Robert Rohde sur Twitter : “It is interesting to compare official #COVID-19 death tolls, to the apparent death tolls estimated from looking at total excess deaths. Some official statistics (e.g. France & Belgium) seem to closely capture the true mortality. Others underestimate by a large fraction.” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1264708175334440960
#décès #surmortalité #statistiques
Source: ►https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
UK benefits ban leaves migrants struggling for food during lockdown | Free to read | Financial Times
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#RoyaumeUni#aide
▻https://www.ft.com/content/bedca1a9-2de6-4072-95c8-8d3384315bda
Immigration policy leaves families without access to state aid as unemployment soars
Another kind of representation
Migrants watch and wait as coronavirus shuts routes down | Financial Times
►https://www.ft.com/content/c7f0803a-7328-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fprod-upp-image-read.ft.com%2Fa7b9cd56-735c-11ea-90ce-5fb6c07a27f2?s
#migration#migrant#Covid-19#Serbia#protest
Singapore must rethink how it treats migrant workers - Nikkei Asian Review
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#Singapour#protection
▻https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Singapore-must-rethink-how-it-treats-migrant-workers
Catherine James is the Executive Director of the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics, or HOME, a Singapore-based charity dedicated to empowering and supporting migrant workers who find themselves victims of abuse and exploitation.
Mortalité : les graphiques utiles... et les autres - Par Loris Guémart | Arrêt sur images
▻https://www.arretsurimages.net/articles/mortalite-les-graphiques-utiles-et-les-autres
Les représentations visuelles du nombre de décès liés au Covid-19 se sont multipliées dans les médias du monde entier. Mais ils sont loin de tous transmettre une information utile, surtout à mesure que l’épidémie évolue. Comment et pourquoi les infographistes, en particulier anglo-saxons, de loin les plus influents, ont-ils choisi l’échelle logarithmique, laissé de côté le nombre de morts par habitants, ou fini par adopter la statistique des « morts en excès » ?
" "Dans une interview du 14 avril, Burn-Murdoch explique : « Vers le 10 mars, un de nos journalistes voulait savoir où en étaient l’Espagne et le Royaume-Uni par rapport à l’Italie », note Burn-Murdoch. Le journaliste fait alors le choix déterminant d’une progression dite « logarithmique » (et non plus linéaire). Il crée deux courbes, du nombre de cas d’abord, du nombre de morts cumulé ensuite (qu’il transformera en avril en nombre de morts quotidiennes). Actualisées chaque jour sur une page placée en accès libre par ce média 100 % payant en temps normal, elles deviendront les infographies les plus citées au monde.
▻https://medium.com/nightingale/how-john-burn-murdochs-influential-dataviz-helped-the-world-understand-coron
►https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
« Pour représenter une croissance , une échelle linéaire utilise une grande partie de l’espace disponible pour montrer la verticalité grandissante de la courbe », détaille Burn-Murdoch. Cela aboutit à « écraser » les pays dont l’épidémie est naissante dans un espace restreint, tout en rendant plus difficile les comparaisons, toutes les courbes exponentielles semblant similaires. Très remarqué, son choix a également été loué par le New York Times : « Sur une échelle linéaire, la courbe s’envole. Sur une échelle logarithmique, elle se transforme en une ligne droite, ce qui signifie que les déviations (soit une croissante encore plus forte, ou réduite, ndlr) deviennent beaucoup plus simples à déceler. »
Les courbes de progression logarithmiques permettent de comprendre où en est chaque pays, relativement aux autres. Mais elles constituent des représentations peu efficaces pour apprécier en un clin d’œil le niveau d’accélération ou de décroissance d’un pays donné, malgré les affirmations du journaliste du Financial Times, notait début avril le responsable des données du groupe Veolia. Autre défaut : leur efficacité semble tout aussi limitée pour appréhender la réussite ou l’échec des politiques de santé de chaque État, hors des cas les plus flagrants, tel que le succès de la Corée du Sud. « Nous nous concentrons sur la trajectoire (…) et sur les nombres que vous entendez dans les médias », défendait le Financial Times le 30 mars. « Si nous choisissions d’aller vers un ratio du nombre de morts par habitant, vous perdriez un peu du côté viscéral, immédiat et évident. »
The Economist diffuse en effet des comparaisons entre les données de surmortalité issues de sources fiables, comme la base de données européenne de décès EuroMOMO, et les bilans officiels dans de nombreux pays et régions, dont la France. Il est rapidement imité par le New York Times, le Financial Times et Mediapart, entre autres.
Si les comparaisons internationales du nombre de morts, comme du nombre de morts par habitants, sont particulièrement défavorables au gouvernement français, le différentiel entre la surmortalité totale et les décès officiels du Covid-19 montre plutôt une transparence acceptable et de données relativement fiables… du moins depuis que la France s’est résolue à comptabiliser les morts des Ehpad.
#mortalité #surmortalité #chiffres #statistiques
cc @fil @simplicissimus
Chiffres de mortalité par pays.
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fd2e2d892-896e-11ea-9dcb-fe6871f4145a?fit=scale-down&quality=highest&source=next&width=1260#.jpg 
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcfd965b2-896e-11ea-9dcb-fe6871f4145a?fit=scale-down&quality=highest&source=next&width=1260#.jpg Surmortalité par pays
Surmortalité par aires urbaines (pas encore de pic à #Sockholm, #Jakarta, NYC, etc.)
Mortalité par région
Mortalité en Europe
▻https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus-map-europe.svg?frame=webM
Bon, vous irez voir vous-mêmes les graphiques du FT, la preview était pas mal.
#merci !
sous-titre : au delà des données brutes
On a de plus en plus d’images comme ça, avec des URL qui n’indiquent plus la terminaison correspondant au format de fichier. Et du coup Seenthis ne les identifie pas comme des images.
Quand ça arrive, on peut forcer en ajoutant #.jpg à la fin de l’URL de l’image concernée. Le dièse fait que ça ne change pas l’URL du fichier qui est réellement appelé, mais ça permet d’avoir côté Seenthis la terminaison « .jpg » nécessaire pour déclencher la création de la vignette.
Sinon, l’article d’Arrêt sur Image suggère d’utiliser plus le nombre de morts rapporté à la population. Mais il y a encore une limite avec ça, c’est que tous les pays n’ont pas le même âge. Ça a été remarqué pour l’Afrique : l’âge moyen des populations est tellement bas qu’il ne reste pas beaucoup de vieux de plus de 80 ans pour Covid-19. C’est le même souci qui permettait de penser que les Hauts-de-Seine avaient une mortalité plus importante que la Seine-Saint-Denis.
C’est pour cela que j’essaie de réduire encore cette différence entre rapportant à la population de plus de 75 ans. Ce qui me fait un chiffre faux (c’est le nombre de morts tous âges confondus rapporté à la population de plus de 75 ans), mais au moins ça tente de pallier ce biais de la pyramide des âges.
Si on faisait ça à l’échelle des pays, on aurait certainement encore un autre « classement » (dans quasiment tous les pays africains, au moins la moitié de la population a moins de 20 ans ; au Liban la moitié de la population a moins de 30 ans ; en France, la moitié de la population a moins de 41 ans).
J’ai mis dans un tableau les décès Covid-19 par pays, la population globale, et la part de la population de plus de 65 ans. Et du coup, je peux faire un calcul du nombre de morts global rapport à 100 000 personnes de plus de 65 ans.
à comparer avec le graphique du Parisien signalé par Mediapart :
– « L’âge médian du décès était de 84 ans et 75% avaient 75 ans et plus. »
▻https://sante.journaldesfemmes.fr/fiches-maladies/2622115-coronavirus-victime-france-age-mort-deces-qui-en-meur
– Morts par pays :
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandémie_de_Covid-19
– Population âgée de 65 et plus :
▻https://donnees.banquemondiale.org/indicateur/SP.POP.65UP.TO.ZS
– Liste des pays par population :
▻https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Liste_des_pays_par_population
Merci @arno ! Ça marche pas pour le dernier mais pour les autres, oui.
Je viens de constater sur ft.com que l’augmentation des décès concernant les États-Unis est proportionnellement assez faible par rapport à d’autres pays d’Europe. Un commentaire ?
Perso, je dirai que les États-Unis sont un pays où l’on meurt (déjà) beaucoup en temps « normal ».
Sinon, leur ratio décès (lié au coronavirus) - population totale est de 193 pour 1 million. Bien moins que le Royaume Uni où ce ratio monte à 394. La moyenne mondiale, quant à elle, est de 30 ppM.
(Source : ►https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus)
Mon but : chercher à « corréler » ces chiffres à des spécificités suivant chaque état (densité de population, qualité du système de santé, « mentalité » des populations, efficacité de l’arsenal répressif, gouvernance et institutions politiques, etc)
Sombre : c’est un très grand pays, avec des situations très différentes d’un État à l’autre. Au minimum, il faudrait comparer avec la surmortalité à l’échelle européenne, où tu auras un effet de minoration de la moyenne à cause de certains pays.
En revanche, dans les courbes là-haut, tu as la surmortalité de la ville de New York. Et par rapport aux autres villes du monde qui sont présentées, c’est la pire surmortalité du lot…
c’est un très grand pays, avec des situations très différentes d’un État à l’autre.
C’est ce que je me disais aussi. Et je viens de le vérifier sur les données par état chez worldometers.info. L’effet « lissage » des moyennes, c’est assez, comment dire... mortel ?
Il y a une échelle de la sévérité du confinement sur la page du FT.
Et une carte sur les disparités régionales aux USA pour @sombre.
Ici l’adresse de l’image avec ou sans le truc.
▻https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus-map-united-states.svg?frame=webL
▻https://ig.ft.com/autograph/graphics/coronavirus-map-united-states.svg?frame=webL
Bon, ça marche pas ton truc de dièse-point-jpg, @arno.
Sur la situation US, un podcast sur le delta du Mississipa confronté au Covid.
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/851012
Merci @antonin1 ! Très «parlante» la carte, effectivement.
Vendredi 24 avril l’Insee a publié sa mise à jour hebdomadaire du nombre de décès quotidiens par département :
►https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4470857
Et les surmortalités provoquées par Covid-19 commencent à sérieusement se voir, puisqu’on a enfin des chiffres portant sur la pire période de mortalité (première moitié d’avril).
Dans les tableaux de l’Insee, pour chaque département, il y a un graphique comparant les décès quotidiens cumulés des années 2020, 2019 et 2018 pour chaque département.
Pour un département faiblement touché par Covid-19, par exemple la Gironde, on obtient ceci : la courbe bleue (2020) est quasiment identique aux années précédentes (en fait, inférieure à l’année 2018…) :
Pour des départements lourdement touchés par l’épidémies c’est une autre histoire, la différence devient spectaculaire :
Pour la Seine-Saint-Denis, l’Insee indique 2342 décès entre le 1er mars et le 17 avril 2020. Alors que, sur la même période, il y a eu 1008 décès en 2019 et 1125 en 2018. On a donc plus du double de décès sur cette période.
Attention, si on restreint à la période du pic (espérons…) de l’épidémie,
disons du 1er au 17 avril, on obtient 1118 morts en 2020, contre 315 en 2019 et 359 en 2018. C’est-à-dire plus du triple.
Enfin, le tableau qui rapporte le nombre de décès à la population de plus de 75 ans dans chaque département :
Rappel : ce tableau est né pour répondre à l’affirmation selon laquelle il n’y avait pas réellement de surmortalité en Seine-Saint-Denis, et qu’il s’agit d’un montage pour stigmatiser ces habitants, puisque si on rapporte le nombre de nombre de morts au nombre d’habitants, on aurait tendance à moins y mourir que dans le 92, le 94 et le 75. Ce que la mise à jour du tableau confirme. Mais…
– Le 93 est un département particulièrement plus jeune que ses voisins, la proportion de plus de 75 ans y est de 5%, contre 7 à 9% ailleurs. Donc ce tableau rapporte le nombre de décès à la population âgée de plus de 75 ans pour chaque département (attention : ce n’est pas la proportion de décès dans cette classe d’âge : c’est juste une façon de minorer l’effet déformant de la relativement jeunesse de la population du 93).
Et avec les derniers chiffres, la différence de mortalité devient de plus en plus marquée : 35% plus importants dans le 93 que sur Paris.
– L’autre biais de cette affirmation consiste à comparer le 93 uniquement à des départements eux-mêmes très marqués par la surmortalité de Covid-19. Si on compare à un département faiblement marqué (Gironde), on voit que les chiffres sont spectaculairement supérieures dans les 4 départements de la région parisienne.
Sinon, un aspect intéressant du premier tableau, c’et qu’on a tout de même une surmortalité très impressionnante dans les Hauts-de-Seine, qui est le deuxième département le plus riche de France, alors que la Seine-Saint-Denis est le deuxième département le plus pauvre de la métropole. Même s’il y a une différence, on reste dans des proportions tout de même très proches.
Avec toutes les morts évitées (accidents de la route, pollution) et toutes les morts accrues (accidents domestiques) par la pandémie, c’est difficile de déterminer la surmortalité.
Les Hauts-de-Seine, département « le plus riche de France » comptent aussi un certain nombre de communes pauvres, historiquement PC, dont la situation peut être comparée à leurs homologues du 93 : Nanterre, Genevilliiers, La Garenne, etc.
@antonin1 Ça peut se discuter sur les départements faiblement touchés tels que la Gironde, mais certainement pas pour la région parisienne, où l’on meurt 3 fois plus vite pendant le pic de l’épidémie qu’en temps normal.
Et il faut donc utiliser la comparaison : en Gironde, faiblement impacté par Covid-19 mais subissant aussi le confinement, le nombre de morts est exactement le même que les années précédentes. La seule variable qui fait qu’on meurt trois fois plus en Seine-Saint-Denis par rapport à la Gironde, ce n’est pas le confinement et ses impacts possibles sur les accidents, la pollution, la maladresse des gens avec un couteau de cuisine… mais bien la présence de Covid-19.
@marclaime Oui, c’est bien ce que je me suis dit aussi. Mais on est tout de même en train de calculer des moyennes départementales, et la différence de revenu moyen entre 92 et 93 est très impressionnant (de mémoire, du simple au double).
L’explication la plus plausible (et je vais dans ton sens), c’est que puisqu’on reste encore sur des nombres relativement faibles de décès ramenés à la population totale, alors ce n’est pas tant la moyenne qui compte que la concentration de la maladie dans certaines catégories de la population. Auquel cas les inégalités du bas jouent plus que la valeur moyenne elle-même.
En Ile-de-France, la mortalité a quasiment doublé
avec l’épidémie
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2020/05/04/en-ile-de-france-la-mortalite-a-quasiment-double-avec-l-epidemie_6038623_823
Sept semaines après le début du confinement, « tous les indicateurs témoignent d’une diminution des recours aux soins pour Covid-19 en ville comme à l’hôpital », indique l’Agence régionale de santé dans son dernier point hebdomadaire. Le coronavirus représente désor- mais moins de 10 % de l’activité de SOS Médecins dans la région parisienne, contre plus de 30 % fin mars. Le nombre de victimes de l’épidémie en réanimation dans la région a reflué de 42 % par rapport au pic observé début avril. On compte cependant encore 1 550 patients en réanimation, soit nettement plus que les 1 200 lits disponibles dans les hôpitaux d’Ile-de-France avant le début de la crise. A elle seule, la région concentre 41 % des malades du Covid-19 en réanimation à l’échelle nationale.
Surtout, le nombre de morts reste élevé, même si les décès hospitaliers rapportés en sept jours ont diminué pour la première fois en Ile-de-France durant la dernière semaine d’avril. Les statistiques de la mortalité globale donnent une idée de la catastrophe. Entre le 1er mars et le 20 avril, 10 200 décès supplémentaires ont été recensés en Ile-de-France par rapport à la même période de 2019, soit un bond de 95 %, selon les chiffres diffusés lundi 4 mai par l’Insee. Un quasi-doublement qui tient avant tout à l’épidémie de coronavirus.
[...] Le nombre de décès s’est ainsi accru de 74 % dans la capitale. Mais les trois départements limitrophes ont encore plus souffert, avec des hausses de 104 % dans le Val-de-Marne, 122 % dans les Hauts-de-Seine et même 130 % en Seine-Saint-Denis.
Les habitants de Seine-Saint-Denis auraient pu espérer un bilan bien moins sombre. C’est le département le plus jeune de France. Seuls 15 % des hommes y ont plus de 60 ans, contre 37 % dans la Creuse ou le Lot, par exemple. Cet atout face à une maladie qui tue surtout les plus âgés n’a cependant pas suffi, loin de là. Car le « 93 » est aussi le département le plus pauvre de la métropole.
@arno, je disais pas ça pour nier la surmortalité. En effet avec le même confinement dans des départements différemment impactés, on a de quoi comparer.
Le FT dit x 2,4 de surmortalité en IdF (+137 %).
The Arab medics battling coronavirus in Israel’s segregated society- Financial times
Arabs make up only a fifth of Israel’s population, but represent half the country’s pharmacists, a quarter of its nurses and just under a fifth of its doctors, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. Some of the nation’s largest hospitals have Arab doctors heading major departments, and the country’s leading virologist is Arab.
#Covid19#Israel#Palestine#Arabe#Santé#Hopitaux#migrant#Politique#réfugiés#migration
▻https://www.ft.com/content/f193a9b9-c3a0-4da2-9a26-be4a92f99006
FT Interview: Emmanuel Macron says it is time to think the unthinkable
▻https://www.ft.com/content/3ea8d790-7fd1-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84
“I never imagined anything because I’ve always put myself in the hands of fate,” he says. “You have to be available for your destiny . . . so that’s where I find myself, ready to fight and promote what I believe in while remaining available to try and comprehend what seemed unthinkable.”
monstrueux... On a vraiment au pouvoir la pire bande de crétins décérébrés qu’on puisse imaginer.
#paywall, aucun accès, même pas le chapeau…
Le mec qui s’entraine devant la glace depuis l’âge de 6 ans avec tout ses soutiens qui lui répépètent en or « tu sras président » et il attend le destin. mwawaaaa
Ça fait rire mais avec des frissons d’angoisse dans le dos quand même...
@simplicissimus C’est marrant, quand je l’ai référencé, j’avais l’intégralité de l’article visible. Effectivement là c’est fermé.
À l’instant, en faisant une recherche sur Twitter puis en suivant le lien depuis Twitter, l’article s’est réaffiché. Mais les fois suivantes ça s’est refermé.
Le FT a un système intelligent, tu peut voir l’article au premier clic mais après ça repasse en paywall. The Economist fait la même chose
#charabia (mais la prochaine fois vous copiez-coller, qu’on puisse mesure le level ?)
Bon, je n’ai pas le texte mais on me communique le lien vers la vidéo de l’intégralité de l’interview…
Il faut se le taper, ce que je m’évite depuis avant l’élection présidentielle, mais là, je fais une exception. Et c’est intéressant. Par moment, ça fait vraiment Grand O de l’ENA, à d’autres présentation d’un bilan financier (les P&L, les basis points de mon spread), par moment on est dans les sommets anthropologiques et aussi il redécouvre que la mondialisation a accru les inégalités et fragilise la démocratie…
Quand il dit que l’Europe, pour lui, c’est d’abord un projet politique avant d’être un marché, c’est bôô comme l’antique, mais ça semble quand même être la naissance d’une flamme dont on est fondé à douté de la longévité…
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGfKhCICC0
argh, le sourire final d’autosatisfaction.
#je_m'aime …
Sackings and ineligibility for benefits deepen migrants’ plight in crisis | Financial Times
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#RoyaumeUni#travail
▻https://www.ft.com/content/d3b7c80b-9d33-4eac-97f4-bfc1da3c9df3
Coronavirus tracked: the latest figures as the pandemic spreads | Free to read | Financial Times
►https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
LATEST CHANGES
April 9: All maps and charts now exclude nursing home deaths from France’s totals to maintain cross-national comparability
April 8: Added streamgraph and stacked column charts, showing regional daily deaths of patients diagnosed with coronavirus.
April 7: The maps now display total deaths rather than confirmed cases.
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-us.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fd88acce8-79b3-11
Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Financial Times
►https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
Arundhati Roy April 3 2020 - Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?
Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?
And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?
The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.
But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.
The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?
Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”
The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.
At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.
And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?
In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.
The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.
Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.
It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.
Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitiser.
March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.
Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.
He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.
Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.
On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.
He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.
Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.
The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.
As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.
The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.
Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.
They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.
As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.
A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.
Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.
When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.
The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.
Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.
“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.
“Us” means approximately 460m people.
State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.
In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.
The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.
As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.
The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.
The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.
Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.
India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.
All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.
People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F14bf90c2-74ff-11
Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus at a White House briefing on April 1, as the number of US cases topped 200,000
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F3903dd30-74ff-11
Narendra Modi with the US president and his wife Melania at a packed rally in Ahmedabad on February 24 — part of a lavish official visit
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F76bb88f0-74fd-11
Women ang pots and pans to show their support for the emergency services dealing with the coronavirus outbreak
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4c4e4a16-74fe-11
A resident wears a face mask in Mumbai, where the usually bustling streets are almost deserted. . .
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F5880f84c-74fe-11
. . . while in Bangalore people queue to buy supplies at a supermarket
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F737c2424-74fd-11
Migrant workers head towards a highway leading out of New Delhi, hoping to return to their home villages
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F2540e862-74fd-11
On the outskirts of New Delhi on March 29, a woman pushes her daughter on to an overcrowded bus as they attempt the journey back to their home village
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F071edd62-74fd-11
Migrant workers in New Delhi wait to board buses
▻https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.upp-prod-eu.s3.amazonaws.com%2F77000d22-74fd-11
A boy wearing a protective mask ventures on to a balcony in Srinagar, which recorded Kashmir’s first coronavirus death in late March
Syria’s shattered health service left exposed as coronavirus spreads- Financial time
Nearly a decade of civil war has driven up to 70 per cent of medics to flee, WHO says
In opposition-controlled Idlib city, 300km to the north, Dr Mohamad Abrash said he has watched in dismay as people have continued to roam the streets, enjoying the calm of a shaky ceasefire despite the creeping threat of coronavirus.
#Covid19#Syrie#International#Sanctions#Economie#migrant#santé#réfugiés#migration
▻https://www.ft.com/content/130b0083-6339-4118-8dae-14de9e13513f
Tracking #coronavirus: #big_data and the challenge to privacy | Free to read | Financial Times
▻https://www.ft.com/content/7cfad020-78c4-11ea-9840-1b8019d9a987
Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.
Both politicians and the industry insist that the data sets will be “anonymised”, meaning that customers’ individual identities will be scrubbed out. Mr Breton told the Financial Times: “In no way are we going to track individuals. That’s absolutely not the case. We are talking about fully anonymised, aggregated data to anticipate the development of the pandemic.”
But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous.
Greece confirms first coronavirus case in migrant camp
▻https://www.ft.com/content/cee3c95d-f2cd-4529-828f-637a1a9ab380
Greece has confirmed the first case of coronavirus in a migrant camp on the mainland, as public health workers warn of a humanitarian disaster if the highly contagious disease takes hold in the overcrowded settlements.
On Tuesday, an asylum seeker who had been living in a camp outside Athens tested positive for the virus after giving birth at a clinic, the first recorded case among an estimated 60,000 refugees and migrants living in camps on the eastern Aegean Islands and remote areas of mainland Greece.
It is not clear where the woman contracted the virus.
Migrants describe a climate of fear as they live packed together with little water, sanitation or information about the coronavirus crisis that is raging across Europe.
“What hope do we have of defending ourselves from corona? ” said Ahmad, on the phone from a camp under lockdown in northern Greece. He shares his small living space with five other men, his cooking facilities with dozens of people, and his camp recently had no running water for 10 days.
Six people have also tested positive for coronavirus on the Greek island of Lesbos, home to the 20,000-strong Moria camp that activists say is particularly ill-equipped to handle an outbreak.
Residents have been ordered not to leave the camp, even to collect their monthly stipend in the nearby town as police step up patrols on the roads nearby.
“There are areas in the Lesbos camp […] where there is one water point for 1,300 people. There is one toilet for 167 people. And there is one shower for 200 people,” says Apostolos Veizis, head of mission in Greece for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors without Borders. “So when we call for people to stay home, this is the paradox: what home?”
Public health experts say the situation is not only a humanitarian failure, it risks undermining the fight against the pandemic in Europe.
“Either we include everyone in this strategy, or we strategically fail. Not including these populations is a recipe for failure for our whole society,” said Karl Blanchet, a public health professor and director of the Geneva-based Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action.
Human Rights Watch and MSF are calling for the immediate evacuation of overcrowded island camps. Sea Watch, a search and rescue group, has proposed that decommissioned cruise ships could house those who have been evacuated.
The European Commission says the risk of a coronavirus outbreak in the migrant camps is “of concern to us and to the Greek authorities” and is seeking to speed up the transfer of people from Greek islands — which host some 41,000 in camps — to the mainland.
Athens has also announced measures to improve screening and limit groups or visitors, measures Mr Dr Veizis said would do little good given the already unhygienic, overcrowded conditions.
Meanwhile, despite coronavirus being spread by close human contact, other countries in south-east Europe have been accelerating moves to corral migrants into camps.
Editor’s note
The Financial Times is making key coronavirus coverage free to read to help everyone stay informed. Find the latest here.
Migrants have been forced into makeshift settlements in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Serbia some migrants said they had no access to disinfectants or gloves and that camps were under military guard. In some camps, those with a fever said they were left among the camp population while others were whisked into isolation. Some anxious residents wondered whether a coronavirus outbreak had begun.
“The scariest thing is we have no idea who might be sick and who isn’t,” said Mohammed, living in Serbia’s Sombor camp.
Many Balkan states appeared to be trying to push migrants across their borders and into Serbia, where the migrant population in its camps climbed from 5,000 to 8,000 in just a few weeks.
“They [other Balkan states] have taken note of Serbia’s relatively open stance and are pushing migrants into their territories as they try to get rid of migrants in this Covid-19 crisis period,” said Stefan Lehmeier, the deputy director of International Rescue Committee in Europe, “I’m not sure what governments intend to do — the migrants cannot make themselves disappear.”
#Covid-19 #Migration #Migrant #Balkans #Grèce #Camp #Lesbos #Moria #Bosnie-Herzégovine #Serbie
Le dinosaure onusien #UIT vient de publier des documents sur « l’Internet du futur » ▻https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/studygroups/2017-2020/13/Documents/Internet_2030%20.pdf où ils annoncent un nouvel Internet, et critiquent l’actuel. L’approche proposée (purement « vaporware » à cette étape) est celle de la table rase.
Un résumé en français ▻https://www.letemps.ch/monde/chine-exacerbe-bataille-controle-dinternet Bien plus médiocre, cet article qui présente la proposition UIT comme achevée alors qu’il ne s’agit que de PowerPoints ▻https://siecledigital.fr/2020/03/31/huawei-et-la-chine-proposent-un-nouveau-protocole-internet
Commme #Huawei est derrière, il y a eu des réactions parfois assez chauvines, notamment aux États-Unis. Article du Financial Times derrière un paywall : ▻https://www.ft.com/content/ba94c2bc-6e27-11ea-9bca-bf503995cd6f Milton Muller a critiqué ces réactions ▻https://www.internetgovernance.org/2020/03/30/about-that-chinese-reinvention-of-the-internet
L’#IETF a fait une réponse cinglante et très détaillée à ce projet ▻https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1677
L’ETSI, traditionnelle émanation des industriels de la téléphonie s’y met aussi, en se prétendant en charge de concevoir le nouvel Internet ▻https://www.etsi.org/newsroom/press-releases/1749-2020-04-etsi-launches-new-group-on-non-ip-networking-addressing-5g-new-se Leur projet ne mentionne pas l’UIT et semble distinct (bien que le discours soit identique).
Notez que le communiqué de l’ETSI parle d’un groupe de travail NGP qui aurait produit analyse et identification de technologies possibles (aucun lien fourni sur ces analyse et identifictaion) mais quand on regarde la page du groupe NGP à l’ETSI, on a… 404.
ce passage de la réponse de l’IETF est hilarant : “We also note
that any real-time systems requiring sub-millisecond latency inevitably have limited scope because of the constraints of the speed of light.”
Ils les auraient traités directement d’abrutis ça aurait été pareil !
L’article du Financial Times est derrière un paywall mais il y a une traduction ici : ▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/long-format/enquete-quand-internet-sera-chinois
L’intégralité de l’article du FT repris ici :
China’s Controversial Mission To Reinvent The Internet - Thakoni
▻https://thakoni.com/inside-chinas-controversial-mission-to-reinvent-the-internet
▻https://thakoni.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Inside-China’s-controversial-mission-to-reinvent-the-internet.jpeg
Ci-après la partie que le CI n’a pas traduite (curieusement les derniers paragraphes sont en français)
The new IP presentation paints a picture of a digital world in 2030 where virtual reality, holographic communication and remote surgery are omnipresent – and for which our current network is unsuitable. The traditional IP protocol is described as “unstable” and “largely insufficient”, with “many security, reliability and configuration issues”.
The documents suggest that a new network should rather have a “top-down design” and promote data sharing systems between governments “thus serving AI, Big Data and all kinds of other applications”. Many experts fear that under the new IP, Internet service providers, usually state-owned, will control and supervise all devices connected to the network and be able to monitor and control individual access.
The system is already under construction by engineers from “industry and academia” in “several countries,” Huawei team leader Sheng Jiang told the group in September, although he will not reveal who they were due to commercial sensitivities. Spectators included ITU veterans, including government officials from the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China.
For some participants, the very idea is anathema. If the new IP address was legitimized by the ITU, state operators could choose to implement a Western or Chinese Internet, they say. The latter could mean that everyone in these countries would need permission from their internet provider to do anything over the internet – whether it’s downloading an app or accessing a site – and administrators might have the power to deny access on a whim.
Rather than a unified global network, citizens may be forced to connect to a patchwork of national internet, each with its own rules – a concept known in China as cyber sovereignty.
In recent periods of civil unrest, Iran and Saudi Arabia have cut internet connectivity for long periods, with the exception of some
In recent periods of civil strife, Iran and Saudi Arabia have cut internet connectivity for long periods, with the exception of some “essential” services © Alexander Glandien
Recent events in Iran and Saudi Arabia provide a glimpse of what it would look like. These governments blocked global internet connectivity for long periods during the civil unrest, allowing only limited access to essential services such as banking or healthcare. In Russia, a new Internet sovereign law adopted in November enshrined the government’s right to monitor web traffic closely and showed the country’s ability to separate from the global web – a capacity that Chinese companies, including Huawei, have helped the Russians build.
Experts now wonder whether China’s vision of Internet governance could shift from a defensive vision, in which the government wanted to be left alone to impose authoritarian Internet controls at home, to a more assertive approach, in which the country openly advocates for others. follow his example.
The creators of New IP say that parts of the technology will be ready for testing next year. Efforts to convince delegations of its value will culminate in an important ITU conference to be held in India in November. To persuade the ITU to approve it within the year, so that it can be officially “normalized”, representatives must reach an internal consensus, freely based on a majority agreement. If delegates fail to agree, the proposal will be put to a closed-door vote in which only member countries will be able to participate, cutting off the views of industry and civil society.
The rapid timetable is causing particular concern to Western delegations and requests have been made to slow the process down, according to documents consulted by the FT. A participant in the Dutch delegation wrote in an official response, leaked to the FT by several sources, that the “open and adaptable nature” of the Internet – both its technical structure and its mode of governance – was fundamental to its success and that he was “particularly concerned” that this model departed from this philosophy.
Another scathing reprimand from a British delegate, also leaked to the FT, said: “It is far from clear that technically sound justifications have been provided for taking such a drastic step. Unless these are to come, the reasonable basis for future work or even ongoing research activities on these topics is, at best, weak or nonexistent. “
Patrik Fältström, a non-conformist engineer with long hair, known in his native Sweden as one of the fathers of the Internet, is one of the most vocal critics of the new intellectual property. In the early 1980s, Fältström was a math student in Stockholm when he was hired to build and test the infrastructure for a new technology that the US government called the Internet.
His job was to write a series of protocols that allowed computers to send text to each other. “In Europe, we were maybe 100 people in Sweden, 100 in the United Kingdom, 50 here, 20 there, we all knew each other. We used to joke that if there was a problem, you knew who to call, ”he says.
Today, Fältström is a digital advisor to the Swedish government and its representative to most major Internet standards organizations, including the ITU. Thirty years after helping to assemble the building blocks of the Internet, it embodies the Western cyber-libertarian ideals that were woven into its foundation.
“The Internet architecture makes it very, very difficult, almost impossible for anyone providing Internet access to know or regulate the use of Internet access,” he says. “It is a problem for law enforcement and others who would like an ISP to control it, so it is not used for illegal activities such as film pirating or child abuse.
“But I am ready to accept that there will be criminals who will do bad things and the police will be unable to fight [all of] he. I accept this sacrifice. “
For Fältström, the beauty of the Internet is its nature “without permission”, as demonstrated by the Arab Spring. “We have to remember,” he says, “it’s a balance between being able to communicate and to control, but people who have a voice are always more important.”
A stark contrast to this view can be found in a river village called Wuzhen near Shanghai, which is emptied every fall to make room for technical executives, academics and policy makers attending the ambitious world conference of the Internet. The event was created by the China Cyberspace Administration in 2014, a year after President Xi Jinping came to power. A row of world flags greets visitors – a nod to Xi’s vision of creating “a shared future community in cyberspace”.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, at the 2017 World Internet Conference in China. Foreign participation has declined in recent years as the technology war between the United States and China has intensified and leaders feared to be too aligned with Beijing
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, at the 2017 World Internet Conference in China. Foreign participation has declined in recent years as the technology war between the United States and China intensified and leaders feared being too aligned with Beijing © Getty
Tech executives, from Tim Cook of Apple to Steve Mollenkopf of Qualcomm, spoke at the event, crediting Xi’s attempts to bring together the international tech elite. But in recent years, foreign participation has declined American-Chinese Technological War intensifies and leaders fear being too closely aligned with Beijing.
There is a precedent for such fears. During the first year of the event, the organizers slipped a draft joint declaration under the doors of the guests’ hotels at midnight, setting out Xi’s point of view on each nation’s right to “cyber sovereignty” . Customers were invited to return with any changes before 8 a.m. After the protests, the organizers dropped the case completely. But the fact that management attempted such a move reflected Xi’s digital ambitions.
In the early 1990s, the Chinese government began to develop what is now known Large firewall, a system of internet controls that prevent citizens from connecting to banned foreign websites – from Google to the New York Times – as well as blocking politically sensitive national content and preventing mass organization online.
Beijing technical controls are supported by large teams of government censors as well as those hired by private tech companies such as Baidu and Tencent. Although anyone in the world can technically host their own website using just a computer and an Internet connection, in China you need to apply for a license to do so. Telecommunications providers and Internet platforms are also required to assist the police in monitoring “crimes”, which may include actions such as calling Xi “steamed bun” in a private discussion group , an act punishable by two years in prison.
Chinese President Xi Jinping at the World Internet Conference in 2015, where he told participants that each nation should have independent authority over its own Internet
Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 2015 World Internet Conference, where he told participants that each nation should have independent authority over its own Internet © Getty
Despite this, the Chinese Internet is not 100% effective in blocking content deemed sensitive or dangerous by the government. “The leaking global internet remains frustrating for Chinese censors, and they have dealt with it at great cost and effort, but if you could make these problems go away almost completely using a more automated and technical process, maybe like New IP, that would be fantastic for them, “says James Griffiths, author of The Great Firewall of China: How to Create and Control an Alternative Internet Version.
“Building a new version of the Internet could prevent more people from acquiring politically dangerous knowledge, thereby saving a great deal of effort, money and manpower on the censorship side. They can choose the commands they want, integrate them with technology and deploy them. “
The establishment of a sophisticated alternative to the Western Internet would also fit in with China’s ambitions to expand its digital footprint on a global scale. “At the very beginning of the Internet, China was a follower and did not recognize, like many other countries, how disruptive the Internet would be,” said Julia Voo, research director for the China Cyber Policy Initiative at the Harvard University in Belfer. Center.
“As they realized how important it was, [they] channeled more resources into technology development. . . and we can see their influence increased in many standards bodies like the ITU in the past two or three years.
“But the United States and others have made a strategic mistake by failing to see the value of growing infrastructure in developing markets,” she added. “There is still a lot of infrastructure to provide and over the past 10 years, Chinese companies have been at their disposal, especially in Africa.”
Beijing has signed memoranda of understanding on building a “digital silk road” – or advanced IT infrastructure system – with 16 countries. Huawei says it has 91 contracts to supply 5G wireless telecommunications equipment worldwide, including 47 in Europe – despite US warnings that Huawei’s involvement amounted to giving Chinese access to national security secrets, an allegation denied by the society.
“By proving that you can control and monitor your home internet intensely and prevent it from being used as a tool to rally people against the government, combined with the economic success of its businesses, China has made this vision incredibly attractive to regimes – autocratic and others – all over the world, ”says Griffiths.
ITU was created 155 years ago, making it one of the oldest international organizations in the world, even before the United Nations. It is installed in a group of glazed buildings on Place des Nations in Geneva. On the 10th floor is the airy office of Bilel Jamoussi, the head of ITU study groups, born in Tunisia – the units that develop and ratify technical standards.
The room is lined with a huge library from which Jamoussi draws a dusty blue book – his doctoral thesis, written 25 years ago, on traffic passing through the Internet. At the time, there was a desire to build a new networking protocol to meet the growing base of Internet users. Ultimately, the engineers opted for a layer on top of the existing TCP / IP infrastructure. Technology, invented in the late 1970s by computer engineers working for the United States Department of Defense, was a means of transmitting messages between computers at the speed of light, using a special addressing system.
Bilel Jamoussi, Head of ITU study groups, which ratify technical standards.
Bilel Jamoussi, Head of ITU study groups, which ratify technical standards. “Twenty years ago, it was Europe and North America that dominated the development of products, solutions and standards, we now have an eastward orientation” © YouTube
“Twenty-five years ago we had this conversation as a community – is it TCP / IP or is it something else – and then a lot of design and development came to a kind of rescue [it]Explains Jamoussi. “We are now, I think, at another turning point, saying, is this enough, or do we need something new?”
In its early days, the ITU oversaw the first international telegraph networks. Since then, it has grown from 40 countries to 193 and has become de facto the standardization body for telecommunications networks. The standards produced there legitimize new technologies and systems in the eyes of some governments – especially those in developing countries that do not participate in other Internet organizations. In the end, they give a business advantage to the companies that have built the technology on which they are based.
Over the past 21 years, Jamoussi has witnessed a geopolitical shift. “The pendulum has tilted to the east, and now we see more participation from China, Japan, Korea,” he said. “Twenty years ago, it was Europe and North America that dominated the development of products, solutions and standards, we now have an eastward orientation.”
On one of the marble walls of the ITU, backlit flags are hung, showing the largest donor countries. The Chinese flag – currently number five – was not there at all a few years ago, said an employee, but it is progressing gradually.
New intellectual property is the latest grenade launched in the ITU arena, but it is not the first Internet-related standard to be offered as an alternative to the original Western-style system. The governments of Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and Iran have been pushing the idea of alternative networks for years, according to participants who wanted to remain anonymous.
“In the early 2000s, once you saw widespread use of the Internet, you suddenly had this idea of democratization, which is basically to give people more control and more information. For authoritarian governments, it was something they were not happy with, ”said a member of the British delegation. “And so the work started, around the beginning of the 2000s, especially in China, then a little later in Iran and Russia, on how to create an alternative to the standards and technologies that were still being developed mainly by Americans. “
But in recent years, Chinese companies have switched to new intellectual property. “There is a new paradigm, it is not voice and text and video and people talking, it is real-time control of something remotely, or telepresence, or holograms”, explains Jamoussi. “These new applications require new solutions. And now it’s more doable, it’s no longer science fiction, it’s almost a reality. “
Cutting-edge projects for a new IP is Richard Li, chief scientist at Futurewei, Huawei’s R&D division located in California. Li worked with Huawei engineers based in China, as well as state-owned telecommunications companies China Mobile and China Unicom, with the explicit support of the Chinese government, to develop the technology specifications and the proposal for standards.
Having Huawei at the helm will sound the alarm for many in Europe and the United States, where governments are concerned that Chinese technology is being developed as a vehicle for state espionage. The advent of 5G – a much higher bandwidth network that will serve as the digital backbone for a more automated world – has raised growing concern that products developed by Huawei will be built with “backdoors” for consumers. spies in Beijing.
Richard Li, chief scientist at Futurewei, Huawei’s R&D division. Li worked with the explicit support of the Chinese government to develop technology that would allow
Richard Li, chief scientist at Futurewei, Huawei’s R&D division. Li worked with the explicit support of the Chinese government to develop the technology that would allow “cyber sovereignty” © YouTube
Last year, the United States excluded Huawei from sale in its market, and the British government is involved in a parliamentary battle over the company’s involvement in its basic telecommunications infrastructure.
The FT contacted Li to discuss the new IP, but Huawei declined the opportunity to explain the idea in more detail. The company said in a statement, “The new IP aims to provide new IP technology solutions that can support. . . future applications such as the Internet of Everything, holographic communications and telemedicine. New IP’s research and innovation is open to scientists and engineers from around the world to participate and contribute. “
Critics argue that the technical claims made in the New IP documentation are false or unclear and represent a “solution to the search for a problem”. They insist that the current IP system is suitable for use, even in a fast-scanning world. “The way the Internet has grown is through modular and weakly coupled building blocks, it’s the brilliance of it,” says Alissa Cooper, president of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an organization industry-dominated standardization in the United States. .
In November, Li introduced himself to a small group at an IETF meeting in Singapore, which Cooper attended. “[The current infrastructure] is in stark contrast to what you see in the new IP proposition, which is this type of top-down monolithic architecture that wants to tightly couple applications to the network. This is exactly what the internet was not designed for, “she said.
The implications for the average user could be enormous. “You push control into the hands of [telecoms] public operators, “said a member of the British ITU delegation. “Therefore [it means] now you can not only control access to certain types of online content, or track that content online, but you can actually control a device’s access to a network. “
For internet pioneer Patrik Fältström, the beauty of the Internet is its
For internet pioneer Patrik Fältström, the beauty of the Internet is its “unlicensed” nature. “We have to remember,” he says, “it’s a balance between being able to communicate and controlling, but people who have a voice are always more important” © Alexander Glandien
China is already in the process of setting up a credit rating system for its people, based on online and offline behavior and past “crimes”, noted the member of the delegation. “Donc, si le score de crédit social d’une personne est tombé en dessous d’un certain montant parce qu’il publiait trop sur les réseaux sociaux, vous pourriez en fait empêcher ce téléphone de se connecter au réseau.”
Les opérateurs de télécommunications chinois disposent de nombreuses données sur leurs abonnés. Selon la loi, les clients doivent s’inscrire pour un numéro de téléphone ou une connexion Internet en utilisant leur vrai nom et identification, qui est ensuite accessible par d’autres sociétés telles que les banques. La loi du pays sur la cybersécurité stipule également que tous les «opérateurs de réseaux», y compris les sociétés de télécommunications, doivent tenir des «journaux Internet» – bien que ce que cela implique ne soit pas clair.
Jamoussi fait valoir que ce n’est pas à l’UIT de juger si les propositions pour une nouvelle architecture Internet sont «descendantes» »ou pourraient être utilisées à mauvais escient par des gouvernements autoritaires. «Bien sûr, tout ce que vous construisez est une épée à double tranchant. Vous pouvez utiliser n’importe quoi pour le bien ou pour le mal, et c’est la décision souveraine de chaque État membre », dit-il. “À l’UIT, nous ne nous engageons pas dans ce mauvais usage potentiel de la technologie, nous nous concentrons uniquement sur” en voici quelques-uns. . . problème de la technologie de la communication, voici une aspiration, en tant que communauté, construisons une solution pour y parvenir. “Mais la façon dont les gens l’utilisent est vraiment à eux.”
Les ambitions de Pékin de renforcer les contrôles dans l’infrastructure Internet ne sont pas perçues par tout le monde comme un problème – simplement comme le prochain chapitre de son évolution.
«Internet était censé être une infrastructure neutre, mais il est devenu un bras de contrôle politisé. De plus en plus, l’infrastructure Internet est utilisée à des fins politiques – pour réprimer les gens économiquement et physiquement – nous l’avons vu au Cachemire, au Myanmar et dans les révélations de Snowden », explique Niels ten Oever, ancien délégué néerlandais à l’UIT.
«Pour moi, la question primordiale est: comment construire un réseau public sur des infrastructures privées? C’est le problème avec lequel nous nous débattons. Quel est le rôle de l’État par rapport au rôle des entreprises? “
Selon lui, les entreprises conçoivent des technologies principalement dans un but lucratif. «Internet est dominé par les entreprises américaines, toutes les données y circulent. Alors, bien sûr, ils veulent garder ce pouvoir », dit-il. «Nous avons peur de la répression chinoise. Nous faisons des caricatures des Chinois d’une manière impérialiste-raciste limite. Mais la gouvernance d’Internet ne fonctionne pas aujourd’hui. Il y a de la place pour une alternative. “
Partout où notre avenir numérique se construit actuellement, il semble y avoir un accord mondial pour dire que le moment est venu pour une meilleure version du cyberespace. “Je pense [some] les gens diraient que notre modèle actuel d’Internet est profondément défectueux, sinon cassé. À l’heure actuelle, il n’existe qu’un seul autre modèle vraiment complet et pleinement réalisé, celui de la Chine », écrit Griffiths dans Le grand pare-feu de Chine.
«Le risque est que si nous ne parvenons pas à trouver un troisième modèle – un qui autonomise les utilisateurs et accroît la démocratie et la transparence en ligne, et réduit les pouvoirs des services de sécurité des grandes technologies et du gouvernement – alors de plus en plus de pays pencheront vers les Chinois modèle, plutôt que de faire face aux retombées de l’échec de la Silicon Valley. “
Aujourd’hui le “Déclaration d’indépendance du cyberespace»- le principe directeur d’Internet – commence à ressembler de plus en plus à une relique. Le manifeste, écrit en 1996 par John Perry Barlow, co-fondateur de la fondation américaine sans but lucratif Electronic Frontier Foundation et parolier de Grateful Dead, était un appel aux armes.
«Gouvernements du monde industriel, vous, géants las de chair et d’acier, je viens du cyberespace, la nouvelle maison de l’esprit», commence le document. «Au nom de l’avenir, je vous demande du passé de nous laisser seuls. Vous n’êtes pas les bienvenus parmi nous. Vous n’avez aucune souveraineté là où nous nous réunissons. “
Cette opinion est maintenant devenue un retour à une époque antérieure à la capitalisation boursière de billions de dollars dans l’industrie de la technologie, disent les critiques. Mais il y a encore de l’espoir – et peut-être une troisième alternative à nos deux internets d’aujourd’hui.
«Ce qui nous différencie de la Chine maintenant, c’est qu’à l’ouest, le public peut toujours se mobiliser et avoir son mot à dire. Une grande partie de cette responsabilité incombe désormais aux législateurs de protéger la démocratie à l’ère de la surveillance, qu’elle soit dictée par le marché ou autoritaire », a déclaré Zuboff. «Le géant endormi de la démocratie est enfin en train de remuer, les législateurs se réveillent, mais ils ont besoin de sentir le public dans leur dos. Nous avons besoin d’un Web occidental qui offrira le genre de vision d’un avenir numérique compatible avec la démocratie. C’est l’œuvre de la prochaine décennie. “
Madhumita Murgia est la correspondante technologique européenne du FT. Anna Gross est journaliste aux marchés FT. Reportage supplémentaire par Yuan Yang et Nian Liu
Arundhati Roy : « En #Inde, le #confinement le plus gigantesque et le plus punitif de la planète »
►https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2020/04/06/arundhati-roy-en-inde-le-confinement-le-plus-gigantesque-et-le-plus-punitif-
Les mandarins qui gèrent l’#épidémie aiment à parler de #guerre. Ils font même du terme un usage littéral et non métaphorique. Pourtant, s’il s’agissait réellement de guerre, qui mieux que les #Etats-Unis y eût été préparé ? Si, au lieu de masques et de gants, leurs soldats avaient eu besoin de bombes surpuissantes, de sous-marins, d’avions de chasse et de têtes nucléaires, aurait-on assisté à une #pénurie ?
J’ai une amie bloquée en Inde actuellement obligée de se cacher pour ne pas être arrêtée. Elle a la nationalité canadienne même si elle est née à Delhi où vivent ses parents qui sont indiens.
Pour circuler et trouver à manger, elle porte des vêtements indiens pour ne pas se faire remarquer car elle a le type indien.
Elle a réussi à obtenir un certificat médical qui était obligatoire pour les étrangers comme quoi elle n’est pas porteuse du coronavirus. Après avoir fait plusieurs hôtels où elle ne pouvait rester qu’une nuit, les hoteliers ont peur de la police et des dénonciations, elle s’est réfugiée dans un temple et attend que ça se calme pour revenir en france où elle vit.
Totalité de l’article ici
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/839908
L’article original en anglais
Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read | Financial Times
►https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?
What #coronavirus tests does the world need to track the pandemic? | Free to read | Financial Times
▻https://www.ft.com/content/0faf8e7a-d966-44a5-b4ee-8213841da688
The imperative to “test, test, test” has become a slogan of the coronavirus pandemic since it was voiced last month by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization. But the simple goal continues to elude even well-off countries that are struggling to track the spread of the virus among their populations.
Germany and South Korea have led the way in rolling out tests on a large scale, but the UK and US have been laggards. The greater the delays, the more prolonged the uncertainty over the size of the virus threat. As hunger for diagnosis grows, as testing kits are rejected and impatience with government mounts, we look at the available technologies, their potential and limitations.
Spain’s ministry of health last week withdrew 8,000 Chinese-made testing kits delivered to Madrid’s regional government because of worries about inaccurate results. But the manufacturer Shenzhen Bioeasy said the problems may have been because of incorrect sample collection or use of the product.
Dr Preston said: “It is not easy to quickly and massively ramp up testing capacity when it requires both high-quality kits and properly trained staff.”
Expliquer le Coronavirus avec les données : pourquoi tant de morts en Italie ? Et dans le monde ?
(très très mauvaise qualité de l’image)
–-> il souligne avant tout, ce qui est tout à fait logique, que les personnes qui ont eu un #test de #dépistage rentrent dans les #statistiques
–-> #Décès : distinction entre ceux qui meurent DE covid (sans autre pathologie auparavant) et ceux qui meurent AVEC covid (personnes qui ont une autre pathologie, et apparemment c’est surtout des #maladies_cardiovasculaires qui seraient là un facteur aggravant) :
– AVEC covid 98,8% des cas
– DE covid 1,2% des cas
–-> Source, une étude épidémiologique du 20 mars de l’ISS (▻https://www.iss.it) :
Quand est-ce qu’un système hospitalier collapse ?
Eléments communs des pays qui soit ont un fort taux de décès et ceux qui ont un faible taux de décès :
▻https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1578893788930683&id=100004302308708?sfnsn=scwspwa&d
#coronavirus #Italie #taux_de_mortalité
ping @simplicissimus @fil
Coronavirus: learning urgent lessons from Italy
FT statistics journalist Federica Cocco looks at what the data can teach us about distancing, demographics, culture and testing
▻https://www.ft.com/video/939b9b2d-1561-4566-83ef-783209f7a086?playlist-name=editors-picks&playlist-offset
@kassem en fait, pas un médecin, pas un épidémiologiste, mais, de ce que je comprends sur son parcours qu’il a mis sur FB, surtout un conseiller, notamment scientifique, pour différentes boîtes... dans sa présentation, il agrège des informations d’instituts sérieux, notamment l’institut de l’ISS