy in a phone call on Tuesday, but two days after the phone call the supplies were on their way.

Italy has already had a taste of Europes lack of solidarity. During the 2015 refugee crisis some 1.7 million people arrived on EU territory, mostly in Italy and Greece (with Germany and Sweden the most common destinations), but in 2017 some EU member states were still refusing to accept them under a solidarity scheme. The coronavirus crisis is similar to the refugee crisis: Countries that are not immediately affected are mostly not willing to help, Massari said. Different countries obviously have different threat perceptions. We [Italy] feel that the coronavirus is a global and European threat that needs a European response, but other countries dont see it that way.

Europes selfishness is morally lamentable, and its unwise, because misery loves company. A struggling Italy will drag its European friends down, too, starting with their economies. But the cold response to Italys plea points to a larger issue: How would European allies respond in case of crisis even more devastating than the coronavirussay, a massive cyberattack that knocks out power for a prolonged period of time? Without electrical power, other critical functions quickly cease to function, too. Brno University Hospital home to one of the Czech Republics largest COVID-19 testing labshas already been hit by a serious cyber attack.

The fact that no countrywith the possible exception of Chinacan survive without close allies is the reason that NATO was founded 71 years ago and the European Coal and Steel Community three years later. NATOs member states are supposed to do their best to defend their countries, but they all know that they need one another: Collective defense is NATOs raison dtre. Only the United States has considerable supplies of ammunition; all the other member states know that they can turn to the U.S. military if they run out, as happened during NATOs 2011 intervention in Libya.

Yet at a moment of extreme hardship for a key EU (and NATO) member, Italys allies are showing that they cant be counted on in a severe crisisand that means Italy may increasingly turn toward China. It will remain stalwart member of the EU and NATO, but why should it support its various European allies next time theyre in a pinch? And why should it pay heed to European allies calls for it to reverse its participation in Chinas Belt and Road Initiative, which it joined last year?

The Belt and Road, Chinas vast global infrastructure program, involves investments and constructions in a range of countries, primarily developing countries. Italy and China have, however, been deepening their cooperation through the Belt and Road Initiative and beyond; last year, a police cooperation program saw Chinese police officers patrol the streets of Rome and Milan.

And why should Italy keep its some 6,000 troops on foreign missions, troops who lead and make up large parts of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon and NATOs forces in Kosovo, soldiers who help defend Latvia as part of NATOs Enhanced Forward Presence, and sailors who participate in the EUs mission combating Somali piracy and who police the western Mediterranean for the benefit not just of Italy but the rest of Europe, too?

La maledizione! cries Rigoletto, the title character in Giuseppe Verdis famous opera. La maledizionethe cursesometimes seems to be Italys destiny. EU membership has been mostly good for Italy. Its economy has been propelled upward by the single market and the euro, and its citizens have benefited enormously from free movementsome 2.7 million Italians currently live in other EU member states. And Italians appreciate the alliance: a 2018 Pew Research Center survey showed that 58 percent of Italians have a favorable view of the EU, somewhat lower than the EU median of 62 percent but far higher than Greeces 37 percent. On March 13, the European Commission stepped in to at least help Italys economy, but so far no medical assistance from member states has materialized.

Indeed, with the current lack of solidarity, the EU might lose Italys affectionand China will happily continue to take advantage of the situation. That mustnt happen.

Instead, the EUs net beneficiaries (and low-coronavirus-count nations) such as Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Poland should send Italy face masks and whatever else the country might need. Indeed, would it be too much to ask those countries to fulfill their obligations under the EUs solidarity scheme?

Otherwise, dont expect Italian soldiers to come to the aid of European allies when Russia stages a surprise on a European country of its choice, or when a hostile state or its proxies knock out Polands power grid.

More:

The EU Is Abandoning Italy During the Coronavirus Crisis - Foreign Policy

Opinion: People with disabilities don’t need eugenics to improve – UI The Daily Iowan

Posted on by

Modern social Darwinism is looking at altering DNA of babies with genetic diseases. This isnt the future we need.

Ally Pronina, Columnist March 9, 2020

We all have value and deserve to be loved for who we are, but society doesnt always recognize that. There are plenty of different bigotries across history, a major one being social Darwinism, also known as eugenics.

Eugenics can be defined as selective breeding of human populations to improve the populations genetic composition. This started as advocacy for sterilizing those seen as less fit, but has since moved on to include gene editing for babies with genetic disorders.

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and ethologist, says this idea would work to improve human beings.

Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher, Dawkins tweeted.

He went on to say that it would be bad in practice, but the idea that humans need artificial improvement is abhorrent in itself.

Cows humanity does not depend on how much milk they produce. Peoples humanity does not depend on their athletic ability. Our worth does not come from things determined by genetics such as weight, height, and appearance. Our value comes from qualities we have which make us unique and able to change the world.

Being human means imperfection. A world where everyone is the same would be a boring one. If we were all perfect and the same, we might as well just be robots.

Improve is subjective. As someone who cannot jump high or run fast, I disagree changing my genetic makeup so I could improve it. It wouldnt change who I am as a person at all.

Throughout history, there have been individuals who made noteworthy achievements despite and because of qualities eugenicists would want to change their genetic makeup to get rid of.

Harriet Tubman an African American who many in her time would have considered inferior because of her race created the Underground Railroad which saved thousands from slavery. Helen Keller someone who was blind and deaf founded a school for others with disabilities. Susan B. Anthony whose status as a woman would have been enough to be less fit was a leader in the Womens Suffrage Movement.

As a society, we have made progress in accepting diversity. African Americans are not legally enslaved. People with mental disorders are not institutionalized. Women can vote. However, the entertainment of eugenic ideas is still around; thats going backwards in history.

Eugenicists want a perfect race. Again, perfect is a subjective term. Being human means imperfection. A world where everyone is the same would be a boring one. If we were all perfect and the same, we might as well just be robots.

Eugenicists would argue improving genetics would increase quality of life and that is what makes it human. Why change peoples genetic make-up when we can change societal attitudes?

During segregation and slavery, false beliefs about black Americans decreased their value as people. If Rosa Parks used gene editing to change her skin tone, she wouldnt be a hero in the Civil Rights Movement.

Back before the Americans with Disabilities Act was established, it was not peoples disabilities which caused them to not be able to have jobs. It was societys false belief that they were not smart enough to be in the workforce.

During the 1800s, it was not the gender of women which restricted their opportunities. It was societys posturing that they were not as smart as men.

Eugenics had a place in Nazi Germany, not todays America. We have evolved to be more accepting of people and having a more negative view of eugenics. This can be seen from the backlash Dawkins has received- simply for saying something supporting eugenics.

Or, as Anne Frank wrote in her diary, In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart.

Columns reflect the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Editorial Board, The Daily Iowan, or other organizations in which the author may be involved.

More here:

Opinion: People with disabilities don't need eugenics to improve - UI The Daily Iowan

Assistant professor says he’s been fired because he dared to talk about human population variation – Inside Higher Ed

Posted on by

An assistant professor of psychology at Marietta College says his contract isnt being renewed because of what hes said and was alleged to have said about differences between ethnic groups.

Many academics believe that race is mere social construct -- that there is no meaning behind being black, white or anything else, beyond what society assigns to it. Others say that that is mere orthodoxy and that race is real; this group often points to research demonstrating group-based differences in complex traits such as intelligence.

Scientists at the cutting edge of studying race and complex traits, meanwhile, say that these traits are always a mix between genetics and environment. And as of now, these experts add, its impossible to tell in any genuine way just what the mix is, because babies cant be raised exactly the same way over two generations, as such experiments would require.

Bo Winegard falls in the middle camp and believes that purposely not talking about race-based differences is disingenuous and dangerous. The "rich, variegated tapestry of humanity" and its evolution have long interested him and ought to be among the truths that academics pursue, he said in a recent interview. Otherwise, he added, "literal racists" will fill the information void.

I do think theres an informational embargo on human population variation and certainly on race and IQ, he said. People have opinions, and they dont want those to get out publicly.

Whatever you think of Winegards ideas, he said in a recent essay in the conservative academic publication Quillette, you should care that hes effectively being fired for them.

If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline, he wrote. You may disagree with everything I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyones interests that you support my freedom to believe, say and write it.

Trouble Begins

Winegard, who is in his second year at Marietta and is scheduled to leave at the end of the academic year, says the trouble started in October. That's when he was invited to address the University of Alabamas Evolution Working Group, which is affiliated with the universitys evolution studies program. Both parties agreed that Winegard would talk about population variation, or, in his words, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time.

The idea was to link the theory with natural selection, in line with a recent article Winegard co-wrote for Personality and Individual Differences. The article, called "Dodging Darwin: Race, Evolution and the Hereditarian Hypothesis," says, "Like most hereditarians (those who believe it likely that genes contribute to differences in psychological traits among human populations), we do not believe there is decisive evidence about the causes of differences in cognitive ability." Yet the "partial genetic hypothesis is most consistent with the Darwinian research tradition."

One class visit with students went well, Winegard recalled in Quillette. Then he received a number of texts from a campus host expressing concern about Winegards entry on the website RationalWiki. The website, like Wikipedia, is edited by volunteers, but is dedicated to debunking what it sees as junk science. And Winegard, according to RationalWiki, is guilty of writing racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.

Winegard told his hosts that he disagreed with the characterization. He has previously argued, for example, that racism isnt wrong because there arent races; it is wrong because it violates basic human decency and modern moral ideals.

This, of course, contradicts a broad literature asserting that race is a social construct, not a biological one, but it doesnt endorse racism. As Winegard said in the same co-written article, In fact, pinning a message of tolerance to the claim that all humans are essentially the same underneath the skin is dangerous. It suggests that if there were real differences, racism would be justified.

Despite the texts, Winegards main talk at Alabama went on as scheduled, followed by what he described as a rowdy question-and-answer period. Someone yelled that he was a racist, and another accused him of promoting phrenology, a discredited pseudoscience having to do with skull shape.

But Winegard said via telephone that that he never spoke about phrenology or on race and IQ at Alabama. The most controversial thing he said was that psychology may someday, in the aggregate, provide some explanation as to why East Asian societies tend toward collectivism, he added.

One of his slides, however, did say that groups may vary on socially significant traits (on average) such as intelligence, agreeableness, athleticism, cooperativeness [and] criminality.

Alabamas student newspaper published an article on the talk, vaguely linking the subject matter to eugenics, or reproduction to promote certain heritable traits. It also published an apology from the group that hosted him.

Winegard said this week that he never mentioned eugenics, and that he finds things such as forced sterilization morally repugnant. He didn't preclude having mentioned embryo selection once or twice on Twitter, he said, but he's never made a sustained argument.

Back at Marietta, Winegard was summoned to a meeting with his president and provost to discuss the article. While they werent pleased, Winegard wrote in Quillette, they told [him] to be more strategic in my navigation of such a sensitive topic. I agreed that I would try.

Months later, someone began emailing Winegards department and administration about things hes written and said on Twitter. One tweet, in particular, read, The greatest challenge to affluent societies is dealing openly, honestly, and humanely with biological (genetic) inequality. If we dont meet this challenge, I suspect our countries will be torn apart from the inside like a tree destroyed by parasites.

At a second, consequent meeting with his supervisors, Winegard explained (as he recapped in Quillette) that his tweet was not about groups, but rather about individual genetic differences, and the need to create a humane society for everyone, not just for the cognitive elite and hyper-educated (a theme I discuss often). The simile about parasites was a reference to political conflict and not a reference to some group of humans or another, he also said.

Winegard recalled his bosses expressing disappointment in me and particular dismay about the tweet I had deleted, which they said evoked anti-black and anti-Semitic tropes. He agreed and apologized but said he would continue to pursue potentially controversial research topics.

Termination

Termination never came up, even after Winegard published a co-written article on human population variation -- until two weeks ago.

My boss informed me, without any warning, that the college was not renewing my contract, he wrote in Quillette. I dont know if my paper was the proximate cause of my firing, but in the light of the foregoing weeks tumult, it was plausibly the last straw.

Did Winegard see it coming? I had worried vaguely about such an eventuality, but didnt really think it would happen, he wrote. I naively assumed that the norms of academic freedom would prevail. They did not.

Winegard told Inside Higher Ed that hes had strong teaching evaluations and high research productivity since hes been at Marietta. He sees no apparent reason for his effective termination, apart from the controversy surrounding what he has said and, more to the point, is alleged to have said.

In response to his Quillette article, some have argued that one should wait until tenure to pursue certain topics. But Winegard reiterated that he, perhaps navely, took academic freedom seriously. Beyond that, he said, if academics follow "pragmatic" advice about waiting until tenure to discuss controversial issues, it means waiting 10 or more years, through graduate school and the tenure track.

Im perplexed by the response, he said of Mariettas actions. The best response would have been to come out with a bold, affirmative statement for academic freedom, even if the college distanced itself from Winegards views in doing so.

Otherwise, he said, Youre incentivizing this trollish behavior. Trollish here refers to those Winegard says emailed his institution about him anonymously.

Marietta declined comment, saying Winegards case was a private personnel issue.

Relevant, widely followed American Association of University Professors policy says that even professors on probationary appointments should enjoy the same academic freedom as those with tenure, even if they don't have the same due process protections. Winegard said he's unaware of any paths to appeal, but AAUP policy also holds that a faculty committee should evaluate any concerns about non-reappointment related to a possible violation of academic freedom.

Winegard's department chair did not respond to a request for comment. Marietta's Faculty Council chair also did not respond to questions about the case.

Facts and Feelings

Attempts to link cognition to race have for decades happened mostly in academe's fringes. That's because it's either dog-whistle racist junk science or there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding it, depending on what you believe. In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life was immediately controversial, stirring concerns about lack of peer review and whether it represented mainstream science.

Race-based science debates don't just happen in psychology. In January, for example, Philosophical Psychology faced a boycott for publishing an article in defense of race-based research on intelligence. The gist of that article, written by Nathan Cofnas, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Oxford, was that when advances in science reveal genetic variants underlying individual differences in intelligence, we wont be ready for it.

One of the main criticisms of Cofnas's piece was that it speculated that these breakthroughs are close. They are not. So postulating about them is, in a sense, pseudoscience, critics maintain.

Cofnas said at the time that those "who argue that we should wait for the genetics and neuroscience of intelligence to become more advanced before we attempt to study this issue often claim that, in the meantime, we should accept the environmental explanation for the purpose of policy making" and more. But that is a "political, not a scientific, position."

Journalist Angela Saini, author of the 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science (which Winegard has reviewed), said that her research demonstrates there is simply "no conspiracy against talking about race and IQ in academia, largely because this matter was settled 70 years ago -- and reinforced by genetics since -- by the universal understanding that race is a social construct."

It's "impossible to say that any differences in attainment we may see between socially defined groups must be biological in origin," Saini added. "Scientists are overwhelmingly in consensus on this."

That a "few academics like to claim otherwise," she said, "in particular, a small number of social scientists on the margins of respectable academia, does nothing to undermine the scientific facts. The facts, Im afraid, dont care about their feelings."

Intelligence researcher Richard Haier, professor emeritus in the pediatric neurology division at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, said that the questions Winegard is working on are controversial and emotional -- and well within the bounds of reasonable debate.

What happened at Marietta is, therefore, an apparent violation of academic freedom, Haier said. I dont know all the details, but I do know that it is very hard to defend academic freedom for issues that are not just controversial but also extremely emotional. And a lot of people in academia are happy to say that they support academic freedom but there are many examples of occurrences that appear to violate academic freedom, and the local academic community has not stood up for academic freedom.

Haier added, The hard thing about science is to go where the data take you. Without tenure and even with tenure, its becoming increasingly difficult to address controversial ideas, where some points of view do not acknowledge the legitimacy of other points of view, and therefore shut down discussion. Thats not how science works.

Lee Jussim, distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University and co-author of a recent paper on political bias in social science research, said that the topic of race and IQ "is poison." Further, he said, "I see no reason to believe the methods are capable of answering the question of how much race differences in intelligence are genetic versus environmental versus some combination.

That doesn't mean that Winegard or anyone else should be fired for trying to do so, however, Jussim said. Of course he has a right to pursue the line of inquiry.

See original here:

Assistant professor says he's been fired because he dared to talk about human population variation - Inside Higher Ed

The right has perfected making people expendable but a coronavirus recession will take it further than ever – The Independent

Posted on by

The 30bn in the Budget to fight both coronavirus and a new recession has been met with breathless talk of political realignment. After bailing out their banks, western governments responded to the financial crisis of 2008 with a severe and economically illiterate tightening of the public purse-strings.

Today, the direction of travel on the right couldnt appear more different. From Rishi Sunaks Keynesian largesse and promise to make sure that our safety net remains strong enough to fall back on to Trumps plans to spend his way out of the crisis, right-wing governments on both sides of the Atlantic appear to be preparing an expansionary economic response to the coming downturn.

Yet as the virus has spread, so have murmurs on the right of what sounds oddly like enthusiasm,hard to reconcile with this new appearance of humanist welfarism: CNBC News editor Rick Santelli has suggested that the US encourage the disease to quickly spread through the population in order to minimise economic uncertainty; the Telegraphs Jeremy Warner affected manful resignation about a cull of the unproductive elderly; Boris Johnson flirted with taking it on the chin last week, and has been accused of prioritising the views of behaviourists and eugenics-adjacent assorted weirdos over medical expertise in his stance on deferring containment.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The right has changed economic tack, in other words, but this neednt stop them from carrying the selective empathy, social sadism, and the withdrawal of protections that characterised austerity into the new regime of expansionist economic policy.

In our book, Work Want Work: Labour and Desire at the End of Capitalism, we show how governments since the financial crash have not merely cut funding to the welfare system, but have used such measures as a lever to remove inconvenient parts of the population from the official economy and politics altogether. The big spending commitments of the Tory Budget are tantamount to an admission of how poorly Britain has recovered from the last recession, and that austerity was as counterproductive as it was cruel. But the motivations of the right in the period since 2008 were never solely about cutting public spending for its own sake.

Benefits claimants, for example, had been fined for infractions (such as voluntarily leaving a job) since the start of the welfare state. Yet the coalition governments 2012 reforms extended such sanctions to single parents, the long-term sick and the disabled, and increasingly focussed on internal infractions such as claimants administrative errors. The result was an expansion of a caste of people neither in work nor on benefits, who have simply been expelled from the economy altogether.

The routine use of benefit sanctions generally meaning the withdrawal of an individuals entire livelihood is inconsistent with a belief in the liberal states responsibility to ensure a baseline living standard for those within it. Yet this innovation is typical of the rights behaviour since the last financial crisis. The effectively ongoing Windrush scandal and makingShamima Begum stateless are part of the same pattern. On the American right, this logic is now replicated on an international level, as whole countries and regions are spoken of as sacrifice zones, to be abandoned to climate change and pollution.

While Trump and Johnsons response to a new recession are anything but austere, their measures in no way preclude continuing with this logic. The Tory Budgetstopped short of anything that might alter the precarious employment status of those in the gig economy, who are unentitled to statutory sick pay. The promise to speed up Universal Credit payments for those forced onto benefits by coronavirus simply admits that slow payments are already a deliberate disciplining feature of the normal system. Trumps travel ban on Europeans (arbitrarily excluding the UK), meanwhile, is an iteration of that already trialled for Muslim-majority countries, an opportunistic extension of the power of the state to eject aliens from its borders.

'60 per cent' of public need to contract coronavirus for herd immunity to take effect

Both US and UK spending programmes are also environmentally regressive: Johnson has pledged 4,000 miles of new road and no rise in fuel duty, while Trump is pushing for federal aid for oil and gas companies. Instead of seizing the crisis and crash in oil prices to push for a more environmentally sustainable economy, both are using the states new largesse to protect polluters guaranteeing yet more environmental sacrifice zones to come.

We can only cautiously welcome the rights abandonment of its economic hawkishness in response to the coronavirus and hope that it does indeed extend into any coming financial crisis. But we shouldnt make the mistake of thinking the eugenic and sacrificial fantasies some on the right let slip in the face of the pandemic couldnt be reconciled with its new anti-austerity policies.

Mareile Pfannebecker and James Smith are authors of Work want work: Labour and desire at the end of capitalism

Read this article:

The right has perfected making people expendable but a coronavirus recession will take it further than ever - The Independent

Iain Macwhirter: Herd immunity does not mean the Government is trying to kill old people – HeraldScotland

Posted on by

It was hard not to sympathise with Nicola Sturgeon at First Minister's Questions on Thursday. Having accepted the advice of her clinical advisers, and decided not to close schools, universities and large gatherings, she risked being accused of allowing people to die needlessly.

Minutes before she rose in the Scottish Parliament, the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, declared a blanket ban on all meetings of more than 100 people. A measure like that would not just mean schools closing, but the Scottish parliament going into lockdown.

Ms Sturgeon was painfully aware that many of her ardent followers believed Ireland is taking the right policy, and that the First Minister was allowing herself to be dictated to by Boris Johnson, a PM they loathe.

READ MORE:Coronavirus in Scotland: All Scottish schools could close from end of Easter break

The First Minister's discomfort was obvious as she, on the one hand, advised people to stay at home to stop the symptoms spreading, while arguing that school children should continue to be exposed by attending school. It seemed to defy common sense.

If only Scotland could make its own decisions, they moaned on Twitter. But the First Minister had made her own decision. She agreed with her National Clinical Adviser, Jason Leitch, as well as the UK Chief Medical Officer. It was her call.

Politicians, not scientists, made the decision not to close schools. And she was right to do so. Even though she appeared to contradict herself by arguing for the cancellation of events involving more than 500 people.

She justified this in practical terms as being necessary to release police and ambulance staff for coronavirus work. The UK government followed suit later, for the same reasons. This was not a change in infection-control policy. But the wisdom of crowds was taking over.

Sports like football are already self-isolating. Book festivals, conference and concerts are spontaneously shutting up shop. By tomorrow, parents may be ignoring government advice and keeping their children at home.

Another problem for the First Minister, as she tries to keep in step with the other nations and regions of the UK, is that Britain looks out of step with the rest of the world. Not just Ireland but countries like Belgium and Norway have resorted to lockdown.

Politicians like Rory Stewart, the former Tory Development Secretary, took to the airwaves to argue that the government had got it all wrong. We should be shutting down immediately, cancelling sporting events, banning large meetings, keeping people in social isolation.

After all, that's what China has done. Coronavirus has peaked there. So why aren't we doing the same?

Whom to believe? Paranoia is the default condition of social media and all weeks people on Twitter have been claiming in all seriousness - that Boris Johnson is content to see millions of old people and poor people sacrificed on the altar of the economy in order to justify Brexit.

Then there are those who believe that Dom Cummings, the Prime Minister's saturnine adviser, is a eugenicist conducting an evil experiment under the guise of herd immunity. The Brexit culture war has morphed into a coronavirus culture war.

Herd immunity is the doctrine that the epidemic is allowed to spread through the community so that the population acquires antibodies. Eventually, enough people develop immunity through exposure that the disease cannot spread much as children do when they are exposed to diseases in school.

READ MORE:Coronavirus: Scientists claim UK strategy is 'risking lives'

However, this well-respected epidemiological approach implies that some people just might die in the short term in order to save a lot more people dying down the road. It means allowing the virus to run through the community, rather than locking down and minimising the immediate risk of infection.

Herd immunity is central to the Government's coronavirus strategy. According to the epidemiologist, Professor Graham Medley, on Thursday's Newsnight, the only way we can acquire it, given that there is no vaccine yet, is to allow everyone to be infected. He'd like all older, vulnerable people to be sent to Scotland, so that there could be a nice big epidemic in Kent.

He's not serious of course. Like Boris Johnson's remark about taking it on the chin, the Warwick University epidemiologist was trying to explain disease modelling to a lay audience. But you can't use metaphors in the age of Twitter.

Herd immunity has been attacked as social Darwinism survival of the fittest. Social media has become a factor now in epidemics. Herd immunity attracts the kind of venom and abuse that is normally associated with the transgender debate. The free-floating animus that resides on that platform instantly descends on anyone trying to explain what the scientists mean.

How can you sit there and let people die! they screamed.

The simple answer is because it's what the Chief Medical Officer and the National Clinical Adviser say we should do. They argue that if we go into lockdown, and inhibit herd immunity, we risk another wave of the pandemic when the lockdown is lifted or breaks down.

We live in a democratic society, and the kind of draconian restrictions imposed in communist China would not work here, or would not work for long. We can't turn the country into a prison.

Moreover, complete isolation would mean millions losing their jobs, the economy collapsing, social services in disarray. In epidemics, people don't just die from the disease. They can die just as easily from losing their livelihoods.

The last thing the NHS needs is thousands of health workers staying at home to look after children locked out of school. The health service doesn't have the capacity right now for a major epidemic hence all the talk about "flattening the curve". Within a couple of months it may be in much better shape to cope.

Anyway, as the First Minister explained, closing schools doesn't necessarily halt transmission. Children will still associate with others when they are off school often in less clean environments than a well-scrubbed classroom. They will often be looked after by older people the ones most at risk from the collateral effects of coronavirus.

We are a risk-averse society which believes in a risk-free world that doesn't exist and never could. Over the last 30 years, a generation has been brought up to believe that it has a right to be protected from every risk even the risk of being exposed to difficult ideas. Hence the obsession in universities with creating "safe spaces".

This snowflake generation dominates social media and is outraged at the thought that there is something from which they cannot be protected. They believe it must be a government plot, a Brexit ploy; capitalists making a buck out of hardship.

So we end up with people on the one hand condemning Donald Trump for taking drastic measures without understanding the science, and on the other, calling on the government to ignore the advice of its medical experts.

But Boris Johnson is right. The First Minister is right. They are over a barrel. You can't insist that politicians listen to the best medical advice, and then insist that they reject it because it sounds wrong.

The harsh reality is that some people are going to die whatever happens. Politicians can't do miracles; they can only do their best.

Original post:

Iain Macwhirter: Herd immunity does not mean the Government is trying to kill old people - HeraldScotland

Wendy Vogel on art and abortion – Artforum

Posted on by

A DECADE AGO, while living in Houston, Texas, I volunteered as a patient escort at the citys Planned Parenthood downtown office. Then located on a busy street, the reproductive-care clinics public location attracted a diverse cross-section of the anti-choice movement. The scenes outside the office ranged from the bizarre to the ghoulish. In a modern interpretation of the Battle of Jericho, one man circled the building seven times every afternoon and blew on a shofar, in hopes that the clinic would crumble to the ground. Busloads of students from religious high schools in Houstons conservative suburbs would file out in front of Planned Parenthood with red tape across their lips, symbolizing the silencing of unborn fetuses. Other protestors adopted a twisted logic where anti-choice politics met anti-racist lip service. A white woman would approach African American clients with a pamphlet about the connection between birth control and eugenics. Did you know the most dangerous place for a black child is in the womb? she would yell.

At the time, Planned Parenthood Houston was in the midst of constructing a new clinic, double the size of the downtown location, to better serve the citys population of two million (now more than 2.3 million). In January 2010, thousands of anti-choicers organized a protest at the new clinic site, pejoratively dubbed by the movement an abortion supercenter. Police corralled counterprotestorsmyself and a few dozen othersinto tighter and tighter quarters on the sidewalk across the street. Though the new clinics opening was assured, I could not help feeling outnumbered. As we drove away that afternoon, I spotted a stone-faced man perched on the side of I-45 in a lawn chair, holding a pitchfork with baby doll parts stuck through each of its spikes.

Ive never forgotten the vehement imagery of these protestors. By contrast, contemporary art has been reluctant to address the subject of abortion in such direct terms, until recently. In 2015, journalists and bloggers launched the online campaign #ShoutYourAbortion, which encouraged social media users and artists alike to share their experiences with reproductive choice. In 2018, artist Barbara Zucker curated the open-call exhibition Currents: Abortion at AIR, the cooperative feminist gallery in Brooklyn. Her press release articulated the connection between reproductive choice and human rights: Abortion remains a signifier of womens ownership over their bodies, being as urgent a subject as any of the issues that now consume us. In the opening months of 2020, three exhibitions have framed abortion in no uncertain terms as a political, intersectional, and conceptual issue.

Through October 15, New Yorks Museum of Sex hosts Barcelona-based artist Laia Abrils exhibition On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access. One chapter of her larger project A History of Misogyny, On Abortion chronicles obstacles to reproductive choice in across the world. Abril employs a documentary mode common to conceptual art, drawing on the testimonies of individuals who were denied care. She pairs black-and-white photographic portraits of her subjects with typed statements and evidentiary images of their struggles, such as maps of their travels to neighboring countries for health care and photos of shadowy waiting rooms and plum pits (as one woman describes the size of her fetus). The subjects include Franoise, a septuagenarian Frenchwoman who performed five thousand clandestine abortions from the 70s to the 90s, to three Chinese womenidentified by their initials ZWF, FJ, and GYLwhose abortions and sterilizations were forced upon them. Abril also uses the photographic grid format to depict the desperate measures people have taken to end pregnancy throughout history, from herbal mixtures to the coat hanger method. Alongside her work, she exhibits birth-control artifacts from the Museum of Sex holdings and gynecological tools from the Burns Archive, a private collection in Manhattan devoted to medical photography and objects from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sober nature of Abrils exhibition sharply contrasts with the spectacular format of the MoSex shows directly above and below herson webcam models and fin de sicle stag films, respectively. Still, on a recent busy Friday night at the museum, On Abortion invited quiet contemplation from a busy crowd.

In January and February, the two-part show Abortion Is Normal was mounted at the downtown galleries Eva Presenhuber and Arsenal Contemporary Art. Conceived as a fundraiser for Downtown for Democracy, a liberal super PAC, the show donated its proceeds to Planned Parenthood and efforts to support voter education on reproductive rights. Curated by Project for Empty Space Newark cofounders Rebecca Pauline Jampol and Jasmine Wahi and co-organized by Marilyn Minter, Gina Nanni, Laurie Simmons, and Sandy Tait, the show brought together over fifty diverse artistsseveral with blue-chip appeal, like Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman. While the title polemically defined reproductive rights as normal healthcare, the works on view approached bodily and sexual autonomy in various ways, oscillating in attitude between anger, celebration, and grief. Carrie Mae Weemss photograph The Broken, See Duchamp, 201216, depicts the artist in a spread-eagled posture reminiscent of Etant donns; Hayv Kahramans paintings of fair-skinned, dark-haired women, punctuated with woven bits of canvas, suggest the fracturing and mending potentials of art in the wake of traumas related to sexual violation and migration. Jane Kaplowitzs painted portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg lionize the Supreme Court Justice, while Jon Kesslers multimedia collage Birmingham, 2019, mourns the victims of the 1998 bombing of an Alabama abortion clinic by the terrorist Eric Rudolph.

One of the few works rooted in activism, Viva Ruizs performance project Thank God for Abortion received prime real estate in both iterations of the show. Ruizs work takes an intersectional approach to abortion rights, positing reproductive freedom as an issue aligned with queer rights and the autonomy of non-white people. Ruiz regularly participates in Pride parades and protests wearing saintly regalia, spreading her message about guilt-free, god-approved abortion. Likewise, Elektra KBs photo-dominant installation Radical Family Structures of Care and Mutual Aid Mutual Aid for Cyborgs and Goddesses, 2020, documents queer and trans individuals reproductive health choices. One of the most visceral works in Abortion Is Normal, Christen Cliffords installation I Want Your Blood, 201320, displays menstrual fluid donated by various participants, which the artist decanted into tiny vintage perfume vials. Clifford seeks to undo the stigma attached to menstruation, which is linked to fears and taboos around miscarriage and abortion. Theres no equality without reproductive rights, she has said. Theres no reproductive rights without knowledge of the female body, and theres no knowledge of the female body without knowledge of blood. If most of the work in Abortion is Normal hewed more closely to the conventions of the white cube gallery, this did not diminish its efficacy. The show pointed to the wide-ranging implications of healthcare restrictions while garnering crowds, press attention, and money for political causes.

While Cliffords work suggests we honor the products of the female reproductive system, Aliza Shvartss solo exhibition Purported explores the polarizing reactions provoked by evidence of self-administered abortion. On view at Art in General in Brooklyn through May 9, the show features video documentation of the artists notorious 2008 Yale University undergraduate thesis project for which, over the course of an academic year, she allegedly inseminated herself monthly, then checked into a hotel to ingest abortifacient drugs, after which time she would cramp and bleed. As the exhibition brochure describes it, This bleeding could have been either a normal period or a very early-stage self-induced miscarriagethe work was intentionally crafted so that not even Shvarts knew which. At the time of its making, Shvarts intended for her Untitled [Senior Thesis Project] to include a sculptural cube wrapped in a lining of her own blood, as well as video documentation. The work caused a firestorm of controversy online and was subsequently censored by Yale. A spokesperson for the school declared the project a creative fiction to the press, claiming that no human blood was usedpresumably to shield the school from further negative attention. The school asked Shvarts to sign a statement agreeing that her work was a fiction. She refused and submitted an alternative senior project. The artists subsequent work has explored how individuals from historically marginalized groups have had their life experiences reduced to fiction, with physical evidence like rape kits (which she has attempted to gather and display from all fifty US states) overriding their spoken testimony.

These shows arrive at a moment of growing legal momentum to obstruct rights to abortion access. Last week, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo was heard in the US Supreme Court. The case concerns the constitutionality of a Louisiana state law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at hospitals within thirty miles of the clinic. It represents the first case of its kind to be heard since Trump appointed conservative justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the bench, threatening to overturn the precedent of a 2016 ruling, Whole Womans Health v. Hellerstedt, which had declared a similar law in Texas unconstitutional and an undue burden to people seeking abortion access. If this case proceeds differently, it could unravel the protections of the landmark Roe v. Wade decisionwhich ultimately defended abortion access on the basis of privacy.

This new burst of interest in art about reproductive freedom shifts the discussion from privacy, even choice, to defend and normalize reproductive health care for all bodies. The political rhetoric of keeping abortions safe, legal, and rarea phrase made popular by President Bill Clinton in the 90sfeels out of step with todays leftist politics. Although the ethical debates about where and when life begins may never subside, artists are shifting the narrative about abortion from a secret, sin, or painstaking choice to an issue of bodily autonomyan issue that affects all genders and sexualities.

Wendy Vogel is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator.

See the original post:

Wendy Vogel on art and abortion - Artforum

Full Sixth Circuit Takes Up Ohio Ban on Selective Abortions – Courthouse News Service

Posted on by

CINCINNATI (CN) The en banc Sixth Circuit heard arguments Wednesday over Ohios ban on abortions involving fetuses with Down syndrome, with abortion providers again fighting to prevent the law from taking effect.

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to Planned Parenthood and Preterm-Cleveland in March 2018, just over a month after then-Governor John Kasich signed House Bill 214 into law.

The bill criminalizes performing an abortion if the person performing the abortion knows that one reason, in whole or part, for the womans decision to terminate her pregnancy is a fetal indication of Down syndrome.

Ohio appealed the decision to the Sixth Circuit, and the case was initially argued in in front of a three-judge panel that upheld the injunction last October.

The state requested and was granted another set of arguments in front of the entire Cincinnati-based appeals court, at which point numerous state governments, as well as medical and civil rights organizations, filed amicus briefs with the court.

Attorney Ben Flowers argued on behalf of Ohio and told the court Wednesday the law was passed to prohibit Down syndrome selective abortions and prevent abortion providers from straying into practices that some might consider eugenics.

Flowers said the law sends a message that these abortions are so heinous and so inhumane that doctors can go to jail and lose their licenses.

The states attorney repeatedly told the judges his opponents failed to provide any evidence the law will place an undue burden on women seeking abortions, and said its practical effect is unknown because it has yet to be implemented.

U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Moore, an appointee of Bill Clinton, asked about the bills subjective knowledge requirement, and asked if it was a run-around to allow doctors to perform the abortions so long as the woman does not talk about the reasoning behind her decision.

Flowers answered that if a woman does not tell her doctor a diagnosis of Down syndrome is part of her reasoning, the doctor would not be in violation of the law.

Attorney Jessie Hill argued on behalf of Preterm-Cleveland and was grilled by several judges throughout her remarks about whether the law places an undue burden on women or simply regulates the doctors who perform the abortions.

Hill cited the 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and said it held that states are unable to pass any law that restricts the availability of a pre-viability abortion.

The attorney called Ohios law an absolute ban.

It doesnt regulate the woman at all directly, U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge said, adding later that, Its not a ban.

Kethledge, an appointee of George W. Bush, joined several of his colleagues in voicing their opinion that the law regulates only doctors, and not the women seeking abortions.

U.S. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton, another George W. Bush appointee, sided with Kethledge, and noted it was not a terrible idea to pass legislation that limits a doctors ability to perform selective abortions, whether they are based on a medical diagnosis, race, or any other consideration.

Hill criticized the judges for their assumptions about the reasons women choose to have abortions, and said to paint [these women] with the broad brush of eugenics is wrong.

Kethledge conceded the use of the term was not applicable to all women affected by the law, but added that the restriction strikes a balance between two extremes.

Arguments were extended to 25 minutes per side to allow for an appearance by Justice Department attorney Alexander Maugeri, who argued on behalf of the federal government, an amicus party that supports Ohios position.

Maugeri said the government believes the Ohio law expresses the view that Down syndrome lives have value, and allows the state to prevent women from being pressured into abortions by portions of the medical community.

While several members of the court seem poised to overturn the lower courts injunction, the majority of the 14 judges remained silent throughout proceedings.

Hill spoke to reporters after the hearing and stressed that women who make the decision to obtain an abortion do so after serious thought.

Women are moral decision-makers, the attorney remarked, after saying the issues involved are complex.

Ohios attorney, Flowers, could not be reached for comment.

No timetable has been set for the courts decision.

Like Loading...

Read more:

Full Sixth Circuit Takes Up Ohio Ban on Selective Abortions - Courthouse News Service

Will This Years Census Be the Last? – The New Yorker

Posted on by

Count all people, including babies, the U.S.Census Bureau instructs Americans on the questionnaire that will be mailed to every household by April 1, 2020, April Fools Day, which also happens to be National Census Day (and has been since 1930). You can answer the door; you can answer by mail; for the first time, you can answer online.

People have been counting people for thousands of years. Count everyone, beginning with babies who have teeth, decreed census-takers in China in the first millennium B.C.E., under the Zhou dynasty. Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls, God commands Moses in the Book of Numbers, describing a census, taken around 1500 B.C.E., that counted only men twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israelthat is, potential conscripts.

Ancient rulers took censuses to measure and gather their strength: to muster armies and levy taxes. Who got counted depended on the purpose of the census. In the United States, which counts the whole number of persons in each state, the chief purpose of the census is to apportion representation in Congress. In 2018, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross sought to add a question to the 2020 U.S. census that would have read, Is this person a citizen of the United States? Ross is a banker who specialized in bankruptcy before joining the Trump Administration; earlier, he had handled cases involving the insolvency of Donald Trumps casinos. The Census Bureau objected to the question Ross proposed. Eighteen states, the District of Columbia, fifteen cities and counties, the United Conference of Mayors, and a coalition of non-governmental organizations filed a lawsuit, alleging that the question violated the Constitution.

Last year, United States District Court Judge Jesse Furman, in an opinion for the Southern District, found Rosss attempt to add the citizenship question to be not only unlawful, and quite possibly unconstitutional, but also, given the way Ross went about trying to get it added to the census, an abuse of power. Furman wrote, To conclude otherwise and let Secretary Rosss decision stand would undermine the propositioncentral to the rule of lawthat ours is a government of laws, and not of men. There is, therefore, no citizenship question on the 2020 census.

All this, though, may be by the bye, because the census, like most other institutions of democratic government, is under threat. Google and Facebook, after all, know a lot more about you, and about the population of the United States, or any other state, than does the U.S.Census Bureau or any national census agency. This year may be the last time that a census is taken door by door, form by form, or even click by click.

Until ten thousand years ago, only about ten million men, women, and children lived on the entire planet, and any given person had only ever met a few dozen. (One theory holds that this is why some very old languages have no word for numbers.) No one could count any sizable group of people until human populations began to cluster together and to fall under the authority of powerful governments. Taking a census required administrative skills, coercive force, and fiscal resources, which is why the first reliable censuses were taken by Chinese emperors and Roman emperors, as the economist Andrew Whitby explains in The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age.

Censuses abound in the Bible, including one ordered by the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus and overseen by Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed, according to the Gospel of Luke. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. Everyone was supposed to register in the place of his or her birth. That, supposedly, was why Joseph made the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. (Quirinius census of Judea actually took place years later, but its a good story.)

The first modern censusone that counted everyone, not just men of fighting age or taxpayers, and noted all their names and agesdates to 1703, and was taken in Iceland, where astonishingly accurate census-takers counted 50,366 people. (They missed only one farm.) The modern census is a function of the modern state, and also of the scientific revolution. Modern demography began with the study of births and deaths recorded in parish registers and bills of mortality. The Englishman John Graunt, extrapolating from these records in the mid-seventeenth century, worked out the population of London, thereby founding the field that his contemporary William Petty called political arithmetic. Another way to do this is to take a census. In 1753, Parliament considered a bill for taking and registering an annual Account of the total number of people in order to ascertain the collective strength of the nation. This measure was almost single-handedly defeated by the parliamentarian William Thornton of York, who asked, Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased? He argued that a census would reveal to Englands enemies the very information England sought to conceal: the size and distribution of its population. Also, it violated liberty. If any officer, by whatever authority, should demand of me an account of the number and circumstance of my family, I would refuse it, he announced.

Two years later, in Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin published Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. Franklin had every reason to want to count the people in Britains North American colonies. He calculated that they numbered about a million, roughly the population of Scotland, which had forty-five members in the House of Commons and sixteen peers in the House of Lords. How many had the Americans? None.

To make this matter of representation mathematical, enumeration of the people, every ten years, is mandated by the U.S.Constitution. There would be no more than one member of Congress for every thirty thousand people. The Constitution also mandates that any direct tax levied on the states must be proportional to population. The federal government hardly ever levies taxes directly, though. Instead, its more likely to provide money and services to the states, and these, too, are almost always allocated in proportion to population. So the accuracy of the census has huge implications. Wilbur Rosss proposed citizenship question, which was expected to reduce the response rate in congressional districts with large numbers of immigrants, would have reduced the size of the congressional delegations from those districts, and choked off services to them.

Under the terms of the Constitution, everyone in the United States was to be counted, except Indians not taxed (a phrase that both excluded Native peoples from U.S. citizenship and served as a de-facto acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Native nations). Every person would be counted, and there were three kinds: free persons; persons bound to service for a term of years; and all other persons, the last a sorry euphemism for enslaved people, who were to be counted as three-fifths of a free person. It was a compromise between Northern delegates (who didnt want to count them at all, to thwart the South from gaining additional seats in Congress) and Southern delegates (who wanted to count them, for the sake of those seats)a compromise, that is, between zero and one.

Read more here:

Will This Years Census Be the Last? - The New Yorker

Will the Ecosystem Completely Change with Ethereum 2.0? – Crypto Daily

Posted on by

Within the crypto community, there is a lot of curiosity surrounding Ethereum 2.0. With its promise to enhance scalability and privacy on an impressive scale, this upgrade is expected to revolutionise the way the ecosystem works for Ethereum.

Speaking in a recent podcast, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin asserted that Ethereum 2.0 is going to address all the problems that the ecosystem has been having to deal with ever since it was created.

Specifically, a situation that occurred in 2017 where the app CryptoKitties slowed down the network and put transactions in a constant state of purgatory was mentioned in the podcast. The co-founder was then asked in the podcast how Ethereum 2.0 would help in situations like these.

In response, Buterin said the following:

Current Ethereum chain can do 36 transactions a second. If you do a roll-up optimistic roll-up or a ZK roll up, it goes up to 2,500. If you do just Sharding, it goes up to maybe 2000 and 10,000 and a roll-up on top of sharding, it goes up to a hundred thousand to a million per second.

In a separate interview, Buterin highlighted that Ethereum 2.0 will be providing further limits for users through the use of scaling, procedures, sharding and much more. This will be alongside a new proof-of-stake system. He further added that the upgrade would give users the ability for private transactions and that contracts could be completed without needing to demonstrate the content of such activities.

It will be interesting to see how Ethereum 2.0 plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!

Continued here:

Will the Ecosystem Completely Change with Ethereum 2.0? - Crypto Daily

Pact inked to boost drone ecosystem – The Hindu

Posted on by

A memorandum of understanding between Marut Dronetech Private Limited, Asia Pacific Flight Training and the Telangana government was signed on Saturday in an effort to give drone ecosystem a boost.

In collaboration with the Telangana government, Apollo Hospitals and World Economic Forum, Marut plans to provide a solution to take on shortcomings in supply chain in the crucial healthcare sector. For instance, blood samples or medicines from primary health centres can be transported quickly and efficiently by means of drones. Or for that matter, organs too can be transported reducing crucial travel time significantly.

Marut, co-founded by three IIT Guwahati graduates Prem Kumar Vislawath, Suraj Peddi and Sai Kumar Chinthala, tested its drone at Wings India 2020 Global Aviation Summit.

We tested the drone for a distance of 12 km which we completed in eight minutes. Required approvals and exemptions from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and Ministry of Civil Aviation were taken to do this, said Mr Vislawath.

The test entailed a payload weighing 3 kg.

The drone is powered by an app. The user can chose whether he or she wants to send a package, schedule a delivery and view incoming packages. Another screen on the app allows the user to choose whether he or she would like to send blood, vaccines, samples for medical diagnosis or organs.

While 3 kg payload was tested today, the drone can carry a payload of up to 20 kg and has the range to travel a distance of 40 km in about 20 minutes, Mr Vislawath said.

Earlier in the day, a tripartite MoU was signed between MoCA Krishi Udaan Scheme by Ras Al Khaimah International Airport, GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd and Spicejet Limited.

You have reached your limit for free articles this month.

Register to The Hindu for free and get unlimited access for 30 days.

Find mobile-friendly version of articles from the day's newspaper in one easy-to-read list.

Enjoy reading as many articles as you wish without any limitations.

A select list of articles that match your interests and tastes.

Move smoothly between articles as our pages load instantly.

A one-stop-shop for seeing the latest updates, and managing your preferences.

We brief you on the latest and most important developments, three times a day.

Not convinced? Know why you should pay for news.

*Our Digital Subscription plans do not currently include the e-paper ,crossword, iPhone, iPad mobile applications and print. Our plans enhance your reading experience.

View original post here:

Pact inked to boost drone ecosystem - The Hindu

The Irish Banking Ecosystem, Interconnection and the Speed of Change – Finextra

Posted on by

Irish banks are operating in a rapidly changing market and must embrace new technologies and business models to keep pace and to stay ahead of energetic new entrants. But the same banks should accept that they cannot make this transformation alone and have to seek out new partners if they are to succeed or even survive in a new marketplace.

The current trends towards open banking services, increasingly digitised products, and the appetite for real-time payments is playing out globally.

In Ireland, where fintechs and big tech both reside in increasing numbers,the trend is especially acute.

Many banks are adopting a cloud-based strategy to cope with new processing demands and to extract value from the increasing amounts of data, constantly generated from a myriad of remote devices.

Fast, agile and secure is the order of the day in order to join up the dots in the emerging ecosystem and be a frontrunner in the development of dynamic new products and services.

The question is, can banks do it alone and what are the key ingredients for a successful partnership?

Download the full white paper to find out more.

Read more:

The Irish Banking Ecosystem, Interconnection and the Speed of Change - Finextra

Most Definitive & Accurate Study on The V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Communications Ecosystem: 2019 2030 Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies…

Posted on by

Commonly referred to as V2X, vehicle-to-everything communications technology allows vehicles to directly communicate with each other, roadside infrastructure, and other road users to deliver an array of benefits in the form of road safety, traffic efficiency, smart mobility, environmental sustainability, and driver convenience. In addition, V2X is also helping pave the way for fully autonomous driving through its unique non line-of-sight sensing capability which allows vehicles to detect potential hazards, traffic, and road conditions from longer distances and sooner than other in-vehicle sensors such as cameras, radar, and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).

Although legacy V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) technologies are currently in operational use worldwide for ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) and relatively simple V2I applications, advanced V2X systems capable of supporting V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle), V2I and other forms of V2X communications are beginning to gain broad commercial acceptance with two competing technologies vying for the attention of automakers and regulators: the commercially mature IEEE 802.11p/DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications) standard, and the relatively new 3GPP-defined C-V2X (Cellular V2X) technology which has a forward evolutionary path towards 5G.

With an initial focus on road safety and traffic efficiency applications, Toyota and GM (General Motors) have already equipped some of their vehicle models with IEEE 802.11p-based V2X technology in Japan and North America. Among other commercial commitments, Volkswagen will begin deploying IEEE 802.11p on volume models in Europe starting from 2019, while Geely and Ford plan to integrate C-V2X in their new vehicles by 2021 and 2022 respectively. It is also worth nothing that a number of luxury automakers including BMW, Daimler, Volkswagens subsidiary Audi, and Volvo Cars already deliver certain V2X-type applications through wide-area cellular connectivity and supporting infrastructure such as appropriately equipped roadwork trailers.

Despite the ongoing 802.11p/DSRC versus C-V2X debate, regulatory uncertainty and other challenges, global spending on V2X communications technology is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 170% between 2019 and 2022. SNS Telecom & IT predicts that by the end of 2022, V2X will account for a market worth $1.2 Billion, with an installed base of nearly 6 Million V2X-equipped vehicles worldwide.

The V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Communications Ecosystem: 2019 2030 Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report presents an in-depth assessment of the V2X ecosystem including market drivers, challenges, enabling technologies, application scenarios, use cases, business models, key trends, standardization, spectrum availability/allocation, regulatory landscape, V2X deployment case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents market size forecasts from 2019 till 2030. The forecasts cover four submarkets, two air interface technologies, 10 application categories and five regions.

The report comes with an associated Excel datasheet suite covering quantitative data from all numeric forecasts presented in the report.

Topics Covered

The report covers the following topics:

Forecast Segmentation

Market forecasts are provided for each of the following submarkets and their subcategories:

Submarkets

Air Interface Technologies

Application Categories

Regional Markets

Key Questions Answered

The report provides answers to the following key questions:

Key Findings

The report has the following key findings:

Countires Covered

List of Companies Mentioned

For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,90 State Street,Albany NY,United States 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email:[emailprotected]Follow us on LinkedIn @http://bit.ly/1TBmnVGMedia Release:https://www.researchmoz.us/pressreleaseFollow me on :http://marketresearchlatestreports.blogspot.com/

Read this article:

Most Definitive & Accurate Study on The V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) Communications Ecosystem: 2019 2030 Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies...

The Impact of Automated Vehicles on the Transportation Ecosystem – MarketScale

Posted on by

Driverless vehicles are not things of the future anymore. Thomas Bamonte, Senior Program Manager, Automated Vehicles, within North-Central Council of Governments of Texas, spoke to Marketscale host Jeb Morris about transportation automation being developed and deployed in the North-central region, giving examples of automated vehicles already in action.

Every movement of people and people is being automated in various fashions, Bamonte said. During his discussion on this episode of Roads, Rails, and Rides, Bamonte spoke about automation for commuters, delivery, farms, and more. Through his position, Bamonte gets a firsthand look at whats happening in the industry as he and his agency work to make North-Central Texas a hub for the deployment and scaling of transportation automation.

For instance, Bamontes agency is seeking to land a high-speed automated intercity loop for transportation. They are also partnering with companies to begin deploying and testing technologies. On the University of Dallas campus, for example, small robots are actively delivering packages.

Of all the advancements being made in mobility technology, Bamonte said, I think freight is going to be the leading edge of transportation automotation. Automated eighteen wheelers are already transporting goods between Houston and Dallas.

Transition automation comes at a time when were starting to rethink mobility, Bamonte also pointed out. While automated fleets for commuters are likely ten to fifteen years in the future still, transitionary technology like smarter cars with more alerts and robotic features, are already reshaping the industry and user experience. The potential for automated fleets to become popular is reasonable as a result of these transition automations.

To Bamonte, one of the goals of all transportation automation is to improve safety. He hopes robotics and automation will turn the corner and improve safety greatly for all modes of transportation.

Tune in for the details of Bamontes insights into the present and future of transportation automation. For the latest news, videos, and podcasts in theTransportation Industry, be sure to subscribe to our industry publication.

Read the original post:

The Impact of Automated Vehicles on the Transportation Ecosystem - MarketScale

Trends driving the Thiamazole market in the digital ecosystem – 3rd Watch News

Posted on by

Prominent Players in the Thiamazole Market:

Merck KGaA, Seebio, Sinopharm, Bayer, Xiuzheng Pharmaceutical Group, Pfizer, Harbin Pharmaceutical Group, CSPC

The Thiamazole Market report is prepared with a view in mind to provide our market readers with pertinent specifics about growth aspects, threats and upcoming business opportunities that the market is anticipated to grab.

This intelligence study further evaluates revenue share, market size and potential, and rate of consumption to give a better understanding of the future dynamics of the Thiamazole market. The report draws insights pertaining to give market analytics that will help key players in strategic decisions.

________________________________________________________________________________

Ask For Sample [emailprotected] https://www.regalintelligence.com/request-sample/85763

________________________________________________________________________________

The Thiamazole Market report further includes crucial information about the business vertical, key factors such as market dynamics, key market factors, and future opportunities for the period 2020-2025. The Thiamazole Industry research also studies important insights pertaining to the national and international ambit of this business space along with a succinct overview of its market segments.

Competitive landscape:

The Thiamazole market is highly lucrative owing to the existence of several established companies that are adopting strategic decision making to increase their market share. The prominent profiles listed in the report are based on their financial performance, market portfolio, market reach, and strategic moves. The vendors are constantly adopting planning and analysis to enhance their market base.

Thiamazole Market Segmented by Region/Country:

Market Segment by Product Types considering Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trends:

Market Segment by Applications considering Consumption Growth Rate and Market Share:

______________________________________________________________________________

Grab Amazing Discount Here: https://www.regalintelligence.com/check-discount/85763

________________________________________________________________________________

Thiamazole Market Report Includes:

Benefits of Purchasing Thiamazole Market Report:

How and Why the Report is going to Benefit a Reader? The report performs an analysis of the dynamic competitive landscape that can help the reader/client move ahead in the global market.

It also presents an in-depth view of different factors driving or restraining the growth of the global market.

The Global Thiamazole Market report provides a five-year forecast derived on the basis of the potential growth of the market.

________________________________________________________________________________

Access full Report Overview, TOC, Table and Figures, Statistics, etc. @ https://www.regalintelligence.com/request-toc/85763

________________________________________________________________________________

This report helps to formulate profitable business decisions by offering thorough insights into the global Thiamazole market and by creating a comprehensive analysis of pivotal market segments and sub-segments.

More here:

Trends driving the Thiamazole market in the digital ecosystem - 3rd Watch News

Why do some men have red beards, but not red hair? – Live Science

Posted on by

It's relatively rare to see a redhead just 1% to 2% of humans are natural gingers. So, you might do a double-take if you see a man sporting a reddish or even a full-blown red beard, even though he is clearly not a carrot top.

What's the science behind these curious beards, especially among men with dark, blond or even graying mops?

This follicular fluke hasn't escaped the notice of researchers like Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, whose research has focused on the biology of hair hues. "I have observed many, especially younger, men with red beards and red hair and some with reddish beards and light brown, blond or red-blond hair," she told Live Science.

Related: Why do men have facial hair but women don't?

Most redheads live in Celtic countries such as Scotland, Ireland and Wales, followed by England and the Nordic nations, according to The Telegraph. Perhaps predictably, these red tresses exist because of a genetic mutation. Specifically, a mutation in a gene known as "MC1R," which controls pigment production in hair cells, among other things such as fair skin, poor tanning ability and pain perception, which may explain why a local anesthetic is less effective for redheads.

Hair color is determined by the ratio of two different pigments; eumelanin is responsible for black tones and pheomelanin causes red ones. People with black or dark brown hair will probably have only eumelanin, or at least it will be the dominant pigment. Blonds, meanwhile, have less of both types of pigment than their darker-haired and redheaded friends. And redheads, of course, have mostly pheomelanin.

One role of the MC1R gene is to code for a protein called melanocortin, whose job is to convert the red pigment into the black one. But if a person has a double mutation in this gene, its resulting proteins aren't as effective, which lead to red locks.

So, what happens when a person has a red beard, paired with a brown head of hair? The answer has some curious genetics at play, according to Jablonski.

"This will almost certainly be due to the differential expression of MC1R in the follicles of beard hair versus scalp hair resulting in the production of a different mixture of dark brown eumelanin and yellow-red pheomelanin," Jablonski said.

In other words, the same gene is behaving differently in different parts of the body and that's probably because there's just a single mutation of the MC1R gene, rather than a double mutation meaning that the person is effectively a carrier of the redhead gene.

The phenomenon also occurs in some men as they age usually as they pass their 40th birthday, which is probably because the pigment-producing cells in scalp hair and beard hair age at different rates, Jablonski said.

So you don't have to be young and ginger to have a red beard, but it certainly helps.

Originally published on Live Science.

More:

Why do some men have red beards, but not red hair? - Live Science

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Match in Red at Royal Albert Hall Event – E! NEWS

Posted on by

Shutterstock

One word: wowzers!

Meghan Markle and Prince Harryare proving once again why they're couple goals... and fashion goals.

On Saturday, the famous pair turned heads and dropped jaws, as they made a grand (and unforgettable) entrance at the Mountbatten Music Festival at the Royal Albert Hall event in London, England.

The dynamic duo certainly stole the show when the both they sashayed into the room, hand-in-hand, in matching red ensembles.

For the special occasion, the former Suits starlit up the room in aregal red Safiyaa gown that featured a floor-length cape, puffed sleeves and a dainty back slip that put her toned legs on display.

She accessorized with statement pieces that matched her apple red design. Meghan rocked drop-earrings by Simone Rocha,Stuart Weitzman pumps and Manolo Blahnik clutch.

Prince Harry also cleaned up nicely for the event, as he donned ared embroidered coat and military regalia.

And this celebration is a bittersweet one, as it's Harry's last engagement as the Captain General of the Royal Marines, a role he was given in December 2017.

This wasn't lost on attendees, as the couple received a long round of applause and a standing ovation from the crowd as they took their seats in the royal box, per the PA Wire.

Aside from having a little date night, the couple attended the event for a good cause, asit helps to raise money for the Royal Marines Association.

Considering this isthe one of the couple's final appearance as "senior members" of the royal family, it's safe to say they are ending it on a high note. Starting on March 31, the two will transition out of theirroyal duties.

Fans may recall that in January, the couple made the shocking decision to step back from their royal duties.

"After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution," the statement from thetwobegan. "We intend to step back as 'senior' members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen."

"It is with your encouragement, particularly over the last few years, that we feel prepared to make this adjustment. We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to The Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages," their statement continued. "This geographic balance will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter, including the launch of our new charitable entity."

While the couple hasn't shared what plans they have set in their future, theymaking an upcoming appearance at theannual Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey on March 9.

Originally posted here:

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Match in Red at Royal Albert Hall Event - E! NEWS

Former All-American Red Heads player reflects ahead of Hall of Fame induction – 4029tv

Posted on by

Former All-American Red Heads player reflects ahead of Hall of Fame induction

Updated: 4:34 PM CDT Mar 14, 2020

Hide TranscriptShow Transcript

IN BASKETBALL. 40/29S MITCH ROBERTS HAS HER STORY. WILLA FAYE MASON FROM SILOAM SPRINGS... WILL BE INDUCTED INTO THE ARKANSAS ''SPORTS'' HALF OF FAME THIS WEEKEND... SHE PLAYED FOR THE ALL-AMERICAN REDHEADS. A GLOBE-TROTTERS TYPE TEAM... FOR WOMEN ONLY. WILLA FAYE MASON FROM SILOAM SPRINGS PLAYED FOR AMERICA'S ''FIRST'' PRO WOMEN'S BASKETBALL TEAM. THE ''ALL-AMERICAN'' RED HEADS... PLAYED AGAINST WOMEN & MEN. STARTING IN 1936.... ENDING IN 86. SHOOTING STARS BACK THEN...NOW HALL OF FAMERS. ''Oh, it's the big weekend for the All-American Redheads. We're being inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in Little Rock. We're having a reunion to coincide with the induction.'' THE RED HEADS ARE ''ALREADY'' MEMBERS OF THE NAISMITH AND WOMEN'S BASKETBALL HALL OF FAMES. BEING A BASKETBALL ''PIONEER'' WAS FUN, BUT NOT GLAMOROUS. TRAVELING IN A CAR PACKED WITH ''RED HAIRED'' HOOPERS... NIGHT AFTER NIGHT.... GAME AFTER GAME. ''The whole story is amazing. The way it was all organized and the way we played it. We played every night for six months.'' FAYE STARTED W/ THE REDHEADS IN 19-48 AND PLAYED FOR SEVEN SEASONS. ALSO COACHED KANSAS STATE, AND NORTHEAST OKLAHOMA IN TALLEQUAH. BUT IT WAS THE ALL- AMERICAN RED HEADS...THAT MADE HER A HALL OF FAMER ''We played about thirty games a month. The season lasted six months. So that would be about 180. Many times we'd play a double-header on Sunday.' WILLA FAYE IS NOW 90 YEARS YOUNG. HAPPY TO BE GOING.... INTO YET ''ANOTHER'' HALL OF FA

Former All-American Red Heads player reflects ahead of Hall of Fame induction

Updated: 4:34 PM CDT Mar 14, 2020

Willa Faye Mason from Siloam Springs played for one of the nations first professional womens basketball teams, the All-American Red Heads. The team was inducted into the 2020 Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Watch the video above for more information.

Willa Faye Mason from Siloam Springs played for one of the nations first professional womens basketball teams, the All-American Red Heads. The team was inducted into the 2020 Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame. Watch the video above for more information.

See more here:

Former All-American Red Heads player reflects ahead of Hall of Fame induction - 4029tv