Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[davkol]

The data scientist exposing US white supremacists: 'This is how you fight Nazis'

The far-right Proud Boys group, whom Donald Trump refused to denounce this week, have been linked to assaults on protesters, white supremacist organizing, the spread of Covid misinformation and other threats against Americans.

Emily Gorcenski has been tracking them every step of the way.

Since 2018, the 38-year-old data scientist has been exposing members of the far right and cataloguing white supremacist violence across the US through her site, First Vigil. The project grew out of the attack on her Charlottesville, Virginia, community the year prior – the deadly Unite the Right rally, which brought Gorcenski face to face with neo-Nazis bearing torches and swastikas, shouting racist and transphobic vitriol at her. One of her attackers was later revealed to be an active service US marine.

Using court files and other public records, the anti-fascist researcher has catalogued hundreds of criminal cases, connected the dots of dangerous neo-Nazi networks, and revealed links that journalists and authorities have missed. These days, it can be difficult to keep up. Far-right violence has escalated dramatically under Trump, who has ignored his own government’s domestic terrorism warnings and encouraged vigilante violence against leftists.

For her safety, Gorcenski has relocated to Berlin, where she has some distance from the US white supremacist threats and the groups she investigates.

…

There’s a diversity of strategies we can have on how to build a world that is resilient to fascism. Protest is part of that. So is community involvement. I think one of the most effective things that people can do is learn ways they can help their neighbors in the community – in direct ways that do not rely on governments and the state and other systems. I think the fundamental principle of anti-fascism is mutual aid. And we have to look at the long game. With Covid and the economy, hard times are still to come and we have to position ourselves to survive. Self-empowerment is to me the most anarchist principle out there, because it means you’re dependent on nobody but yourself, or you get to create those structures of support in your community. People ask, ‘How do you fight Nazis?’ I say, learn Spanish so you can translate for immigrants. Learn how to fix a tail light so you can keep somebody from getting pulled over on a bullshit charge. Find ways to lift each other up, to better help others.

…

White supremacy is not purely a racial concept. It’s fundamentally racist, but it’s also fundamentally antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-trans, anti-disability. It’s about purification through whiteness and through maleness and through the consolidation of power. When we look at communities that are exclusionary, whether it is the “Terf” movement [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] or the anti-vaxxer movement, we see these movements are an entry point into a broader white supremacist movement. If you read anti-trans forums, which talk about defending “womanhood” against trans people, you will also see anti-Islam sentiments, defending womanhood against Muslims. Then they start gatekeeping sexuality and cis women. You’ll see antisemitic posts about how the initial researchers on “transgenderism” in the early 20th century were Jewish, which is a fact. Then they say it’s the Jews funding medical studies on trans healthcare. You get sucked into this.

…

Sam Levin
October 2, 2020
The Guardian

[Pavel.Moravec]

Proč je důležité trasovat CO NEJRYCHLEJI: TL;DR článku je "Snížení zpoždění v testování a trasování by mohlo zabránit až 80 % dalšího přenosu z diagnostikovaného případu."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... 38473049=1

[Daniel.Vrsansky]

Řecký soud rozhodl, že krajně pravicová strana Golden Dawn operoval jako kriminální organizace:
https://www.ekathimerini.com/257783/art ... ganization

[davkol]

Orders from the Top: The EU’s Timetable for Dismantling End-to-End Encryption

…

The public signs of this shift in the EU—which until now has been largely supportive toward privacy-protecting technologies like end-to-end encryption—began in June with a speech by Ylva Johansson, the EU’s Commissioner for Home Affairs.

Speaking at a webinar on “Preventing and combating child sexual abuse [and] exploitation”, Johansson called for a “technical solution” to what she described as the “problem” of encryption, and announced that her office had initiated “a special group of experts from academia, government, civil society and business to find ways of detecting and reporting encrypted child sexual abuse material.”

The subsequent report was subsequently leaked to Politico. It includes a laundry list of tortuous ways to achieve the impossible: allowing government access to encrypted data, without somehow breaking encryption.

At the top of that precarious stack was, as with similar proposals in the United States, client-side scanning. We’ve explained previously why client-side scanning is a backdoor by any other name. Unalterable computer code that runs on your own device, comparing in real-time the contents of your messages to an unauditable ban-list, stands directly opposed to the privacy assurances that the term “end-to-end encryption” is understood to convey. It’s the same approach used by China to keep track of political conversations on services like WeChat, and has no place in a tool that claims to keep conversations private.

It’s also a drastically invasive step by any government that wishes to mandate it. For the first time outside authoritarian regimes, Europe would be declaring which Internet communication programs are lawful, and which are not. While the proposals are the best that academics faced with squaring a circle could come up with, it may still be too aggressive to politically succeed as enforceable regulation—even if tied, as Johannsson ensured it was in a subsequent Commission communication, to the fight against child abuse.

But while it would require a concerted political push, EU’s higher powers are gearing up for such a battle. In late September, Statewatch published a note, now being circulated by the current EU German Presidency, called “Security through encryption and security despite encryption”, encouraging the EU’s member states to agree to a new EU position on encryption in the final weeks of 2020.

While conceding that “the weakening of encryption by any means (including backdoors) is not a desirable option”, the Presidency’s note also positively quoted an EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator (CTC) paper from May (obtained and made available by German digital rights news site NetzPolitik.org), which calls for what it calls a “front-door”—a “legal framework that would allow lawful access to encrypted data for law enforcement without dictating technical solutions for providers and technology companies”.

…

Danny O'Brien
October 6, 2020
Electronic Frontier Foundation

[davkol]

Bolivians Return Evo Morales’s Party to Power One Year After a U.S.-Applauded Coup

In November 2019, Bolivia’s three-term President Evo Morales was forced under threat of police and military violence to flee to Mexico, just weeks after he was declared the winner of the October presidential election that would have sent him to his fourth term. Installed in his place was an unelected right-wing coup regime, led by self-declared “interim President” Jeanine Áñez, who promptly presided over a military massacre that killed dozens of Morales’s Indigenous supporters and then granted immunity to all the soldiers involved. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the time cheered the coup by citing subsequently debunked claims of election fraud by the Organization of American States, or OAS, and urging “a truly democratic process representative of the people’s will.”

But after the Áñez regime twice postponed scheduled elections this year, Bolivians went to the polls on Sunday. They delivered a resounding victory to presidential candidate Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister and the candidate from his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, Party. Although official results are still being counted, exit polls from reputable firms show Arce with a blowout victory — over 50 percent against a centrist former president and a far-right coup leader — and Áñez herself conceded that MAS has won: “We do not yet have an official count, but from the data we have, Mr. Arce and [MAS Vice Presidential candidate] Mr. Choquehuanca have won the election. I congratulate the winners and ask them to govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind.”

…

At least as of now, though, it looks as though the margin of victory delivered to MAS by the Bolivian people was so stunning, so decisive, that there are few options left for the retrograde forces — in Bolivia, Washington, and Brussels — which tried to destroy the country’s democracy. Anyone who believes in the fundamentals of democracy, regardless of ideology, should be cheering the Bolivians who sacrificed so much to restore their right of self-rule and hoping that the stability and prosperity they enjoyed under Morales expands even further under his first democratically elected successor.

Glenn Greenwald
October 19, 2020
The Intercept

[klivan]

Lékař z misí: Polní nemocnice nedává smysl, je to marketingový projekt
Zdroj: https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/poln ... domaci_lre

[klivan]

Němci v případě nouze převezmou pacienty

https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/zahranicni/ ... anicni_jhr

[davkol]

EU Border Agency Frontex Complicit in Greek Refugee Pushback Campaign

Greek border guards have been forcing large numbers of refugees back to sea in pushback operations that violate international law. DER SPIEGEL and its reporting partners have learned that the European Union is also complicit in the highly controversial practice.

…

The Greek government denies it conducted pushbacks of refugees to Turkey, even though DER SPIEGEL and other media have fully documented several of these operations, known as pushbacks. Greek border guards are growing increasingly ruthless. As in the case of al-Badi, they are now pushing even refugees who have reached the Greek isles back to sea in operations that are illegal under international law.

…

Together with Lighthouse Reports, Bellingcat, "Report Mainz” -- a program on ARD, the German public broadcaster -- and Japanese broadcaster TV Asahi, DER SPIEGEL spent several months reporting in the Aegean Sea region. The reporters tracked the positions of Frontex units and compared them with position data from pushbacks recorded by NGOs and migrants. They interviewed witnesses, refugees and Frontex staff. They viewed internal documents and dozens of videos and satellite photos.

Their research proves for the first time that Frontex officials know about the Greek border guards’ illegal practices – and that the agency itself is at times involved in the pushbacks. Breaking the law has become an everyday occurrence at Europe’s borders, and the EU is allowing it to happen.

…

In the coming years, there are plans to further expand Frontex with more money and staff to support patrols at Europe’s borders. But Frontex’s complicity in crimes being committed in the Aegean Sea raise fresh doubts about whether the authority is suited to the task.

…

Giorgos Christides, Emmanuel Freudenthal, Steffen Lüdke, Maximilian Popp
October 23, 2020
Der Spiegel

[Vaclav.Vcelica]

These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do Nothing To Stop COVID
Ve zkratce článek s porovnáním států, kde jsou a nejsou povinné roušky.
https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/European-comparison-768x432.jpeg
https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Texas-vs-Georgia-768x432.jpeg

.... na závěr se autor grafů ptá:
Why Don’t Masks Work?
Why don’t masks work on the general public? For one, if you read the fine print on most consumer masks you will see something along the line of “not intended for medical purposes and has not been tested to reduce the transmission of disease.” Masks can work well when they’re fully sealed, properly fitted, changed often, and have a filter designed for virus-sized particles. This represents none of the common masks available on the consumer market, making universal masking much more of a confidence trick than a medical solution.

If we actually wanted effective masks, then manufacturers should be conducting scientific tests evaluating masks specifically for their ability to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration and CDC should be making recommendations on which masks to use and approving masks based on their scientific efficacy rather than promoting the wrapping of any piece of miscellaneous cloth around your face.
Many powerful institutions have too much political capital invested in the mask narrative at this point, so the dogma is perpetuated.

Effective masks, if they exist, should then be distributed to highly vulnerable groups for use only in rare and extenuating circumstances. There would be little point for the population at large to wear masks all the time because while focused protection may be possible, it is not possible to eradicate the virus at this point or stop its spread.

Our universal use of unscientific face coverings is therefore closer to medieval superstition than it is to science, but many powerful institutions have too much political capital invested in the mask narrative at this point, so the dogma is perpetuated. The narrative says that if cases go down it’s because masks succeeded. It says that if cases go up it’s because masks succeeded in preventing more cases. The narrative simply assumes rather than proves that masks work, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

The narrative further ignores places like Sweden and Georgia, which never required masks in the first place, and it suppresses new scientific evidence if it doesn’t support desired political results, such as data from the world’s only randomized trial investigating if masks actually protect from COVID-19. Even a Nobel laureate has been canceled because his COVID charts and data were found to be undesirable.

History does not bode well for times that politics meddles with science. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a leader in disease surveillance methods and infectious disease outbreaks, describes the current COVID scientific environment this way: “After 300 years, the Age of Enlightenment has ended.”

In the end, it will be the loss of credibility in our scientific institutions, and the unnecessary division they have sowed among us, for which masks will be remembered.

Závěr ve zkratce:
Pokud bychom skutečně chtěli účinné masky, měli by výrobci provádět vědecké testy hodnotící masky konkrétně pro jejich schopnost omezit šíření koronaviru. Úřad pro kontrolu potravin a léčiv a CDC by měly spíše doporučovat, jaké masky používat, a schvalovat masky na základě jejich vědecké účinnosti, než podporovat balení jakéhokoli kusu různých látek kolem obličeje.
Účinné masky, pokud existují, by pak měly být distribuovány vysoce zranitelným skupinám pro použití pouze za výjimečných a polehčujících okolností. Pro populaci jako celek by byl malý důvod nosit po celou dobu masky, protože i když je možná cílená ochrana, v tomto okamžiku není možné virus vymýtit nebo zastavit jeho šíření.
Naše univerzální použití vědou neověřovaných pokrývek tváří je proto blíže středověké pověře než vědě, ale mnoho mocných institucí má v tomto okamžiku do vyprávění o účinnosti masek investováno příliš mnoho politického kapitálu, takže dogma je udržováno. Narativ říká, že pokud případy klesnou, je to proto, že roušky uspěly. Říká se, že pokud se případy zvýší, je to proto, že maskám/rouškám se podařilo zabránit dalším případům. Tento příběh jednoduše předpokládá, spíše než dokazuje, že masky fungují, a to navzdory ohromným vědeckým důkazům o opaku.
Příběh dále ignoruje místa jako Švédsko a Gruzie, které masky vůbec nikdy nevyžadovaly, a potlačuje nové vědecké důkazy, pokud nepodporují požadované politické výsledky, jako jsou údaje z jediného randomizovaného soudu na světě, který zkoumá, zda masky skutečně chrání před COVID-19. Dokonce i nominace jednomu laureátu Nobelovy ceny byla zrušena, protože jeho grafy a údaje COVID byly shledány nežádoucími.
Historie neveští nic dobrého pro časy, kdy se politika míchá s vědou. Martin Kulldorff, profesor na Harvardské lékařské fakultě a lídr v oblasti metod sledování nemocí a propuknutí infekčních nemocí, popisuje současné vědecké prostředí COVID takto: „Po 300 letech věk osvícenství skončil.“

[davkol]

These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do Nothing To Stop COVID

S vědomím, že The Federalist je ultrakonzervativní médium publikující v synergii s konzervativními politiky, jsem se podíval na výběr příkladů a primárních zdrojů – nepřekvapil.

Jak se vyrovná se zkušenostmi z Arizony nebo Německa, zvláště Jeny?