• How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project-maven-pentagon.html

    WASHINGTON — Fei-Fei Li is among the brightest stars in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, somehow managing to hold down two demanding jobs simultaneously : head of Stanford University’s A.I. lab and chief scientist for A.I. at Google Cloud, one of the search giant’s most promising enterprises. Yet last September, when nervous company officials discussed how to speak publicly about Google’s first major A.I. contract with the Pentagon, Dr. Li strongly advised shunning those two (...)

    #lutte #militaire #drone #Google #Maven #algorithme #USDepartmentofDefense-DoD

  • Origins of an Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew Its Opioids Were Widely Abused - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxycontin.html

    Prosecutors found that the company’s sales representatives used the words “street value,” “crush,” or “snort” in 117 internal notes recording their visits to doctors or other medical professionals from 1997 through 1999.

    The 120-page report also cited emails showing that Purdue Pharma’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, were sent reports about abuse of OxyContin and another company opioid, MS Contin.
    Image
    “We have in fact picked up references to abuse of our opioid products on the internet,” Purdue Pharma’s general counsel, Howard R. Udell, wrote in early 1999 to another company official. That same year, prosecutors said, company officials learned of a call to a pharmacy describing “OxyContin as the hottest thing on the street — forget Vicodin.”

    A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, Robert Josephson, declined to comment on the allegations in the report but said the company was involved in efforts to address opioid abuse.

    Suggesting that activities that last occurred more than 16 years ago are responsible for today’s complex and multifaceted opioid crisis is deeply flawed ,” he said in a statement.

    La famille sacquer savait, dès le début...

    In May 1996, five months after OxyContin’s approval, Richard Sackler and Mr. Udell were sent an older medical journal article describing how drug abusers were extracting morphine from MS Contin tablets in order to inject the drug , prosecutors reported. A Purdue Pharma scientist researched the issue and sent his findings to several Sacklers, the government report states.
    “I found MS Contin mentioned a couple of times on the internet underground drug culture scene,” the researcher wrote in that 1996 email. “Most of it was mentioned in the context of MS Contin as a morphine source.”

    #Opioides #Sackler

  • Manifestations anti-Tech à San Francisco
    https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2018/06/02/manifestations-anti-tech-a-san-francisco_5308658_3234.html

    La grande banderole jaune donne le ton : « la techsploitation est toxique ». Au sol, une dizaine de trottinettes électriques de location sont empilées. Jeudi 31 mai, les démonstrations anti-tech ont repris à San Francisco (Californie). Une cinquantaine de manifestants, vêtus d’une combinaison blanche, ont bloqué pendant une heure plusieurs bus transportant les salariés de Google, de Facebook et de YouTube vers la Silicon Valley.

    Au cœur des critiques : l’impact des sociétés technologiques, notamment sur les loyers. Depuis près de dix ans, les prix des logements ont explosé dans la région en raison de l’afflux de salariés du high-tech, dont la rémunération annuelle moyenne dépasse les 100 000 dollars (86 000 euros). Cette évolution a accéléré le phénomène de gentrification. Et le nombre de sans-abri a explosé.

    Deux mondes se côtoient

    Après les « Google Bus », les trottinettes électriques pourraient bien devenir un symbole de la contestation sociale. En moins de trois mois, plusieurs milliers d’exemplaires ont été déployés dans la ville par trois start-up, sans aucune autorisation. Elles peuvent être louées grâce à une application mobile pour un dollar. Mais elles agacent une partie de la population car elles sont souvent mal garées ou sont utilisées sur les trottoirs.

    La manifestation a eu lieu dans le Mission District, l’un des quartiers les plus chers de San Francisco. Ici, deux mondes se côtoient. L’historique, populaire et majoritairement latino, et le nouveau, qui gagne du terrain avec ses restaurants branchés et ses boutiques vintages. Fin avril, les tentes d’une centaine de SDF ont été enlevées par les services municipaux. « Nettoyer la tech, pas les tentes », proclamait une banderole.

    Entre la fin 2013 et le printemps 2014, plusieurs blocages avaient déjà eu lieu. Mais le mouvement s’était rapidement essoufflé, non sans quelques dérapages. Cette nouvelle vague de manifestations intervient à quelques jours d’une élection municipale très indécise. L’une des favorites du scrutin, la démocrate London Breed, est régulièrement attaquée pour ses liens avec plusieurs personnalités du tech.

    Voir aussi :
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/google-bus-protest.html
    http://abc7news.com/traffic/protesters-use-scooters-to-block-traffic-in-sfs-mission/3545854

    #techsploitation #GAFAM #Silicon_Valley #gentrification #anti-tech #épuration_sociologique

  • Qu’est-ce qu’un riche ?, dessin de L.L. de Mars

    Je voudrais revenir sur cette idée de la violence.

    La violence j’ai toujours été contre. Et je comprends aujourd’hui à quel point cela fait de moi un bon bourgeois. J’ai enfin compris. Il m’a fallu le temps. Et pourtant cela faisait des années que je remâchais sans cesse une citation de Jean-Luc Godard à propos du cadrage, mais à vrai dire j’ai tellement de mal, chaque fois que je veux la produire, d’en retrouver l’originale, au point même de douter de l’avoir jamais lue ― sans parler que chaque fois que je la cherche sur Internet, je retrouve des traces de mes citations précédentes, je crois que je devrais m’interroger à propos de cette citation dont Godard n’est peut-être pas l’auteur véritable pas plus que de Vent d’Ouest, passons ―, c’est une citation à propos du cadrage, mais dont l’exportation dans tant de champs est possible. À propos du cadrage donc, Godard aurait dit, pensé ou écrit, que l’on parle souvent de la violence des crues et nettement moins souvent de celle des berges qui enchâssent le fleuve dans son lit le reste de l’année. Et il me semble qu’avant même de parler de cadrage cette citation de Godard parle surtout de violence.

    Or la violence des berges n’a jamais été aussi violente, féroce même.

    Mais, la violence des berges est invisible, par définition, en grande partie parce qu’elle est quoti-dienne. Mais ce n’est pas parce qu’une chose est invisible qu’elle n’existe pas, a fortiori si elle est quotidienne.

    Je donne un exemple. Le premier mai, le cortège de tête aurait été violent. C’est possible. On doit pouvoir chiffrer la chose avec la comptabilité de quelques factures de vitrier, c’est-à-dire pas grand-chose, je ne sais même pas si on peut parler d’une crue, une vaguelette est passée au-dessus des berges. Or, au même moment ― et il y a une certaine violence dans ce au même moment ― les berges, elles, ont été d’une violence inouïe (et je ne parle pas, même pas de la violence policière ce jour-là, qui, nul doute, a sans doute été le déluge habituel), non : Macron a annoncé sa volonté de supprimer l’exit-tax, dispositif fiscal qui lutte contre l’évasion fiscale, veillant à poursuivre celles et ceux qui s’en rendent coupables, d’une part, mais aussi de leur faire payer leurs éventuelle velléités de relocaliser leurs capitaux échappés ― au motif, sans doute, qu’on ne peut pas se contenter de dépenser tout ce bel argent dans les pays pour lesquels l’argent n’a pas d’odeur, ou dit autrement, on peut seulement manger autant de chocolat et avoir autant de montres à ses poignet, pour les voitures de courses, on est coincé, le pays hôte ne semble pas en fabriquer. Il m’arrive de demander ce qu’il se passe dans la tête des adeptes de la grande théorie du ruissellement, se pourrait-il qu’ils et elles en soient convaincues elles-mêmes ? Des fois il est étonnant de voir comment tous ces penseuses et penseurs de droite parviennent surtout à se convaincre eux-mêmes. Passons. Dans le cas de l’annulation future de l’exit-tax, ce n’est plus une facture, voire des factures, de vitriers, ce sont carrément des millions, possiblement des milliards que l’on dérobe à des personnes qui en ont besoin, nous tous et toutes, certaines parmi nous, qui en ont crucialement besoin pour être logées, nourries soignées, autant dire des besoins tout ce qu’il y a de fondamentaux, et l’argent de ce rapt des berges est ensuite dirigé vers des organismes, des corps et des institutions qui d’une part n’en ont pas vraiment besoin, mais qui en plus n’en feront rien de bien, rien d’utile, rien de nourrissant, sauf pour eux-mêmes, mais plus j’y pense et plus je me demande qui sont-ils et elles celles et ceux qui effectivement y ont intérêt. En fait c’est toujours devant ce seuil infranchissable que ma compréhension des raisonnements économiques cesse, parce que cela devient littéralement abstrait, ce que j’en perçois c’est que cela relève du systémique, que le système profite au système, lequel ruisselle, en fait, le moins possible et dans des écuelles parfaitement désignées qui sont celles de celles et ceux les seuls vraiment affairés à travailler à cette limitation du ruissellement tout en expliquant à quel point il est vital. Bref pour singer Edouard Levé dans Autoportrait, je comprends le début de la fin et la fin du début, le début du début de la fin et la fin du de la fin du début, ou encore la fin du début de la fin et le début du début de la fin, c’est après que je ne comprends plus.

    Et jusqu’à maintenant, je me tenais hésitant sur ce seuil, puisque ma compréhension ne parvenait pas à aller plus loin quelle était ma légitimité à me joindre à celles et ceux qui elles et eux ont compris depuis longtemps, d’une part qu’il y a duperie, c’est entendu, un ruissellement vers l’amont et non vers l’aval n’est pas un ruissellement mais une captation, mais d’autre part aussi que pour rétablir le cours naturel du ruissellement, il n’y avait qu’une seule solution, le renversement, et étant donné la taille du plateau, cela ne se ferait sans doute pas sans violence.

    Et il aura fallu un dessin de mon ami L.L. de Mars pour que je comprenne qu’il n’y avait justement plus rien à comprendre. Ce dessin c’est celui que j’ai mis en tête de cet article. C’est ce dessin, comme aucun graphique, aucune courbe, aucun fait, qui décrit, avec précision, la violence des berges qui est normalement invisible, transparente.

    Un dessin vaut parfois de longs discours.

    #pendant_qu’il_est_trop_tard

    • On dit d’un fleuve emportant tout qu’il est violent
      Mais on ne dit jamais rien de la violence
      Des rives qui l’enserrent

      Je comprends bien l’idée, mais.
      A part lorsque les rives sont fabriquées par les aménageurs des territoires, ce sont le plus souvent les fleuves qui creusent leur propre lit et de fait, s’enserre dans des rives créés par eux-mêmes. Sont-ce les pauvres qui s’enserrent dans des lois qu’ils auraient dictées ?

    • @philippe_de_jonckheere ça doit paraitre salement autocentré de relayer un article avec un dessin dedans, mais c’est pas le dessin qui me motive, j’ai quelques potes qui ne vous suivent pas dont j’aimerais qu’ils lisent l’article . Je crois que les processus de décillement sont des faits politiques moins observés et commentés que les autres, et pourtant vraiment passionnants (si quelqu’un a des références de travail là-dessus, ça m’intéresse). J’ai très brièvement évoqué je-sais-plus-où le long fondu enchaîné qui m’a conduit de gros con d’un tropisme socio-culturel misogyne à féministe, et de plus en plus, c’est ces moments rarement décrits qui m’intéressent (mes amitiés politiques, désormais, ne sont pas les choses les moins étranges au regard de mon espèce d’apolitisme misanthropique et de mon horreur apriorique du militantisme des années 80, celles de mon adolescence) ; en substance, quelque part, ils doivent contenir les modalités d’une action politique possible, d’un mouvement qui par le partage de l’expérience pourrait assez favorablement remplacer la tentative de conviction militante, l’argumentaire politico rationnel etc., utiles sans doute mais peu efficaces. Et même si l’efficacité est une notion dangereuse - je pense que devant la violence extrême qui « nous » est faite, nous avons besoin d’efficacité.

    • @philippe_de_jonckheere question, Phil : qu’est-ce qui dans ce faite précis -la décision de Macron de supprimer l’exit tax - s’est combiné à d’autres choses ( et auxquelles si ça vous revient) a rendu ce fait assez décisif pour que vous puissiez formuler plus clairement que jamais cette intériorisation nouvelle, cette clarté subite sur un truc auquel vous étiez confronté sans l’avoir jusque là compris de telle façon ? Dans un faisceau de choses quotidiennes (invisibles, donc), quel fait nouveau, ou quelle nouvelle combinaison déclenche leur nouvelle lecture ? Qu’est-ce qui nous change ? (obsession du moment, pardon)

    • Laurent

      Question plus difficile à répondre qu’une autre. Et je me la posais avant que vous ne me la posiez, c’est d’ailleurs le point de départ de cette rubique de « Pendant qu’il est trop tard ».

      La bascule complète, cela ne vous étonnera pas de trop, c’est le plan autisme du gouvernement avec cette parole délirante du premier sinistre, faut qu’on s’occupe des autistes parce que ce serait bête de passer à côté de leur force de travail future. Ca commençait déjà à craquer de partout, mais là, tout d’un coup j’ai vu au travers, j’ai vu ce qu’il y avait derrière (et d’ailleurs il n’y a rien derrière, et là autant vous dire cela rejoint la fin du Secret, votre merveilleux album de bandes dessinées).

      C’était comme si j’avais toujours su que cette histoire de travail était un mensonge, en plus d’être une aliénation, mais que chaque fois que je tentais de me le démontrer à moi-même, je butais sur un dernier petit doute, qui n’était pas toujours le même, et que ces petits doutes s’amalgamant les uns aux autres, m’empêchaient de bien voir, et puis cette parole délirante, on va coller les autistes au travail. Et là j’ai ma preuve, définitive, irréfutable.

      Et depuis que je sais ça, je m’emploie à rechercher et agrandir les coutures qui craquent, en espérant inviter d’autres à regarder par ces interstices. Mais je remarque que c’est très difficile à faire, parce que c’est comme le conte enfantin du roi nu. Moi-même j’ai refusé un temps d’admettre que le roi était et est nu, même quand on me le faisait remarquer (notamment vous ou certaines de mes lectures) et en cela j’ai souvent le sentiment honteux et rétropescitf d’avoir participé à l’aveuglement collectif en refusant d’admettre cette évidence.

      D’ailleurs pour moi l’exemple de l’aveuglement c’est les Papers. A chaque nouveau Papers, Paradise papers, Panama Papers, leaks etc..., on se dit cette fois c’est bon, on ne va pas pouvoir nous raconter de carabistouilles et c’est au même moment qu’on nous explique la théorie de ruissellement qui est naturellement une insigne fumisterie et pendant ce temps-là après les journaux ont fait coup double, à la fois en vendant du papier et s’achetant une nouvelle virginité, on oublie justement le contenu des Papers (une information insignifiante en chassant une autre, surtout si cette dernière était signifiante) et autres fuites d’informations parfaitement avérées, elles, au contraire des constructions et théories folles.

      Donc pour synthétiser la réponse, un jour que je portais mes lunettes, qu’elles étaient propres, que je venais de boire mon café que j’étais bien réveillé, le jour s’est fait au travers d’une déchirure de la toile de fond de scène, j’ai eu une vue imprenable sur les coulisses et depuis je tente de provoquer d’autres occasions d’être décillé et de déciller.

      Et pourquoi l’exit-tax et les casseurs-cueilleurs du premier mai, parce que c’était en même temps, les deux articles étaient l’un à côté de l’autre dans la un du Monde et qu’il n’y avait qu’un geste à faire, celui #de_la_dyslexie_créative en somme.

    • @intempestive @odilon je trouve votre interprétation limitative, elle rend la métaphore contreproductive.

      la légitimité de la berge en tant que contrainte ne découle pas du fait qu’elle ait été générée par le fleuve, elle en est tout autant le résultat d’une contrainte géologique. D’ailleurs, quelle part de décision, de libre arbitre dans la création des berges par le fleuve ? L’un n’est pas plus ni moins responsable que l’autre, susceptible d’être étudié que l’autre.

      Si la crue du fleuve est dangereuse, elle est aussi vitale : qu’en saurait-il été de l’agriculture égyptienne sans le dépôt des limons fertiles ?

      la métaphore est juste la aussi, si quelques âmes émoustillent leur sens artistique en satisfaisant une sorte d’exhibitionnisme, nombreux sont ceux qui ont besoin de tâtonner, de faire leurs erreurs ou leurs approximations dans leur coin sans publicité avant de montrer le fruit d’un travail « personnel ». Bien sûr qu’un besoin excessif de contrôle est dangereux pour l’innovation, la créativité (sur la zad de nddl ce n’est même plus métaphorique), bien sûr que c’est une violence et elle n’est pas plus acceptable ni légitime que la violence du fleuve.

      Le plus violent c’est justement qu’elle se prétende non susceptible d’être remise en question, tout en jugeant et condamnant le fleuve, et que bien des personnes y croient !

      There is no alternative !

      Alors, oui, parlons en des crues ! Mais oui, parlons aussi des berges ! Enfin, c’est mon point de vue, ma lecture, du coup la vôtre m’a fait tiquer ;)

  • It Saves Lives. It Can Save Money. So Why Aren’t We Spending More on Public Health ? - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/upshot/it-saves-lives-it-can-save-money-so-why-arent-we-spending-more-on-public-he

    Mais s’il y a beaucoup moins de malades, comment les grosses compagnies pharmaceutiques, les gros hôpitaux privés et les gros médecins vont-ils sur-vivre, notamment à travers Medicare et Medicaid dont les budgets sont proprement faramineux, infiniment plus que les sommes décrites ci-dessous ?

    Et comment interdire coca-cola et big-mac sans nuire au lobbying alias « liberté d’expression », et autre « respect de la liberté individuelle » ?

    Of course, it’s hard to pin down total public health spending. In 2017, the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which almost all agree is public health spending — was about $12 billion.

    The budget for the Health Resources and Services Administration — some of which is devoted to public health — was $10.7 billion. (The agency helps people who are uninsured or medically vulnerable gain access to health care.)

    The Agriculture Department spends more than $100 billion on nutrition assistance and about $1 billion on food safety, both of which arguably contribute to public health.

    But even if we’re generous, and call all of that public health spending, it’s dwarfed by what Americans spend on health care directly.

    #santé_publique
    #Etats-Unis
    #gabegie
    #inefficacité
    #corruption

  • Democratic Candidate Who Criticized Israel Faces Charges of Anti-Semitism - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/us/politics/democrat-israel-anti-semitism.html

    À cause d’un livre écrit en tant que journaliste il y a 27 ans, livre que le #new_york_times, dont l’objectivité envers #Israël est légendaire, avait jugé partisan et injuste à l’époque.

    WASHINGTON — On Monday evening, at the home of a retired rabbi in Charlottesville, Va., the Democratic nominee for the Fifth Congressional District of Virginia sat down with about 40 Jewish leaders to try to defuse Virginia Republican charges that she was a “virulent anti-Semite.”

    At issue was the candidate’s 27-year-old book, “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,” a broadside written by Leslie Cockburn, a journalist-turned-politician, with her husband, Andrew Cockburn, that was panned in several reviews as an inflammatory screed.

    [...]

    When the book was published in 1991, a review in The New York Times described it as “largely dedicated to Israel-bashing for its own sake.”

    “Its first message is that, win or lose, smart or dumb, right or wrong, suave or boorish, Israelis are a menace,” the review said. “The second is that the Israeli-American connection is somewhere behind just about everything that ails us.”

    Ms. Cockburn told the group on Monday that she was being critical of government policy from a fact-based perspective, not out of animus toward Jews. In the interview, she said she was seeking the endorsement of J Street, a Jewish political group that has set itself up as a progressive alternative to other American Jewish organizations more uncritical of Israeli government policies.

  • In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/world/europe/uk-austerity-poverty.html


    #austérité #pauvreté

    Britain’s Big Squeeze
    In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything

    After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.

    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Emma Wilde has lost the welfare benefits she depended on to support herself and her two children.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times

    By Peter S. Goodman

    May 28, 2018

    PRESCOT, England — A walk through this modest town in the northwest of England amounts to a tour of the casualties of Britain’s age of austerity.

    The old library building has been sold and refashioned into a glass-fronted luxury home. The leisure center has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered.

    Now, as the local government desperately seeks to turn assets into cash, Browns Field, a lush park in the center of town, may be doomed, too. At a meeting in November, the council included it on a list of 17 parks to sell to developers.

    “Everybody uses this park,” says Jackie Lewis, who raised two children in a red brick house a block away. “This is probably our last piece of community space. It’s been one after the other. You just end up despondent.”

    In the eight years since London began sharply curtailing support for local governments, the borough of Knowsley, a bedroom community of Liverpool, has seen its budget cut roughly in half. Liverpool itself has suffered a nearly two-thirds cut in funding from the national government — its largest source of discretionary revenue. Communities in much of Britain have seen similar losses.

    For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.

    When Ms. Lewis and her husband bought their home a quarter-century ago, Prescot had a comforting village feel. Now, core government relief programs are being cut and public facilities eliminated, adding pressure to public services like police and fire departments, just as they, too, grapple with diminished funding.

    By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.

    “The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”

    Conservative Party leaders say that austerity has been driven by nothing more grandiose than arithmetic.

    “It’s the ideology of two plus two equals four,” says Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, and a columnist for The Times of London. “It wasn’t driven by a desire to reduce spending on public services. It was driven by the fact that we had a vast deficit problem, and the debt was going to keep growing.”

    Whatever the operative thinking, austerity’s manifestations are palpable and omnipresent. It has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes.

    Much as the United States took the Great Depression of the 1930s as impetus to construct a national pension system while eventually delivering health care for the elderly and the poor, Britain reacted to the trauma of World War II by forging its own welfare state. The United States has steadily reduced benefits since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Britain rolled back its programs in the same era, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Still, its safety net remained robust by world standards.

    Then came the global financial panic of 2008 — the most crippling economic downturn since the Great Depression. Britain’s turn from its welfare state in the face of yawning budget deficits is a conspicuous indicator that the world has been refashioned by the crisis.

    As the global economy now negotiates a wrenching transition — with itinerant jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labor — Britain’s experience provokes doubts about the durability of the traditional welfare model. As Western-style capitalism confronts profound questions about economic justice, vulnerable people appear to be growing more so.

    Conservative Party leaders initially sold budget cuts as a virtue, ushering in what they called the Big Society. Diminish the role of a bloated government bureaucracy, they contended, and grass-roots organizations, charities and private companies would step to the fore, reviving communities and delivering public services more efficiently.

    To a degree, a spirit of voluntarism materialized. At public libraries, volunteers now outnumber paid staff. In struggling communities, residents have formed food banks while distributing hand-me-down school uniforms. But to many in Britain, this is akin to setting your house on fire and then reveling in the community spirit as neighbors come running to help extinguish the blaze.

    Most view the Big Society as another piece of political sloganeering — long since ditched by the Conservatives — that served as justification for an austerity program that has advanced the refashioning unleashed in the 1980s by Mrs. Thatcher.

    “We are making cuts that I think Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of,” Greg Barker said in a speech in 2011, when he was a Conservative member of Parliament.

    A backlash ensued, with public recognition that budget cuts came with tax relief for corporations, and that the extensive ranks of the wealthy were little disturbed.

    Britain hasn’t endured austerity to the same degree as Greece, where cutbacks were swift and draconian. Instead, British austerity has been a slow bleed, though the cumulative toll has been substantial.

    Local governments have suffered a roughly one-fifth plunge in revenue since 2010, after adding taxes they collect, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

    Nationally, spending on police forces has dropped 17 percent since 2010, while the number of police officers has dropped 14 percent, according to an analysis by the Institute for Government. Spending on road maintenance has shrunk more than one-fourth, while support for libraries has fallen nearly a third.

    The national court system has eliminated nearly a third of its staff. Spending on prisons has plunged more than a fifth, with violent assaults on prison guards more than doubling. The number of elderly people receiving government-furnished care that enables them to remain in their homes has fallen by roughly a quarter.

    In an alternate reality, this nasty stretch of history might now be ending. Austerity measures were imposed in the name of eliminating budget deficits, and last year Britain finally produced a modest budget surplus.

    But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.

    In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed.

    “It’s clearly an attack on our class,” says Dave Kelly, a retired bricklayer in the town of Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where many factories sit empty, broken monuments to another age. “It’s an attack on who we are. The whole fabric of society is breaking down.”

    As much as any city, Liverpool has seen sweeping changes in its economic fortunes.

    In the 17th century, the city enriched itself on human misery. Local shipping companies sent vessels to West Africa, transporting slaves to the American colonies and returning bearing the fruits of bondage — cotton and tobacco, principally.

    The cotton fed the mills of Manchester nearby, yielding textiles destined for multiple continents. By the late 19th century, Liverpool’s port had become the gateway to the British Empire, its status underscored by the shipping company headquarters lining the River Mersey.

    By the next century — through the Great Depression and the German bombardment of World War II — Liverpool had descended into seemingly terminal decline. Its hard luck, blue-collar station was central to the identity of its most famous export, the Beatles, whose star power seemed enhanced by the fact such talent could emerge from such a place.

    Today, more than a quarter of Liverpool’s roughly 460,000 residents are officially poor, making austerity traumatic: Public institutions charged with aiding vulnerable people are themselves straining from cutbacks.

    Over the past eight years, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, which serves greater Liverpool, has closed five fire stations while cutting the force to 620 firefighters from about 1,000.

    “I’ve had to preside over the systematic dismantling of the system,” says the fire chief, Dan Stephens.

    His department recently analyzed the 83 deaths that occurred in accidental house fires from 2007 to 2017. The majority of the victims — 51 people — lived alone and were alone at the time of the deadly fire. Nineteen of those 51 were in need of some form of home care.

    The loss of home care — a casualty of austerity — has meant that more older people are being left alone unattended.

    Virtually every public agency now struggles to do more with less while attending to additional problems once handled by some other outfit whose budget is also in tatters.

    Chief Stephens said people losing cash benefits are falling behind on their electric bills and losing service, resorting to candles for light — a major fire risk.

    The city has cut mental health services, so fewer staff members are visiting people prone to hoarding newspapers, for instance, leaving veritable bonfires piling up behind doors, unseen.

    “There are knock-on effects all the way through the system,” says Chief Stephens, who recently announced plans to resign and move to Australia.

    The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts. But spending has been frozen in many areas, resulting in cuts per patient. At public hospitals, people have grown resigned to waiting for hours for emergency care, and weeks for referrals to specialists.

    “I think the government wants to run it down so the whole thing crumbles and they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” says Kenneth Buckle, a retired postal worker who has been waiting three months for a referral for a double knee replacement. “Everything takes forever now.”

    At Fulwood Green Medical Center in Liverpool, Dr. Simon Bowers, a general practitioner, points to austerity as an aggravating factor in the flow of stress-related maladies he encounters — high blood pressure, heart problems, sleeplessness, anxiety.

    He argues that the cuts, and the deterioration of the National Health Service, represent a renouncement of Britain’s historical debts. He rattles off the lowlights — the slave trave, colonial barbarity.

    “We as a country said, ‘We have been cruel. Let’s be nice now and look after everyone,’” Dr. Bowers says. “The N.H.S. has everyone’s back. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. It’s written into the psyche of this country.”

    “Austerity isn’t a necessity,” he continued. “It’s a political choice, to move Britain in a different way. I can’t see a rationale beyond further enriching the rich while making the lives of the poor more miserable.”

    Wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo. The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.

    For Emma Wilde, a 31-year-old single mother, the misadventure began with an inscrutable piece of correspondence.

    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Ms. Wilde has depended on welfare benefits to support herself and her two children. Her father, a retired window washer, is disabled. She has been taking care of him full time, relying on a so-called caregiver’s allowance, which amounts to about $85 a week, and income support reaching about $145 a month.

    The letter put this money in jeopardy.

    Sent by a private firm contracted to manage part of the government’s welfare programs, it informed Ms. Wilde that she was being investigated for fraud, accused of living with a partner — a development she is obliged to have reported.

    Ms. Wilde lives only with her children, she insists. But while the investigation proceeds, her benefits are suspended.

    Eight weeks after the money ceased, Ms. Wilde’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment. During the late winter, she and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. to save on heat. She has swallowed her pride and visited a food bank at a local church, bringing home bread and hamburger patties.

    “I felt a bit ashamed, like I had done something wrong, ” Ms. Wilde says. “But then you’ve got to feed the kids.”

    She has been corresponding with the Department for Work and Pensions, mailing bank statements to try to prove her limited income and to restore her funds.

    The experience has given her a perverse sense of community. At the local center where she brings her children for free meals, she has met people who lost their unemployment benefits after their bus was late and they missed an appointment with a caseworker. She and her friends exchange tips on where to secure hand-me-down clothes.

    “Everyone is in the same situation now,” Ms. Wilde says. “You just don’t have enough to live on.”

    From its inception, austerity carried a whiff of moral righteousness, as if those who delivered it were sober-minded grown-ups. Belt tightening was sold as a shared undertaking, an unpleasant yet unavoidable reckoning with dangerous budget deficits.

    “The truth is that the country was living beyond its means,” the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, declared in outlining his budget to Parliament in 2010. “Today, we have paid the debts of a failed past, and laid the foundations for a more prosperous future.”

    “Prosperity for all,” he added.

    Eight years later, housing subsidies have been restricted, along with tax credits for poor families. The government has frozen unemployment and disability benefits even as costs of food and other necessities have climbed. Over the last five years, the government has begun transitioning to so-called Universal Credit, giving those who receive benefits lump sum payments in place of funds from individual programs. Many have lost support for weeks or months while their cases have shifted to the new system.

    All of which is unfortunate yet inescapable, assert Conservative lawmakers. The government was borrowing roughly one-fourth of what it was spending. To put off cuts was to risk turning Britain into the next Greece.

    “The hard left has never been very clear about what their alternative to the program was,” says Neil O’Brien, a Conservative lawmaker who was previously a Treasury adviser to Mr. Osborne. “Presumably, it would be some enormous increase in taxation, but they are a bit shy about what that would mean.”

    He rejects the notion that austerity is a means of class warfare, noting that wealthy people have been hit with higher taxes on investment and expanded fees when buying luxury properties.

    Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    But those dependent on state support express a sense that the system has been rigged to discard them.

    Glendys Perry, 61, was born with cerebral palsy, making it difficult for her to walk. For three decades, she answered the phones at an auto parts company. After she lost that job in 2010, she lived on a disability check.

    Last summer, a letter came, summoning her to “an assessment.” The first question dispatched any notion that this was a sincere exploration.

    “How long have you had cerebral palsy?” (From birth.) “Will it get better?” (No.)

    In fact, her bones were weakening, and she fell often. Her hands were not quick enough to catch her body, resulting in bruises to her face.

    The man handling the assessment seemed uninterested.

    “Can you walk from here to there?” he asked her.

    He dropped a pen on the floor and commanded her to pick it up — a test of her dexterity.

    “How did you come here?” he asked her.

    “By bus,” she replied.

    Can you make a cup of tea? Can you get dressed?

    “I thought, ‘I’m physically disabled,’” she says. “‘Not mentally.’”

    When the letter came informing her that she was no longer entitled to her disability payment — that she had been deemed fit for work — she was not surprised.

    “They want you to be off of benefits,” she says. “I think they were just ticking boxes.”

    The political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. London makes the aggregate cuts, while leaving to local politicians the messy work of allocating the pain.

    Spend a morning with the aggrieved residents of Prescot and one hears scant mention of London, or even austerity. People train their fury on the Knowsley Council, and especially on the man who was until recently its leader, Andy Moorhead. They accuse him of hastily concocting plans to sell Browns Field without community consultation.

    Mr. Moorhead, 62, seems an unlikely figure for the role of austerity villain. A career member of the Labour Party, he has the everyday bearing of a genial denizen of the corner pub.

    “I didn’t become a politician to take things off of people,” he says. “But you’ve got the reality to deal with.”

    The reality is that London is phasing out grants to local governments, forcing councils to live on housing and business taxes.

    “Austerity is here to stay,” says Jonathan Davies, director of the Center for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “What we might now see over the next two years is a wave of bankruptcies, like Detroit.”

    Indeed, the council of Northamptonshire, in the center of England, recently became the first local government in nearly two decades to meet that fate.

    Knowsley expects to spend $192 million in the next budget year, Mr. Moorhead says, with 60 percent of that absorbed by care for the elderly and services for children with health and developmental needs. An additional 18 percent will be spent on services the council must provide by law, such as garbage collection and highway maintenance.

    To Mr. Moorhead, the equation ends with the imperative to sell valuable land, yielding an endowment to protect remaining parks and services.

    “We’ve got to pursue development,” Mr. Moorhead says. “Locally, I’m the bad guy.”

    The real malefactors are the same as ever, he says.

    He points at a picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the wall behind him. He vents about London bankers, who left his people to clean up their mess.

    “No one should be doing this,” he says. “Not in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world. Sacking people, making people redundant, reducing our services for the vulnerable in our society. It’s the worst job in the world.”

    Now, it is someone else’s job. In early May, the local Labour Party ousted Mr. Moorhead as council leader amid mounting anger over the planned sale of parks.

  • Every Cell in Your Body Has the Same DNA. Except It Doesn’t. - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/mosaicism-dna-genome-cancer.html

    But scientists are also finding that mosaicism does not automatically equal disease. In fact, it’s the norm.

    When a fertilized egg — known as a zygote — starts dividing in the womb, many of its early descendant cells end up with the wrong number of chromosomes. Some are accidentally duplicated, and others lost.

    Most of these unbalanced cells divide only slowly or die off altogether, while the normal cells multiply far faster. But a surprising number of embryos survive with some variety in their #chromosomes.

    #ADN #mosaïcisme #mosaïque_génétique

  • How More Carbon Dioxide Can Make Food Less Nutritious - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warming.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

    In recent years, though, researchers have begun to realize that the extra carbon dioxide that humanity is pumping into the atmosphere isn’t just warming the planet, it’s also making some of our most important crops less nutritious by changing their chemical makeup and diluting vitamins and minerals.

    Now, a new study has found that rice exposed to elevated levels of carbon dioxide contains lower amounts of several important nutrients.

    The potential health consequences are large, given that there are already billions of people around the world who don’t get enough protein, vitamins or other nutrients in their daily diet.

    http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaaq1012
    #pollution #agriculture #nutriments #climat

  • Under Attack, Drug Maker Turned to Giuliani for Help - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/us/politics/28oxycontin.html

    As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it for OxyContin abuse.

    Despite these efforts, Purdue suffered a crushing defeat in May at the hands of Mr. Brownlee when the company and three top executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

    In the OxyContin case, Mr. Giuliani’s supporters suggest that as a cancer survivor himself, he was driven by a noble goal: to keep the company’s proven pain reliever available to the widest circle of sufferers.

    “I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness,” Mr. Giuliani said at the time. “I know that proper medications are necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality of life.”

    #Opioides #Purdue_Pharma #Procès #Rudolph_Giuliani

  • Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/alexa-siri-hidden-command-audio-attacks.html

    Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to (...)

    #Apple #Google #Amazon #YouTube #Alexa #Echo #domotique #Home #Siri #voix #hacking

  • Saudi Arabia Detains Activists Who Pushed to End Ban on Women Driving
    By Ben Hubbard
    May 18, 2018
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/world/middleeast/saudi-women-drivers-arrests.html

    BEIRUT, Lebanon — Saudi Arabia has detained at least five people connected to the campaign to end the kingdom’s longtime ban on women driving, despite the fact that the government has promised to lift the ban next month, associates of the detainees said on Friday.

    The Saudi government has billed the lifting of the driving ban as part of a reform push spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The changes have also included curtailing the powers of the religious authorities and expanding the entertainment options available in the conservative kingdom.

    But those efforts have coincided with waves of arrests that have scooped up clerics, businessmen, members of the royal family and activists who have a history of challenging the government’s positions. Many of them have not been officially charged with crimes despite having been held for months.

    The Saudi government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new detentions, and it remained unclear whether those detained had been charged with anything.

    #réformes #MBS #arabie_saoudite

  • A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem
    by Michelle Goldberg

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/opinion/jerusalem-embassy-gaza-protests.html

    On Monday, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other leading lights of the Trumpist right gathered in Israel to celebrate the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, a gesture widely seen as a slap in the face to Palestinians who envision East Jerusalem as their future capital.

    The event was grotesque. It was a consummation of the cynical alliance between hawkish Jews and Zionist evangelicals who believe that the return of Jews to Israel will usher in the apocalypse and the return of Christ, after which Jews who don’t convert will burn forever.

    Religions like “Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism” lead people “to an eternity of separation from God in Hell,” Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor, once said. He was chosen to give the opening prayer at the embassy ceremony. John Hagee, one of America’s most prominent end-times preachers, once said that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland. He gave the closing benediction.

    This spectacle, geared toward Donald Trump’s Christian American base, coincided with a massacre about 40 miles away. Since March 30, there have been mass protests at the fence separating Gaza and Israel. Gazans, facing an escalating humanitarian crisis due in large part to an Israeli blockade, are demanding the right to return to homes in Israel that their families were forced from at Israel’s founding. The demonstrators have been mostly but not entirely peaceful; Gazans have thrown rocks at Israeli soldiers and tried to fly flaming kites into Israel. The Israeli military has responded with live gunfire as well as rubber bullets and tear gas. In clashes on Monday, at least 58 Palestinians were killed and thousands wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

    The juxtaposition of images of dead and wounded Palestinians and Ivanka Trump smiling in Jerusalem like a Zionist Marie Antoinette tell us a lot about America’s relationship to Israel right now. It has never been closer, but within that closeness there are seeds of potential estrangement.

  • Israel in major raids on ’Iran’ targets in Syria after rocket fire | AFP.com
    https://www.afp.com/en/news/205/israel-major-raids-iran-targets-syria-after-rocket-fire-doc-14q3b14

    Elle est pas belle la vie ? Ça fait une bonne semaine que l’armée israélienne est en alerte maximale dans le Golan occupé. C’est donc le moment idéal pour lui envoyer une bordée de roquettes dont aucune n’a atteint le territoire israélien…
    Israël est forcément obligé de riposter.

    Israel carried out widespread deadly raids against what it said were Iranian targets in Syria on Thursday after rocket fire towards its forces which it blamed on Iran, marking a sharp escalation between the two enemies.

    The incident came after weeks of rising tensions and followed US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from a key 2015 Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, a move Israel had long advocated.

    It led to immediate calls for restraint from Russia, France and Germany. “The escalation of the last hours shows us that it’s really about war and peace,” warned German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

    The raids that a monitor said killed 23 fighters were one of the largest Israeli military operations in recent years and the biggest such assault on Iranian targets, the military said.

    We hit nearly all the Iranian infrastructure in Syria,” Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman told a security conference.

    I hope we’ve finished this episode and everyone understood.

    Israel carried out the raids after it said 20 rockets, either Fajr or Grad type, were fired from Syria at its forces in the occupied Golan Heights at around midnight.

    It blamed the rocket fire on Iran’s Al-Quds force, adding that Israel’s anti-missile system intercepted four while the rest did not land in its territory.

    No Israelis were wounded.

  • Are You a #Fortnite Addict? - The New York Times

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/learning/are-you-a-fortnite-addict.html

    By Natalie Proulx
    May 2, 2018

    Do you, or have you ever, played Fortnite? Do any of your friends or peers at school play? What do you think of the game?

    In “Parenting the Fortnite Addict,” Lisa Damour writes:

    Every so often a game comes along that conquers the hearts, minds and thumbs of gamers everywhere. Fortnite: Battle Royale is the latest victor in this category. According to a report last week from the market research firm SuperData, the game generated $223 million in March, and it begins a new season — with a new theme and a few other changes — on May 1.

    Like a cross between #Minecraft and the Hunger Games, Fortnite drops 100 competitors on an island and requires them to scavenge for weapons and other resources, build defensive structures and vanquish opponents in a quest to become the last player standing. The game itself is free and playable on game systems, computers and mobile phones alike, but players pay for accessories and costumes for their characters.

    #jeux_vidéo #addiction #roblox

  • Trump Is Ending One Gulf Conflict to Start Another – Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/03/trump-is-ending-one-gulf-conflict-to-start-another

    Now Trump is back to intervening — but only to make an apparent U-turn. Instead of hammering the Qataris as he did last June, the president just sent his newly confirmed secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to the Middle East, where he read the Saudis the riot act. Pompeo told Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir to fix the problem with Qataris. Enough is apparently enough.

    What changed? The Trump administration realized its relationship with #Iran is coming to a head, and it wants a unified Gulf Cooperation Council on its side. Trump’s change of tone on Qatar almost certainly means he has made up his mind to bust the Iran nuclear deal in the coming weeks.

    Ironically, the Saudi-Emirati-Egyptian-Bahraini blockade had become, in the interim, the new regional reality, with #Qatar using its considerable financial wherewithal to tread water. It has set up its own dairy industry, adjusted Qatar Airways’ flight patterns, deepened its ties with Turkey, and accepted shipments of food from Iran, especially in the early days of the blockade. The emir has also used the fact that not everyone in the region was on board with the four countries’ program to his own diplomatic advantage.

    The blockading nations, for their part, once they understood the Qataris would not knuckle under and accede to 13 demands they had laid out as a condition for ending the blockade, shifted to working toward Doha’s long-term isolation in the region. The conflict has thus settled into a pattern of each side indulging in various degrees of trolling via fake news, strategic leaks, and hacks to embarrass the other. At times the level of pettiness has barely approached middle school levels. Etihad Airways has, for example, removed the word “Qatar” from its moving map program; meanwhile, the repeated public dumps of the Emirati ambassador’s emails have taken on a vendetta quality.

    #nuit_torride #mesquineries
    #bagarre_de_cour_de_récréation (c’est pas moi qui le dit…)

  • Army Green Berets Secretly Help Saudis Combat Threat From Yemen Rebels - The New York Times

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/us/politics/green-berets-saudi-yemen-border-houthi.html

    By Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt
    May 3, 2018
    WASHINGTON — For years, the American military has sought to distance itself from a brutal civil war in Yemen, where Saudi-led forces are battling rebels who pose no direct threat to the United States.

    But late last year, a team of about a dozen Green Berets arrived on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, in a continuing escalation of America’s secret wars.

    With virtually no public discussion or debate, the Army commandos are helping locate and destroy caches of ballistic missiles and launch sites that Houthi rebels in Yemen are using to attack Riyadh and other Saudi cities.

    Details of the Green Beret operation, which has not been previously disclosed, were provided to The New York Times by United States officials and European diplomats.
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    They appear to contradict Pentagon statements that American military assistance to the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen is limited to aircraft refueling, logistics and general intelligence sharing.

    There is no indication that the American commandos have crossed into Yemen as part of the secretive mission.

    But sending American ground forces to the border is a marked escalation of Western assistance to target Houthi fighters who are deep in Yemen.

    Beyond its years as a base for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen has been convulsed by civil strife since 2014, when the Shiite Muslim rebels from the country’s north stormed the capital, Sana. The Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, ousted the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the Americans’ main counterterrorism partner in Yemen.

    In 2015, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia began bombing the Houthis, who have responded by firing missiles into the kingdom. Yet there is no evidence that the Houthis directly threaten the United States; they are an unsophisticated militant group with no operations outside Yemen and have not been classified by the American government as a terrorist group.

    The Green Berets, the Army’s Special Forces, deployed to the border in December, weeks after a ballistic missile fired from Yemen sailed close to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The Saudi military intercepted the missile over the city’s international airport, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman renewed a longstanding request that the United States send troops to help the kingdom combat the Houthi threat.

  • The great nutrient collapse
    http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511

    Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.

    [...] Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2 has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

    #climat #agriculture #alimentation

    He was told he could pursue his research interests as long as he brought in funding, but he struggled. Biology grant makers said his proposals were too math-heavy; math grant makers said his proposals contained too much biology.

    [...] It’s not just in the fields of math and biology that this issue has fallen through the cracks. To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement. It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health or nutrition communities. At all.

    #recherche

    • How More Carbon Dioxide Can Make Food Less Nutritious
      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warming.html

      Now, a new study has found that rice exposed to elevated levels of carbon dioxide contains lower amounts of several important nutrients.

      [...] The researchers focused on rice because more than 2 billion people worldwide rely on it as a primary food source.

      [...] There has been no work done to date, for instance, on how crops planted in impoverished soils in Africa might respond to rising CO2 levels. And studies to date have focused on staple crops such as wheat and rice rather than fruits or vegetables. And, while Dr. Ziska has published a paper on how changes in plant protein content might affect bee colonies, little is known about how other parts of the food chain might be affected.

      “The idea that food might become less nutritious was a surprise, it’s not intuitive,” said Dr. Myers. “But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system, and we still have very little understanding of how those disruptions will ripple through ecosystems and affect human health.”