city:baltimore

  • Democrats and Republicans Passing Soft Regulations - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/democrats-and-republicans-passing-soft-regulations/592558

    Your face is no longer just your face—it’s been augmented. At a football game, your face is currency, used to buy food at the stadium. At the mall, it is a ledger, used to alert salespeople to your past purchases, both online and offline, and shopping preferences. At a protest, it is your arrest history. At the morgue, it is how authorities will identify your body.

    Facial-recognition technology stands to transform social life, tracking our every move for companies, law enforcement, and anyone else with the right tools. Lawmakers are weighing the risks versus rewards, with a recent wave of proposed regulation in Washington State, Massachusetts, Oakland, and the U.S. legislature. In May, Republicans and Democrats in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform heard hours of testimony about how unregulated facial recognition already tracks protesters, impacts the criminal-justice system, and exacerbates racial biases. Surprisingly, they agreed to work together to regulate it.

    The Microsoft president Brad Smith called for governments “to start adopting laws to regulate this technology” last year, while the Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy echoed those comments in June, likening the technology to a knife. It’s a less dramatic image than the plutonium and nuclear-waste metaphors critics employ, but his message—coming from an executive at one of the world’s most powerful facial-recognition technology outfits—is clear: This stuff is dangerous.

    But crucially, Jassy and Smith seem to argue, it’s also inevitable. In calling for regulation, Microsoft and Amazon have pulled a neat trick: Instead of making the debate about whether facial recognition should be widely adopted, they’ve made it about how such adoption would work.

    Without regulation, the potential for misuse of facial-recognition technology is high, particularly for people of color. In 2016 the MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini published research showing that tech performs better on lighter-skinned men than on darker-skinned men, and performs worst on darker-skinned women. When the ACLU matched Congress members against a criminal database, Amazon’s Rekognition software misidentified black Congress members more often than white ones, despite there being far fewer black members.

    This includes House Chairman Elijah Cummings, a Baltimore native whose face was also scanned when he attended a 2015 rally in memory of Freddie Gray, the unarmed black teenager who died of a spinal-cord injury while in police custody. The Baltimore Police Department used facial recognition to identify protesters and target any with outstanding warrants. Most of the protesters were black, meaning the software used on them might have been less accurate, increasing the likelihood of misidentification. Expert witnesses at the committee hearing in May warned of a chilling effect: Protesters, wary of being identified via facial recognition and matched against criminal databases, could choose to stay home rather than exercise their freedom of assembly.

    Microsoft and Amazon both claim to have lessened the racial disparity in accuracy since the original MIT study and the ACLU’s report. But fine-tuning the technology to better recognize black faces is only part of the process: Perfectly accurate technology could still be used to support harmful policing, which affects people of color. The racial-accuracy problem is a distraction; how the technology is used matters, and that’s where policy could prevent abuse. And the solution Microsoft and Amazon propose would require auditing face recognition for racial and gender biases after they’re already in use—which might be too late.

    In early May, The Washington Post reported that police were feeding forensic sketches to their facial-recognition software. A witness described a suspect to a sketch artist, then police uploaded the sketch to Amazon’s Rekognition, looking for hits, and eventually arrested someone. Experts at the congressional hearing in May were shocked that a sketch submitted to a database could credibly qualify as enough reasonable suspicion to arrest someone.

    Read: Half of American adults are in police facial-recognition databases

    But Jassy, the Amazon Web Services CEO, claimed that Amazon has never received a report of police misuse. In May, Amazon shareholders voted down a proposal that would ban the sale of Rekognition to police, and halt sales to law enforcement and ICE. Jassy said that police should only rely on Rekognition results when the system is 99 percent confident in the accuracy of a match. This is a potentially critical safeguard against misidentification, but it’s just a suggestion: Amazon doesn’t require police to adhere to this threshold, or even ask. In January, Gizmodo quoted an Oregon sheriff’s official saying his department ignores thresholds completely. (“There has never been a single reported complaint from the public and no issues with the local constituency around their use of Rekognition,” a representative from Amazon said, in part, in a statement to Gizmodo.)

    #Reconnaissance_faciale #Libertés #Espace_public #Etat_policier

  • Les mystérieux et puissants effets du placebo
    https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/06/18/les-mysterieux-et-puissants-effets-du-placebo_5477641_1650684.html

    En matière de placebo, une précision s’impose d’emblée : on pourrait croire que les termes « effet placebo » et « réponse placebo » sont strictement synonymes. Il n’en est rien.

    « L’effet placebo traduit la réaction psychologique et neurobiologique, fonction des attentes du patient, faisant suite à l’administration d’un placebo. La réponse placebo désigne un changement positif chez le patient, tel qu’un soulagement de la douleur, de l’anxiété, des nausées. Celui-ci peut être effectivement dû à l’effet placebo, mais aussi à l’histoire naturelle de la maladie ou à l’effet Hawthorne, qui correspond à la modification des réponses des patients du seul fait qu’ils se sentent observés pendant l’essai clinique et souhaitent faire plaisir aux investigateurs », souligne Luana Colloca, professeure à l’université du Maryland (Baltimore, Etats-Unis).

    Le premier essai, dirigé par Ted Kaptchuk, professeur à la faculté de médecine de Harvard (Boston, Etats-Unis), a été publié dans la revue PLOS One en 2010. Baptisé « placebo en ouvert » (open label placebo), il a consisté à administrer à 80 patients souffrant du syndrome du côlon irritable un placebo en plus de leur traitement habituel ou uniquement ce dernier.

    Après trois semaines, les résultats ont été des plus surprenants : 60 % des patients du groupe « placebo ouvert » ont obtenu un soulagement adéquat, contre 35 % dans le groupe traité par le seul médicament. Un résultat statistiquement significatif.

    Trois autres essais cliniques en placebo ouvert vont ensuite être réalisés auprès de patients souffrant de lombalgie chronique, de fatigue associée au cancer, de crises épisodiques de migraine. Là encore, les résultats surprennent, suggérant que donner un placebo ouvertement à un patient peut l’aider à soulager ses symptômes.

    Attentes du patient

    Des suggestions peuvent induire des attentes positives de la part du patient. Or celles-ci constituent l’un des principaux leviers de l’effet placebo.

    Ainsi, après chirurgie, lorsqu’un patient sait qu’on lui administre de la morphine en même temps qu’on lui dit qu’il s’agit d’un puissant médicament antalgique, le bénéfice sur le soulagement de la douleur postopératoire est plus important que lorsqu’il ignore qu’il en reçoit à travers une seringue automatique.

    Ce phénomène psychobiologique apparaît indissociable du contexte clinique et environnemental, comme l’illustre une approche expérimentale dénommée « procédure ouvert-­caché » (open-hidden study). Son originalité tient à ce qu’elle évalue la part de la réponse placebo alors même qu’elle n’emploie pas de placebo.

    Dans le premier groupe, le médicament est administré au vu et au su du patient (« en ouvert »), le médecin étant présent et délivrant des informations verbales contextuelles. Dans le second groupe, le patient reçoit le médicament à son insu (« en caché »), celui-ci étant délivré par l’intermédiaire d’une pompe, en l’absence de médecin. La différence entre l’effet du traitement ouvert et celui du traitement caché correspond alors à la réponse placebo. Selon le professeur Benedetti, « le traitement caché est moins efficace, voire parfois inefficace, ce qui indique que le fait de savoir que l’on reçoit un médicament et que l’on en attend un bénéfice s’avère crucial en matière d’efficacité thérapeutique ».

    En effet, il se produit une association entre un stimulus et des réactions automatiques de l’organisme. Exemple : des individus présentant fréquemment des maux de tête et prenant régulièrement de l’aspirine peuvent associer la couleur, la forme et le goût du comprimé avec le soulagement de la douleur. Lorsque, après plusieurs dizaines de prises de ce médicament, on administre à ces patients un placebo ayant la même couleur, la même forme, le même goût qu’un comprimé d’aspirine, ils ressentent un effet analgésique comparable.

    Les travaux sur le rôle du conditionnement dans l’effet placebo ont récemment permis de créer un nouveau concept : donner au patient un placebo à la suite de l’administration répétée d’un traitement efficace. L’idée est d’alterner la prise d’un placebo avec celle d’un médicament à l’efficacité reconnue. Cette nouvelle stratégie thérapeutique pourrait entraîner une baisse des doses d’antalgiques utilisés en même temps, réduire la survenue des effets secondaires et diminuer les coûts de traitement.

    Si le conditionnement du traitement tient une place importante dans l’apparition de l’effet placebo, il en va de même de sa présentation, de son prix, de sa couleur, de son goût, de sa voie d’administration.

    Ainsi, dans la douleur, une étude a comparé la même crème placebo. On avait cependant indiqué aux participants que l’un des deux produits avait un prix plus élevé que l’autre. La réponse placebo a été plus importante lorsque les participants pensaient utiliser la crème antidouleur la plus chère. Par ailleurs, par rapport au placebo bon marché, l’autre a entraîné une activation plus importante du cortex cingulaire antérieur, région impliquée dans le contrôle endogène de la douleur.

    Plusieurs études semblent également montrer que les piqûres et les injections intraveineuses induisent de plus fortes attentes, et de ce fait un plus grand effet placebo que l’administration d’un traitement par une voie non invasive comme la prise orale ou nasale. Comme le souligne le professeur Benedetti, « le placebo ne se résume pas à la seule substance inerte. Son administration s’intègre au sein de stimuli sensoriels et sociaux qui disent au patient qu’on lui administre un traitement bénéfique ».

    #Médecine #Santé_publique #Placebo

  • A computer virus has thrown Philadelphia’s court system into chaos, by Colin Lecher, on Jun 11, 2019, for TheVerge
    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/11/18661484/philadelphia-court-system-shutdown-computer-virus-document-file-system

    As Baltimore deals with a devastating malware attack, the Philadelphia court shutdown is raising similar questions about how cities can respond when crucial services are suddenly lost. The outage has now stretched on for weeks, forcing attorneys to use paperwork filed in person and raising difficult questions about who is slipping through the cracks of the broken system.

  • Paralysée par un puissant ransomware depuis trois semaines, Baltimore peine à relancer ses systèmes
    https://cyberguerre.numerama.com/1382-paralysee-par-un-puissant-ransomware-depuis-trois-semaine

    Située dans le Maryland, la ville de Baltimore est en proie à une cyberattaque de type ransomware depuis trois semaines. Avec comme principale conséquence un blocage partiel des systèmes informatiques de l’agglomération, la mairie ayant refusé de payer la rançon exigée par les hackers. Clou du spectacle : le virus en question a en partie été créé par la National Security Agency (NSA). Fraîchement intronisé à la tête de Baltimore après la démission de Catherine Pugh, accusée de corruption, le nouveau maire (...)

    #FBI #NSA #ransomware #hacking

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  • Baltimore paralysée par un virus informatique en partie créé par la NSA
    https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/05/29/la-ville-de-baltimore-paralysee-par-un-virus-informatique-en-partie-cree-par

    Le problème, c’est que, trois semaines plus tard, l’affaire n’est toujours pas résolue. Les serveurs et les e-mails de la ville restent désespérément bloqués. « Service limité », indiquent les écriteaux à l’entrée les bâtiments municipaux. Les équipes municipales, le FBI, les services de renseignement américains et les firmes informatiques de la Côte ouest s’y sont tous mis : impossible de débarrasser les dix mille ordinateurs de la ville de ce virus, un rançongiciel. Et pour cause : selon le New York Times, l’un des composants de ce programme virulent a été créé par les services secrets américains, la National Security Agency (NSA), qui ont exploité une faille du logiciel Windows de Microsoft. L’ennui, c’est que la NSA s’est fait voler en 2017 cette arme informatique devenue quasi impossible à contrôler.

    Alors, beaucoup de bruit pour rien ? Non, à cause du rôle trouble de la NSA. Selon le New York Times, celle-ci a développé un outil, EternalBlue (« bleu éternel »), en cherchant pendant plus d’une année une faille dans le logiciel de Microsoft.

    L’ennui, c’est que l’outil a été volé par un groupe intitulé les Shadow Brokers (« courtiers de l’ombre »), sans que l’on sache s’il s’agit d’une puissance étrangère ou de hackeurs américains. Les Nord-Coréens l’ont utilisé en premier en 2017 lors d’une attaque baptisée Wannacry, qui a paralysé le système de santé britannique et touché les chemins de fer allemands. Puis ce fut au tour de la Russie de s’en servir pour attaquer l’Ukraine : code de l’opération NotPetya. L’offensive a atteint des entreprises, comme l’entreprise de messagerie FedEx et le laboratoire pharmaceutique Merck, qui auraient perdu respectivement 400 millions et 670 millions de dollars.

    Depuis, EternalBlue n’en finit pas d’être utilisé, par la Chine ou l’Iran, notamment. Et aux Etats-Unis, contre des organisations vulnérables, telle la ville de Baltimore, mais aussi celles de San Antonio (Texas) ou Allentown (Pennsylvanie). L’affaire est jugée, à certains égards, plus grave que la fuite géante d’informations par l’ancien informaticien Edward Snowden en 2013.

    Le débat s’ouvre à nouveau sur la responsabilité de la NSA, qui n’aurait informé Microsoft de la faille de son réseau qu’après s’être fait voler son outil. Trop tard. En dépit d’un correctif, des centaines de milliers d’ordinateurs n’ayant pas appliqué la mise à jour restent non protégés. Un de ses anciens dirigeants, l’amiral Michael Rogers, a tenté de dédouaner son ancienne agence en expliquant que, si un terroriste remplissait un pick-up Toyota d’explosifs, on n’allait pas accuser Toyota. « L’outil qu’a développé la NSA n’a pas été conçu pour faire ce qu’il a fait », a-t-il argué.

    Tom Burt, responsable chez Microsoft de la confiance des consommateurs, se dit « en total désaccord » avec ce propos lénifiant : « Ces programmes sont développés et gardés secrètement par les gouvernements dans le but précis de les utiliser comme armes ou outils d’espionnage. Ils sont, en soi, dangereux. Quand quelqu’un prend cela, il ne le transforme pas en bombe : c’est déjà une bombe », a-t-il protesté dans le New York Times.

    #Virus #NSA #Baltimore #Cybersécurité

  • « La brèche la plus destructrice de l’histoire » : Des pirates informatiques utilisent du code de la NSA pour arrêter Baltimore (Zerohedge)
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/informatik/93-securite/16071-la-breche-la-plus-destructrice-de-l-histoire-des-pirates-informatiq

    Les États-Unis ne fournissent plus seulement des armes classiques à leurs ennemis - cette liste comprend désormais aussi les cyberarmes. Alors que Baltimore a été aux prises avec une cyber-attaque agressive au cours des trois dernières semaines, dont nous avons déjà parlé ici, il a été révélé qu’un élément clé des logiciels malveillants utilisés par les cybercriminels a en fait été développé à une courte distance de Baltimore - à la NSA, selon le New York Times.

    image 1

    L’outil utilisé - appelé EternalBlue - a été utilisé par des pirates informatiques en Corée du Nord, en Russie et en Chine pour "couper un chemin de destruction à travers le monde", et a causé des milliards de dollars de dommages.

    Aujourd’hui, la boucle est bouclée et il est de retour aux États-Unis, faisant des ravages à (...)

    #En_vedette #Sécurité #Actualités_Informatiques

  • In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen N.S.A. Tool Wreaks Havoc
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html

    For nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services.

    But here is what frustrated city employees and residents do not know: A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the attack was developed at taxpayer expense a short drive down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at the National Security Agency, according to security experts briefed on the case.

    Since 2017, when the N.S.A. lost control of the tool, EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and, more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has boomeranged back and is now showing up in the N.S.A.’s own backyard.

    #boomerang

  • Suffering unseen: The dark truth behind wildlife tourism
    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/06/global-wildlife-tourism-social-media-causes-animal-suffering

    I’ve come back to check on a baby. Just after dusk I’m in a car lumbering down a muddy road in the rain, past rows of shackled elephants, their trunks swaying. I was here five hours before, when the sun was high and hot and tourists were on elephants’ backs.

    Walking now, I can barely see the path in the glow of my phone’s flashlight. When the wooden fence post of the stall stops me short, I point my light down and follow a current of rainwater across the concrete floor until it washes up against three large, gray feet. A fourth foot hovers above the surface, tethered tightly by a short chain and choked by a ring of metal spikes. When the elephant tires and puts her foot down, the spikes press deeper into her ankle.

    Meena is four years and two months old, still a toddler as elephants go. Khammon Kongkhaw, her mahout, or caretaker, told me earlier that Meena wears the spiked chain because she tends to kick. Kongkhaw has been responsible for Meena here at Maetaman Elephant Adventure, near Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, since she was 11 months old. He said he keeps her on the spiked shackle only during the day and takes it off at night. But it’s night now.

    I ask Jin Laoshen, the Maetaman staffer accompanying me on this nighttime visit, why her chain is still on. He says he doesn’t know.

    Maetaman is one of many animal attractions in and around tourist-swarmed Chiang Mai. People spill out of tour buses and clamber onto the trunks of elephants that, at the prodding of their mahouts’ bullhooks (long poles with a sharp metal hook), hoist them in the air while cameras snap. Visitors thrust bananas toward elephants’ trunks. They watch as mahouts goad their elephants—some of the most intelligent animals on the planet—to throw darts or kick oversize soccer balls while music blares.

    Meena is one of Maetaman’s 10 show elephants. To be precise, she’s a painter. Twice a day, in front of throngs of chattering tourists, Kongkhaw puts a paintbrush in the tip of her trunk and presses a steel nail to her face to direct her brushstrokes as she drags primary colors across paper. Often he guides her to paint a wild elephant in the savanna. Her paintings are then sold to tourists.

    Meena’s life is set to follow the same trajectory as many of the roughly 3,800 captive elephants in Thailand and thousands more throughout Southeast Asia. She’ll perform in shows until she’s about 10. After that, she’ll become a riding elephant. Tourists will sit on a bench strapped to her back, and she’ll give several rides a day. When Meena is too old or sick to give rides—maybe at 55, maybe at 75—she’ll die. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a few years of retirement. She’ll spend most of her life on a chain in a stall.

    Wildlife attractions such as Maetaman lure people from around the world to be with animals like Meena, and they make up a lucrative segment of the booming global travel industry. Twice as many trips are being taken abroad as 15 years ago, a jump driven partly by Chinese tourists, who spend far more on international travel than any other nationality.

    Wildlife tourism isn’t new, but social media is setting the industry ablaze, turning encounters with exotic animals into photo-driven bucket-list toppers. Activities once publicized mostly in guidebooks now are shared instantly with multitudes of people by selfie-taking backpackers, tour-bus travelers, and social media “influencers” through a tap on their phone screens. Nearly all millennials (23- to 38-year-olds) use social media while traveling. Their selfies—of swims with dolphins, encounters with tigers, rides on elephants, and more—are viral advertising for attractions that tout up-close experiences with animals.

    For all the visibility social media provides, it doesn’t show what happens beyond the view of the camera lens. People who feel joy and exhilaration from getting close to wild animals usually are unaware that many of the animals at such attractions live a lot like Meena, or worse.

    Photographer Kirsten Luce and I set out to look behind the curtain of the thriving wildlife tourism industry, to see how animals at various attractions—including some that emphasize their humane care of animals—are treated once the selfie-taking crowds have gone.

    After leaving Maetaman, we take a five-minute car ride up a winding hill to a property announced by a wooden plaque as “Elephant EcoValley: where elephants are in good hands.” There are no elephant rides here. No paint shows or other performances. Visitors can stroll through an open-air museum and learn about Thailand’s national animal. They can make herbal treats for the elephants and paper from elephant dung. They can watch elephants in a grassy, tree-ringed field.

    EcoValley’s guest book is filled with praise from Australians, Danes, Americans—tourists who often shun elephant camps such as Maetaman because the rides and shows make them uneasy. Here, they can see unchained elephants and leave feeling good about supporting what they believe is an ethical establishment. What many don’t know is that EcoValley’s seemingly carefree elephants are brought here for the day from nearby Maetaman—and that the two attractions are actually a single business.

    Meena was brought here once, but she tried to run into the forest. Another young elephant, Mei, comes sometimes, but today she’s at Maetaman, playing the harmonica in the shows. When she’s not doing that, or spending the day at EcoValley, she’s chained near Meena in one of Maetaman’s elephant stalls.

    Meena Kalamapijit owns Maetaman as well as EcoValley, which she opened in November 2017 to cater to Westerners. She says her 56 elephants are well cared for and that giving rides and performing allow them to have necessary exercise. And, she says, Meena the elephant’s behavior has gotten better since her mahout started using the spiked chain.
    Read MoreWildlife Watch
    Why we’re shining a light on wildlife tourism
    Poaching is sending the shy, elusive pangolin to its doom
    How to do wildlife tourism right

    We sit with Kalamapijit on a balcony outside her office, and she explains that when Westerners, especially Americans, stopped coming to Maetaman, she eliminated one of the daily shows to allot time for visitors to watch elephants bathe in the river that runs through the camp.

    “Westerners enjoy bathing because it looks happy and natural,” she says. “But a Chinese tour agency called me and said, ‘Why are you cutting the show? Our customers love to see it, and they don’t care about bathing at all.’ ” Providing separate options is good for business, Kalamapijit says.

    Around the world Kirsten and I watched tourists watching captive animals. In Thailand we also saw American men bear-hug tigers in Chiang Mai and Chinese brides in wedding gowns ride young elephants in the aqua surf on the island of Phuket. We watched polar bears in wire muzzles ballroom dancing across the ice under a big top in Russia and teenage boys on the Amazon River snapping selfies with baby sloths.

    Most tourists who enjoy these encounters don’t know that the adult tigers may be declawed, drugged, or both. Or that there are always cubs for tourists to snuggle with because the cats are speed bred and the cubs are taken from their mothers just days after birth. Or that the elephants give rides and perform tricks without harming people only because they’ve been “broken” as babies and taught to fear the bullhook. Or that the Amazonian sloths taken illegally from the jungle often die within weeks of being put in captivity.

    As we traveled to performance pits and holding pens on three continents and in the Hawaiian Islands, asking questions about how animals are treated and getting answers that didn’t always add up, it became clear how methodically and systematically animal suffering is concealed.

    The wildlife tourism industry caters to people’s love of animals but often seeks to maximize profits by exploiting animals from birth to death. The industry’s economy depends largely on people believing that the animals they’re paying to watch or ride or feed are having fun too.

    It succeeds partly because tourists—in unfamiliar settings and eager to have a positive experience—typically don’t consider the possibility that they’re helping to hurt animals. Social media adds to the confusion: Oblivious endorsements from friends and trendsetters legitimize attractions before a traveler ever gets near an animal.

    There has been some recognition of social media’s role in the problem. In December 2017, after a National Geographic investigative report on harmful wildlife tourism in Amazonian Brazil and Peru, Instagram introduced a feature: Users who click or search one of dozens of hashtags, such as #slothselfie and #tigercubselfie, now get a pop-up warning that the content they’re viewing may be harmful to animals.

    Everyone finds Olga Barantseva on Instagram. “Photographer from Russia. Photographing dreams,” her bio reads. She meets clients for woodland photo shoots with captive wild animals just outside Moscow.

    For her 18th birthday, Sasha Belova treated herself to a session with Barantseva—and a pack of wolves. “It was my dream,” she says as she fidgets with her hair, which had been styled that morning. “Wolves are wild and dangerous.” The wolves are kept in small cages at a petting zoo when not participating in photo shoots.

    The Kravtsov family hired Barantseva to take their first professional family photos—all five family members, shivering and smiling in the birch forest, joined by a bear named Stepan.

    Barantseva has been photographing people and wild animals together for six years. She “woke up as a star,” she says, in 2015, when a couple of international media outlets found her online. Her audience has exploded to more than 80,000 followers worldwide. “I want to show harmony between people and animals,” she says.

    On a raw fall day, under a crown of golden birch leaves on a hill that overlooks a frigid lake, two-and-a-half-year-old Alexander Levin, dressed in a hooded bumblebee sweater, timidly holds Stepan’s paw.

    The bear’s owners, Yury and Svetlana Panteleenko, ply their star with food—tuna fish mixed with oatmeal—to get him to approach the boy. Snap: It looks like a tender friendship. The owners toss grapes to Stepan to get him to open his mouth wide. Snap: The bear looks as if he’s smiling.

    The Panteleenkos constantly move Stepan, adjusting his paws, feeding him, and positioning Alexander as Barantseva, pink-haired, bundled in jeans and a parka, captures each moment. Snap: A photo goes to her Instagram feed. A boy and a bear in golden Russian woods—a picture straight out of a fairy tale. It’s a contemporary twist on a long-standing Russian tradition of exploiting bears for entertainment.

    Another day in the same forest, Kirsten and I join 12 young women who have nearly identical Instagram accounts replete with dreamy photos of models caressing owls and wolves and foxes. Armed with fancy cameras but as yet modest numbers of followers, they all want the audience Barantseva has. Each has paid the Panteleenkos $760 to take identical shots of models with the ultimate prize: a bear in the woods.

    Stepan is 26 years old, elderly for a brown bear, and can hardly walk. The Panteleenkos say they bought him from a small zoo when he was three months old. They say the bear’s work—a constant stream of photo shoots and movies—provides money to keep him fed.

    A video on Svetlana Panteleenko’s Instagram account proclaims: “Love along with some great food can make anyone a teddy :-)”

    And just like that, social media takes a single instance of local animal tourism and broadcasts it to the world.

    When the documentary film Blackfish was released in 2013, it drew a swift and decisive reaction from the American public. Through the story of Tilikum, a distressed killer whale at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, the film detailed the miserable life orcas can face in captivity. Hundreds of thousands of outraged viewers signed petitions. Companies with partnership deals, such as Southwest Airlines, severed ties with SeaWorld. Attendance at SeaWorld’s water parks slipped; its stock nose-dived.

    James Regan says what he saw in Blackfish upset him. Regan, honeymooning in Hawaii with his wife, Katie, is from England, where the country’s last marine mammal park closed permanently in 1993. I meet him at Dolphin Quest Oahu, an upscale swim-with-dolphins business on the grounds of the beachfront Kahala Hotel & Resort, just east of Honolulu. The Regans paid $225 each to swim for 30 minutes in a small group with a bottlenose dolphin. One of two Dolphin Quest locations in Hawaii, the facility houses six dolphins.

    Bottlenose dolphins are the backbone of an industry that spans the globe. Swim-with-dolphins operations rely on captive-bred and wild-caught dolphins that live—and interact with tourists—in pools. The popularity of these photo-friendly attractions reflects the disconnect around dolphin experiences: People in the West increasingly shun shows that feature animals performing tricks, but many see swimming with captive dolphins as a vacation rite of passage.

    Katie Regan has wanted to swim with dolphins since she was a child. Her husband laughs and says of Dolphin Quest, “They paint a lovely picture. When you’re in America, everyone is smiling.” But he appreciates that the facility is at their hotel, so they can watch the dolphins being fed and cared for. He brings up Blackfish again.

    Katie protests: “Stop making my dream a horrible thing!”

    Rae Stone, president of Dolphin Quest and a marine mammal veterinarian, says the company donates money to conservation projects and educates visitors about perils that marine mammals face in the wild. By paying for this entertainment, she says, visitors are helping captive dolphins’ wild cousins.

    Stone notes that Dolphin Quest is certified “humane” by American Humane, an animal welfare nonprofit. (The Walt Disney Company, National Geographic’s majority owner, offers dolphin encounters on some vacation excursions and at an attraction in Epcot, one of its Orlando parks. Disney says it follows the animal welfare standards of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, a nonprofit that accredits more than 230 facilities worldwide.)

    It’s a vigorous debate: whether even places with high standards, veterinarians on staff, and features such as pools filled with filtered ocean water can be truly humane for marine mammals.

    Dolphin Quest’s Stone says yes.

    Critics, including the Humane Society of the United States, which does not endorse keeping dolphins in captivity, say no. They argue that these animals have evolved to swim great distances and live in complex social groups—conditions that can’t be replicated in the confines of a pool. This helps explain why the National Aquarium, in Baltimore, announced in 2016 that its dolphins will be retired to a seaside sanctuary by 2020.

    Some U.S. attractions breed their own dolphins because the nation has restricted dolphin catching in the wild since 1972. But elsewhere, dolphins are still being taken from the wild and turned into performers.

    In China, which has no national laws on captive-animal welfare, dolphinariums with wild-caught animals are a booming business: There are now 78 marine mammal parks, and 26 more are under construction.

    To have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see rare Black Sea dolphins, people in the landlocked town of Kaluga, a hundred miles from Moscow, don’t have to leave their city. In the parking lot of the Torgoviy Kvartal shopping mall, next to a hardware store, is a white inflatable pop-up aquarium: the Moscow Traveling Dolphinarium. It looks like a children’s bouncy castle that’s been drained of its color.

    Inside the puffy dome, parents buy their kids dolphin-shaped trinkets: fuzzy dolls and Mylar balloons, paper dolphin hats, and drinks in plastic dolphin tumblers. Families take their seats around a small pool. The venue is so intimate that even the cheapest seats, at nine dollars apiece, are within splashing distance.

    “My kids are jumping for joy,” says a woman named Anya, motioning toward her two giddy boys, bouncing in their seats.

    In the middle of the jubilant atmosphere, in water that seems much too shallow and much too murky, two dolphins swim listlessly in circles.

    Russia is one of only a few countries (Indonesia is another) where traveling oceanariums exist. Dolphins and beluga whales, which need to be immersed in water to stay alive, are put in tubs on trucks and carted from city to city in a loop that usually ends when they die. These traveling shows are aboveboard: Russia has no laws that regulate how marine mammals should be treated in captivity.

    The shows are the domestic arm of a brisk Russian global trade in dolphins and small whales. Black Sea bottlenose dolphins can’t be caught legally without a permit, but Russian fishermen can catch belugas and orcas under legal quotas in the name of science and education. Some belugas are sold legally to aquariums around the country. Russia now allows only a dozen or so orcas to be caught each year for scientific and educational purposes, and since April 2018, the government has cracked down on exporting them. But government investigators believe that Russian orcas—which can sell for millions—are being caught illegally for export to China.

    Captive orcas, which can grow to 20 feet long and more than 10,000 pounds, are too big for the traveling shows that typically feature dolphins and belugas. When I contacted the owners of the Moscow Traveling Dolphinarium and another operation, the White Whale Show, in separate telephone calls to ask where their dolphins and belugas come from, both men, Sergey Kuznetsov and Oleg Belesikov, hung up on me.

    Russia’s dozen or so traveling oceanariums are touted as a way to bring native wild animals to people who might never see the ocean.

    “Who else if not us?” says Mikhail Olyoshin, a staffer at one traveling oceanarium. And on this day in Kaluga, as the dolphins perform tricks to American pop songs and lie on platforms for several minutes for photo ops, parents and children express the same sentiment: Imagine, dolphins, up close, in my hometown. The ocean on delivery.

    Owners and operators of wildlife tourism attractions, from high-end facilities such as Dolphin Quest in Hawaii to low-end monkey shows in Thailand, say their animals live longer in captivity than wild counterparts because they’re safe from predators and environmental hazards. Show operators proudly emphasize that the animals under their care are with them for life. They’re family.

    Alla Azovtseva, a longtime dolphin trainer in Russia, shakes her head.

    “I don’t see any sense in this work. My conscience bites me. I look at my animals and want to cry,” says Azovtseva, who drives a red van with dolphins airbrushed on the side. At the moment, she’s training pilot whales to perform tricks at Moscow’s Moskvarium, one of Europe’s largest aquariums (not connected to the traveling dolphin shows). On her day off, we meet at a café near Red Square.

    She says she fell in love with dolphins in the late 1980s when she read a book by John Lilly, the American neuroscientist who broke open our understanding of the animals’ intelligence. She has spent 30 years training marine mammals to do tricks. But along the way she’s grown heartsick from forcing highly intelligent, social creatures to live isolated, barren lives in small tanks.

    “I would compare the dolphin situation with making a physicist sweep the street,” she says. “When they’re not engaged in performance or training, they just hang in the water facing down. It’s the deepest depression.”

    What people don’t know about many aquarium shows in Russia, Azovtseva says, is that the animals often die soon after being put in captivity, especially those in traveling shows. And Azovtseva—making clear she’s referring to the industry at large in Russia and not the Moskvarium—says she knows many aquariums quietly and illegally replace their animals with new ones.

    It’s been illegal to catch Black Sea dolphins in the wild for entertainment purposes since 2003, but according to Azovtseva, aquarium owners who want to increase their dolphin numbers quickly and cheaply buy dolphins poached there. Because these dolphins are acquired illegally, they’re missing the microchips that captive cetaceans in Russia are usually tagged with as a form of required identification.

    Some aquariums get around that, she says, by cutting out dead dolphins’ microchips and implanting them into replacement dolphins.

    “People are people,” Azovtseva says. “Once they see an opportunity, they exploit.” She says she can’t go on doing her work in the industry and that she’s decided to speak out because she wants people to know the truth about the origins and treatment of many of the marine mammals they love watching. We exchange a look—we both know what her words likely mean for her livelihood.

    “I don’t care if I’m fired,” she says defiantly. “When a person has nothing to lose, she becomes really brave.”

    I’m sitting on the edge of an infinity pool on the hilly Thai side of Thailand’s border with Myanmar, at a resort where rooms average more than a thousand dollars a night.

    Out past the pool, elephants roam in a lush valley. Sitting next to me is 20-year-old Stephanie van Houten. She’s Dutch and French, Tokyo born and raised, and a student at the University of Michigan. Her cosmopolitan background and pretty face make for a perfect cocktail of aspiration—she’s exactly the kind of Instagrammer who makes it as an influencer. That is, someone who has a large enough following to attract sponsors to underwrite posts and, in turn, travel, wardrobes, and bank accounts. In 2018, brands—fashion, travel, tech, and more—spent an estimated $1.6 billion on social media advertising by influencers.

    Van Houten has been here, at the Anantara Golden Triangle Elephant Camp & Resort, before. This time, in a fairly standard influencer-brand arrangement, she’ll have a picnic with elephants and post about it to her growing legion of more than 25,000 Instagram followers. In exchange, she gets hundreds of dollars off the nightly rate.

    At Anantara the fields are green, and during the day at least, many of the resort’s 22 elephants are tethered on ropes more than a hundred feet long so they can move around and socialize. Nevertheless, they’re expected to let guests touch them and do yoga beside them.

    After van Houten’s elephant picnic, I watch her edit the day’s hundreds of photos. She selects an image with her favorite elephant, Bo. She likes it, she says, because she felt a connection with Bo and thinks that will come across. She posts it at 9:30 p.m.—the time she estimates the largest number of her followers will be online. She includes a long caption, summing it up as “my love story with this incredible creature,” and the hashtag #stopelephantriding. Immediately, likes from followers stream in—more than a thousand, as well as comments with heart-eyed emoji.

    Anantara is out of reach for anyone but the wealthy—or prominent influencers. Anyone else seeking a similar experience might do a Google search for, say, “Thailand elephant sanctuary.”

    As tourist demand for ethical experiences with animals has grown, affordable establishments, often calling themselves “sanctuaries,” have cropped up purporting to offer humane, up-close elephant encounters. Bathing with elephants—tourists give them a mud bath, splash them in a river, or both—has become very popular. Many facilities portray baths as a benign alternative to elephant riding and performances. But elephants getting baths, like those that give rides and do tricks, will have been broken to some extent to make them obedient. And as long as bathing remains popular, places that offer it will need obedient elephants to keep their businesses going. 


    In Ban Ta Klang, a tiny town in eastern Thailand, modest homes dot the crimson earth. In front of each is a wide, bamboo platform for sitting, sleeping, and watching television.

    But the first thing I notice is the elephants. Some homes have one, others as many as five. Elephants stand under tarps or sheet metal roofs or trees. Some are together, mothers and babies, but most are alone. Nearly all the elephants wear ankle chains or hobbles—cuffs binding their front legs together. Dogs and chickens weave among the elephants’ legs, sending up puffs of red dust.

    Ban Ta Klang—known as Elephant Village—is ground zero in Thailand for training and trading captive elephants.

    “House elephants,” Sri Somboon says, gesturing as he turns down his TV. Next to his outdoor platform, a two-month-old baby elephant runs around his mother. Somboon points across the road to the third elephant in his charge, a three-year-old male tethered to a tree. He’s wrenching his head back and forth and thrashing his trunk around. It looks as if he’s going out of his mind.

    He’s in the middle of his training, Somboon says, and is getting good at painting. He’s already been sold, and when his training is finished, he’ll start working at a tourist camp down south.

    Ban Ta Klang and the surrounding area, part of Surin Province, claim to be the source of more than half of Thailand’s 3,800 captive elephants. Long before the flood of tourists, it was the center of the elephant trade; the animals were caught in the wild and tamed for use transporting logs. Now, every November, hundreds of elephants from here are displayed, bought, and sold in the province’s main town, Surin.

    One evening I sit with Jakkrawan Homhual and Wanchai Sala-ngam. Both 33, they’ve been best friends since childhood. About half the people in Ban Ta Klang who care for elephants, including Homhual, don’t own them. They’re paid a modest salary by a rich owner to breed and train baby elephants for entertainment. As night falls, thousands of termites swarm us, attracted to the single bulb hanging above the bamboo platform. Our conversation turns to elephant training.

    Phajaan is the traditional—and brutal—days- or weeks-long process of breaking a young elephant’s spirit. It has long been used in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia to tame wild elephants, which still account for many of the country’s captives. Under phajaan, elephants are bound with ropes, confined in tight wooden structures, starved, and beaten repeatedly with bullhooks, nails, and hammers until their will is crushed. The extent to which phajaan persists in its harshest form is unclear. Since 2012, the government has been cracking down on the illegal import of elephants taken from the forests of neighboring Myanmar, Thailand’s main source of wild-caught animals.

    I ask the men how baby elephants born in captivity are broken and trained.

    When a baby is about two years old, they say, mahouts tie its mother to a tree and slowly drag the baby away. Once separated, the baby is confined. Using a bullhook on its ear, they teach the baby to move: left, right, turn, stop. To teach an elephant to sit, Sala-ngam says, “we tie up the front legs. One mahout will use a bullhook at the back. The other will pull a rope on the front legs.” He adds: “To train the elephant, you need to use the bullhook so the elephant will know.”

    Humans identify suffering in other humans by universal signs: People sob, wince, cry out, put voice to their hurt. Animals have no universal language for pain. Many animals don’t have tear ducts. More creatures still—prey animals, for example—instinctively mask symptoms of pain, lest they appear weak to predators. Recognizing that a nonhuman animal is in pain is difficult, often impossible.

    But we know that animals feel pain. All mammals have a similar neuroanatomy. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians all have pain receptors. As recently as a decade ago, scientists had collected more evidence that fish feel pain than they had for neonatal infants. A four-year-old human child with spikes pressing into his flesh would express pain by screaming. A four-year-old elephant just stands there in the rain, her leg jerking in the air.

    Of all the silently suffering animals I saw in pools and pens around the world, two in particular haunt me: an elephant and a tiger.

    They lived in the same facility, Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm and Zoo, about 15 miles south of Bangkok. The elephant, Gluay Hom, four years old, was kept under a stadium. The aging tiger, Khai Khem, 22, spent his days on a short chain in a photo studio. Both had irrefutable signs of suffering: The emaciated elephant had a bent, swollen leg hanging in the air and a large, bleeding sore at his temple. His eyes were rolled back in his head. The tiger had a dental abscess so severe that the infection was eating through the bottom of his jaw.

    When I contacted the owner of the facility, Uthen Youngprapakorn, to ask about these animals, he said the fact that they hadn’t died proved that the facility was caring for them properly. He then threatened a lawsuit.

    Six months after Kirsten and I returned from Thailand, we asked Ryn Jirenuwat, our Bangkok-based Thai interpreter, to check on Gluay Hom and Khai Khem. She went to Samut Prakan and watched them for hours, sending photos and video. Gluay Hom was still alive, still standing in the same stall, leg still bent at an unnatural angle. The elephants next to him were skin and bones. Khai Khem was still chained by his neck to a hook in the floor. He just stays in his dark corner, Jirenuwat texted, and when he hears people coming, he twists on his chain and turns his back to them.

    “Like he just wants to be swallowed by the wall.”

    #tourisme #nos_ennemis_les_bêtes

  • L’inflammation, une immunité innée qui s’est retournée contre l’humanité
    https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2019/05/14/l-inflammation-mal-du-siecle_5461715_3224.html

    Cette réaction de défense de notre corps a protégé l’humanité depuis des centaines de milliers d’années. La vie moderne et sédentaire percute une physiologie façonnée par l’évolution.


    Des cellules de cerveau humain reproduites par ordinateur.

    L’inflammation, chacun de nous l’a déjà éprouvée dans sa propre chair. Ça rougit et ça gonfle ; ça brûle et ça lance. C’est, en réalité, une réaction de défense normale de notre corps, face à une agression : ­infection, blessure physique, tumeur… Partout, dans notre corps, des cellules sentinelles patrouillent. Dès qu’elles détectent un signal suspect, elles envoient des « molécules SOS ». Très vite, les soldats de l’inflammation accourent. C’est que l’enjeu est vital.

    Les armes de cette immunité innée ont été rodées depuis des centaines de milliers d’années. Il s’agissait de juguler nos ennemis ancestraux : ces hordes sournoises de microbes, ces dents et ces griffes des grands prédateurs, ces défenses de mammouths, ces massues des tribus rivales… L’inflammation, ou comment protéger l’humanité chancelante, livrée à un milieu hostile.

    Et pourtant. « L’inflammation est-elle notre amie ou notre ennemie ? », s’interroge le professeur Charles Serhan, de l’Ecole de médecine d’Harvard (Massachusetts, Etats-Unis). « C’est une arme critique pour notre survie. Mais un excès d’inflammation fait le lit de nombreuses maladies chroniques. »

    Depuis trente ans, sa face sombre se révèle peu à peu. Et l’on découvre l’ampleur des dégâts. Elle a beau œuvrer à bas bruit, cette inflammation, quand elle devient chronique, n’en est pas moins la plus meurtrière des pandémies :
    Diabète de type 2
    Infarctus du myocarde et accidents vasculaires cérébraux
    Obésité
    Cancers
    Asthme
    Maladies neurodégénératives et psychiatriques
    Maladies inflammatoires chroniques de l’intestin ou des articulations
    Psoriasis

    La liste est longue de ces « maladies de civilisation » qui nous minent, sous l’attaque sournoise et répétée d’une alimentation trop riche et d’une ­sédentarité trop grande. Aucun pays n’est épargné.
    « Nous sommes passés, en une centaine d’années, de l’ère des maladies infectieuses à l’ère de l’hygiène et des antibiotiques », résume la professeure ­Karine Clément, spécialiste des maladies cardiométaboliques à l’hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière (AP-HP), à Paris. L’ère, également, de l’agriculture ­industrielle, de la révolution des transports et de l’informatique.

    Les forces de pression évolutives qui, durant des centaines de milliers d’années, se sont exercées sur l’humanité de l’ère préindustrielle ne pouvaient anticiper cette révolution qui, au XXe siècle, allait tout bouleverser – pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Elles ont retenu ceux qui survivaient aux infections, aux famines et aux griffes des grands fauves. Comment ? En sélectionnant trois caractères. Pour résister aux infections, il fallait un système immunitaire hyperactif. Revers de la médaille aujourd’hui : une tendance accrue à l’inflammation chronique. Pour résister aux famines, il fallait pouvoir stocker facilement le gras. Revers de la médaille aujourd’hui : une tendance au diabète et à l’obésité. Pour résister aux blessures, il fallait un sang qui coagule facilement.

    Revers de la médaille aujourd’hui : une tendance à la formation de caillots sanguins, menaçant de boucher nos artères.
    Une armée de l’ombre, œuvrant et communiquant par une myriade d’acteurs cellulaires et de molécules chimiques, nomade par essence, élusive : la complexité de notre système immunitaire explique qu’on ait longtemps méjugé son rôle dans cette pandémie moderne.
    Il a fallu attendre la fin du XXe siècle pour mieux cerner la coupable. Et comprendre que, quand cet incendie n’est pas éteint, il ronge à ­petit feu notre organisme. Corrode nos artères. Gangrène notre tissu graisseux. Abîme notre cœur et notre cerveau. Sape nos poumons et notre intestin. Attaque nos articulations. Mine nos muscles et notre foie…

    Premier tissu concerné : la graisse corporelle. « Longtemps le tissu adipeux n’a pas été jugé noble, raconte Karine Clément. Et puis, dans les années 1990, on s’est aperçu qu’il n’était pas qu’un sac inerte rempli de graisse. » Les personnes ­obèses ont des taux sanguins accrus de marqueurs de l’inflammation, découvre-t-on. Dont la fameuse CRP, cette protéine plus abondante dans le sang des patients atteints de maladies chroniques inflammatoires.

    Altération de tous les organes

    Les cellules adipeuses, quand elles se gonflent de gras, fabriquent des messagers de l’inflammation (TNF-alpha, interleukines…), montre-t-on ensuite. Ceux-ci attirent des cellules de l’immunité qui s’accumulent. « Chez les personnes obèses, les gènes de l’inflammation sont très fortement activés dans ces cellules », relève Karine ­Clément. Sous l’action des messagers sanguins, l’inflammation gagne tout l’organisme. « Le fonctionnement de tous les organes est altéré. »Dont le cerveau. Une étude publiée dans Cell Metabolism, le 3 janvier, livre un résultat étonnant. Dans un modèle de souris obèses, les chercheurs ont observé une sénescence accrue des cellules immunitaires du cerveau, ou « microglie ». « Ces cellules sénescentes sont un moteur-clé de l’anxiété induite par l’obésité », indiquent les auteurs, de la Mayo Clinic (Etats-Unis). Elles altèrent la production de nouveaux neurones (neurogenèse) chez l’adulte. En les éliminant, ils sont parvenus à restaurer une neurogenèse et à réduire l’anxiété des rongeurs.

    Et l’athérosclérose, ce fléau mondial ? Ce processus d’érosion des artères a été disséqué. L’offensive commence par un dépôt de graisses (LDL-cholestérol) dans la paroi des artères, où il subit une oxydation. « C’est là qu’entre en jeu l’inflammation, raconte Alain Tedgui, Grand Prix 2018 de l’Inserm (Hôpital européen Georges-Pompidou à Paris). Ce LDL oxydé attire des globules blancs du sang, qui pénètrent dans la plaque. Là, ces cellules se gorgent de LDL oxydé. » Cette boule de graisse grossit, devient plaque d’athérome. « Les macrophages qu’elle renferme sont totalement inaptes à nettoyer les dégâts. » Ils meurent, forment des ­débris qui s’accumulent. Mais ils hébergent des molécules qui favorisent la coagulation : une bombe à retardement. « Plus tard, quand la plaque se fissurera, ils entreront en contact avec le sang : d’où la formation d’un caillot. » Et ce sera l’accident, brutal et ravageur : l’infarctus ou l’AVC.

    Là encore, l’immunité apparaît mi-ange, mi-démon, comme le montreront Alain Tedgui et Ziad Mallat. Certaines molécules anti-inflammatoires, par exemple, sont protectrices (IL-10 et TGF-bêta). Autre découverte : chez des souris ayant fait un infarctus, la taille des plaques peut être réduite par un médicament « anti-CD20 », qui inhibe les cellules délétères.

    Suite logique : chez l’homme, deux essais cliniques préliminaires sont en cours à l’université de Cambridge (Royaume-Uni), sous la direction de Ziad Mallat. Tous deux concernent un petit nombre de patients ayant fait un infarctus. Tous sont sous statine, bêtabloquant et IEC (la triade médicamenteuse classique après un tel accident). Le premier essai évalue, en sus, de faibles doses d’IL-2 pour favoriser l’expansion de cellules bénéfiques. Le second essai teste l’effet d’un anti-CD20.
    Les affections psychiatriques aussi sont ­concernées. « Depuis les travaux de Robert Dantzer, à l’Inserm de Bordeaux, on sait que des cytokines pro-inflammatoires agissent sur le cerveau », indique Pierre Ellul, du service de psychiatrie de l’enfant et de l’adolescent à l’hôpital Robert-Debré (AP-HP). Environ 30 % à 45 % des patients déprimés présentent des taux accrus de CRP, ce marqueur de l’inflammation. « Ils répondent moins bien aux antidépresseurs classiques. » Pour le moment, le concept reste théorique. « Mais, dans cinq à dix ans, cela pourrait changer. »

    C’est une retombée inattendue de l’inflammation : elle jette des ponts entre disciplines. Parce qu’elle est un moteur commun de nombreuses affections, on comprend leur association fréquente chez une même personne. Ainsi les patients atteints de polyarthrite rhumatoïde (une maladie inflammatoire des articulations) souffrent-ils plus souvent d’athérosclérose ; les patients diabétiques ou obèses font plus souvent des cancers ou des accidents cardio-vasculaires ; tous, aussi, souffrent plus de dépressions sévères. « Que les patients atteints de maladies chroniques soient plus déprimés, cela semble logique. Mais ce lien est plus fort avec les maladies inflammatoires », relève Pierre Ellul.

    Pour la même raison, on comprend les bénéfices collatéraux d’un traitement anti-inflammatoire, prescrit contre une maladie, sur les autres pathologies associées d’un patient. Ici, les exemples abondent. « Nous soignons des enfants atteints de lupus sévère », raconte Pierre Ellul. Beaucoup ont des dépressions associées, qui résistent aux antidépresseurs. « Mais quand nous traitons ces lupus par des thérapies ciblant l’inflammation, nous guérissons souvent ces dépressions. »

    Plus inattendu encore : en 2017, les résultats de l’essai Cantos étaient publiés dans le NEJM. Portant sur plus de 10 000 patients ayant une CRP élevée, cet essai évaluait l’impact d’une molécule médicament ciblant l’inflammation (le canakinumab, un anti-IL-1bêta de Novartis) sur le risque d’accident cardio-vasculaire. Ce médicament diminuait ce risque. Mais, en plus, il a fait chuter la mortalité par cancer du poumon et le risque d’arthrite ou de goutte…

    Les cancers, maintenant. « Le rôle de l’inflammation est très exploré. Il est très variable selon les types de tumeurs. Dans les cancers du sein “triple négatif”, par exemple, on voit beaucoup de cellules inflammatoires autour des tumeurs. Mais pas dans les cancers du sein hormono-dépendants », indique le professeur Christophe Le Tourneau, responsable du département d’essais cliniques précoces et d’innovation de l’Institut Curie (Paris et Saint-Cloud). Les cancers colorectaux, par ailleurs, sont associés aux maladies inflammatoires chroniques de l’intestin ; les cancers du foie, à certaines hépatites…

    La question de la poule et de l’œuf

    « L’inflammation chronique est responsable de près de 20 % de tous les décès par cancer dans le monde », estime Shawn Demehri, de l’hôpital général du Massachusetts, dans les PNAS en février. Son équipe a identifié deux déclencheurs d’une inflammation chronique qui favorise des cancers de la peau et du côlon chez la souris. Il s’agit d’un messager chimique, l’IL-33, et d’une catégorie de cellules, des lymphocytes T régulateurs. Leur blocage prévient ce risque de cancers.
    L’inflammation chronique a d’autres effets pernicieux. Elle s’est révélée associée à un déclin cognitif accru. La preuve : pendant vingt ans, une équipe de l’université Johns Hopkins, à Baltimore (Etats-Unis), a suivi 12 336 individus, âgés de 57 ans en moyenne au début de l’étude. Résultats, publiés le 13 février dans Neurology : au bout de vingt ans, le déclin cognitif était supérieur de 12 % chez ceux qui avaient, en début d’étude, les taux les plus élevés de CRP, un des marqueurs de l’inflammation.

    Un doute surgit ici. Cette inflammation est-elle la cause ou la conséquence de ces maladies ? Le débat n’est pas clos. « C’est l’éternelle question de la poule ou de l’œuf, observe Alain Bessis, directeur de recherche au CNRS et professeur attaché à l’ENS (Paris). Par exemple, on sait depuis longtemps que des cellules immunitaires du cerveau, la microglie, sont activées dans toutes les maladies neurodégénératives (Alzheimer, Parkinson, sclérose en plaques…) ou psychiatriques (dépression, autisme, schizophrénie…). » Mais la place de cette inflammation reste incertaine. En tout cas, elle entretient le cercle vicieux.

    « L’inflammation chronique est responsable de près de 20 % de tous les décès par cancer dans le monde », Shawn Demehri, hôpital général du Massachusetts

    « L’inflammation chronique est absolument causale, puisque, si vous interférez avec elle, vous pouvez inverser le cours de ces maladies », assure de son côté Gökhan Hotamisligil, de l’Ecole de santé publique d’Harvard, dans le magazine d’Harvard (mai-juin 2019). Il cite l’exemple du diabète : si vous rendez une mouche diabétique, et qu’ensuite vous bloquez la réponse inflammatoire, vous guérissez son diabète. De même chez la souris, le singe et l’homme, avec les bons outils de blocage. « Bien sûr, plus l’espèce est évoluée, plus les voies de l’inflammation sont complexes. Si bien qu’il est plus difficile d’identifier les processus exacts à manipuler. »

    Et les maladies inflammatoires des articulations, comme la polyarthrite rhumatoïde ? « La compréhension des mécanismes de l’inflammation a permis d’identifier des cibles pour développer des traitements très efficaces », résume le professeur Pascal Richette, rhumatologue à ­l’hôpital Lariboisière à Paris (il déclare des liens d’intérêts avec Pfizer, Lilly, Roche, Celgene). Parmi ces ­cibles, le TNF-alpha et l’IL-6, qu’inhibe une panoplie de molécules aux noms étranges (infliximab, adalimumab, étanercept, tocilizumab, canakinumab…), apparues depuis une vingtaine d’années. Et franchement, il est rare qu’un médicament puisse changer à ce point la vie des malades – auparavant très handicapés par des douleurs et la perte de fonction des articulations touchées. Au prix, certes, d’un risque accru de certaines ­infections. « Mais, globalement, ces traitements sont bien tolérés, en regard de leur efficacité. »

    Au fond, la question est : pourquoi cette inflammation à bas bruit persiste-t-elle ? C’est ici qu’entre en scène le professeur Charles Serhan. Il a ­déterré un trésor : une superfamille de molécules qui, après la phase aiguë de l’inflammation, viennent éteindre ce feu. Il les a nommés « SPM ». ­Résolvines, protectines, marésines, lipoxines : autant de petits lipides qui, en temps normal, mettent fin à cet incendie.

    « Charles Serhan est sur ma liste personnelle des nobélisables, confie Jean-Marc Cavaillon, de l’Institut Pasteur. Son travail sur la compréhension de la résolution de l’inflammation est admirable. » Pourquoi ces molécules sont-elles, parfois, impuissantes à combattre ce feu ? Peut-être sont-elles débordées, l’incendie couvant sans répit. Peut-être sont-elles altérées. « En cas d’obésité et de diabète de type 2, les résolvines sont perturbées », note Karine Clément. Ces molécules ou leurs avatars de synthèse (seuls à être brevetables !) sont à l’étude, chez l’animal et l’homme.

    Effets bénéfiques de l’activité physique

    Mais le plus simple, pour limiter ce feu, n’est-il pas d’adopter des modes de vie favorables ? Le sport, d’abord. A court terme, on sait qu’une activité physique intense induit une inflammation aiguë, vite résolue. Mais, à long terme, un exercice physique régulier, au contraire, a des effets anti-inflammatoires. En témoigne cet essai retentissant, publié en 2007 dans la revue Circulation. Au total, 27 055 femmes ont été suivies sur onze ans. Verdict : un tiers environ des bienfaits de l’activité physique régulière sur le risque ­d’accidents cardio-vasculaires ont été attribués à une baisse de l’inflammation.
    Et la nutrition ? Une restriction calorique chronique abaisse les marqueurs de l’inflammation. Pas facile à mettre en pratique.

    Mieux vaut privilégier une alimentation riche en « bons acides gras » ­nécessaires à la fabrication des SPM, ces « pompiers de l’inflammation ». On les trouve principalement dans les poissons gras, certaines algues, des œufs, de la viande de poulet ou de bœuf. « Bien sûr, il ne suffit pas de manger du poisson pour avoir ces bons acides gras. Mais cela ne peut pas faire de mal ! », estime Jean-Marc Cavaillon.
    Une alimentation vertueuse ? Plus facile à dire qu’à faire. Car l’évolution ne nous a guère sélectionnés pour nos aptitudes à apprécier les choux de Bruxelles. Bien au contraire : elle a favorisé notre appétence pour le sucre et le gras. Peut-on lui en vouloir ? Si nous sommes là aujourd’hui, c’est parce que nos ancêtres sont passés au travers de son filtre implacable.

    • Inflammation : « Mieux vaut stimuler sa résolution qu’empêcher son déclenchement... », Propos recueillis par Florence Rosier

      https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/05/14/inflammation-mieux-vaut-stimuler-sa-resolution-qu-empecher-son-declenchement

      Pour Charles Serhan, de l’Ecole de médecine d’Harvard, la découverte de la famille des SPM - résolvines, protectines...- offre l’espoir de contrôler l’inflammation d’une façon précise et sûre.

      Charles Serhan est professeur d’anesthésie à l’Ecole de médecine d’Harvard et d’immunologie à l’Ecole de médecine dentaire d’Harvard (Massachussetts, Etats-Unis). Il dirige aussi un centre sur les thérapies expérimentales des lésions d’ischémie-reperfusion, au Brigham and Women’s Hospital de Boston. Depuis vingt-cinq ans, il explore les mécanismes cellulaires et moléculaires de résolution de l’inflammation. Il a découvert une superfamille de molécules, les SPM, produites par l’organisme après la phase aiguë de l’inflammation. Leur mission : éteindre cet incendie.

      Vous avez découvert toute une famille de molécules « pompiers de l’inflammation ». Quand et comment interviennent-elles ?
      En temps normal, la réponse inflammatoire est protectrice : son rôle est de défendre l’organisme contre une agression (infection, traumatisme…). Une fois cette mission accomplie, en principe, elle se résout spontanément. On a longtemps cru que ce processus était passif, mais il n’en est rien : il met en jeu un programme actif et coordonné. Mes recherches se sont centrées sur les molécules qui le contrôlent. Dans les années 2000, mon équipe a découvert les résolvines, puis les protectines et les marésines. Avec les lipoxines, elles forment une superfamille, les SPM (« specialized pro-resolving mediators »). Elles stimulent la résolution de l’inflammation et réduisent la douleur associée. Plusieurs aident aussi à résoudre les infections et à régénérer les tissus. Toutes sont des lipides (molécules de gras), ce qui en fait un mode de signalisation à part.

      Que se passe-t-il quand l’inflammation persiste à bas bruit ?
      Il arrive en effet – c’est même fréquent – que l’inflammation ne se résorbe pas. Pourquoi ? Les causes possibles sont nombreuses. Ce peut être parce que le facteur d’agression persiste lui-même (infection latente, excès de nourriture grasse et sucrée, exposition chronique à des toxiques…). Ou bien les SPM sont débordées, inefficaces, ou elles ne sont pas produites. Certaines maladies ou déficiences du système immunitaire entrent aussi en jeu.

      Cette inflammation persistante est un moteur du vieillissement accéléré, mais aussi du développement de nombreuses affections chroniques, soit autant de « maladies de civilisation » : diabète de type 2, maladies cardiovasculaires, cancers, asthme…

      Quelles sont les promesses médicales liées à la découverte des SPM ?
      La découverte de ces molécules ouvre l’espoir de contrôler l’inflammation d’une façon plus précise et plus sûre. Car plutôt que d’empêcher l’inflammation, mieux vaut en stimuler la résolution. Aujourd’hui les médicaments anti-inflammatoires sont très utilisés. Mais ils bloquent nos défenses naturelles : d’où leurs nombreux effets indésirables – immunosuppression et infections, surtout. Par contraste, les SPM laissent l’inflammation accomplir sa mission de défense, puis elles mettent fin au processus et nettoient le champ de bataille. Leur utilisation pourrait donc éviter les séquelles au long cours d’une inflammation persistante, sans les effets indésirables des anti-inflammatoires classiques.

      Dans quelles maladies ces molécules semblent-elles prometteuses ?
      Les résolvines, par exemple, ont montré leur intérêt contre la parodontite (inflammation des gencives) chez le lapin, et contre la colite (inflammation du côlon) chez la souris. Les protectines peuvent prévenir les accidents vasculaires cérébraux ischémiques chez le rat. Les lipoxines ont atténué des pleurésies (inflammation de la plèvre, autour des poumons) chez la souris. Et les marésines ont accéléré la cicatrisation des plaies et bloqué la perception de la douleur chez la souris. Certaines SPM sont aussi à l’étude chez des joueurs professionnels de football américain, très exposés aux lésions tissulaires. D’autres pourraient être utilisées pour contrôler l’inflammation liée à la reprise de la circulation sanguine dans les tissus, après une opération. En Chine, leurs effets sont évalués contre l’asthme ou le psoriasis. En Australie, contre la polyarthrite rhumatoïde…

      Et la maladie d’Alzheimer ?
      De nombreux patients présentent des déficits en certaines SPM, comme la neuroprotectine D1. Des travaux sont en cours pour caractériser les liens entre ces déficits, l’inflammation associée à la maladie et le défaut d’élimination des lésions cérébrales (les « plaques amyloïdes »). La plupart de ces études concernent des modèles animaux. Sur un petit nombre de patients, ces molécules ont semblé sans danger et montré des signes d’action encourageants. Mais beaucoup reste à faire.
      Vous venez de publier un article sur les effets anticancer de l’aspirine, qui semble mobiliser ces molécules ?

      Dans l’édition du 12 mars des PNAS, nous montrons en effet comment l’aspirine stimule la production de certaines résolvines. Celles-ci, à leur tour, inhibent la croissance tumorale, in vitro et chez la souris. L’intérêt potentiel : ces résolvines sont actives à des taux bien plus faibles que l’aspirine, d’où l’espoir d’un effet bénéfique sans la toxicité de l’aspirine.

      Pour maintenir des niveaux suffisants de SPM dans notre organisme, ne nous suffit-il pas de consommer des aliments riches en leurs précurseurs, comme les poissons gras ?
      Je pense, en effet, que nous pouvons maintenir des niveaux suffisants de SPM en mangeant des aliments riches en leurs précurseurs, à partir desquels notre corps les fabrique. Pour les résolvines, les protectines et les marésines, ces précurseurs sont l’EPA et le DHA, deux acides gras « omega-3 » trouvés principalement dans les huiles de poissons gras (anchois, sardines, maquereaux, saumon, huile de foie de morue) et certaines algues. Les lipoxines, elles, sont dérivées de l’acide arachidonique, présent dans les œufs, le poisson, la viande de poulet ou de bœuf. Pour autant, notre alimentation occidentale reste très pauvre en ces précurseurs.

      Le régime alimentaire de la Vieille Europe n’est-il pas plus favorable, ici, que le régime américain à base d’aliments gras, sucrés et ultratransformés ?
      Je ne connais pas, honnêtement, les taux comparés de SPM des populations d’Europe et des Etats-Unis. Mais je pense que nous pourrions améliorer nos apports alimentaires en EPA et en DHA. A vrai dire, nous ignorons les niveaux d’aliments que nous devrions consommer pour bénéficier d’un taux de ces molécules optimal, pour notre santé. Déterminer ces niveaux est d’ailleurs sur notre liste de choses à faire ! Mon laboratoire a récemment développé une technique pour mesurer les taux de SPM circulant dans le sang de chaque personne.

      Les SPM, molécules naturelles, ne sont pas brevetables. Intéressent-elles l’industrie pharmaceutique ?
      Dans mon laboratoire, nous avons fabriqué des versions synthétiques des résolvines. Certains de ces analogues pourraient être développés sous forme de médicaments. Plusieurs ont déjà été évalués dans des essais cliniques préliminaires, ce qui nécessite une collaboration étroite avec des Big Pharma. Les institutions qui accueillent mon laboratoire détiennent plus de cent brevets sur les SPM, dont les inventeurs sont moi-même et mes collaborateurs.

      Où quand nos défenses nous attaquent.

      #inflammation #inflammation_chronique

  • Culpabilité par association ? L’arrestation de l’ami d’Assange , Ola Bini n’a aucun fondement
    http://enuncombatdouteux.blogspot.com/2019/05/culpabilite-par-association.html

    Ola Bini, expert en cyber-sécurité et en protection de la vie privée, a été arrêté en Équateur le jour même où l’Équateur a révoqué l’asile de Julian Assange. Un tribunal a maintenant confirmé sa détention provisoire, alors que ses parents et ses avocats ont déclaré que rien ne le justifiait.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfCGNMWTb9A


    GREG WILPERT : Ola Bini, un ami du fondateur de WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, a été condamné à rester en prison jeudi dans le cadre de son appel à la libération d’une prison équatorienne. Bini, un expert en cyber-sécurité, est en prison depuis le jour où l’Équateur a révoqué l’asile de Julian Assange à l’ambassade de l’Équateur à Londres. Les procureurs ont vaguement accusé Bini d’avoir piraté les ordinateurs du gouvernement équatorien, mais n’ont porté aucune accusation précise contre lui. Un panel d’appel de la cour provinciale de Quito a décidé, après trois heures de délibérations, que Bini devait rester en prison pendant que l’enquête se poursuivait. Les procureurs ont fait valoir que Bini représentait un risque de fuite et pouvait interférer dans l’enquête.

    Je suis Sharmini Peries venant de Baltimore. Lorsque le gouvernement équatorien a révoqué l’asile de Julian Assange et l’a expulsé de l’ambassade à Londres le 11 avril, il a également arrêté un de ses amis, Ola Bini, qui vivait en Équateur. Il a été arrêté le même jour. Le gouvernement équatorien accuse Ola Bini, citoyen suédois, d’avoir aidé Assange à pirater les ordinateurs du gouvernement équatorien, y compris le téléphone du président Moreno. Les amis et la famille de Bini nient avec véhémence qu’il serait impliqué dans de telles activités, car il est un défenseur bien connu de la confidentialité numérique. Les parents d’Ola Bini, sa mère, Dag Gustafsson, et son père, Gorel Bini, m’accompagnent à présent de Quito, en Équateur, pour débattre de cette affaire. Je vous remercie beaucoup d’être avec nous aujourd’hui.

    Les preuves dont ils disposent sont le livre de Noam Chomsky, deux clés USB et quelques ordinateurs. Il n’ya aucun témoin de crime en cours. Et comme je l’ai dit plus tôt, le crime qu’il était censé commettre n’a pas été précisé. Donc, il n’y a aucune raison légale pour Ola d’être en prison. Alors bien sûr, il devrait être libéré jeudi.

    #Noam_Chomsky

  • Fade to pleasure 29.2
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-29-2-

    Music matters the most.

    A smooth balance between the experimental and club oriented sides of an artist.

    Do It Yourself is our leitmotiv. Stencil hand-made artwork on the sleeve, every NoSR copy is unique

    Mixed By Scaarlet & hosted By Snooba on Panik (Brussels-Be) Grenouille (Marseille) Canal B (Rennes-Fr) C’rock (Vienne-Fr) Diversité FM (Dijon-Fr) LNFM (LLN-Be)You FM (Mons-Be) Woot (Marseille) Campus FM (Toulouse-FR)

    Thanks to Nicolas Landrieux aka Nico Gomez

    1. A-Sim - Ghost of Skye (NoSR 010)

    2. Volatil - Cycles (NoSR 003)

    3. Scaarlet - Baltimore (Forthcoming NoSR)

    4. Scaarlet - Spotless Dream (NoSR 004)

    5. C/Fe - Approaching The Gaz Giant (NoSR 005)

    6. Scaarlet - Not Good (NoSR 009)

    7. Scaarlet - Communication Failure (NoSR 004)

    8. Roger 23 - Output (NoSR 006)

    9. Peev - (...)

    #indie #idm #electronic_music #deep #indépendant_label #abstract #No_suit_records #electro_acoustique #indie,idm,electronic_music,deep,indépendant_label,abstract,No_suit_records,electro_acoustique
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/ftp/fade-to-pleasure-29-2-_06517__1.mp3

  • How the Disposable Straw Explains Modern Capitalism - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/disposable-america/563204

    Alexis C. Madrigal - Jun 21, 2018

    A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the stuff of tragedy, and America.

    Over the last several months, plastic straws have come under fire from environmental activists who rightly point out that disposable plastics have created a swirling, centuries-long ecological disaster that is brutally difficult to clean up. Bags were first against the wall, but municipalities from Oakland, California, (yup) to Surfside, Florida, (huh!) have started to restrict the use of plastic straws. Of course, now there is a movement afoot among conservatives to keep those plastics flowing for freedom. Meanwhile, disability advocates have pointed out that plastic straws, in particular, are important for people with physical limitations. “To me, it’s just lame liberal activism that in the end is nothing,” one activist told The Toronto Star. “We’re really kind of vilifying people who need straws.” Other environmentalists aren’t sure that banning straws is gonna do much, and point out that banning straws is not an entirely rigorous approach to global systems change, considering that a widely cited estimate for the magnitude of the problem was, umm, created by a smart 9-year-old.

    All this to say: The straw is officially part of the culture wars, and you might be thinking, “Gah, these contentious times we live in!” But the straw has always been dragged along by the currents of history, soaking up the era, shaping not its direction, but its texture.

    The invention of American industrialism, the creation of urban life, changing gender relations, public-health reform, suburbia and its hamburger-loving teens, better living through plastics, and the financialization of the economy: The straw was there for all these things—rolled out of extrusion machines, dispensed, pushed through lids, bent, dropped into the abyss.

    You can learn a lot about this country, and the dilemmas of contemporary capitalism, by taking a straw-eyed view.

    People have probably been drinking things through cylindrical tubes for as long as Homo sapiens has been around, and maybe before. Scientists observed orangutans demonstrating a preference for a straw-like tool over similar, less functional things. Ancient versions existed, too.

    But in 19th-century America, straws were straw, rye stalks, cut and dried. An alternative did not present itself widely until 1888. That year, Marvin Stone, a Washington, D.C., gentleman, was awarded a patent for an “artificial straw”—“a cheap, durable, and unobjectionable” substitute for natural straws, Stone wrote, “commonly used for the administration of medicines, beverages, etc.”

    Workmen created these early artificial straws by winding paper around a thin cylindrical form, then covering them in paraffin. Often, they were “colored in imitation of the natural straw.” Within a decade, these straws appeared often in newspaper items and advertisements across the country.
    A typical Stone straw ad from a newspaper in 1899 (Google Books)

    Advertising for the Stone straw describes its virtues and emphasizes the faults of the natural straw. Stone’s straws were free from TASTE and ODOR (natural straws were not). Stone’s straws were SWEET, CLEAN, and PERFECT (natural straws could be cracked or musty). You only had to use one Stone straw per drink (not always the case with natural straws).

    They worked. They were cheap. They were very popular and spawned many imitators because once an artificial straw had been conceived, it just wasn’t that hard to make them, tinkering with the process just enough to route around Stone’s patent. This could be read as a story of individual genius. America likes this kind of story.

    But in 1850, long before Stone, Abijah Fessenden patented a drinking tube with a filter attached to a vessel shaped like a spyglass. Disabled people were using drinking tubes in the mid-19th century, as attested to by a patent from 1870. These were artificial, high-value straws; rye was natural and disposable. But it wasn’t until the late 1880s that someone thought to create the disposable, artificial straw.

    Why?

    Americans were primarily a rural people in the early 19th century. Cities had few restaurants until the 1830s and 1840s. Most that did exist were for very rich people. It took the emergence of a new urban life to spark the creation of the kind of eating and drinking establishment that would enshrine the straw in American culture: the soda fountain.

    Carbon dioxide had been isolated decades before, and soda water created with predictably palate-pleasing results, but the equipment to make it was expensive and unwieldy. It wasn’t until the the gas was readily available and cheap that the soda fountain became prevalent. In the 1870s, their technical refinement met a growing market of people who wanted a cold, sweet treat in the city.

    At the same time, the Civil War had intensified American industrialization. More and more people lived in cities and worked outside the home. Cities had saloons, but they were gendered spaces. As urban women fought for greater independence, they, too, wanted places to go. Soda fountains provided a key alternative. Given the female leadership of the late-19th-century temperance movement, soda fountains were drafted onto the side. Sodas were safe and clean. They were soft drinks.

    By 1911, an industry book proclaimed the soda fountain the very height of democratic propriety. “Today everybody, men, women and children, natives and foreigners, patronize the fountain” said The Practical Soda Fountain Guide.

    Temperance and public health grew up together in the disease-ridden cities of America, where despite the modern conveniences and excitements, mortality rates were higher than in the countryside. Straws became a key part of maintaining good hygiene and public health. They became, specifically, part of the answer to the scourge of unclean drinking glasses. Cities begin requiring the use of straws in the late 1890s. A Wisconsin paper noted in 1896 that already in many cities “ordinances have been issued making the use of wrapped drinking straws essential in public eating places.”

    But the laws that regulated health went further. A Kansas doctor campaigned against the widespread use of the “common cup,” which was ... a cup, that many people drank from. Bans began in Kansas and spread.
    The Cup Campaigner

    In many cases, this cup was eventually replaced by the water fountain (or paper cups). Some factories kept the common cup, but purchased straw dispensers that allowed all to partake individually. “The spectacle of groups of able-bodied men standing around drinking water through straws and out of a common, ordinary drinking cup, prompted no end of facetious comment,” read an item in the Shelbina Democrat of October 11, 1911.

    Cup and straw both had to be clean to assure no germs would assail the children (or the able-bodied men). So even the method by which straws were dispensed became an important hygienic indicator. “In some stores, customers are permitted to choose their own straws, and this system would work very well if customers would not finger the straws,” The Practical Soda Fountain Guide lamented.

    That led to the development of the straw dispenser, which has a deep lineage. Already, in 1911, the thing existed where you individually pop a straw into reach. That’s it, right below, with the rationale written in: “Protects straws from flies, dust, and microbes.”
    The Practical Soda Fountain Guide

    To people living through the early 20th century, the straw was a creation of the new public-health regime. “Due to the ‘Yankee mania for sanitation,’ the [American] output of artificial straws has increased from 165 million in 1901 to 4 billion a year at present,” the Battle Creek Enquirer wrote in May 1924. “A manufacturer pointed out yesterday that, laid end to end, these straws would build an ant’s subway 16 times around the world at the equator.”

    Four billion straws! There were only 114 million Americans at the time, so that’s 35 straws per capita (though some were exported).

    Of course, straw making was improving through all these decades—mechanizing, scaling up—but the straw itself basically stayed the same. According to Sidney Graham—who founded the National Soda Straw Company in 1931, and who competed against Stone and other early straw manufacturers—in a 1988 history of the straw:

    Straws were uniform up until the 1930s ... They were tan in color, thin, and exactly 8.5 inches long. Then someone in the soda-bottling business started marketing eight-ounce bottles, and straws grew to 10.5 inches. Various soda fountains began mixing malted milks, and the old straws were too thin. So we started making them thicker. Still, they were all tan in color, like the original straws.

    In the interwar years, however, major changes came to straws. In 1937, for example, Joseph Friedman invented the bendy straw at his brother’s soda shop in San Francisco, leading to the design that’s prevalent today.

    But what happened to the straw industry is far more interesting than its (limited) technical advances. Three of the biggest names in the industry—Friedman’s Flexi-Straw Company; the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, which made popular white straws; and Maryland Cup Corporation—have bumped around the last 80 years like corporate Forrest Gumps.

    As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.

    Let’s start with Ray Kroc, who built the McDonald’s empire. For about 16 years, beginning in 1922, he sold cups for the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation, rising to lead sales across the Midwest. “I don’t know what appealed to me so much about paper cups. Perhaps it was mostly because they were so innovative and upbeat,” Kroc recalled in his memoir, Grinding It Out. “But I sensed from the outset that paper cups were part of the way America was headed.”

    At first, selling cups was a tough job. Straws were cheap—you could get 100 for nine cents in the 1930s—but cups were many times more expensive. And besides, people could just wash glasses. Why would they need a paper cup? But America was tilting toward speed and disposability. And throwaway products were the future (“innovative and upbeat”). Soda fountains and their fast-food descendants were continuing to grow, spurring more sales of cups and straws. In the end, Kroc called the years between 1927 and 1937 “a decade of destiny for the paper-cup industry.”

    Selling all those cups brought Kroc into contact with soda fountains, and eventually he went into business selling milkshake mixers. This led him to Southern California, where he saw the first McDonald’s in operation. He bought his way into the small company and deposed the original owners. With Kroc growing the brand, McDonald’s added 90 franchises between 1955 and 1959. By 1961, Kroc was fully in control of the company, and by 1968, there were 1,000 McDonald’s restaurants.
    The first McDonald’s that Ray Kroc opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, is now a museum dedicated to the burger chain. (Reuters/Frank Polich)

    The restaurant chain became a key customer for Maryland Cup, which began as an ice-cream-cone bakery in Boston. Its first nonfood product launched under a brand that became nationally famous, Sweetheart. That product? The straw. The name derived from the original packaging, which showed “two children sharing a milkshake, each drinking from a straw and their heads forming the two curved arcs of a heart.”

    After the war, the company went into cups, and later other kinds of packaging for the growing fast-food industry. It developed new products for McDonald’s, like those old foam clamshell packages that hamburgers used to come in. It also snatched up the Flexi-Straw Company—along with all its patents and rights—in 1969. Things were going great. The founder’s son-in-law was president of the company in Baltimore; one nephew of the founder ran the McDonald’s relationship; the other ran the plastics division.

    Because the future, at that point, had become plastics! In 1950, the world produced 1.5 million tons of plastic. By the late 1960s, that production had grown more than tenfold. Every product was being tried as a plastic thing, and so naturally, the straw became a plastic thing, too. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years for paper straws to lose their cultural salience.

    While functionally, paper and plastic straws might have seemed the same, to the keen observer who is the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s dazzling 1988 novel, The Mezzanine, the plastic and paper straw were not interchangeable. Paper did not float. Plastic did: “How could the straw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness!”

    Baker’s narrator wonders why the big fast-food chains like McDonald’s didn’t pressure the straw engineers into fixing this weighting mistake. “[The chains] must have had whole departments dedicated to exacting concessions from Sweetheart and Marcal,” Baker writes.

    But there was a problem: lids, which had come into vogue. Plastic straws could push through the little + slits in the cap. Paper ones could not. The restaurant chains committed fully to plastic straws.

    Baker goes on to imagine the ramifications, painting a miniature portrait of the process of path-dependent technological choice, which has helped shape everything from the width of railroad tracks to the layout of your keyboard. The power players went plastic, so everyone had to go plastic. “Suddenly the paper-goods distributor was offering the small restaurants floating plastic straws and only floating plastic straws, and was saying that this was the way all the big chains were going,” Baker writes. Sometimes it all works. Other times, a small pleasure is lost, or a tiny headache is created: “In this way the quality of life, through nobody’s fault, went down an eighth of a notch.”

    I can’t prove that this was the precise series of events that took hold among straw engineers, cup distributors, and McDonald’s. Most corporate decision-making of this kind simply doesn’t stick in the nets of history. Yet these differences influence the texture of life every single day, and ever more so, as the owners of corporations become ever further removed from the products they sell. Let’s just say that the logic Baker describes, the way he imagines the development and consequences of these forgettable technologies, squares with the histories that we do know. The very straw engineers that Baker describes might well have been working in the plastics division of the Maryland Cup Corporation, owners of the Sweetheart brand.

    Baker was writing in the 1980s, when straws of all kinds had begun to proliferate, and the American economic system entered a period of intense consolidation and financialization. A key component of this new form of capitalism was the “leveraged buyout,” in which private-equity firms descended on old companies, sliced them up, took out huge amounts of debt, and sold off the various components, “unlocking value” for their investors. You might remember this was how Mitt Romney made his fortune. Matt Taibbi described the model in acerbic but not inaccurate terms: “A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place.”

    Global competition and offshoring enabled by containerized trade was responsible for some of the trouble American manufacturing encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. But the wholesale restructuring of the economy by private-equity firms to narrow the beneficiaries of business operations contributed mightily to the resentments still resounding through the country today. The straw, like everything else, was swept along for the ride.

    In the early 1980s, Maryland Cup’s family-linked executives were on the glide path to retirement. Eighty family members held about half the company’s stock. In 1983, the company had $656 million in revenue, $32 million in profits, and 10,000 employees. It was the biggest disposable-food-product manufacturer in the nation, an empire built on cups, straws, and plastic silverware. The family was ready to cash out.

    The big paper and food companies circled Maryland Cup, but it was eventually sold for $534 million to Fort Howard, a paper company that had gone public in the early ’70s, and began to aggressively expand beyond its Wisconsin base.

    The sale was a boon for Maryland Cup’s shareholders, but the company did not fare well under the new management. Following the transaction, the Baltimore Sun relates, Maryland Cup executives flew to dinner with Fort Howard’s hard-charging CEO, Paul Schierl. He brought out a flip chart, on which he’d written the company’s “old” values—“service, quality, responding to customers.” He turned the page to show the company’s “new” values—“profits, profits, profits.” It’s like a scene out of Tommy Boy, or a socialist’s fever dream.

    Fort Howard forced deep cuts on the company. Some longtime managers quit. The trappings of the family company went out the window. No more executives dressing up as Santa Claus or local charitable contributions. And while Fort Howard was cutting people, it invested in expanding the company’s factories. This was just business. Schierl literally appeared at a sales meeting in a devil’s mask.

    Maryland Cup’s struggles intensified after the wave of departures that followed the acquisition. It needed customer volume to keep its new, bigger plants running, so Fort Howard snatched up the Lily-Tulip Cup Corporation in 1986 for another $332 million. Surely there would be synergies. More layoffs came.

    Two years later, the private-equity guys struck. Morgan Stanley, which had helped broker Fort Howard’s deals, swept in and snatched the company for $3.9 billion in one of those famed leveraged buyouts. The whole enterprise was swept off the public markets and into their hands.

    One of their moves was to spin out the cup business as Sweetheart Holdings—along with a boatload of debt jettisoned out of Fort Howard. Just eight years inside Fort Howard and a turn through the private-equity wringer had turned a profitable company into one that still made money on operations in 1991, but was $95 million in the red because it was so loaded up with debt.

    The company made layoffs across the country. Retirement health-care benefits were cut, leaving older employees so livid they filed a class-action lawsuit. A huge Wilmington factory closed after McDonald’s got rid of its plastic clamshell packaging for hamburgers, citing environmental concerns over plastic.

    In 1993, the company was sold again to a different investment group, American Industrial Partners. Eventually, it was sold yet again to the Solo Cup Company, makers of one-third of the materials necessary for beer pong. And finally, in 2012, Solo was itself sold to Dart Container, a family-owned packaging company that sells a vast array of straws under the Solo brand.

    Fort Howard continued on, going back public in 1995, then merging with another paper company, James River, in 1997, to become Fort James. Just three years later, an even bigger paper company, Georgia Pacific, snatched up the combined entity. In 2005, Koch Industries bought the shares of all the companies, taking the company back private. They still make straws.

    While bulk capitalism pushes hundreds of millions of plain plastic straws through the American food system, there are also thousands of variations on the straw now, from the “krazy” whirling neon kind to a new natural straw made from rye stalks advertised on Kickstarter (the entrepreneur calls them “Straw Straws”). There are old-school paper straws and newfangled compostable plastic straws. Stone Straw, founded by the inventor of the artificial straw, even survives in some form as the straw-distributing subsidiary of a Canadian manufacturing concern. Basically, there’s never been a better time to be a straw consumer.

    Meanwhile, the country has shed manufacturing jobs for decades, straws contribute their share to a dire global environmental disaster, the economy continues to concentrate wealth among the very richest, and the sodas that pass through the nation’s straws are contributing to an obesity epidemic that threatens to erase many of the public health gains that were won in the 20th century. Local governments may legislate the use of the plastic straw, but they can’t do a thing about the vast system that’s attached to the straw, which created first disposable products, then companies, and finally people.

    The straw is the opposite of special. History has flowed around and through it, like thousands of other bits of material culture. What’s happened to the straw might not even be worth comment, and certainly not essay. But if it’s not clear by now, straws, in this story, are us, inevitable vessels of the times in which we live.

    #USA #histoire #capitalisme #alimentation #plastique

  • Utilisés par la police françaises, les #flash-balls suisses dans le viseur

    La majorité des policiers français sont équipés de #LBD_40, fabriqués par l’entreprise #Brügger_&_Thomet, basée à Thoune. Mais l’utilisation de ces #lanceurs_de_balle, qui ont fait des dizaines de blessés, est très controversée.
    Dans la nuit du 5 au 6 janvier dernier, la police intervient au domicile d’un homme en pleine crise de démence dans son appartement d’Auxerre, en France. Afin de l’immobiliser, un agent lui tire dessus avec un LBD 40 de fabrication suisse. Ce lanceur de balles en caoutchouc est plus communément appelé flash-ball. Quelques heures plus tard, le trentenaire décède. L’autopsie a relevé « des contusions pulmonaires et cardiaques liées à l’onde de choc du projectile ».

    Discrète entreprise suisse alémanique

    La France a commencé à utiliser des flash-balls au milieu des années 90, afin d’aider les forces de l’ordre à réagir en cas d’échauffourées. Elle équipe d’abord ses policiers du modèle français, fabriqué par #Verney-Carron. Mais suite à plusieurs accidents, le ministère de l’Intérieur change son fusil d’épaule et opte pour des lanceurs suisses, réputés plus précis. C’est la très discrète entreprise suisse alémanique Brügger & Thomet, créée en 1991 à Thoune, qui remporte le marché en 2007 avec ses LBD puissants, au canon de 40 millimètres.

    Pour la société de Thoune, l’affaire est intéressante, car elle porte sur des milliers de flash-balls, vendus environ 1800 francs pièce. Son chiffre d’affaires a doublé depuis les deux dernières années, expliquait en février au Schweiz am Sonntag son fondateur, #Karl_Brügger. Cette entreprise familiale, qui indique sur son site internet occuper moins de 50 collaborateurs, a su se faire un nom.

    Matériel militaire

    En décembre dernier, à la Bourse internationale aux armes de Lausanne, elle disposait d’un stand impeccable, où pistolets et carabines rutilants étaient présentés. Les flash-balls #GL_06, surnommés LBD 40 par les policiers français, ne s’y trouvaient pas. Sur place, l’employé nous a précisé qu’il s’agit de #matériel_militaire, impossible à exposer dans une foire publique. Car si le flash-ball envoie des balles en caoutchouc, il n’a rien d’un jouet. Ce petit fusil, d’un noir mat, pèse 2,1 kilos et mesure 60 cm. Selon l’entreprise, il s’agit du flash-ball le plus « léger, le plus ergonomique et le plus rapide à tirer ».

    Le plus rapide, mais pas le moins dangereux. Depuis 2004, les flash-balls ont fait au moins deux morts et 39 blessés graves en France, dont 21 éborgnés, selon un rapport de l’ONG Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture (ACAT) publié en mai 2016. Parmi les victimes, on compte un tiers de mineurs, dont deux enfants de neuf ans. L’arme, considérée comme « non-létale », est classée dans la catégorie A, à usage militaire. Le LBD 40 comprend un canon rayé ainsi qu’un viseur électronique de la marque #EOTech, utilisé par l’armée américaine, qui a une portée de tir de 50 mètres. Pour ces raisons, l’ACAT considère que sa #dangerosité est « disproportionnée » et préconise son interdiction.

    Victime indemnisée

    #Pierre_Douillard en sait quelque chose : le 27 novembre 2007, il a perdu son œil droit sous les balles d’un LBD 40. L’adolescent français, alors âgé de 16 ans, manifestait devant la préfecture de Nantes avec d’autres lycéens, quand un agent lui tire au visage avec son flash-ball. Le choc provoque plusieurs fractures crâniennes et abîme son œil droit, dont il perd définitivement la vue. Depuis, le jeune homme milite contre les flash-balls. « C’est une arme qui se situe à la frontière entre le maintien de l’ordre et la guerre : on retrouve ce type de munitions tirées à Jérusalem Est, à Baltimore ou en Seine-Saint-Denis », explique-t-il. La justice vient de lui donner raison : l’Etat français a été condamné en novembre dernier par le tribunal et devra indemniser Pierre Douillard.

    Dans l’hexagone, les policiers ont l’interdiction formelle de viser avec leur flash-ball la tête d’un manifestant. Mais face à une foule agitée, il est souvent difficile pour les forces de l’ordre de respecter ces consignes… Qu’en pense Brügger & Thomet ? A Thoune, le directeur de l’entreprise, Karl Brügger, a refusé notre demande d’interview en invoquant l’accord de confidentialité signé avec ses clients. Il regrette toutefois qu’en France, les manifestants soient souvent présentés comme « gentils, alors qu’ils jettent parfois des pierres ou des cocktails Molotov aux policiers », qui peuvent également causer des blessures. « Si les manifestants se comportaient de manière pacifique, l’utilisation du LBD 40 ne serait pas nécessaire… », ajoute-t-il par e-mail.
    La police de Lausanne l’utilise

    La multiplication des accidents causés par le LBD 40 en France n’empêche pas l’entreprise de remporter des marchés, comme en Catalogne, où elle complète désormais l’attirail des forces de l’ordre. Plus près de chez nous, la police de Lausanne en possède depuis 2012. L’arme remplissait le cahier des charges et présentait l’avantage de venir du marché local.

    « Seuls les opérateurs du Groupe d’Intervention les utilisent dans des situations bien particulières avec comme principe de repousser le plus possible, si la situation le permet, le recours aux armes létales », précise son porte-parole Sébastien Jost. Celui-ci a eu connaissance des incidents causés par le flash-ball en France. Mais cela ne l’inquiète pas, car selon lui, l’utilisation faite par les agents lausannois n’est pas la même. Avant de conclure : « Toute arme est dangereuse ».

    https://www.letemps.ch/suisse/utilises-police-francaises-flashballs-suisses-viseur
    #armes #armement #flashball #France #Suisse #police #violences_policières

    ping @reka @fil @davduf

    • Mettan dit stop à la vente de l’arme qui crève l’oeil

      Un élu genevois a déposé, lundi, un projet de résolution pour que la Suisse arrête d’approvisionner la France en armes LBD.

      Le député au Grand Conseil genevois #Guy_Mettan veut interdire l’exportation en France du lanceur de balles de défense (LBD), de fabrication suisse. L’élu a déposé, lundi, un projet de résolution allant dans ce sens auprès du Parlement cantonal.

      Le texte invite le Conseil fédéral « à mettre tout en oeuvre pour interdire l’exportation du LBD en France ». Guy Mettan demande au gouvernement suisse de s’appuyer sur l’Ordonnance sur le matériel de guerre, qui prohibe l’exportation d’armes s’il y a de forts risques que ce matériel soit utilisé contre la population civile.

      Pour le député qui siège comme indépendant, le LBD, conçu par l’entreprise bernoise Brügger & Thomet, est utilisé de façon abusive par les forces de l’ordre françaises lors des manifestations des gilets jaunes. A ce jour, poursuit M.Mettan, des centaines de blessures irréversibles à la tête et aux yeux ont été causées par ce lanceur.

      La situation est aggravée par l’emploi en France de munitions plus dangereuses et non conformes au mode d’emploi du fabricant suisse, relève encore M. #Mettan. Le député est effrayé de l’usage qui est fait du LBD par la police de l’Hexagone, transformant ce moyen défensif lourd « en une arme d’attaque terrifiante ».

      https://www.tdg.ch/monde/mettan-dit-stop-vente-arme-creve-loeil/story/25909412

  • El #petro no ve la luz y se convierte en una gran estafa de Maduro
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/gda/petro-luz-convierte-una-gran-estafa-maduro_259941

    Transcurrido un año [del] nacimiento [del petro] y con varias resurrecciones encima, el chavismo vende el petro como un «Superman económico» con el que pretende resolver su derrumbe económico y como una de las piedras angulares de su narrativa propagandística: la alternativa criolla para la economía del mundo.

    Creado en un principio por el gobierno para evitar las sanciones de Estados Unidos, el petro navega atrapado en una tercera dimensión ajena a la economía real del país.

    Incumpliendo una fecha tras otra, el gobierno nacional fue incapaz de lanzarlo a la circulación digital.

    La semana pasada, incluso, sufrió una nueva mutación, para transformarse en un certificado de ahorro. Nada se sabe, mientras tanto, de los 5000 millones de dólares que el gobierno aseguró que ya fueron invertidos por compradores de petros.

    Para la mayoría de los expertos, el petro es una fantasía que se trata de imponer al país como forma de pago para comprar pasajes de avión, compraventa de viviendas y otras actividades económicas cuando ni siquiera se respetó la fecha de 5 de noviembre como inicio de operaciones, el último fiasco. El atrevimiento revolucionario es de tal calibre que el general Manuel Quevedo, presidente de la petrolera estatal Pdvsa, propuso que el petro se convierta en método de pago para la OPEP, «la moneda digital para el petróleo».

    «El petro es un fraude. La aplicación de Android para adquirirlo ha desaparecido misteriosamente. Se ha lanzado dos veces y nada. Las principales agencias de calificación criptográficas lo llaman una estafa», aseguró Steve Hanke, profesor de economía aplicada en la Universidad John Hopkins (Baltimore).
    […]
    «Están copiando nuestra inferfaz, que es muy particular, única, la han copiado exactamente», subraya a la nacion JP Thieriot, CEO de Uphold, plataforma de dinero digital que aloja varias criptomonedas y que tiene en Venezuela, con 100.000 usuarios, su segunda comunidad de clientes.

    «Lo más gracioso es que nos pusimos en contacto con ellos mediante Twitter. Increíblemente nos contestaron que China copió la tecnología de Occidente durante décadas y al perfeccionarla se convirtió en una fuerza mundial. En este caso no tenemos miedo de reconocer una cosa buena, nos dijeron. Jamás un gobierno soberano había respondido de esta forma», asegura Thieriot.

    La #criptomoneda dash es la otra gran inspiración del petro. «Es un clon descarado de dash», aseguró Joey Zhou, principal desarrollador de Ethereum y el primero en revelar las copias bolivarianas.

    Un experto venezolano conocedor de la operación pormenorizó a la nacion varias de las anomalías que presenta el petro.

    «La característica principal de un #blockchain (cadena de bloques que elimina a los intermediarios tradicionales) es que todo queda registrado en un libro mayor de cuentas públicas, inexistente todavía. No se ha registrado ningún cambio de mano del petro en ningún blockchain. Hay un backup blockchain al que se puede ingresar, pero ni siquiera está 1% de las supuestas transacciones que han sucedido con el criptoactivo», especifica, bajo anonimato.

  • Le Vatican bloque des mesures des évêques américains contre les abus sexuels Belga - 13 Novembre 2018 - RTBF
    https://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_le-vatican-bloque-des-mesures-des-eveques-americains-contre-les-abus-sex

    Le Saint-Siège a ordonné lundi à la conférence des évêques américains de ne pas se prononcer, lors de son assemblée générale, sur des mesures de lutte contre les abus sexuels en son sein, lui demandant d’attendre la tenue d’une conférence sur le sujet en février.

    Lors de son discours d’ouverture, le cardinal Daniel DiNardo, président de la conférence, a confirmé avoir reçu une lettre de la Congrégation pour les évêques et annoncé qu’aucun vote ne se tiendrait lors de cette assemblée générale, contrairement à ce qui était prévu initialement.

    Le cardinal Blase Cupich, évêque de Chicago, a lui précisé, dans un communiqué, que le Vatican avait demandé à la conférence de « reporter » le vote final dans l’attente d’une rencontre des conférences épiscopales du monde entier, convoquée en février à Rome.

    Le cardinal DiNardo a fait part de sa « déception » lors d’une conférence de presse à la mi-journée, lundi, au premier jour de l’assemblée générale qui se tient à Baltimore (nord-est) jusqu’à mercredi.

    Régulièrement mise en cause ces dernières années pour sa gestion du scandale des abus sexuels au sein de l’église catholique américaine, la conférence des évêques américains avait annoncé, en octobre, plusieurs mesures phares, qui devaient faire l’objet d’un vote.

    Le haut clergé américain proposait notamment un nouveau code de conduite, un nouveau mécanisme de signalement, ainsi que la création d’une commission d’enquête menée par des personnes n’appartenant pas à l’église catholique américaine.

    « Nous ne sommes pas satisfaits de cela », a assuré le cardinal DiNardo au sujet de la demande du Vatican. « Nous travaillons dur pour passer à l’action. Et nous allons le faire. Nous rencontrons juste un contretemps. »

    Mi-août, les services du procureur de Pennsylvanie ont publié un rapport accablant, détaillant des abus perpétrés durant plusieurs décennies par plus de 300 prêtres et dont ont été victimes plus de 1.000 enfants.

    Le rapport dépeint une hiérarchie ayant souvent eu une démarche active pour ne pas ébruiter les cas d’abus sexuels et pour protéger les auteurs de ces agressions.

    #pédophilie #culture_du_viol #viol #église #enfants #catholicisme #eglise #viols #religion #violences_sexuelles #pedocriminalité #vatican #eglise_catholique #pape #usa #prêtres

  • The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/the-growth-of-sinclairs-conservative-media-empire

    Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a hundred and ninety-two stations in eighty-nine markets. It reaches thirty-nine per cent of American viewers. The company’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, is a conservative whose views combine a suspicion of government, an aversion to political correctness, and strong libertarian leanings. Smith, who is sixty-eight, has a thick neck, deep under-eye bags, and a head of silvery hair. He is an enthusiast of fine food and has owned farm-to-table restaurants in Harbor East, an upscale neighborhood in Baltimore. An ardent supporter of Donald Trump, he has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology. Sinclair employees say that the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, including editorials by the conservative commentator Mark Hyman, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.

    In some cases, anchors have been compelled to read from scripts prepared by Sinclair. In April, 2018, dozens of newscasters across the country parroted Trump’s invectives about “fake news,” saying, “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” In response, Dan Rather, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” wrote, on Twitter, “News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda. It’s Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”

    It’s unclear whether Sinclair is attempting to influence the politics of its viewers or simply appealing to positions that viewers may already have—or both. Andrew Schwartzman, a telecommunications lecturer at Georgetown Law School, told me, “I don’t know where their personal philosophy ends and their business goals begin. They’re not the Koch brothers, but they reflect a deep-seated conservatism and generations of libertarian philosophy that also happen to help their business.”

    Sinclair has even greater ambitions for expansion. In May, 2017, the company announced a proposed $3.9-billion merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media Company, which owns forty-two television stations. The merger would make Sinclair far larger than any other broadcaster in the country, with stations beaming into seventy per cent of American households. The proposal alarmed regulatory and free-speech experts. Michael Copps, a former official at the Federal Communications Commission, told me, “One of the goals of the First Amendment is to make sure the American people have the news and information they need to make intelligent decisions about our democracy, and I think we’re pretty close to a situation where the population lacks the ability to do that. That’s the whole premise of self-government.” He went on, “There are a lot of problems facing our country, but I don’t know one as important as this. When you start dismantling our news-and-information infrastructure, that’s poison to self-government and poison to democracy.”

    In subsequent years, Smith took measures to deepen Sinclair’s influence among policymakers, apparently recognizing that the company’s profits were dependent upon regulatory decisions made in Washington. One of Smith’s first notable forays into politics was his support for Robert Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican congressman who represented Maryland from 1995 until 2003. Sinclair became a top donor to Ehrlich and, in 2001, Ehrlich sent the first of several letters on Sinclair’s behalf to Michael Powell, who had recently become the chair of the F.C.C. The commission was investigating a request from Sinclair to buy a new group of stations, and Ehrlich protested the “unnecessary delays on pending applications.” The F.C.C.’s assistant general counsel responded that Ehrlich’s communication had violated procedural rules. Ehrlich sent another message, alleging that the delays were politically motivated and threatening to “call for a congressional investigation into this matter.” He added, “Knowing that you have served as Chairman for a few short months, we would prefer to give you an opportunity to address these concerns.” The proposed acquisitions were approved.

    A former general-assignment reporter at the station, Jonathan Beaton, told me, “Almost immediately, I could tell it was a very corrupt culture, where you knew from top down there were certain stories you weren’t going to cover. They wanted you to keep your head down and not upset the fruit basket. I’m a Republican, and I was still appalled by what I saw at Sinclair.” Beaton characterized the man-on-the-street segments as “Don’t forget to grab some random poor soul on the street and shove a microphone in their face and talk about what the Democrats have done wrong.” He said that reporters generally complied because of an atmosphere of “intimidation and fear.”

    After Trump’s victory, it looked as though Sinclair’s investment in the candidate would pay off. In January, 2017, Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a vocal proponent of media deregulation, to be the chair of the F.C.C. Pai, formerly an associate general counsel at Verizon and an aide to Senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, was exactly the sort of commission head that Sinclair had been hoping for. He believed that competition from technology companies such as Google had made many government restrictions on traditional media irrelevant—an argument that echoed Smith’s views on ownership caps and other regulations. Sinclair executives quickly tried to cultivate a relationship with Pai; shortly after the election, he addressed a gathering of Sinclair managers at the Four Seasons in Baltimore. He also met with David Smith and Sinclair’s C.E.O., Christopher Ripley, the day before Trump’s Inauguration.

    It’s not unusual for business executives to meet with the chair of the F.C.C., but Pai soon announced a series of policy changes that seemed designed to help Sinclair. The first was the reinstatement of the ultrahigh-frequency discount, an arcane rule that digital technology had rendered obsolete. The move served no practical purpose, but it freed Sinclair to acquire many more stations without bumping up against the national cap.

    The F.C.C. soon made other regulatory modifications that were helpful to Sinclair. It eliminated a rule requiring television stations to maintain at least one local studio in licensed markets, essentially legitimatizing Sinclair’s centralized news model. Perhaps most perniciously, Pai took steps toward approving a new broadcast-transmission standard called Next Gen TV, which would require all consumers in the U.S. to purchase new televisions or converter devices. A subsidiary of Sinclair owns six patents necessary for the new standard, which could mean billions of dollars in earnings for the company. Jessica Rosenworcel, the sole Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C., told me, “It’s striking that all of our media policy decisions seem almost custom-built for this one company. Something is wrong.” Rosenworcel acknowledged that many F.C.C. policies need to be modernized, but, she said, “broadcasting is unique. It uses the public airwaves, it’s a public trust.” She added, “I don’t think those ideas are retrograde. They are values we should sustain.”

    The F.C.C. and the D.O.J. both warned Sinclair about the dummy divestitures, insisting that the company find independent owners in ten problematic markets. According to a lawsuit later filed by Tribune, instead of taking steps to appease regulators, Sinclair executives “antagonized DOJ and FCC staff” by acting “confrontational” and “belittling.” The company offered to make sales in only four of the markets, and told the Justice Department that it would have to litigate for any further concessions. One Sinclair lawyer told government representatives, “Sue me.” There was no tactical reason for Sinclair to take such a combative and self-sabotaging stance. Instead, the episode seemed to reflect how Trump’s own corruption and conflicts of interest have filtered into the business community. One industry expert who followed the proceedings closely told me that the company clearly “felt that, with the President behind them, why would the commission deny them anything?

    Then, in April, the Web site Deadspin edited the broadcasts of Sinclair anchors reciting the script about fake news into one terrifying montage, with a tapestry of anchors in different cities speaking in unison. The video ignited public outrage, and Trump tweeted a defense of Sinclair, calling it “far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.” (In a statement, a spokesperson for Sinclair said, “This message was not presented as news and was not intended to be political—there was no mention of President Trump, political parties, policy issues, etc. It was a business objective centered on attracting more viewers.”)

    #Médias #Concentration #Dérégulation #Etats-Unis #Sinclair

  • Aux États-Unis, la crise des opioïdes bénéficie au don d’organes _ Marine Van Der Kluft - 1 Octobre 2018 - Le Figaro -
    http://sante.lefigaro.fr/article/aux-etats-unis-la-crise-des-opioides-beneficie-au-don-d-organes

    La hausse du nombre de décès par overdose aux antidouleurs a entraîné une augmentation du nombre d’organes disponibles à la greffe.

    Aux États-Unis, la crise des opioïdes continue de faire des ravages. Morphine, oxycodone ou encore le redoutable fentanyl… Entre 2010 et 2017, le nombre d’Américains décédés d’une overdose a été multiplié par deux. Des événements tragiques qui ont eu un effet inattendu, comme l’ont constaté les banques d’organes américaines : sur la même période, le nombre de donneurs morts par overdose a quadruplé, passant de 350 à 1400.

    « C’est une sinistre ironie : les décès dus à la drogue pourraient augmenter la disponibilité des organes », observent les responsables de la banque d’organes de Nouvelle-Angleterre (région du nord-est des États-Unis) dans un éditorial publié dans la revue Transplantation. En effet, après avoir atteint un pic en 2014, la liste des patients en attente d’une transplantation a diminué pour la première fois depuis vingt-cinq ans. Une baisse qui s’explique en partie par la crise des opioïdes.

    Des candidats idéaux aux greffes
    Les personnes décédées d’une overdose d’opioïdes sont-elles pour autant de bonnes candidates au don d’organes ? Selon le Pr Olivier Bastien, directeur du prélèvement et des greffes d’organes et de tissus à l’Agence de la biomédecine, il s’agit même de conditions idéales, dans le cas où les secours arrivent rapidement. « Le fentanyl est 1000 fois plus puissant que la morphine. Une overdose de ce produit bloque la respiration du patient. L’arrêt cardiaque est rapide, et les organes ne sont pas touchés. Si les secours arrivent vite, ils réalisent un massage cardiaque qui va permettre de faire repartir le cœur. Cependant, le cerveau aura été trop longtemps privé d’oxygène et le patient sera en état de mort cérébral », explique le médecin.

    Risque d’infections
    Cependant, les organes prélevés sur ce type de patients sont régulièrement mis de côté, ce que regrette une équipe de chercheurs de la faculté de médecine Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, États-Unis). « Malgré les caractéristiques favorables de ces donneurs, leurs reins et leur foie sont jetés trois fois plus souvent que ceux issus des morts par traumas », observent-ils dans une étude publiée dans la revue Annals of Internal Medicine.

    Ces patients sont en effet plus susceptibles d’avoir développé des infections consécutives à l’injection de drogues, et notamment l’hépatite B, C et le VIH. Pourtant, les risques de transmission sont désormais très faibles, avec moins d’un cas sur 1000 pour l’hépatite C et un sur 10.000 pour le VIH. En outre, l’étude montre que le taux de survie cinq ans après une greffe d’organes provenant d’une personne décédée d’overdose est équivalent à celui consécutif à la greffe d’organes provenant d’un donneur décédé par trauma.

    « Bien que ça ne soit pas la solution idéale à la pénurie, l’utilisation de ces organes devrait être optimisée », concluent les chercheurs de Johns Hopkins. C’est la stratégie qu’a choisie la banque d’organes de la Nouvelle Angleterre, région qui compte des états très touchés par la crise des opioïdes, comme le Vermont ou le Massachusetts. Alors que le taux national de décès par overdose était de 13,5% en 2017, celui-ci s’élevait à 27% en Nouvelle-Angleterre.

    Désormais, même si les tests révèlent la présence d’une hépatite B, C ou du VIH, l’établissement n’hésite plus à proposer la transplantation. « Les nouveaux traitements ont rendu le VIH maîtrisable et l’hépatite C curable », expliquent-ils. En effet, la loi américaine prévoit la possibilité d’une greffe si le receveur a déjà la maladie ou si le risque de décéder dépasse celui lié à l’infection. Ainsi, en 2016 a eu lieu la première transplantation d’un organe infecté par le VIH vers un patient lui-même atteint du sida. « C’est la preuve qu’avec une bonne stratégie, un élément salvateur peut émerger d’une tragédie nationale », expliquent-ils.

    #opioïdes #greffes #Chirurgie #drogues #Morphine #oxycodone #fentanyl #VIH #sida #optimisation #transplantation

  • US to transfer Coast Guard ships to #Ukraine amid Russia tensions - CNNPolitics
    https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/politics/us-transfer-coast-guard-ships-ukraine/index.html


    La photo représente le WPB 1326 Monomoy, de même classe que les Drummond et Cushing, ceux-ci portant les numéros de coque 1323 et 1321.

    The US Coast Guard plans to transfer two former 110-foot Coast Guard ships to Ukraine during a ceremony on Thursday in Baltimore.

    Coast Guard Vice Adm. Michael McAllister and Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko are expected to attend the transfer ceremony.

    The transfer of the two armed Coast Guard cutters come as tensions between Ukraine and Russia in the Sea of Azov have increased in recent weeks, with Kiev and the US accusing Moscow of interfering with Ukrainian shipping in the region.

    The United States condemns Russia’s harassment of international shipping in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait,” State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said in a statement late last month.

    Russia has delayed hundreds of commercial vessels since April and in recent weeks has stopped at least 16 commercial ships attempting to reach Ukrainian ports,” she added.

    A US defense official told CNN that the cutters Drummond and Cushing were purchased by Ukraine from the Pentagon’s Excess Defense Articles program.
    PUBLICITÉ
    The Island-class cutters are typically armed with a 25 mm machine gun mount and four .50-caliber machine guns.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island-class_patrol_boat

    #poussière_navale

    Note : le fait d’armes du Drummond est d’avoir patrouillé dans le Détroit de Floride et d’y avoir intercepté (au moins) 550 immigrants cubains illégaux depuis 2004 (source : WP)…

  • [Projet] cf. city flows | Till Nagel & Christopher Pietsch
    cf. city flows a comparative visualization of urban bike mobility

    Une exposition sur la mobilité urbaine à vélo conçue "pour aider les citoyens à analyser de façon « décontractée » trois systèmes de Vélo en libre-service (VLS)".

    Trois écrans montrent l’évolution de la mobilité en VLS (trajectoires) des villes de New York, Berlin et Londres... d’ou le cf. (pour confer, en latin).

    Le principe de la co-géo-visualisation de ces « flux » selon différentes modalités graphiques apparaît réussi. Il pousse l’observateur à la comparaison des morphologies urbaines, similitudes, différences, qui résultent du trafic en VLS. Cela permet aussi et surtout de voir la ville autrement que via le prisme des véhicules à moteur.

    Sur les représentations, on notera par exemple cette « magnifique » carte des trajectoires de VLS en 3D et en edge bundling, une « expérience » que je trouve réussie. Après, on peut toujours discuter sur les aspects thématiques etc.


    La représentation animée, en 3D, d’un flux figuré par une ligne (et non pas une bande, de surface mesurable) est également très intéressante. Elle change de propositions antérieures (le flux est symbolisé par une bande) pour laquelle le passage à la 3D donne l’effet d’un caisson, d’un bâtiment ... alors qu’il s’agit d’un déplacement. C’est un peu gênant que la cartographique de flux ressemble à celle de bâtiments en 3D. (Dans la vue ci-dessous, il s’agit de New-York).

    Référence bibliographique : Till Nagel & al. (2016),Staged Analysis :
    From Evocative to Comparative Visualizations of Urban Mobility, Proceedings of the IEEE VIS 2016 Arts Program, VISAP’16 : Metamorphoses, Baltimore, Maryland, October 23th-28th, 2016
    –> https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/staged-analysis-visap-2016.pdf

    En savoir plus sur le projet cf. city flows : https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/cf

    MAJ du 31 janvier 2019 :
    Mise en ligne de l’article de Giovanni Profeta (@profeta_g) : The graphic visualisation of flows
    The information design tools for the analysis of the urban fabric

    http://www.flowsmag.com/en/2017/05/09/the-graphic-visualisation-of-flows

    #cartedeflux #networg #trajectoire #VLS #flowmap #ville #city #réseau #vélo #bike #Berlin #Londres #New-York #Urbanfmobility #gFlowiz

  • Can the Manufacturer of Tasers Provide the Answer to Police Abuse ? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/can-the-manufacturer-of-tasers-provide-the-answer-to-police-abuse

    Tasers are carried by some six hundred thousand law-enforcement officers around the world—a kind of market saturation that also presents a problem. “One of the challenges with Taser is: where do you go next, what’s Act II?” Smith said. “For us, luckily, Act II is cameras.” He began adding cameras to his company’s weapons in 2006, to defend against allegations of abuse, and in the process inadvertently opened a business line that may soon overshadow the Taser. In recent years, body cameras—the officer’s answer to bystander cell-phone video—have become ubiquitous, and Smith’s company, now worth four billion dollars, is their largest manufacturer, holding contracts with more than half the major police departments in the country.

    The cameras have little intrinsic value, but the information they collect is worth a fortune to whoever can organize and safeguard it. Smith has what he calls an iPod/iTunes opportunity—a chance to pair a hardware business with an endlessly recurring and expanding data-storage subscription plan. In service of an intensifying surveillance state and the objectives of police as they battle the public for control of the story, Smith is building a network of electrical weapons, cameras, drones, and someday, possibly, robots, connected by a software platform called Evidence.com. In the process, he is trying to reposition his company in the public imagination, not as a dubious purveyor of stun guns but as a heroic seeker of truth.

    A year ago, Smith changed Taser’s name to Axon Enterprise, referring to the conductive fibre of a nerve cell. Taser was founded in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Smith lives; to transform into Axon, he opened an office in Seattle, hiring designers and engineers from Uber, Google, and Apple. When I met him at the Seattle office this spring, he wore a company T-shirt that read “Expect Candor” and a pair of leather sneakers in caution yellow, the same color as Axon’s logo: a delta symbol—for change—which also resembles the lens of a surveillance camera.

    Already, Axon’s servers, at Microsoft, store nearly thirty petabytes of video—a quarter-million DVDs’ worth—and add approximately two petabytes each month. When body-camera footage is released—say, in the case of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man killed by police in Sacramento, or of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, this past fall—Axon’s logo is often visible in the upper-right corner of the screen. The company’s stock is up a hundred and thirty per cent since January.

    The original Taser was the invention of an aerospace engineer named Jack Cover, inspired by the sci-fi story “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle,” about a boy inventor whose long gun fires a five-thousand-volt charge. Early experiments were comical: Cover wired the family couch to shock his sister and her boyfriend as they were on the brink of making out. Later, he discovered that he could fell buffalo when he hit them with electrified darts. In 1974, Cover got a patent and began to manufacture an electric gun. That weapon was similar to today’s Taser: a Glock-shaped object that sends out two live wires, loaded with fifty thousand volts of electricity and ending in barbed darts that attach to a target. When the hooks connect, they create a charged circuit, which causes muscles to contract painfully, rendering the subject temporarily incapacitated. More inventor than entrepreneur, Cover designed the Taser to propel its darts with an explosive, leading the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to classify it a Title II weapon (a category that also includes sawed-off shotguns), which required an arduous registration process and narrowed its appeal.

    A few years after Tasers went on the market, Rick Smith added a data port to track each trigger pull. The idea, he told me, came from the Baltimore Police Department, which was resisting Tasers out of a concern that officers would abuse people with them. In theory, with a data port, cops would use their Tasers more conscientiously, knowing that each deployment would be recorded and subject to review. But in Baltimore it didn’t work out that way. Recent reports in the Sun revealed that nearly sixty per cent of people Tased by police in Maryland between 2012 and 2014—primarily black and living in low-income neighborhoods—were “non-compliant and non-threatening.”

    Act II begins in the nauseous summer of 2014, when Eric Garner died after being put in a choke hold by police in Staten Island and Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, of the Ferguson Police. After a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson—witness statements differed wildly, and no footage of the shooting came to light—Brown’s family released a statement calling on the public to “join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera.”

    In the fall of 2014, Taser débuted the Officer Safety Plan, which now costs a hundred and nine dollars a month and includes Tasers, cameras, and a sensor that wirelessly activates all the cameras in its range whenever a cop draws his sidearm. This feature is described on the Web site as a prudent hedge in chaotic times: “In today’s online culture where videos go viral in an instant, officers must capture the truth of a critical event. But the intensity of the moment can mean that hitting ‘record’ is an afterthought. Both officers and communities facing confusion and unrest have asked for a solution that turns cameras on reliably, leaving no room for dispute.” According to White’s review of current literature, half of the randomized controlled studies show a substantial or statistically significant reduction in use of force following the introduction of body cameras. The research into citizen complaints is more definitive: cameras clearly reduce the number of complaints from the public.

    The practice of “testi-lying”—officers lying under oath—is made much more difficult by the presence of video.

    Even without flagrant dissimulation, body-camera footage is often highly contentious. Michael White said, “The technology is the easy part. The human use of the technology really is making things very complex.” Policies on how and when cameras should be used, and how and when and by whom footage can be accessed, vary widely from region to region. Jay Stanley, who researches technology for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that the value of a body camera to support democracy depends on those details. “When is it activated? When is it turned off? How vigorously are those rules enforced? What happens to the video footage, how long is it retained, is it released to the public?” he said. “These are the questions that shape the nature of the technology and decide whether it just furthers the police state.”

    Increasingly, civil-liberties groups fear that body cameras will do more to amplify police officers’ power than to restrain their behavior. Black Lives Matter activists view body-camera programs with suspicion, arguing that communities of color need better educational and employment opportunities, environmental justice, and adequate housing, rather than souped-up robo-cops. They also argue that video has been ineffectual: many times, the public has watched the police abuse and kill black men without facing conviction. Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State Los Angeles, who is active in Black Lives Matter, told me, “Video surveillance, including body cameras, are being used to bolster police claims, to hide what police are doing, and engage in what we call the double murder of our people. They kill the body and use the footage to increase accusations around the character of the person they just killed.” In her view, police use video as a weapon: a black man shown in a liquor store in a rough neighborhood becomes a suspect in the public mind. Video generated by civilians, on the other hand, she sees as a potential check on abuses. She stops to record with her cell phone almost every time she witnesses a law-enforcement interaction with a civilian.

    Bringing in talented engineers is crucial to Smith’s vision. The public-safety nervous system that he is building runs on artificial intelligence, software that can process and analyze an ever-expanding trove of video evidence. The L.A.P.D. alone has already made some five million videos, and adds more than eleven thousand every day. At the moment, A.I. is used for redaction, and Axon technicians at a special facility in Scottsdale are using data from police departments to train the software to detect and blur license plates and faces.

    Facial recognition, which techno-pessimists see as the advent of the Orwellian state, is not far behind. Recently, Smith assembled an A.I. Ethics Board, to help steer Axon’s decisions. (His lead A.I. researcher, recruited from Uber, told him that he wouldn’t be able to hire the best engineers without an ethics board.) Smith told me, “I don’t want to wake up like the guy Nobel, who spent his life making things that kill people, and then, at the end of his life, it’s, like, ‘O.K., I have to buy my way out of this.’ ”

    #Taser #Intelligence_artificielle #Caméras #Police #Stockage_données

  • “The Hatpin Peril” Terrorized Men Who Couldn’t Handle the 20th-Century Woman | History | Smithsonian
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hatpin-peril-terrorized-men-who-couldnt-handle-20th-century-woman-18

    “The Hatpin Peril” Terrorized Men Who Couldn’t Handle the 20th-Century Woman
    To protect themselves from unwanted advances, city women protected themselves with some sharp accessories

    On the afternoon of May 28, 1903, Leoti Blaker, a young Kansan touring New York City, boarded a Fifth Avenue stagecoach at 23rd Street and settled in for the ride. The coach was crowded, and when it jostled she noticed that the man next to her settled himself an inch closer to her. She made a silent assessment: elderly, elegantly dressed, “benevolent-looking.” The horse picked up speed and the stage jumped, tossing the passengers at one another again, and now the man was touching her, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. When he lifted his arm and draped it low across her back, Leoti had enough. In a move that would thrill victim of modern-day subway harassment, she reached for her hatpin—nearly a foot long—and plunged it into the meat of the man’s arm. He let out a terrible scream and left the coach at the next stop.

    “He was such a nice-looking old gentleman I was sorry to hurt him,” she told the New York World. “I’ve heard about Broadway mashers and ‘L’ mashers, but I didn’t know Fifth Avenue had a particular brand of its own…. If New York women will tolerate mashing, Kansas girls will not.”

    Newspapers across the country began reporting similar encounters with “mashers,” period slang for lecherous or predatory men (defined more delicately in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as “one whose dress or manners are calculated to elicit the admiration of susceptible young women”). A New York City housewife fended off a man who brushed up against her on a crowded Columbus Avenue streetcar and asked if he might “see her home.” A Chicago showgirl, bothered by a masher’s “insulting questions,” beat him in the face with her umbrella until he staggered away. A St. Louis schoolteacher drove her would-be attacker away by slashing his face with her hatpin. Such stories were notable not only for their frequency but also for their laudatory tone; for the first time, women who fought back against harassers were regarded as heroes rather than comic characters, as subjects rather than objects. Society was transitioning, slowly but surely, from expecting and advocating female dependence on men to recognizing their desire and ability to defend themselves.
    Hatpin-defence.jpeg
    (San Francisco Sunday Call, 1904)

    Working women and suffragists seized control of the conversation, speaking out against mashers and extolling women’s right to move freely—and alone—in public. It was true, as social worker Jane Addams lamented, that “never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs.” Dating rituals and sexual mores were shifting. A man no longer called at a woman’s parlor and courted her under the close eye of her parents, but took her to a show or a dance hall, where all manner of evil lurked. The suffragists rejected the notion, advanced by the Chicago Vice Commission, that unchaperoned women should dress as modestly as possible—no painted cheeks or glimpse of ankle—in order to avoid unwanted attention. The issue lay not with women’s fashion or increasing freedoms, one suffragist countered, but with “the vileness of the ‘masher’ mind.”

    Instead of arguing with the suffragists, some detractors took a more subtle approach, objecting not to women’s changing roles but to their preferred mode of self-defense: the hatpin. Tales abounded of innocent men—no mashers, they—who fell victim to the “hatpin peril.” A 19-year-old girl in Scranton playfully thrust her hatpin at her boyfriend and fatally pierced his heart. A young New York streetcar passenger felt a sharp pain behind his ear—an accidental prick from a stranger’s hatpin—and within a week fell into a coma and died. Also in New York, a hundred female factory workers, all wielding hatpins, attacked police officers who arrested two of their comrades for making allegedly anarchistic speeches. Even other women weren’t safe. In a suburb of Chicago, a woman and her husband’s mistress drew hatpins and circled each other, duel-style, until policemen broke it up. “We look for the new and imported Colt’s hatpin,” one newspaper sarcastically opined, “or the Smith and Wesson Quick-action Pin.” By 1909, the hatpin was considered an international threat, with the police chiefs in Hamburg and Paris considering measures to regulate their length.

    In March 1910, Chicago’s city council ran with that idea, debating an ordinance that would ban hatpins longer than nine inches; any woman caught in violation would be arrested and fined $50. The proceedings were packed with curious spectators, men and women, and acrimonious from the start. “If women care to wear carrots and roosters on their heads, that is a matter for their own concern, but when it comes to wearing swords they must be stopped,” a supporter said. Cries of “Bravo!” from the men; hisses from the women. Nan Davis, there to represent several women’s clubs, asked for permission to address the committee. “If the men of Chicago want to take the hatpins away from us, let them make the streets safe,” she said. “No man has a right to tell me how I shall dress and what I shall wear.”

    Despite Davis’ impassioned speech, the ordinance passed by a vote of 68 to 2. Similar laws subsequently passed in several other cities, including Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and New Orleans. Ten thousand miles away, in Sydney, Australia, sixty women went to jail rather than pay fines for wearing “murderous weapons” in their hats. Even conservative London ladies steadfastly refused to buy hatpin point protectors.

    “This is but another argument for votes for women and another painful illustration of the fact that men cannot discipline women,” argued the suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch, a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Women need discipline; they need to be forced, if not led, out of their barbarisms, but women never have and never will submit to the discipline of men. Give women political power and the best among them will gradually train the uncivilized, just as the best among men have trained their sex.”

    The furor over hatpins subsided at the onset of World War I, and died entirely when bobbed hair and cloche hats came into fashion—at which point emerged a new “social menace”: the flapper. It wouldn’t be long, of course, before politicians grew less concerned with what women wore than with how to win their votes.

    pas encor lu

  • Why ’Dancing In The Street’ Gets The People Going : NPR
    https://www.npr.org/2018/07/28/632661834/american-anthem-dancing-in-the-street-martha-vandellas

    Mark Kurlansky, author of the book Ready For a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America, says that at the time, those campaigning for equal rights were split on strategy — between Dr. King’s nonviolence, and the Black Power movements exemplified by Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), the Black Panthers and Malcolm X’s Black Muslims. It was on the latter side that “Dancing in the Street” began to show a new potential.

    What makes the song an anthem is the ring of authenticity: a cry from the heart of summer in a big city, boiling with energy, turmoil and hope.

    “1964 was the year when Malcolm X famously said, ’We will get our rights by any means necessary. It really was the year that the black liberation movement was under a shift from the civil rights movement to the Black Power movement,” he says. “The people in the Black Power movement used this song for rallies because it got people worked up and got them going.”

    Mark Kurlansky also notes the litany of cities woven into the song: ’They’re dancing in Chicago, down in New Orleans, up in New York City ... Philadelphia, PA, Baltimore and D.C. now," and ending with, "Can’t forget the Motor City.’ “Every city they list where they were dancing,” he says, “was a city with a militant black neighborhood, and a city where, eventually riots, broke out.”

    Martha Reeves wants it to be known, “I had nothing to do with that. I just sang the song and in my heart, I was visualizing people actually dancing in the street. I wasn’t singing, you know, doom and gloom when the sun go down, let’s kill everybody and go steal their property, and break into stores and carry refrigerators home on your back.”

    But she also says the song reminds her of the trials she faced as a black teen in Detroit, before the modern civil rights movement began.

    “We couldn’t stand on street corners and sing,” she recalls, “because there was a police unit called the Big Four. It was usually four big white men, and they had clubs and guns. And if they caught a group of black people standing on the corner singing doo-wop ... they would jump out of the car and attack you, arrest you, or run to your house, because they didn’t want blacks gathering. So ’Dancing in the Street’ is all of that to me.”
    On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American Century
    American Anthem
    On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American Century

    Mark Kurlansky believes that “Dancing in the Street” has grown into an American anthem over six decades because its irresistible beat and engaging images let people find their own message in the song. He says that co-writer Mickey Stevenson “saw it as a song about integration: about how young black people and young white people could go out on the street and be together.”

    #Musique

  • Richard Florida : « La #crise urbaine, c’est la crise centrale du #capitalisme »
    https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2018/07/07/richard-florida-la-crise-urbaine-c-est-la-crise-centrale-du-capitalisme_5327


    Je n’arrête pas de m’en faire la réflexion : les métropoles sont connectées entre elles et tout le reste est de plus en plus exclu, éloigné et négligé.
    À la rentrée, ma fille va intégrer un lycée de la métropole régionale… ce qui a l’air d’être déjà une chance, tant les gosses de bouseux ont l’air assignés à résidence, dans des établissements aussi peu dotés que possible.
    Il y a 30 ans, quand j’ai fait le même chemin, je prenais le bus pour aller à la métropole régionale. Là, les lignes ont été supprimées, nous n’avons trouvé aucune correspondance possible pour le lundi matin, ce qui était impensable il y a 30 ans.
    Là, c’est devenu normal. La plupart des métropoles sont à présent plus proches les unes des autres que les gens de leurs périphéries le sont du centre-ville qui est devenu inatteignable de l’extérieur. Je mets plus de temps pour aller inscrire ma fille à son lycée (où ma présence physique est requise avec des tirages papiers de mes scans, à l’heure d’Internet !), que pour me rendre à Paris, qui est 5 fois plus éloignée !

    Le problème, c’est que quelques grandes ­#métropoles internationales concentrent la ­majorité des #richesses, et deviennent de plus en plus #inaccessibles. Dans ces villes superstars, l’explosion des prix de l’#immobilier chasse peu à peu les artistes, les professions intellectuelles, les créatifs des quartiers qu’ils avaient investis. Mais ce ne sont pas les moins bien lotis, car ceux-ci trouvent souvent d’autres quartiers ­populaires où ils peuvent s’installer. Ce qui est terrifiant, c’est que les policiers, les pompiers, les gens qui travaillent dans des boutiques ou des restaurants, les infirmiers, les artisans, les jardiniers doivent quitter ces grandes villes, devenues trop chères. Et vivre beaucoup plus loin, dans des zones mal desservies par les transports en commun. La nouvelle crise urbaine n’est pas une crise du déclin des villes, comme dans les années 1970. C’est une crise causée par leur succès. Et la conséquence, c’est qu’aux Etats-Unis nous avons d’un côté une petite vingtaine de métropoles superstars, entrées de plain-pied dans l’économie de la connaissance, et de plus en plus riches. Et tout le reste du pays qui plonge et s’appauvrit. La crise urbaine, c’est la crise centrale du capitalisme contemporain.

  • Why Living in a Poor Neighborhood Can Change Your Biology - Issue 61 : Coordinates
    http://nautil.us/issue/61/coordinates/why-living-in-a-poor-neighborhood-can-change-your-biology-rp

    It was the most ambitious social experiment ever conducted by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. And one of the most surprising. In 1994, HUD randomly assigned 4,600 poor, mostly African-American families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to one of three groups. One group received housing vouchers intended to help them move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Another group received vouchers without geographic restrictions. A final control group didn’t receive vouchers at all. Called “Moving to Opportunity,” the study was designed to answer a question that had divided social scientists and policymakers for decades: Did getting people off of welfare and other forms of social assistance depend on changing their social context?TOWN WITHOUT PITY: A (...)

  • WHERE KILLINGS GO UNSOLVED
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/where-murders-go-unsolved/?noredirect=on
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZavZUdbo6Mo

    The Washington Post has identified the places in dozens of American cities where murder is common but arrests are rare. These pockets of impunity were identified by obtaining and analyzing up to a decade of homicide arrest data from 50 of the nation’s largest cities. The analysis of 52,000 criminal homicides goes beyond what is known nationally about the unsolved cases, revealing block by block where police fail to catch killers.

    The overall homicide arrest rate in the 50 cities is 49 percent, but in these areas of impunity, police make arrests less than 33 percent of the time. Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows, 34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate now than a decade ago.

    Some cities, such as Baltimore and Chicago, solve so few homicides that vast areas stretching for miles experience hundreds of homicides with virtually no arrests. In other places, such as Atlanta, police manage to make arrests in a majority of homicides — even those that occur in the city’s most violent areas.

    Police blame the failure to solve homicides in these places on insufficient resources and poor relationships with residents, especially in areas that grapple with drug and gang activity where potential witnesses fear retaliation. But families of those killed, and even some officers, say the fault rests with apathetic police departments. All agree that the unsolved killings perpetuate cycles of violence in low-arrest areas.

    Detectives said they cannot solve homicides without community cooperation, which makes it almost impossible to close cases in areas where residents already distrust police. As a result, distrust deepens and killers remain on the street with no deterrent.

    “If these cases go unsolved, it has the potential to send the message to our community that we don’t care,” said Oakland police Capt. Roland Holmgren, who leads the department’s criminal investigation division. That city has two zones where unsolved homicides are clustered.

    MURDER WITH IMPUNITY
    Out of 52,179 homicides in 50 cities over the past decade,
    51 percent did not result in
    an arrest.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/investigations/unsolved-homicide-database