/07

After Uvalde, a Kindergarten Teacher Trains to Carry a Gun In School - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/us/teachers-guns-schools.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/28/us/00arming-teachers01/00arming-teachers01-facebookJumbo-v2.jpg

A decade ago, it was extremely rare for everyday school employees to carry guns. Today, after a seemingly endless series of mass shootings, the strategy has become a leading solution promoted by Republicans and gun rights advocates, who say that allowing teachers, principals and superintendents to be armed gives schools a fighting chance in case of attack.

At least 29 states allow individuals other than police or security officials to carry guns on school grounds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. As of 2018, the last year for which statistics were available, federal survey data estimated that 2.6 percent of public schools had armed faculty.

The count has likely grown.

#états-unis #armes #folie_furieuse

The U.S. and Russia Need to Start Talking Before It’s Too Late
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/ukraine-russia-us-diplomacy.html

If Russia continues to push farther into #Ukraine, Western partners would likely provide yet more and better weapons. If those weapons allow Ukraine to reverse Russia’s gains, Moscow may feel compelled to double down — and if it is really losing, it might well consider direct attacks against NATO. In other words, there’s no mutually acceptable outcome right now. But talks could help identify the compromises needed to find one.

#samuel_charap

F.T.C. Chair Lina Khan Upends Antitrust Standards by Suing Meta - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/technology/ftc-lina-khan-meta.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/29/business/28ftc-legal1/28ftc-legal1-facebookJumbo.jpg

WASHINGTON — Early in her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan declared that she would rein in the power of the largest technology companies in a dramatically new way.

“We’re trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking fast action,’’ Ms. Khan said in an interview last month. She promised to focus on “next-generation technologies,” and not just on areas where tech behemoths were already well established.

This week, Ms. Khan took her first step toward stopping the tech monopolies of the future when she sued to block a small acquisition by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, of the virtual-reality fitness start-up Within. The deal was significant for Meta’s development of the so-called metaverse, which is a nascent technology and far from mainstream.

In doing so, Ms. Khan upended decades of antitrust standards, potentially setting off a wholesale shift in the way Washington enforces competition across corporate America. At the heart of the F.T.C.’s lawsuit is the idea that regulators can apply antitrust law without waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power. The F.T.C. said such early action was justified because Meta’s deal would probably eliminate competition in the young virtual-reality market.

The F.T.C.’s lawsuit against Meta in the budding virtual-reality market is a “deliberately experimental case that seeks to extend the boundaries of merger enforcement,” said William Kovacic, a former chair of the agency. “Such cases are certainly harder to win.”

The F.T.C.’s action immediately caused a ruckus within antitrust circles and across the tech industry. Silicon Valley tech executives said that moving to block a deal in an embryonic area of technology might stifle innovation and spook technologists from taking bold leaps in new areas.

For Ms. Khan, winning the lawsuit may be less of a priority than showing it’s possible to file against a tech deal while it is still early. She has said regulators were too cautious in the past about intervening in mergers for fear of harming innovation, allowing a wave of deals between tech giants and start-ups that eventually cemented their dominance.

“What we can see is that inaction after inaction after inaction can have severe costs,” she said in an interview with The New York Times and CNBC in January. “And that’s what we’re really trying to reverse.”

The F.T.C. accused Meta of building a virtual reality “empire,” beginning in 2014 with its purchase of Oculus, the maker of the Quest virtual-reality headset. Since then, Meta has acquired around 10 virtual-reality app makers, such as the maker of a Viking combat game, Asgard’s Wrath, and several first-person shooter and sports games.

By buying Within and its Supernatural virtual-reality fitness app, the F.T.C. said, Meta wouldn’t create its own app to compete and would scare potential rivals from trying to create alternative apps. That would hobble competition and consumers, the agency said.

“This acquisition poses a reasonable probability of eliminating both present and future competition,” according to the lawsuit. “And Meta would be one step closer to its ultimate goal of owning the entire ‘Metaverse.’”

The F.T.C. is reviewing other tech deals, including Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of the gaming company Activision and Amazon’s $3.9 billion merger with One Medical, a national chain of primary care clinics. In addition, the agency has been investigating Amazon on claims of monopoly abuses in its marketplace of third-party sellers.

Ms. Khan appears to be prepared for long legal battles with the tech giants even if the cases do not end up going the F.T.C.’s way.

In her earlier interview with The Times and CNBC, she said, “Even if it’s not a slam-dunk case, even if there is a risk you might lose, there can be enormous benefits from taking that risk.”

#Lina_Khan #Federal_Trade_Commission #Etats-Unis #Concurrence #Economie_numérique

Opinion | The Final Frontier Soon May No Longer Belong to All of Us - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/opinion/russia-us-outer-space.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/30/opinion/28green_2/28green_2-facebookJumbo.jpg

The Russian government has said that it will‌ withdraw from the International Space Station‌ “after 2024.” Instead of choosing multilateral cooperation, it plans to build its own station and send cosmonauts there to continue space research and exploration.

Russia’s announcement sounds ominous — particularly given its invasion of Ukraine — but ‌this move, part of a broader trend away from multilateralism in international space law, is but one recent signal of the fraying of international space cooperation. Another was the Artemis Accords, a legal framework designed to potentially regulate future commercial activities in outer space, which was created under the Trump‌ administration and upheld by the Biden ‌‌administration. Such actions threaten multilateralism beyond Earth and portend a future where space may no longer belong, equally, to all people.

A number of U.N. treaties‌‌ regulate outer space, and ‌strong legal norms ‌bolster those global rules. The foundational agreement is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which lays out ‌‌the principles that govern outer space, the moon and other celestial bodies. Signed in the middle of the Cold War, the treaty was a symbol of the triumph of science over politics: States could cooperate in space, even as the prospect of mutual destruction loomed on Earth.

The symbolic value of the treaty is obvious: Nationality recedes into the background when astronauts are floating in space. But beyond that, it has created standards and practices to prevent environmental contamination of the moon and other celestial bodies. It promotes data sharing, including about the many objects, like satellites and spacecraft, launched into space, which helps to avoid collisions. And its codified norms of the common heritage of mankind, peaceful use and scientific cooperation help preserve multilateralism in the face of states’ derogations.

But the looming prospect of the commercialization of space has begun to test the limits of international space law. In 2020, NASA, alone, created the Artemis Accords, which challenge the foundational multilateral principles of ‌prior space agreements. These are rules primarily drafted by the United States that other countries are now adopting. This is not collaborative multilateral rule making but rather the export of U.S. laws abroad to a coalition of the willing.

The accords take the legal form of a series of bilateral treaties with 21 foreign nations, including Australia, Canada, Japan, the U.A.E. and Britain. This is not simply a relic of the antiglobalist rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration. Just two weeks ago, ‌ Saudi Arabia‌ signed the Artemis Accords, during President Biden’s visit.

Moreover, the accords open up the possibility of mining the moon or other celestial bodies for resources. They create “safety zones” where states may extract resources, though the document states that these activities must be undertaken in accordance with the ‌Outer Space Treaty. Legal experts point out that these provisions could violate the principle of nonappropriation, which prohibits countries from declaring parts of space as their sovereign territory. Others suggest that it is important to get in front of the changing technological landscap‌e, arguing that when mining the moon becomes possible, there should already be rules in place to regulate such activities‌. Failure to do so could result in a ‌‌crisis similar to that around seabed mining‌‌, which is poised to begin even though U.N. rules have yet to be finalized.

In the end, Russia’s withdrawal from the International Space Station‌ is but one piece of a larger set of fluid issues in space governance. ‌Russia and the United States — powerful, spacefaring states — have taken steps that challenge existing rules and norms. Russia alone cannot dismantle the collective efforts to maintain space as a peaceful zone of scientific research and exploration, but the current system is in trouble and is likely to be replaced with U.S.-made regulations that allow for the future commercialization of space. That future is the real threat to multilateralism and to humanity’s rights to the final frontier.

#Espace #Communs

Opinion | Zeynep Tufekci: I Was Wrong About the Power of Protest - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/zeynep-tufekci-protests.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/20/opinion/sunday/20IWasWrong-04/20IWasWrong-04-facebookJumbo.jpg

As I studied many of these movements, I noticed more common patterns. The quickly sprung large movements often floundered for direction once the inevitable pushback came. They didn’t have the tools to navigate the treacherous next phase of politics, because they hadn’t needed to build them to get there.

In the past, a truly big march was the culmination of long-term organizing, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, indicating prior planning and strength. Large numbers of people had gotten together and worked for a long time, coordinating, preparing — and getting to know one another and making decisions. So they didn’t just manage to hold a protest; lacking easier ways to organize, they ended up having to build organizational capacity, which then helped navigate what came after.

But since the early 2000s, a big protest has started to feel more like a sentence that begins with a question mark. Newspapers still remark on their size — and many of them are very large — but I’m less impressed now by mere size: The global Occupy demonstrations, the Arab Spring protests and the Women’s March in 2017 all could lay claim to being larger than any previous protest. Maybe they would go on to build more sustained power, but maybe not.

So I concluded that although today’s big protests look the same as those in the past, the different mechanisms that produce them — in particular, the internet and lately, especially, social media — help determine whether governments or other authorities will see them as a genuine threat or just something that can be dismissed like a focus group.

This doesn’t mean I’ve come to think that protests are pointless or that big marches don’t mean anything. They do. I still think demonstrations, marches and other forms of mass mobilization matter; they build solidarity, change lives and highlight dissent. It’s just that they have different trajectories and dynamics now.

Being an academic, I wrote a book about all this, but there was a personal lesson for me as well.

My optimism about the power of our protest had been colored by my inability to recognize that the rules of the game had changed with the changing environment. I really, really wanted our demonstrations — against the invasion of Iraq, against deepening inequality, against the authoritarians in the Middle East, in support of human rights and environmentalism — to achieve more of their goals. I was among people who had the same strong desire for these protests to work and believed they would if they were big enough.

In 2003, during those protests against the impending invasion of Iraq, the other protesters and I were alarmed by the groupthink we observed among politicians and the media about why and how the war was necessary. The evidence they proffered seemed so obviously flimsy, their scenarios for how this would play out so divorced from a realistic understanding of the situation.

But we had our own version of wishful thinking coloring our judgment, too. Obviously, ours wasn’t on a similar level of culpability — failing to stop a catastrophe despite trying hard, compared with starting one based on faulty, flimsy evidence — but it offered a lesson. Being on the right side of history doesn’t insulate one from weak analyses or the temptation to conflate what we collectively hoped to be true with an examination of how things really were.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Manifestations #Médias_sociaux

Des lois anti-avortements empêchent de soigner les fausses couches aux États-Unis Violette Cantin - Le Devoir
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/monde/etats-unis/736167/des-lois-anti-avortements-empechent-de-soigner-les-fausses-couches

Les ravages d’un fléau prévisible, mais terrible, commencent à peine à se faire sentir aux États-Unis, alors que des médecins se montrent réticents à soigner adéquatement des femmes qui font une fausse couche, de peur de se faire accuser d’avoir pratiqué un avortement.

Le New York Times ▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/17/health/abortion-miscarriage-treatment.html rapportait dimanche l’histoire d’une femme s’étant fait refuser des soins d’urgence après une fausse couche au Texas. L’hôpital lui a demandé de revenir uniquement si « elle saignait tellement qu’elle remplirait plus d’une couche en une heure ». Le cas de cette femme est loin d’être isolé, au vu des lois punitives visant les médecins qui pratiquent des avortements.

https://media1.ledevoir.com/images_galerie/nwd_1311558_1014612/image.jpg

Au Texas, la loi prévoit un « dédommagement » pouvant atteindre jusqu’à 10 000 $ aux personnes entamant une procédure judiciaire contre quelqu’un qui aurait pratiqué un avortement. Au Missouri, quiconque pratique une interruption de grossesse s’expose à de la prison pour une durée qui varie entre 5 et 15 ans. Et en mai dernier, en Louisiane, un comité de la Chambre des représentants a approuvé un projet de loi qui aurait permis de considérer l’avortement comme un homicide et de poursuivre les femmes y ayant recours en conséquence. Le projet de loi a finalement été abandonné après qu’une majorité de la Chambre s’y est opposée.

Mais si les femmes ne sont pas encore considérées comme des criminelles pour avoir recours à un avortement, les médecins qui les pratiquent le sont dans plusieurs États et craignent la prison. Plusieurs hésitent désormais à fournir des soins médicaux adéquats à des femmes qui font une fausse couche.

« Il n’y a pas de différence entre les soins médicaux pour une fausse couche et ceux pour un avortement », confirme la Dre Geneviève Bois, qui est professeure adjointe de clinique en médecine à l’Université de Montréal et qui pratique des avortements. « Par exemple, si la grossesse cesse de se développer, mais que la fausse couche n’arrive pas, ça se traite exactement comme un avortement par médicaments, précise-t-elle. Ou alors, on peut y aller par aspiration, comme un avortement médical. »

Détresse psychologique et mortalité  
La Dre Monica Saxena, urgentologue qui pratique en Californie, constate de près les effets désastreux des nouvelles restrictions des lois antiavortement. « Même si la grossesse n’est pas viable, certains États avec des lois restrictives concernant l’avortement interdisent une intervention chirurgicale à moins que l’activité cardiaque du foetus soit indétectable », explique-t-elle. Jointe par le Devoir, elle précise que les délais qui découlent de cette interdiction peuvent entraîner « des hémorragies, des infections ou des sepsis qui peuvent causer la mort » de la personne enceinte.

Bien qu’elle n’ait pas à négocier avec cette ingérence politique dans le domaine médical, la Dre Saxena précise que l’Université de Californie à Los Angeles estime qu’entre 8000 et 16 000 femmes vont se rendre chaque année dans l’État pour obtenir un avortement ▻https://law.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/PDFs/Center_on_Reproductive_Health/California_Abortion_Estimates.pdf . Cela augmentera donc le nombre de patientes à traiter sur son territoire.

« Les lois antiavortement n’ont pas été créées en utilisant des preuves médicales et elles s’immiscent dans la relation médecin-patient. La conséquence est qu’elles augmentent la morbidité et la mortalité des personnes enceintes », condamne-t-elle.

La Dre Bois rappelle pour sa part les effets psychologiques que peut avoir l’absence de soins obstétricaux appropriés. « Ça crée beaucoup de détresse psychologique. Les personnes avec un utérus sont placées dans un état de constante incertitude », relève-t-elle.

L’existence de ce flou juridique aux États-Unis allonge les délais pour des personnes qui pourraient avoir besoin de soins d’urgence tout en créant un climat de suspicion et de retenue parmi les professionnels de la santé.

« Finalement, être enceinte, c’est 10 à 100 fois plus dangereux que d’obtenir un avortement, rappelle la Dre Bois. En étant enceinte, on est toujours en danger. »

#Femmes #religion #avortement #ivg #santé #viol #droits_des_femmes #usa #texas #pologne #catholicisme #fausses_couches

Covid Rises Across U.S. Amid Muted Warnings and Murky Data - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/us/covid-us-outlook.html

#Extraordinaire

In Chicago, where the county’s Covid warning level was raised to “high” last week, the city’s top doctor said there was no reason for residents to let the virus control their lives.

Apple Ends Consulting Agreement With Jony Ive, Its Former Design Leader - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/technology/apple-jony-ive-end-agreement.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/07/12/multimedia/12APPLE/12APPLE-facebookJumbo.jpg

La fin d’une belle histoire.
Ives aura montré l’importance du design (comme Jobs avant lui) pour les outils numériques.

By Tripp Mickle
July 12, 2022

SAN FRANCISCO — When Jony Ive, Apple’s influential design leader, exited the company in 2019, Tim Cook, its chief executive, reassured customers that Mr. Ive, the man who gave the world candy-colored computers, would work exclusively with the company for many years.

Not anymore.

Mr. Ive and Apple have agreed to stop working together, according to two people with knowledge of their contractual agreement, ending a three-decade run during which the designer helped define every rounded corner of an iPhone and guided development of its only new product category in recent years, the Apple Watch.

When Mr. Ive left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, the iPhone maker signed a multiyear contract with him valued at more than $100 million. That made Apple his firm’s primary client, people with knowledge of the agreement said.

The deal restricted Mr. Ive from taking on work that Apple found competitive and ensured that the designer would inform the development of future products, such as an augmented-reality headset that it is expected to ship next year, the people said.

In recent weeks, with the contract coming up for renewal, the parties agreed not to extend it. Some Apple executives had questioned how much the company was paying Mr. Ive and had grown frustrated after several of its designers left to join Mr. Ive’s firm. And Mr. Ive wanted the freedom to take on clients without needing Apple’s clearance, these people said.

Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Ive, 55, declined to comment. Apple also declined to comment.

Before leaving Apple in June 2019, Mr. Ive had grown disillusioned as Mr. Cook made the increasingly enormous company focused more on operations than on big design leaps, according to more than a dozen people who worked closely with Mr. Ive. The designer shifted to a part-time role as Mr. Cook focused on selling more software and services.

In July 2019, Mr. Cook called news coverage of Mr. Ive’s frustrations at Apple “absurd” and said it “distorts relationships, decisions and events.”

Mr. Cook’s strategy has been validated by investors who have added $1.5 trillion to Apple’s market valuation in just over two years, even as some analysts have chided it for the lull in its introduction of revolutionary devices.
Editors’ Picks
Math Defeated Him in School. In His 60s, He Went Back for More.
What Can You Do When Cheaters Take Advantage of Charity?
The New New Haven

Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, will continue to oversee the company’s design teams, with industrial design being led by Evans Hankey and software design being led by Alan Dye. Apple’s product marketing team, led by Greg Joswiak, the senior vice president of marketing, has assumed a central role in product choices.

Mr. Ive’s firm, LoveFrom, will continue to work with clients including Airbnb and Ferrari, and Mr. Ive will continue his personal work with Sustainable Markets Initiative, the nonprofit run by Prince Charles that focuses on climate change.

Born and raised outside London, Mr. Ive joined Apple in 1992 and rose to lead its design team. The company was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1997 when Steve Jobs tasked Mr. Ive’s team with designing the iMac. The bulbous, translucent computer became, at the time, the fastest-selling desktop in history. It restored Apple’s business and turned Mr. Ive into Mr. Jobs’s closest collaborator.

“He’s not just a designer,” Mr. Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “He has more operational power than anyone at Apple, except me.”

Mr. Ive also developed the iPod’s white earbuds, which inspired Apple’s dancing silhouette advertising campaign, and he supported the creation of the iPhone’s touch-screen technology.

After Mr. Jobs’s death from cancer in 2011, Mr. Ive spearheaded the development of the Apple Watch. The product failed to fulfill initial sales expectations, but it created a wearables business that last year generated $38 billion in revenue.

In 2015, Mr. Ive approached Mr. Cook about leaving Apple, according to four people familiar with the conversation. The designer was exhausted from building the consensus required to produce the Apple Watch, these people said. Mr. Cook agreed to let Mr. Ive work part time.

Four years later, Mr. Ive and Mr. Cook announced the designer would leave Apple to create LoveFrom. In a statement at the time, Mr. Cook said, “I’m happy that our relationship continues to evolve, and I look forward to working with Jony long into the future.”

#Design #Appel #Jon_Ives

The Quest by Circadian Medicine to Make the Most of Our Body Clocks - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/magazine/circadian-medicine.html

Des enregistrements d’Eichmann de 1957 mettent au jour son rôle moteur dans la solution finale, son objectif génocidaire assumé & son antisémitisme viscéral.
De ses propres mots, il fut donc plus qu’1 simple rouage du système. Un mal pas si banal que ça.

Nazi Tapes Provide a Chilling Sequel to the Eichmann Trial - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/04/world/middleeast/adolf-eichmann-documentary-israel.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/06/29/world/israel-eichmann/israel-eichmann-facebookJumbo.jpg

Six decades after the historic trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief engineers of the Holocaust, a new Israeli documentary series has delivered a dramatic coda: the boastful confessions of the Nazi war criminal, in his own voice.

The hours of old tape recordings, which had been denied to Israeli prosecutors at the time of Eichmann’s trial, provided the basis for the series, called “The Devil’s Confession: The Lost Eichmann Tapes,” which has generated keen interest in Israel as it aired over the past month.

The tapes fell into various private hands after being made in 1957 by a Dutch Nazi sympathizer, before eventually ending up in a German government archive, which in 2020 gave the Israeli co-creators of the series — Kobi Sitt, the producer; and Yariv Mozer, the director — permission to use the recordings.
Eichmann went to the gallows insisting that he was a mere functionary following orders, denying responsibility for the crimes of which he had been found guilty. Describing himself as a small cog in the state apparatus who was in charge of train schedules, his professed mediocrity gave rise to the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil.The documentary series

Exposing Eichmann’s visceral, ideological antisemitism, his zeal for hunting down Jews and his role in the mechanics of mass murder, the series brings the missing evidence from the trial to a mass audience for the first time.

Eichmann can be heard swatting a fly that was buzzing around the room and describing it as having “a Jewish nature.”