Coronavirus is Changing our World

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1793- March - 27/03/2020

Yesterday’s Paper: Is Picasso Old News?

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng Ever since the coronavirus has hit the globe, many aspects of our daily routines have changed drastically. While it is still unclear how long the global pandemic will persist, people will need to get used to the measures that are in place for the time being. This week’s issue of Majalla focuses on the impact the pandemic has had on people’s lives and the extent of routine changes we have had to endure during this crisis. Yasmine ElGeressi explores the ramifications the virus has had on all aspects of our daily lives from doctor’s appointments, transportation and work. She also goes in on the changes this might have on our lives post the coronavirus crisis.

The situation in Iran is not getting any better. The number of cases and deaths is rising everyday in the Islamic Republic, according to a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, three people are infected every hour, and at least one person dies every 10 minutes. In spite of this, the Islamic Republic has refused to adopt the restrictions that many other countries have, namely enforcing social distancing and encouraging people to stay at home. Some officials have also called this virus a conspiracy from the West, and have refused aid from foreign states. If Iran does not take drastic measures soon, then the cost of human life will be astronomical writes Joseph Braude.

As many states have gone on lockdown, places of worship have become empty. As millions of Muslims around the world usually congregate at mosques five times a day, new restrictions have been placed which have rendered these mosques vacant.

Yasmine El-Geressi writes on how the Muslim world is adapting to these new restrictions, and how devout Muslims are coping with such unprecedented times.

To all our readers, we know that these are extraordinarily difficult times filled with anxiety, uncertainty and anguish. We’d like to thank everyone for sticking with us throughout this period, and ask you to be hopeful for a better tomorrow; no matter how hard this is to do at the moment. We’d also like to invite everyone to cooperate with his or her neighbours, friends and loved ones as the human race has shown to do incredible things when working together. As John Lennon famously sang: “Hold on world, world hold on. It’s gonna be alright, you’re gonna see the light. And when you’re one, really one, well you get things done like they’ve never been done. So hold on.”

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Editor-in-Chief

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

20 The Coronavirus Is Iran’s Perfect Storm

Issue 1793- March - 27/03/2020

Doctors Confront Difficult Choices to Make 32 NHS Room for Coronavirus Patients

16 Keeping the Faith Amid the Coronavirus Crisis

28 China Will Miss American Reporters

When They’re Gone

24 It Takes a World to End a Pandemic

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Is Intermittent Fasting Safe for Older Adults ?

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48 Get Your Museum Fix Here

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An aerial view shows an empty white-tiled area surrounding the Kaaba in Mecca›s Grand Mosque, on March 6, 2020. - Getty

The Giza pyramids necropolis on the southwestern outskirts of the Egyptian capital Cairo is pictured empty on March 25, 2020. - Getty

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Pope Francis, in Rome on March 15, 2020, prays in S. Marcello al Corso church, where there is a miraculous crucifix that in 1552 was carried in a procession around Rome to stop the great plague. - Getty

Worshippers pray as they keep a distance of two meters between each other at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem on March 23, 2020. - Getty

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A man walks on the deserted Trocadero square in front of the Eiffel Tower on March 21, 2020 in Paris on the fifth day of a strict nationwide lockdown. - Getty

Times Square stands mostly empty as as much of the city is void of cars and pedestrians over fears of spreading the coronavirus on March 22, 2020 in New York City.- Getty

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The Houses of Parliament (L) at the end of an empty Westminster Bridge with one pedestrian on the pavement in central London after Britain ordered a lockdown . - Getty

Pianist Denis Matsuev performs during a live broadcast from the empty Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, Russia. - Getty

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eekly news

No 10 by NHS staff and the result of the test was positive,” the spokesman said.

Lockdown Lifted in Hubei Province, Epicenter of China’s Coronavirus Outbreak On Wednesday, Hubei province, epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak and home to 60 million people, removed much of its lockdown transport measures. The lifting of the Hubei lockdown is a major milestone in the fight against the coronavirus in China. More than 80% of COVID-19 cases and 96% of deaths in mainland China have been in

Latest on the Spread of the Coronavirus Around the World

PM Johnson Tests Positive for Coronavirus

More than 531,600 people have been infected globally and over 24,000 have died, according to a Reuters tally. The number of cases in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy increased by some 2,500, a steeper increase than in previous days.

Spain extended its lockdown to at least April 12, and its death toll rose to 4,858. The U.S confirmed cases nearly reached 85,000, surpassing the national tallies of China and Italy, as hot spots faced a surge in hospitalizations and looming shortages of supplies, staff and sick beds. Mainland China reported its first locally transmitted coronavirus case in three days and 54 new imported cases, as Beijing ordered airlines to sharply cut international flights. Iran started an intercity travel ban, as its death toll rose to 2,378 on Friday.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus and is self isolating but will still lead the government’s response to the outbreak.

“Over the last 24 hours I have developed mild symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus,” Johnson said. “I am now self-isolating, but I will continue to lead the government’s response via video-conference as we fight this virus.” A Downing Street spokesman said Johnson, 55, experienced mild symptoms on Thursday - a day after he answered at the prime minister’s weekly questionand-answer session in the chamber of the House of Commons. “The prime minister was tested for coronavirus on the personal advice of England’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty,” the spokesman said. “The test was carried out in

Hubei. The provincial capital Wuhan, where the virus first appeared late last year and which has had 54% of cases, remains under lockdown until April 8. Residents of China’s Xianning city eager to travel after a two-month lockdown faced an unexpected hurdle only hours after the borders were opened — they needed to pass a new rapid detection test to show they didn’t have the coronavirus.

Syria Confirms First Coronavirus Case as Fears Grow It Could Spread War-ravaged Syria on Sunday confirmed its first case of the coronavirus after weeks of rejecting opposition allegations that the disease had already reached a country with a wrecked health system and thousands of Iranian-backed militias and Shi’ite pilgrims. Health Minister Nizar al-Yaziji told state media “necessary measures” had been taken regarding the 20-year-old woman, who he said would be quarantined for 14 days and given medical checks.

There have been unconfirmed reports in recent weeks of coronavirus cases in Syria, whose health system, housing and infrastructure have been ravaged by nine years of civil war, but the authorities have denied any outbreak or cover-up. The virus

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dence in the global economy.

Trump Says Reopen by Easter, Corporate America Says Not So Fast President Donald Trump wants America to get back to business by Easter, suggesting some efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus outbreak will no longer be needed by then, but Corporate America is taking its lead from health professionals. The president, who is concerned about the economic repercussions of an extended shutdown of nonessential business, said in a television interview on Tuesday that he wanted to see businesses returning to normal by Easter, or April 12. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Retail Federation and National Restaurant Association pointed to less optimistic recommendations by public health officials. Many of these have urged that Americans stay in their homes as much as possible for weeks to prevent the virus’ spread.

has been spreading in neighbouring countries.

U.N. officials and humanitarian workers fear a major outbreak in Syria could be particularly catastrophic. Damascus announced a ban on public transport on Sunday as it stepped up a lockdown introduced in recent days, including the closure of schools, parks, restaurants and various public institutions, as well as calling off army conscription.

Fighting Escalates in Libya Despite Coronavirus Threat

G20 Leaders to Inject $5 trillion into Global Economy in Fight Against Coronavirus Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies pledged on Thursday to inject over $5 trillion (£4.1 trillion) into the global economy to limit job and income losses from the coronavirus and “do whatever it takes to overcome the pandemic.” Showing more unity than at any time since the G20 was created during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the leaders said they committed during a videoconference summit to implement and fund all necessary health measures needed to stop the virus’ spread.

Their statement contained the most conciliatory G20 language on trade in years, pledging to ensure the flow of vital medical supplies and other goods across borders and to resolve supply chain disruptions. Saudi King Salman, in opening remarks, said G20 countries should resume the normal flow of goods and services, including vital medical supplies, as soon as possible to help restore confi-

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Battles raged on several fronts in Libya on Friday after a night of heavy bombardment in Tripoli, combatants and residents said, despite the threat continued fighting poses to efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic. Serious warfare resumed this week after a comparative lull in recent weeks, defying international calls for calm to allow Libya’s fragmented and overstretched health system to prepare for any spread of the coronavirus. Libya confirmed its first case of the highly infectious respiratory disease on Monday - a Libyan man recently returned from overseas. After years of instability and violence, much of the North African country’s medical infrastructure is in ruins, hospitals and clinics have been targeted, and many doctors and nurses have not been paid since December.

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Coronavirus is Changing our World How Covid19- Could Change the Way We Work and Global Healthcare Forever

by Yasmine El-Geressi The coronavirus – which keeps a third of the world contained in their homes—maybe for months— is having a drastic effect on everything from our relationship to government, to healthcare, to the outside world, even to each other. In many parts of the world, borders are closed, airports, hotels and

businesses shut, and school cancelled. These unprecedented measures are tearing at the social fabric of some societies and disrupting many economies. You would have to look back to the second world war for an event that affected us as profoundly and pervasively.

Most people presume that all these measures to combat the biggest crisis of our generation will be temporary, and that at some point life will bounce back to its pre-coronavirus state

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and business will continue as usual. To some extent, this may be true - will go back to work and school and gather in restaurants and theaters and sports stadiums again. But many of these effects of these measures are likely to far outlast the current crisis.

Just like illness can lend itself to introspection, times of fundamental crisis also open up a window of opportunity for change and can fast-forward processes and decisions that in normal times could take years of planning and consideration. And there is not much in our recent experience to match the speed with which events have unfolded and in these unprecedented times, entire countries are serving as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments. What happens when health care systems are overwhelmed with more patients than they can feasibly treat? What happens when everybody works from home and communicates from a distance?

THE FUTURE OF HEALTHCARE We haven›t faced a public health emergency of this scale in a century and it is exposing the exclusion of certain groups from accessing care, the under-investment in free public healthcare for all, the failure of governments to plan for and deliver services that meet the needs of everyone, and our collective vulnerability. It is likely that people across the globe will use COVID-19 as a strong justification to demand properly funded, equitable and universal healthcare Access to healthcare and the capacity of health systems is particularly a heightened concern at this time for those already living in poverty or experiencing income inequality, especially as the pandemic brings additional economic risks for low-income or less secure workers. In the US, the coronavirus is a stark reminder of the divide that exists between those who can afford healthcare and those who cannot and may be forced into extreme poverty as a result. People in the US must contend with a fragmented health system where just going to get tested can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars in medical bills -- a risk those in other developed countries don›t face as it is the only developed nation without universal health care.

Nearly 28 million non-elderly Americans, or 10.4%, were uninsured in 2018, according to the most recent Census Bureau data available. 45,000 Americans are dying each year because they do not have health coverage. But even those who have insurance may not seek care that quickly, largely because they face hefty deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for doctor›s visits, emergency room trips and treatment. Another weak point in the nation›s fight against the coronavirus› spread is the lack of national standards on paid sick leave, a rarity among industrialised nations.

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Experts are predicting that a coronavirus-related recession is likely to bring about a spike in labor-replacing automation.

Journalists and healthcare experts have noted that countries like South Korea, which has a comprehensive form of national health care, has performed well in responding to the coronavirus outbreak. «South Korea also has a universal health care system (though a different one from Italy) and has dealt with the pandemic better than anywhere else,» remarked Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

This realisation can in turn pressure the US leadership, and others around the world, to implement the necessary reforms to ensure all citizens have social security, comprehensive labour rights and access to adequate healthcare. With more than two-thirds of Americans, 67 percent, saying they are concerned about someone in their family becoming infected with the COVID-19 illness, a significant percentage of U.S. adults say they have newfound support for a federal government-backed health insurance plan. A new Morning Consult survey revealed that 26 percent of U.S. adults are now «much more likely» to support universal health care proposals.

Something else we’ve been hearing a lot about during the coronavirus crisis is “telehealth”. Telehealth includes all the health-related services that can be performed via digital technology and allow long-distance care, advice, and monitoring.

It’s easy to see why telehealth has become essential during coronavirus. As hospitals and public officials urge patients with symptoms of Covid-19 to avoid emergency rooms, online-only services that allow patients to consult with doctors over the phone, video, or direct message are a natural fit. Beyond individual-level care, the data gathered by telemedicine services can be mined to predict the broader ebb and flow of an epidemic’s trajectory in a population.

In Singapore, more than a million people have used a popular telehealth app called -MaNaDr, founded by family physician Dr. Siaw Tung Yeng, for virtual visits; 20% of the physicians in the island country offer some level of service via the app. In an effort to control escalating cases of coronavirus there, people with symptoms are getting prescreened by physicians on MaNaDr and advised to stay home if they don’t need intensive care. Patients then check in with their

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telehealth doctor every evening and report if their fever persists, if they have shortness of breath or if they are feeling worse. If they are getting sicker, the doctor orders an ambulance to take those people to the hospital In the US, a third of the population already use telemedicine, and now, people currently have no other choice but to rely on it. The more they use it, the more they will learn to trust the method, allowing for the delivery of faster and cheaper healthcare. The Trump administration has used the president›s national emergency declaration and an emergency funding package to lift key barriers to virtual care, including rules that limited payments for telehealth visits and blocked the use of popular video messaging platforms like FaceTime over privacy concerns. Many private insurers appear to be quickly following suit, raising the prospect that remote consultation could become the new normal long after the crisis subsides.

THE FUTURE OF WORK Millions of office workers these days are swapping suits for sweatpants as the coronavirus has made working from home a sudden reality. Although working from home has been on the rise for a while- Gallup’s State of the American Workplace 2017 study found that 43% of employees work remotely with some frequency - not everyone has been eager to embrace the possibilities modern technology offers. In Germany, for example, around one in four companies let at least some of their employees work remotely, according to a study by the IAB Institute for Employment Research. Only twenty percent of workers made use of that. And the majority of those who didn›t work from home said they actually wanted to go into the office every day. But, currently, many of them can›t as Germany - along with many other countries

There is not much in our recent experience to match the speed with which events have unfolded and in these unprecedented times, entire countries are serving as guinea-pigs in large-scale social experiments.

hit by the coronavirus – are in the middle of a large-scale work from home experiment.

With the expectation that sustained efforts will be needed to deal with the pandemic, companies are preparing for months without their staff in offices. JPMorgan, AT&T, Google, Amazon, Nike, Facebook, among many, many more are moving quickly to virtualise and digitalise business operations as social distancing continues to be the best practice to “flatten the curve” of contagion.

Organisations have also been forced to invest in technology and to modify formal processes in order to manage a remote workforce. Companies not used to a remote work environment, but homebound now, are struggling with corporate servers and tools that don’t have the capacity for efficient group sharing. Organisations are also being forced to radically cut down or stop business travel, and realise that it’s not so essential after all.

With meetings being cancelled or shifted to video conferencing, according to Kentik, a global provider of network analytics, videoconferencing traffic in North America and Asia has doubled since the outbreak began. At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in New York in early February, Chinese researchers mostly delivered their talks via video conferencing or canned presentations due to travel bans. The AAAI conference was lucky in that it was able to convene. Many are now wondering

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It is likely that people across the globe will use COVID19- as a strong justification to demand properly funded, equitable and universal healthcare.

While some see an upside to home working, admitting that coronavirus was pushing technophobe colleagues to embrace more digital working, the shift has not been without problems, as bankers worry about how they will be able to meet their clients and managers fret about how they keep staff motivated and productive at home. Plus, this arrangement is only realistic for white-collar workers as sending staff home is not an option for many occupations, including the entertainment workers, technicians, artisans, craftspersons and factory workers.

whether video conferences are the future and experts believe business leaders will come to see that central offices and face-to-face meetings are less vital than they thought. “This is unprecedented,” Ann Francke, head of the Chartered Management Institute told the Financial Times. “It may change the workplace forever. Everyone will need to embrace a different sort of workplace behaviour.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is also resurfacing concerns about technology’s impact on the future of work. Experts are predicting that a coronavirus-related recession is likely to bring about a spike in labor-replacing automation. Automation tends to accelerate in bad times such as in the wake of economic shocks, when humans become relatively more expensive as firms’ revenues rapidly decline. At these moments, employers shed less-skilled workers and replace them with technology and higher-skilled workers, which increases labor productivity as a recession tapers off. The automation surge is likely to affect the most “routine” occupations—jobs in areas such as production, construction, food service, and transportation, for example. According to a report by The Brookings Institute, any downturn is likely to bring a new bout of structural change in the labor market and its demand for skills. “If it extends for a while, the downturn could induce firms in food service, retail, and administrative work to restructure their operations toward greater use of technology and higher-skilled workers. For America’s beleaguered lower-skill workers, these changes will complicate the return to normalcy,” the report said.

In other fields the change will be equally dramatic and possibly for good. For example, higher education has been slow in moving into the online teaching space, but now that the sector is forced to deliver modules online, universities are unlikely to totally revert back to the previous status quo.

There are huge opportunities offered by online education – in terms of new markets for students and cheaper delivery thanks to economies of scale.

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Amid a Mounting Coronavirus Toll, Iranian Officials Reject Social Distancing and Foreign Help All Indicators Point to an Outbreak Far Worse than Tehran’s Official Numbers Suggest 14

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by Joseph Braude Iran’s management of the coronavirus has exposed glaring deficiencies in Tehran’s decision-making. Iranian medical experts are warning of an escalating outbreak and dire consequences if aggressive containment measures, including social distancing and economic closure, are not taken. By contrast, Iran’s political leadership has portrayed the danger as one of foreign manufacture, and rejected both foreign aid and lockdowns. All indicators point to an outbreak far worse than Tehran’s official numbers suggest.

IRANIAN DOCTORS SOUND THE ALARM The Iranian medical community has been sounding increasingly dire notes about the pace of Covid-19’s spread throughout the country. On Thursday, Kianoush Jahanpour, a spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Health, tweeted that “almost 3 people are infected with Covid-19 in Iran every hour, and one person dies every 10 minutes.”

A woman wears a medical mask as a precaution against coronavirus (COVID19-) on March 2020 ,01 in Tehran, Iran. (Getty)

In a similar vein, Dr. Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi, the head of the government’s Medical Council, recently said he holds a grimmer view than most government officials.

In his assessment, “We are still on an upward slope;” if social distancing policies can be effectively adopted and closures imposed, then “the country can pass through the peak of the virus” by late March. However, he added, “If we keep moving on the current path … it will continue until [late May] or even longer.”

Meanwhile, the coronavirus continues to sweep through the senior ranks of the Iranian government. On Monday, Izzat Khamoushi, mother-in-law of Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Maytham, succumbed to the coronavirus. The next day, state media reported that Habib Barzegari, a founding member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and an advisor to the representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the city of Meybod, also died from the virus. His passing marks the sixteenth death of a senior regime figure.

REGIME OFFICIALS RESPOND WITH CHARGES OF CONSPIRACY Tehran’s key figures have responded to these increasingly severe warnings by dismissing them as foreign conspiracies. President Hassan Rouhani continues to

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President Hassan Rouhani continues to oppose even a partial lockdown, claiming on Saturday that the calls to do so represent “a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to shut down offices and do harm to the country’s economy.” oppose even a partial lockdown, claiming on Saturday that the calls to do so represent “a counter-revolutionary conspiracy to shut down offices and do harm to the country’s economy.”

For his part, Supreme Leader Ayatollah made a point of rejecting American offers of humanitarian aid. On Sunday, Khamenei rhetorically asked, “Who in their right mind would trust you to bring them medication? Possibly your medicine is a way to spread the virus more.”

Khamenei also claimed that the U.S. had designed the virus to target Iran, asserting that it “is specifically built for Iran using the genetic data of Iranians, which they have obtained through different means.” As if to emphasize the point, Iranian authorities expelled a team of Doctors Without Borders on Monday. Alireza Vahabzadeh, an adviser to Iran’s health minister, said Iran does “not have a need for hospital beds set up by foreign forces.”

The subordination of public health to political considerations has not gone without remark, either within Tehran or Washington. On Monday, Secretary Pompeo noted, “The U.S. has offered $100M+ in medical aid to other nations—including Iran—and our scientists are working 24/7 to develop a vaccine. [Ayatollah Khamenei] has rejected American offers and spends 24/7 concocting conspiracy theories. How does that help the Iranian people?” In Tehran, even other members of the ruling establishment have been harshly critical of the government’s response. Mahmoud Sadeqi, MP for Tehran, charged in a tweet that the government’s opposition to stricter measures was “fueled by delusion” and conspiracy mongering, and noted that even Iranian experts insist that closures and social distancing are vital to curbing the spread of the virus.

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Keeping the Faith Amid the Coronavirus Crisis How the Muslim World is Adapting 16

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The scene is most salient and sobering in Mecca, Islam’s holiest sanctuary, the usually crowded courtyard around the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque, towards which all Muslims pray, is silent and deserted of worshippers transmissions of the disease.

Across the Muslim world the pandemic is altering ancient standardised rituals. The same undulating Arabic hymn, called the adhan, has echoed across cities and towns all over the globe calling the faithful to perform their five daily prayers in times war or peace, prosperity or famine for more than 14 centuries. But on March 13 a muezzin (the person who calls to prayer) in Kuwait, his voice breaking with emotion, made a small tweak. He changed the words hayya ‹ala as-salah (come to prayer) to as-salatu fi buyutikum (pray in your homes).

A photograph taken on March 2020 ,5 shows the white-tiled area surrounding the Kaaba, inside Mecca›s Grand Mosque, empty of worshippers. (Getty)

by Yasmine El-Geressi Every aspect of modern life as we know it is being hit as sweeping measures are rolled out around the globe in an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus. As billions of people grapple with a pandemic for which scientists and world leaders have few answers, the dread over the virus has driven the globe’s faithful even closer to religion and ritual in their search for solace. But health experts worldwide have advised against mass gatherings to slow the spread of COVID19- and Muslims are adjusting the way they worship to halt

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The coronavirus has stopped communal Muslim prayers for the first time in many mosques. A religious gathering in Malaysia late last month attended by some 16,000 people generated about 670 coronavirus cases across the region, including 576 in Malaysia, 61 in Brunei and 22 in Cambodia. At least 13 Indonesians were also infected. The country is still reeling from the explosion of cases at the religious gathering and weekly prayers have been called off.

In Egypt, the most populous Arab country, religious authorities have ordered a two-week closure of mosques and churches and banned mass communal prayers. The government in Tunisia – where some worshippers have been praying in front of shuttered mosque doors – said messages from imams will be broadcast to reinforce essential health protections. The Blue Mosque of Istanbul, with its slender minarets and cascade of domes, Jerusalem›s Dome of the Rock under its gilded roof and bright blue

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tile façade, and the huge Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca with its 200m ornate square minaret all shut their doors.

Although an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad is said to have urged worshippers to stay at home during bad weather such as strong winds and rain, this is the first time in modern history that prayers were cancelled.

The scene is most salient and sobering in Mecca, Islam’s holiest sanctuary, the usually crowded courtyard around the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque, towards which all Muslims pray, is silent and deserted of worshippers. Saudi Arabia has also banned overseas visitors since the end of February, meaning those wishing to undertake pilgrimage to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina are unable to do so. About 12 million people usually visit Mecca each year, mostly for the hajj, the pilgrimage that all adult Muslims have to perform at least once every lifetime, which this year begins on 28 July. However, thousands wishing to perform umrah, a pilgrimage that can be undertaken at any time of year, have been affected by the ban.

There are fears that the annual hajj pilgrimage will be cancelled but the Kingdom has not yet announced their decision. Cancelling would hit

There are fears that the annual hajj pilgrimage will be cancelled but the Kingdom has not yet announced their decision. Cancelling would hit hard, not just spiritually but financially too. Hajj attracts millions of people and contributes more than 10$bn to the Saudi economy.

hard, not just spiritually but financially too. Hajj attracts millions of people and contributes more than 10$bn to the Saudi economy. Pilgrimages are the kingdom’s largest source of revenue after oil.

However, cancelling Hajj is not without precedent. It has happened many times before in Islamic history due to disease and conflict among other reasons. Earlier this month, the Saudi King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives released a statement noting 40 moments in history where Hajj was either cancelled or the number of pilgrims was extremely low.

For the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, Ramadan is likely to present extra challenges. During the holy month, which starts in late-April and will last for 29 or 30 days, Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, but those with severe sickness,

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People gather outside the closed doors of the Fatima Masumeh shrine in Iran›s holy city of Qom on March 2020 16. (Gettu)

Iran, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks, is also home to dozens of major Shiite Muslim shrines, which remained open to crowds for weeks even as the coronavirus left the country shell shocked. «uncontrollably.»

including flu, are permitted to break their fast.

During Ramadan, mosque attendances usually peak, with people crammed against one another.

But in some places believers have defied medical advice to join together in worship, whatever the risks.

In Indonesia, the most populous Muslimmajority country in the world, many worshipers in the capital accepted advice to avoid religious gatherings and prayed at home. In the teeming capital of Jakarta, the governor has suspended all religious activities for two weeks while President Joko Widodo has spoken of a “need to evaluate religious events that involve many people”. The country›s highest religious authority, the Indonesian Ulema Council, has also issued a nationwide ruling allowing Muslims to temporarily skip Friday prayers in regions where the virus has spread

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But elsewhere in the country people ignored the risk of coronavirus and crowded into their mosques. A rally of Muslim pilgrims in South Sulawesi province was cancelled on Thursday, but only after thousands had already attended.

Some Muslims trusted in their faith to keep them safe. “Allah is protecting those who abide by their obligations,” Aswin Jusar, 76, in the town of Depok, south of Jakarta, told Reuters, as he prepared to attend Friday prayers as usual despite a call from the mayor for religious activities to be suspended. At a mosque in Tangerang, west of Jakarta, one worshipper said he was worried about the virus but still went out for Friday prayers because authorities had not imposed a ban, Reuters reported.

Iran, home to one of the world’s worst outbreaks, is also home to dozens of major Shiite Muslim shrines, which remained open to crowds for weeks even as the coronavirus left the country shell shocked. The country’s president Hassan Rouhani had refused calls to quarantine the holy city of Qom, Iran’s first hot spot. He wanted to shutter some shrines like those that draw pilgrims to Qom, but hard-line clerics balked. When the authorities finally heeded health officials’ pleas and shuttered two popular shrines where crowds mingled, prayed and touched the walls and tombs for blessing in the cities of Mashhad and Qom on March 16, hundreds of men, apparently organized by hard-line factions in seminaries, stormed both shrines, breaking open the doors and overrunning security forces who pleaded with them not to enter, shouting, “The president is damn wrong to do that!” videos on social media showed.

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The Coronavirus Is Iran’s Perfect Storm

Tehran Now Needs the Public Trust and Professional Expertise It Has Squandered

by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani If you want to die, go to Gilan. This old Iranian proverb does not actually warn people against travel to Gilan, Iran’s

beautiful, green, and lush Caspian province, though today that meaning may be more apt. Gilan is the province of Iran most infected with the novel coronavirus after Qom, the city from which the pathogen spread to the rest of the

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country. (The proverb is actually advising anyone who has had a long, happy life to top it off by dying in Gilan, where neighbours feed the deceased person’s family for a week, instead of the bereaved feeding the neighbourhood, which is the custom in the rest of Iran.)

The people of Gilan are paying a high price for the province’s status as a tourist destination. In recent weeks, thousands of Iranians have taken advantage of school closings to go to Gilan, bringing with them the deadly new virus.

Gilan’s governor and its parliamentary representative have been pleading on national television for people not to come to Gilan. They also pleaded with the government to restrict travel so as to contain the spread of the virus, but so far, authorities in Tehran have been steadfast against any such restrictions.

To the surprise and dismay of people in Gilan, on February 25, two weeks after the crisis had become national news and top health officials began asking people to stay in their homes, President Hassan Rouhani inaugurated the first segment of a much-anticipated highway that links Tehran to Gilan’s resort towns and cuts the 180-kilometer distance by a fourth. Mercifully, as thousands were driving the new route, the prayers of the locals were answered and a landslide closed the highway, at least for the time being.

Rana, a -20year-old Iranian biology student, is pictured as she walks in the upmarket Tehran district of Tajrish on February 2020 ,9. - In a country weighed down by sanctions, shaken by protests and stressed by military tensions with the United States, many Tehranis struggle to hide their pessimism.

(Getty)

Gilan’s predicament demonstrates two vulnerabilities that have hobbled the government’s response to the COVID-19 epidemic: the bureaucracy is unprepared to respond in a coordinated and coherent manner to a public health emergency; and trust between the public and the government, especially the state-owned media, has ebbed to an all-time low.

THE WORST OF TIMES Unfortunately for Iran, the COVID-19 outbreak comes at the worst-possible time. In May 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed punitive sanctions on Iran that have seriously hurt the country’s economy, depleted its foreign exchange reserves, and severely limited its ability to respond to a health crisis. To complete the perfect storm, this month the price of oil fell by 25 percent, to $35 per barrel.

Iran’s budget for next year assumed $50.

As a result, last week, for the first time in its 41-year history, the Islamic Republic of Iran requested $5 billion—its full quota—from the International Monetary Fund. Pending the IMF board’s approval, and assuming that the U.S. Treasury Department does not block the actual transfer of funds to Iran, the money will ease the pain somewhat. In 2012, when Iran exported $120 billion worth of oil, $5 billion would have been a drop in the bucket; but this year,

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Gilan is the province of Iran most infected with the novel coronavirus after Qom, the city from which the pathogen spread to the rest of the country. with oil exports below $10 billion, the same amount can make a difference.

Iranians were already hurting. The U.S. sanctions had cut the purchasing power of the average Iranian by nearly 20 percent since 2018. The health crisis will lower that figure some more. Iran’s middle class prospered during the oil boom of the 2000s, accounting for 60 percent of the total population in 2012. In 2018, however, the middle class shrank to 53 percent of the population. It probably accounts for less than 50 percent today.

For those who work for the government, the squeeze is easily measurable. Some two million to three million middleclass families employed by the government have seen their real incomes fall by about 15 percent this year and will likely expect a similar decline next year. The current draft of the budget allows for government salaries to increase by about 15 percent—at a time when prices are likely to increase by 30 percent. The entire government wage bill is projected to go up 22 percent, well below the expected rate of inflation.

Unemployment has put Rouhani under still more pressure, as his administration must contend with three million to four million unemployed workers, with more likely to lose their jobs if the outbreak lasts much longer. Rouhani has turned to the cash transfer program that his nemesis, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, established in 2011 and which he had vehemently criticized. Most Iranians now receive monthly cash transfers.

Over the previous six years, the Rouhani government had allowed inflation to erode the real value of the transfers by more than two-thirds. But last November, Iranians protested hikes in gas prices, and the protests turned into national unrest. Rouhani responded by doubling the amount paid in cash transfers. Still, in 2011, the transfers amounted to 26 percent of the median household income, while today, with the doubling, they account for about eight percent. For the poorest 20 percent of Iranians, however, the transfers still account for 24 percent of income.

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This week, the government announced that it would distribute a one-time cash transfer to households without a “regular source of income.” About three million families fall into this category, and they account for some 20 percent of the population. For the poorest families, the transfer will cover about a month’s worth of expenditures. The government is also disbursing low-interest loans of up to 20 million rials (about $1,200 in purchasing power parity dollars) each to another four million families with business losses due to the health crisis.

How does the government plan to pay for these new loans and transfers? Budget deficits are endemic in populist Iran, and now with sanctions, the health emergency, and much lower oil prices, the government is facing its largest budget deficit ever. The budget it sent to the (now outgoing) parliament proposes to address the shortfall in part by sharply increasing the sale of government bonds—by 150 percent, compared with the current year’s budget.

Even in good times, the Iranian public prefers to store its wealth in gold, foreign currencies, and stocks, rather than bonds. In abnormal times such as these, when public trust in government runs low, the government is unlikely to find many buyers. There is plenty of liquid wealth that the government could tap, as evidenced by the booming Tehran stock exchange, but the public may prefer to gamble with its money rather than lend it to the government. And if the public refuses to buy bonds, government-owned banks will have to step in. But when they turn to the central bank to replenish their reserves, the money supply increases, causing inflation.

Trust in authorities has been diminishing over time but

Even in good times, the Iranian public prefers to store its wealth in gold, foreign currencies, and stocks, rather than bonds. In abnormal times such as these, when public trust in government runs low, the government is unlikely to find many buyers.

plunged after the unfortunate downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane in January. The authorities vehemently denied any responsibility before admitting to having shot the aircraft down by accident. A month later, the Iranian government first denied that there was a COVID-19 outbreak in Qom, then had to confirm the epidemic’s existence when two people died of the disease. This incident further reduced trust.

MOBILIZE THE PROFESSIONALS The Islamic Republic has actively—and fairly successfully—resisted the campaign of sanctions that the U.S. government calls “maximum pressure.” By relying on market forces and letting the Iranian currency devalue, the government spurred the country’s domestic production to substitute for imports. As a result, even though incomes have fallen, employment has risen continuously since U.S. sanctions went into effect in May 2018. Before the health crisis, the economy was relatively stable, as evidenced by the country’s non-oil GDP, which is its best indicator of economic activity. The Islamic Republic had defied the predictions of regime-change proponents who presaged its

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Women in Rasht, Iran wear face masks as a precaution against the outbreak of Coronavirus. (Getty)

Unemployment has put Rouhani under still more pressure, as his administration must contend with three million to four million unemployed workers, with more likely to lose their jobs if the outbreak lasts much longer. performed admirably, treating people in hospitals in every neighborhood and under very difficult circumstances.

Once the immediate crisis is over—hopefully sooner than later—the Islamic Republic will confront a question that has bedeviled it for years. Will those health professionals, who will have waged this battle and eventually triumphed, have won the right to fully participate in the country’s economic, social, and political life? The conservatives who dominate Iran’s newly elected parliament, and who are poised to win the presidency in 2021, will need to weigh this question carefully. For it is no secret that over the years, in multiple elections, the professional class that makes up the core of the country’s middle class has voted for a vision of Iran’s future that is very different from the one presented by the conservatives.

economic and political collapse.

But the COVID-19 crisis has no silver lining, and the virus is unresponsive to the instruments of power that the Islamic Republic has amassed. Mobilizing large, proregime crowds in city streets may be effective in dispelling regime-change speculations. And a show of military strength is good for keeping calculating enemies at bay.

But neither move is much use against a pathogen. Instead of attracting large crowds to streets, authorities should want people to stay at home. Instead of ideologically committed, loyal cadres, the government needs to mobilize educated professionals.

Iran’s health sector has a distinguished past under the Islamic Republic. Three decades ago, Iranian health professionals fought to reduce infant and maternal mortality in rural areas. Their success in that endeavor helped raise the country’s life expectancy to levels that more developed countries enjoy. The professionals that generation trained are today on the frontlines of the fight to contain the new coronavirus. Though this fight is by no means over, by all accounts the younger generation of health professionals has

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Professionals in health, as in other sectors, wish for an Iran that respects their expertise and values and that remains connected to the outside world. Their communication with the global health community, especially through the World Health Organization, not only is critical to defeating the novel coronavirus in the coming months but has already won international respect for the country.

As conservatives complete their grip on power, they need to decide what political space they will open for the participation of the professional class. The young revolutionaries who fought off the Iraqi invasion in the 1980s, and their progeny who have so far protected Iran from the mayhem that pervades the region, rightly claim recognition for their effort and have been rewarded for it by ascent to positions of power. Will they, in turn, recognize the contribution of the health professionals who are literally saving the nation today and allow them a voice in the nation’s affairs?

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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It Takes a World to End a Pandemic

Scientific Cooperation Knows No Boundaries - Fortunately

by Mahlet Mesfin For perhaps the first time in modern history, the entire, interconnected world is focused on solving a single problem. The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2-, and the disease it causes, COVID19-, have transfixed the global community, as leaders and citizens seek to respond to a

threat whose dimensions are neither entirely certain nor entirely known.

Members of the scientific community around the world are stepping up to find answers to the many questions the pandemic raises. Experts are working together, both inside and outside of laboratories, to provide the best information directly to the public (for example, through

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the Federation of American Scientists’ crowd-sourced website), to coordinate global research priorities, and much more. Arguably, no expert community has a more important role to play in finding the solutions the world needs and communicating trustworthy information to the public.

SHARED THREAT, SHARED RESEARCH

A medical laboratory scientist receives packets of samples to check for coronavirus at the University of Washington Medicine virology lab on March 2020 ,13 in Seattle, Washington. (Getty)

With remarkable speed over these last three months, scientists have uncovered fundamental insights about the novel coronavirus and the interventions that might best address the disease it causes. In December, a group of Chinese researchers published the genetic sequence of the new virus online through the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data. That data allowed the international scientific community to start developing diagnostic tests and explore treatment options. The site now holds the genetic sequence of the virus as found in hundreds of patients across six continents. By mid-January, researchers in Germany, along with collaborators in other European countries and in Hong Kong, published details of a diagnostic test to detect the novel coronavirus. The World Health Organization dispatched kits based on these findings to laboratories worldwide and hosts the protocols from kits from seven countries on its website. BioRxiv and medRxiv, open online repositories of not-yetpublished studies in biology and health sciences, currently host more than 420 papers on the new coronavirus. The WHO has reported more than 390 clinical trials on its international registry platform, and the National Institutes of Health’s first vaccine clinical trial commenced on Monday.

As impressive as this progress is, the world needs more, and quickly. Much remains that scientists don’t fully understand about the novel coronavirus, including its transmission dynamics, its potential to re-emerge in waves like the 1918 Spanish flu, whether it is mutating, where it came from, and how environmental factors, such as temperature, may affect its spread.

About the disease, too, questions remain, including why the response of patient populations to infection may differ and whether those who have been infected develop short- or long-term immunity. Researchers are racing to develop treatment options and tests that are accurate, sensitive, rapid, and locally deployable.

Epidemiologists and social scientists seek to understand which mitigation measures will be the most effective

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The novel coronavirus, SARSCoV2-, and the disease it causes, COVID19-, have transfixed the global community, as leaders and citizens seek to respond to a threat whose dimensions are neither entirely certain nor entirely known. in controlling the spread of the virus; how valuable extreme measures, such as quarantines and travel bans, really are; and what consequences such policies may have on other areas of public health.

In the search for answers to these and other burning questions, every nation has something to give and something to gain. Infectious diseases, it is commonly said, know no borders, and neither does the knowledge needed to fight them. Scientists around the world routinely share information and collaborate across borders. The current pandemic has scientists working together on platforms such as Slack, and using new tools, such as machine learning, to rapidly detect the novel coronavirus in tests that use large amounts data from multiple sources. This outbreak has demonstrated in real time how scientific understanding can indeed be a global public good.

In recent years, geopolitical competition, particularly between China and the United States, has given rise to discomfort in some quarters with the collaborative nature of the scientific enterprise. To the extent that scientific advancements lead to new products and technologies, countries seeking to advance their own national or economic interests tend to view science more through a competitive, rather than cooperative, lens. Drugs and vaccines can generate huge revenues.

But one country’s fight against a fast-moving contagion is inherently linked to that of its neighbours—whether friends or foes—so everyone needs to win the battle.

In a global pandemic, the value of open collaboration is obvious. Its usefulness in confronting other shared threats, such as climate change, should be obvious, as well.

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NOT A TIME FOR RETREAT The COVID19- pandemic comes at a time of rising nationalism around the world. But insularity and xenophobia cannot possibly produce an effective response to this global crisis. The magnitude of this moment calls instead for the sharing of expertise and cooperation among nations and for informed, evidence-based, coordinated responses from national governments.

Fortunately, many institutions across countries and sectors have risen to meet the need. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and Mastercard have dedicated 125$ million to the COVID19Therapeutics Accelerator, which seeks to identify potential treatments, accelerate their development, and prepare to manufacture millions of doses for worldwide use. The WHO is working to finalize a “master protocol� for clinical trials, which will increase the size of the trials by pooling patient groups around the world and thus potentially identifying differences in responses across patient populations. The G7 leaders met on Monday and discussed commitments to research cooperation, among other shared concerns.

Much more remains to be done in order for global cooperation to be effective. For example, at a recent meeting led by the WHO and the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness, more than 300 experts highlighted the need to share materials about the virus and clinical samples as an immediate research action. And calls to harmonize regulations across national and regional bodies have never made more sense, as requiring each country or region to separately approve diagnostics and treatments creates bottlenecks whose detrimental consequences

Tensions between China and the United States further threaten to dampen progress on coronavirus research.

are now abundantly clear. The United States furnished a striking example: the country could not use tests developed elsewhere, such as those from the WHO, because they had not been approved for use in U.S. patients.

In the past, the United States prioritized its global leadership role, including in public health. For example, in 2003, the White House responded to the global HIV/AIDS epidemic by initiating an emergency plan and dedicating more than 80$ billion in funds to the worldwide struggle to contain the disease. The United States led international efforts to counter the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014 and assisted in developing the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But priorities have changed. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has recently convened with its counterparts around the world to discuss COVID19-, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration co-chaired the first global regulatory workshop on COVID19- vaccine development, but the U.S. government has not been a robust participant in other international forums, nor has

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University of the Philippines scientists prepare the COVID19test kit locally developed in their labs on MARCH ,12 2020 in Quezon city, Philippines. (Getty)

Infectious diseases, it is commonly said, know no borders, and neither does the knowledge needed to fight them. in Wuhan), government links are strained, just when engagement could help expand the data and sample sharing needed to address this crisis.

A GLOBAL FOUNDATION South Korea lived through the 2003 SARS outbreak, and its response to the COVID19- pandemic reflects better preparation on account of lessons learned. The country effectively “flattened the curve” of infection such that its health-care system could manage the illness. South Korea’s experience demonstrates the importance of sharing lessons learned—and the fact that the foundation set in good times is most critical in bad times. it modelled an approach that values global engagement or involves the whole of government.

Tensions between China and the United States further threaten to dampen progress on coronavirus research. In recent years, U.S. concerns about Chinese espionage and technology transfer have quelled U.S.Chinese scientific cooperation, as demonstrated by the prosecution or firing of top U.S. academics who allegedly covertly participated in programs to develop China’s scientific enterprise. These tensions also limit high-level engagement, as evidenced by the fact that the OSTP did not include Chinese officials in its discussions with foreign counterparts. In the past, the United States would have used government channels to address its concerns even as it looked for ways to continue working with Chinese scientists on matters of shared priority. The two nations possess the world’s greatest biomedical scientific expertise. But although institutions might still collaborate to combat COVID19(for example, the U.S.-based pharmaceuticals company Gilead is working with Beijing’s China-Japan Friendship Hospital to test an antiviral drug on patients

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The global scientific community entered this crisis with a strong foundation of shared objectives and interconnection—one that scientists have built and maintained through collaborative projects, exchanges, international meetings, and engaged dialogues. These links are always beneficial, but they are crucial in times of crisis. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, recently pointed out that the relationships he has cultivated with Chinese researchers over the years have helped him navigate beyond official channels.

The national and global institutions of today will surely be much changed on the other side of a crisis that is also a harbinger of new contagions to come.

The outbreak underscores the importance of a U.S. policy that recognizes human interconnectedness, shared responsibility, and the understanding that the United States is most powerful when it chooses to lead.

International collaboration in science offers both the best hope for a solution to the current crisis and a model for other institutions to follow in order to build a better and safer shared future.

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China Will Miss American Reporters When They’re Gone The Foreign Press Is Essential to Beijing’s Accountabilityand the Country’s Success 28

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by John Pomfret China’s expulsion of more than a dozen American journalists is being heralded as another step toward a new Cold War. Chinese officials are crowing about sovereignty; the expulsions, by their telling, are merely a proportionate response to moves by the Trump administration to limit to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who can work in the United States for five staterun Chinese news organizations. But the comparison doesn’t hold up: Beijing is effectively clearing out the three best independent news organizations in China, while its media companies in the United States are widely understood to be outlets for propaganda and will continue to spout the party line.

What’s particularly ironic, however, is that while readers in the United States are going to be hurt by China’s decision to purge Americans from the bureaus of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, the biggest losers in this “game,” as a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry called it, will be China and its people. For now, Chinese officials may be content to denounce the “ideological prejudice” of the American media. But China is going to miss those reporters when they’re gone.

A Chinese man wears a protective mask on his chin while reading a Communist Party newspaper outside on March 2020 ,19 in Beijing, China. (Getty)

For now, Chinese officials may be content to denounce the “ideological prejudice” of the American media.

But China is going to miss those reporters when they’re gone.

December, communist authorities initially attempted to silence frontline doctors, preventing them from raising the alarm. Think what could have happened if they had been successful? Western reporters, led by the Times, the Post, and the Journal, helped break the information logjam and held the Chinese government to account. Reporting by the Post’s Anna Fifield early in the pandemic exposed undercounting of the death toll that helped embolden Chinese media to follow suit. And Chris Buckley of the Times set the standard for first-person accounts from the locked-down city of Wuhan. (Buckley is an Australian, but his last by-line in the Times was on February 14.)

FORGET TANK MAN

American reporters have played a key role in telling China’s story and encouraging it to modernize, not just over the past 50 years but over the past 150. Their stories have often threatened top Chinese officials and, since 1949, the elite of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But over the past few decades in particular, China has thrived when it has proved responsive to stories that policymakers might otherwise have ignored, and suffered, often catastrophically, when those developments have been suppressed. Given the tight constraints on Chinese reporters, the foreign press corps has been integral to bringing stories to light. Think of the reporting that has been done by the Times and the Journal on China’s environmental problems. That has been to the clear benefit of the Chinese people. It has also, in a way, been to the benefit of China’s leaders, since their success has depended on their ability to be responsive to national needs and popular demands—needs and demands that they often would have missed without the efforts of American reporters.

As far back as the late nineteenth century, American journalists were at the forefront of China’s quest for modernization. In 1867, Young John Allen, a Methodist missionary from Georgia, founded a Chinese-language monthly called The Globe in Shanghai. From The Globe’s pages, Chinese readers first learned about democracy, socialism, economics, and world affairs. The Globe also led the ultimately successful fight to ban foot-binding.

The novel coronavirus outbreak, like the 2003 SARS outbreak before it, provides an especially stark example of how foreign reporting spurs needed government action. In 2003, a doctor at Beijing’s 301 Hospital provided a Time magazine reporter, Susan Jakes, with a signed statement accusing Chinese authorities of covering up the seriousness of SARS, and only then did China’s government act to deal with it. When the coronavirus outbreak began in

In the 1930s, American reporters led the campaign to get the United States to support China against the depredations of imperial Japan. Japanese agents even tried to have the Shanghai-based newspaper publisher John Benjamin Powell expelled from China—and when that didn’t work, they tried to blow him up with a hand grenade. (After the United States declared war on Japan, they locked him in an

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In the 1930s, China’s communists chose an American reporter, a Missourian named Edgar Snow, in their epic public relations battle against Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Snow was crucial to a communist campaign to transform party leader Mao Zedong from a bandit king into, as Snow put it, a “rather Lincolnesque figure” who “may possibly become a very great man.” It was no coincidence that Mao sat for more interviews with Snow for his blockbuster Red Star Over China than he did for any Chinese writer.

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internment cap, took away his shoes, and amputated all his toes after gangrene set in.) And later, during the Cold War, U.S. journalists such as William Worthy of the Baltimore Afro-American risked jail time in the United States to report from China; the editorial pages of American newspapers advocated for the U.S. government to officially recognize the communist government in Beijing.

After President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, the CCP continued to benefit from U.S. reporting. In fact, most major announcements by the party were done in front of a Western reporter who was often American. From China’s decision to join the World Trade Organization to the fallout of internal CCP struggles, American reporters were often the first to broadcast this information to the world.

American reporters have been pesky, but the service they provided, especially to Chinese people, has been invaluable. Think back over the last several decades about key stories involving China, and practically each time there was an American reporter if not at the center, at least close by. The Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Jeff Widener, an Associated Press photojournalist from Long Beach, California, took the iconic picture of “the tank man,” a lone protester who, following the June 4 crackdown, stopped a line of People’s Liberation Army tanks. The CCP may not have liked the picture, but no image from the calamity better captured its pathos than the futile standoff between man and war machine. Widener’s picture was the starting point of thousands of conversations with Chinese students who came to the United States, often to study science but ultimately learning much, much more.

Then there’s the CCP’s much-vaunted crackdown on corruption under President and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Groundbreaking work by the American New York Times journalists Michael

Forsythe and David Barboza on the fortunes of the families of China’s high and mighty set a new standard for financial forensic journalism. No doubt the details of their reports mortified the CCP writ large, but every individual Chinese official with whom I have spoken has privately acknowledged that these reports constituted a necessary, bracing tonic to a sclerotic political system. That would never have come about had these reporters not been in China.

FIT TO PRINT

In the 1930s, China’s communists chose an American reporter, a Missourian named Edgar Snow, in their epic public relations battle against Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.

I saw how useful American reporters could be to China numerous times when I reported there in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but one story will suffice. In 2000, I was part of a team of reporters from The Washington Post who exposed ethically questionable research activities by Harvard University’s School of Public Health in central China. The stories revealed that in the mid1990-s, Harvard researchers had gone to China’s countryside, offered Chinese farmers health check-ups that were never provided, and drawn blood in an effort to find a biotech breakthrough to treat asthma. The researchers neither explained the purpose of the research

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A video journalist (R) is being pulled during a protest in Causeway Bay district in Hong Kong on September ,8 2019. (Getty)

Under Xi, the Chinese political system is becoming ever more closed—making the service provided by the foreign press corps even more valuable. treasured by those high ranking enough to gain access to it. A declassified version of this compendium, Cankao Xiaoxi, has the largest circulation of any newspaper in China.

In a closed system such as China’s, these reports constitute a key source of news and perspective. In an environment where all the news must fit into a narrative set by the Ministry of Propaganda, alternative facts are in scant supply and thus uniquely valuable. That’s what foreign reporters provide the Chinese government; this service will suffer when Beijing nixes the American contribution to that effort.

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

nor got the necessary consent.

After one reporting trip, before the story had been published, an official from the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called me in to ask why I had travelled to Anhui Province. She was worried I had gone there to gather evidence on forced abortions as part of a story on China’s one-child policy. When I told her I was working on the Harvard case, she tipped her head and said: “You mean you’re writing something on behalf of the Chinese people?” (In fact, I told her, “most of the reporting we do in China is on behalf of the Chinese people.”) China’s official Xinhua News Agency followed the Post’s report with stories of its own. And in 2002, Harvard President Larry Summers, during a speech at Beijing University, issued a public apology for the actions of Harvard researchers.

This gets at another key role played by foreign media in China. For decades, foreign reporters have served as a pipeline for information that normally would not make it into the Chinese system. Each day, the Communist Party publishes a compendium of reports about China in foreign publications. This compendium is classified, and it is also

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Under Xi, the Chinese political system is becoming ever more closed—making the service provided by the foreign press corps even more valuable. Xi’s minions have squeezed many avenues of information in their efforts to turn China into an increasingly totalitarian society. They have tightened controls on nongovernmental organizations, thrown human rights lawyers in jail, and replaced the editors of once crusading Chinese newspapers such as Southern Weekend with party hacks. Under such pressure, it is even more difficult for CCP officials to report bad news to Beijing.

In November, The New York Times published a series of stories based on leaked CCP documents concerning the mass incarceration of more than one million Uighurs in northwestern China. The source of the leak is almost as fascinating as the content: “a member of the Chinese political establishment.” That suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than was previously known. Wouldn’t China’s leadership want to know that? To be sure, it’s an inconvenient truth, but it’s an important one. And the chances that someone will report and write a similar story become smaller with every foreign journalist expelled.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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NHS Doctors Confront Difficult Choices to Make Room for Coronavirus Patients Nonemergency and Cancer Surgeries Cancelled as Number of Seriously Ill Patients with Virus Increases

by Yasmine El-Geressi All over the UK, patients are finding their nonemergency surgical appointments canceled as hospitals prepare for a spike in coronavirus cases to ration much-needed personal protective equipment, keep hospital beds open, and to shield patients from the virus. One senior official told the Guardian that hospital trusts across England were moving rapidly to “a footing unlike anything ever seen in peacetime�.

Earlier this month hospitals in England have were told to

postpone all elective operations from 15 April at the latest, for a period of at least three months, in a striking sign of how the coronavirus outbreak is set to strain vital services in the UK. The move left millions of patients waiting for knee and hip replacements, cataract surgery and hernia repairs facing delays to their treatment.

Then this week, an NHS hospital trust became the first in the country to announce the postponement of all routine cancer surgery and chemotherapy due to a surge in coronavirus patients. It comes after NHS hospitals were advised to ration cancer services

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to patients with the highest chance of survival in the event of a major coronavirus outbreak. Doctors say treatment changes have to be weighed carefully in close consultation with patients. Some calls are relatively straightforward. For example, surgeries can be delayed for some thyroid and early-stage prostate cancers, which have high survival rates, but not for pancreatic cancer, which is much more deadly. For patients with aggressive leukemia and lymphoma, treatment usually can’t be postponed. Karol Sikora, chief medical officer at independent provider Rutherford Health told the Health Service Journal: “Nobody knows how bad it’s going to get — that’s the trouble. The danger is… if staff are taken away [from cancer treatments] to help patients in ICU on ventilations. Do you keep a [patient] on a vent with 10 per cent chance of survival and throw cancer patients under the bus?”

Many outpatient clinics will be scaled back, held by telephone or video instead or scrapped altogether, affecting many of the 8 million patients who attend them every month. In some hospitals, A&E doctors and nurses ¬¬will be redeployed to treat

For millions of patients, the canceled appointments has meant rescheduling long-anticipated and life-changing surgeries, leaving them in pain and fear not knowing when they will receive the care they need. virus and 5 per cent of those people need an intensive care bed, that’s over 150,000 people who will need intensive care and we only have 4,000 beds,” he told C4 News on Thursday.

The emergency policy to postpone hundreds of thousands of non-urgent operations and treatments carried out in England each month, in addition, to immediately sending hospital patients who are medically fit home, will free a third of the 100,000 hospital beds, says NHS England. Operating theatres where these procedures are normally carried out are equipped with oxygen supplies, meaning they «can be turned into wards» for coronavirus patients. Hospital bosses said the unprecedented changes would disappoint patients but were needed, given the scale of the threat.

Prof Steve Field, the chair of the board of the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, which runs the city’s New Cross hospital, told the Guardian: “Stopping elective operations has helped us to more than double the number of ventilators we have to 70. We are also reorganising our acute medical wards to cope with patients who have coronavirus, and getting doctors and nurses to work across specialities.”

A sign directs patients towards an NHS 111 Coronavirus (COVID19-) Pod, where people who believe they may be suffering from the virus can attend and speak to doctors, is seen outside University College Hospital in London on March 2020 ,5.

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coronavirus patients, with orthopaedic staff - who usually deal with conditions affecting bones and joints such as broken limbs - given extra training to take on their roles in the emergency department.

Overall, the strain on capacity from the epidemic is likely to be most keenly felt in intensive care units. NHS England figures published on Thursday indicate that in January there were 4,123 adult critical care beds available with 3,423 occupied — an occupancy rate of 83 per cent. Although estimates of the number of intensive care beds that could be needed vary, most projections are way above what could be available and leaders including former health secretary Jeremy Hunt have suggested the NHS may be unable to cope. “If 5 per cent of the population get the

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While no-one can argue the necessity of this move, elective surgery doesn’t mean optional surgery and what is truly nonurgent is not always so obvious. For millions of patients, the canceled appointments has meant rescheduling long-anticipated and life-changing surgeries, leaving them in pain and fear not knowing when they will receive the care they need. Earlier this week Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust wrote to a patient to explain a delay to potentially life-saving surgery because it was “expecting all non-urgent surgeries to be cancelled due to the current crisis”.

The letter said: “Due to the ever-changing state of Covid19- we have just been informed that we cannot book any surgeries later than three weeks from now and there were no slots with the surgeon available before then.”

And at some point, depending on how long the coronavirus outbreak lasts, some non-urgent surgeries could very well become urgent, particularly as when hospitals do have capacity again, they will have a backlog of postponed surgeries to go through.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1793- March - 27/03/2020

Yesterday’s Paper: Is Picasso Old News?

www.majalla.com

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Yesterday’s Paper: Is Picasso Old News?

The Royal Academy in London is the Scene for a Vast Retrospective of Picasso’s Work Focusing on his Use of Paper

by Bryn Haworth In his twenties, John Constable, the great English landscape painter, fell in love with a woman called Maria Bicknell whom he had known since she was the age of twelve. They exchanged letters that became increasingly passionate, but it was not to be an easy courtship, owing to the opposition of her family. For years her grandfather held out against the match, and Constable was forced to stalk his beloved, and to sneak ever more candid letters past the enemy.

In a view he painted often, the one from his upstairs window in East Bergholt House, we can see amid the green – the same green Constable’s contemporaries were to find so unpleasant – and way off across the fields, the rectory where Maria stayed when visiting her grandfather. It is easy to imagine that the besotted Constable painted the distant house in a swoon of bitter-sweet melancholy, maybe even a mood of veneration. You could call it a kind of longdistance portraiture, with the house standing in for a model one remembers with fervour, but whose face one is only permitted to see in the mind’s eye.

The art critic Alastair Sooke went further than this. During a bicycle ride around the artist’s haunts, he remarked of the painting that ‘the space between them [Constable’s house and the rector’s] is heavy with symbolic longing. There’s something visible, but just out of reach.’

Now, I haven’t seen all the examples of Constable’s treatment of this view. Some may well be as anguished as a

few of his much later paintings, after Maria (who eventually became his wife) had died, leaving him bereft and caring for seven children, but the example that Sooke was talking about is a fairly idyllic scene, unremarkable in its emotion. There is no hint of frenzy in its brushstrokes, no trace of violent

Stravinsky, in all his awkwardness (1917)

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A bewildering scene (1935)

impasto, or the cut and thrust of a palette knife. One has to ask, therefore, just how heavy is this space with ‘symbolic longing’? If one was unaware of the artist’s predicament concerning the tiny reddish house on the horizon, would the intervening space be charged with any kind of emotion, apart from contentment?

Probably not. Instead, what would have been viewed by his fellow artists at the Academy as just another ‘green thing’ stands before us, now, as inoffensively pleasant, with no more suggestion of erotic charge or thwarted desire than if it had been painted after the Constables were united in matrimony. Mr Sooke was projecting feelings (about which he had read) back into the picture, under a romantic impulse all his own, simply because whether or not they were the artist’s feelings is impossible to prove.

This all sounds a million miles away from the Royal Academy’s latest show on the greatest of all modern artists, called simply ‘Picasso and Paper.’ In the matter of legibility, the old Cubist is at the opposite extreme from the old romantic. Yet, regardless of their difficulty, we always try to read pictures and divine their meaning, some because they seem too simple, others because they appear complicated, in order to find something to say. In order to render Constable more exciting than he really is, and prove his work does not belong on a chocolate box, we project emotions into some of

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Just like Einstein, Picasso is supposed to be difficult. With life, so with Picasso, no one ever said it would be easy. his canvases that have no congruity with his subject matter.

If that fails to impress, we remind people how the French liked him, so he can’t possibly be dull. The only ‘longing’ in this essentially composed, tranquil landscape is ours – for the scene to be more interesting than it is.

With Picasso, the opposite seems to apply: one assumes there is something difficult about him, something that will require explanation, and that he is ‘interesting’ as a matter of course. I first came to him, decades ago, with the assumption that he would be opaque. For my sins, I have approached Cubism as many times as I’ve had a stab at comprehending the theory of relativity, and emerged none the wiser from both, yet without any resentment over wasted effort because, just like Einstein, Picasso is supposed to be difficult. With

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life, so with Picasso, no one ever said it would be easy. Okay, there are the blue and the rose periods, and the occasional brief episode where he reverts to a simple, naturalistic style, like the beautiful line drawing portraits of Stravinsky and his milieu displayed in this exhibition.

But these are blips. After the arrival of his demoiselles from Avignon, a large amount of the point of what he’s doing is lost on me.

Of course, I’m a grown-up – these days, a very grown up – and I can take it. I can live with the disarranged faces, the peculiar anatomies, the repeating minotaur motif, the rapes and the disembowelled horses. But with a picture like La Minotauromachie (1935), I’m still as baffled by its meaning as I ever was. Instead of comprehension, I’m left only with a sense of the artist’s virtuosity.

Oddly enough, it’s the same quality I detect when looking at the smirking, slightly sexless figures in Leonardo’s pictures.

The old master patented that smirk and it has haunted art historians ever since, demanding an explanation. It is the smirk of high art as in-joke, sealed off from interpretation, laughing at a private thought. This limitless opacity, this sense of something forever illegible, is hard to find in any other Renaissance painter. There’s nothing opaque about Michelangelo’s Moses. Even less about Botticelli’s Venus.

In Picasso’s case, he seems to have picked up the bad habit from Braque, because before his Cubist period the Spaniard was perfectly legible. Once their experiments were in full swing, whether in what the art historians call the analytic or the synthetic phases of the style, both the Cubists disappeared from view behind a curtain of difficulty, the same curtain the demoiselles had hidden behind for so long. The art lover is confronted by what Tim Hilton (of whom more later) once called the ‘haughty privacy of Cubism.’

I say all this as a huge admirer of the Cubist thing. I love the nicotine-stained collapse of its still life scenes, the strange pyramidal structures, the browns and ochres and disembodied scraps of lettering. I love all that, yet I am dubious (and this doesn’t apply in Einstein’s case) when it comes to the theory. Soon after leaving Braque and taking up with the ballet, Picasso reverted, jarringly, to a rather prissy style. It was almost as if the strain of all that fearless experimentalism had exhausted him. The self-styled mountaineer and Wright brother, now free of his mountaineering, aviator chum, craved the relief of less arduous terrain.

There, that’s better. No self-denying ordinances here.

Instead, a Pegasus that could have been painted by a prepubescent boy, and a joyous return to the conviviality of his circus performers, the ones he’d been painting before he encountered the African masks, long before he heard of Braque.

Ballet, as it turned out, was really only a blip. Picasso was a modern artist; there was to be no turning back, and modern art meant illegibility. Yet his illegibility in the wake of Cubism is not the same. With the brown studies of Braque and Picasso, it is the attempt to see how they travelled around the object or face, the effort to retrace their movements, that frustrates. One feels it would have been simpler if they’d gone all the way and dissolved every last vestige of representation. Braque is braver in this respect; it is Picasso who clings to the likenesses of his sitters, who first throws in a bit of sentiment in the inscription MA JOLIE, or who lets a sense of the ridiculous creep past the high artistic censor in his head when he depicts a Man Smoking a Pipe.

After the brief escape into the realm of Diaghilev (excuse

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A very brown thing (12-1911)

guitars, so many bullfights, it all gets a little bit wearisome after a while, but there is something else more specific behind this engraving – the series of bullfight engravings by his illustrious compatriot, Francisco Goya. That ladder in the left of the picture, for example, seems to be a recollection of the ladder in one of Goya’s prints, also on the left of the design.

Drop curtain for production of the ballet Parade (1917)

Goya’s depiction of the coup de grâce, with )1816( ladder

for another such pipe smoker, this time a ‘costume’), Picasso came up with the style one associates with him, a trick of representing the world, but taking Cubist liberties with that representation. This is where we see the faintly ridiculous, which appeared in the pipe smoker, triumph in the form of caricature.

As far as the rarefied air of the heights of style went, this was an admission of defeat. Whereas the opacity of Cubism was a question of almost indiscernible method, the new opacity was the development of a kind of idiolect, a hermetic insistence on Picasso’s personal mythology which disappoints, I think, even at its most virtuosic, because it is ultimately illegible. One sees this in the disarranged faces, the peculiar anatomies, of the endless portraits and nudes. It’s also there in the minotaur motif, the rapes and the disembowelled horses, of what we might call his Arcadian theme.

A picture like La Minotauromachie, for instance, baffles in a different way to Cubism. The title explains something of the origin of the motifs. Picasso never lets us forget he’s Spanish, after all. If he’d been a Scot, his work would have abounded with bagpipes and tartan. There are so many

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The strange title, La Minotauromachie, is a kind of portmanteau, a combination of tauromachy with the Minotaur of Crete that Picasso portrayed in all manner of scenes, some erotic, others violent. The legibility, however, ends there. We can find the figure of the girl elsewhere in Picasso’s work, and her lamp reappears (for instance, in Guernica, along with the horse and the bull), but what these have to do with the slain female matador borne on the horse’s back, or the clutching stride of the labyrinthdweller, is anyone’s guess. Dare we assume this is all some very fraught inner landscape. It certainly seems fraught, in a way that Constable’s supposed landscape of yearning did not. But if so, what is the cause, and how does the theatre of this bullfight make any sense? The Minotaur is usually a stand-in for the artist himself. Are we to assume he has killed the matador? The young girl who steadfastly shines a light seems to be opposing his onslaught, but we have no clue as to why she is able to do this. Meanwhile, it is unclear why the man to the left is scrabbling up the ladder, or down it.

Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, remarked that ‘apparently the scene is a moral melodramatic charade of the soul, though probably of so highly intuitive a character that Picasso himself could not or would not explain it in words.’ This seems like a very measured response to what is, contrary to the Goya work in its DNA, an illegible picture. Sadly, the entire story of Picasso/Minotaur is equally hard to read. He can be seen lounging next to sinuous naked ladies with a glass of wine in his hand, or assaulting a naked woman as she sleeps, but he can also be blind and led by a girl with a bouquet of flowers past fishermen. He has innumerable adventures, this halfman-half-beast, but we are really none the wiser as to why.

Opacity is all, the smirk of the in-joke. With Picasso, the motivation is different to the old master’s. He shows no interest in the religious or mystic possibilities of the opaque.

Instead, we get the imprimatur of high art in a secular age, or possibly a pagan one. Picasso churned out works that fit the opaque category for decades, perhaps as a constraint on his other main impulse, the urge to caricature. It’s hard to take the weirdest of his nudes seriously, for example, rather than accepting them as a form of sport with the female form, as if beyond his lust the Minotaur found all those Theban virgins funny to look at. When he manages to hide his smirk behind his hand, Picasso resorts not to fine painting, but to opacity.

It’s his way of pretending to be deeper than he really is, just as surely as Leonardo’s smirk could be a way of pretending

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to be holier than thou.

This opacity really came home to roost in Guernica. It was the culmination of a string of Minotaur and animal-themed pictures that Tim Hilton, art critic from the seventies, preferred to the eventual product. It is probably the single most well-known piece that Picasso ever did. Thanks to Dora Maar, we know how it developed, along with the changes – notably the decision not to include a defiant fist – and, thanks to the Royal Academy, we can also see its origins in sketches, such as this one of a horse in agony.

Guernica is his most famous image, yet is it a successful one? A form of triptych, it sought to respond to the bombing of the defenceless citizens of a Basque town by the Germans, a way of demoralising the defenders of the Republic against Franco’s rebellion. Picasso had read about the incident in a newspaper report by George Steer, which first appeared in the The Times and was reprinted in L’Humanité. For the artist, whose friends commented on his remarkable lack of interest in politics up until that period, it was a turning point.

Before setting to work on the massive mural, he attacked Franco in a series of etchings intended to be propagandist postcards, depicting the fascist leader as a polyp, a louse, possibly a turd, one minute genuflecting in front of – well, what exactly? – surrounded by barbed wire, then doing battle

Horse in agony

with a bull, then masquerading as a richly-attired Spanish lady complete with fan.

The general is a grotesque caricature of the kind high art could not, according to Hilton, hope to encompass, and by the end of the series Picasso was already etching pictures that were closer to his vocation: the figure of Franco could still be seen, cavorting around, but in some ‘postcards’ he is replaced by tragic images of war that resemble the animals and women in Guernica.

The move in the etchings is essentially as I have already described, though: from caricature to opacity. The same applies to the finished mural, though if anything the move is incomplete, so there is something almost insultingly caricatured in the figures of the women to the right, while the horse, the bull, the broken statue of the soldier all carry the burden of a personal code. It is easy to see, on a visceral level, that the figures are tortured and afflicted as all victims of war must be. One just, inevitably, wonders why they are assembled here, on this ambiguous set, and why the light bulb (possibly a pun involving the Spanish word bombilla?), and why the appearance of newsprint in the hide of the agonised horse? In striving to make a political statement, the very private high priest of modern art had to find a language that could be understood on the streets, in the popular press, among his persecuted people. This probably wasn’t possible any longer. The penurious bohemian turned genius of the age might have toyed with the idea of a return, however briefly, to the simpler messages of his blue period, rather in the way he had consciously abandoned the esoteric to illustrate a ballet. But he resisted, and the opacity of Guernica, with its very private symbolism, was the result.

This, in words far more eloquent than mine, was Tim Hilton’s assessment: ‘it is a vague painting. Nobody knowns what is going on in it, and it is the merest literary double-talk to maintain that this is what gives it universal application. The vagueness is iconographic: there is no possible reading for the bull,

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Franco in three of his myriad guises (1937)

Picasso never lets us forget he’s Spanish, after all. If he’d been a Scot, his work would have abounded with bagpipes and tartan. There are so many guitars, so many bullfights, it all gets a little bit wearisome after a while the dominant figure, because it is always possible the bull might stand for something else. But it is also pictorial: why should we have to decide whether the light in this barn is electric or supernatural?... Guernica is the opposite of a breakthrough. It does not have a true concinnity of artistic intention, but broods competently on its political and oldmaster assumptions. The best things about Guernica are its first impulses, the gesso drawings and certain subsequent spin-offs – though some of those, like the too-celebrated Weeping Woman, protest too much.’

The second set of etchings: Franco begins to yield space to Guernica-like )1937( images

Who knows, maybe the picture has endured longer because of its difficulty. Back in the seventies when Hilton was writing about this, he admired the drawings, the earlier efforts, apparently convinced that Picasso had worked it up too much from these promising beginnings. The Academy’s exhibits offer ample opportunity to judge what was gained and what was lost.

But something of what Hilton himself represents has, in turn, been lost to us as viewers, and the loss may be Picasso’s too. Throughout his little book, Hilton is scathing about the

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inevitable flops in the great artist’s long career. He dislikes the ceramics in particular, witheringly referring to them as beneath the attention of a great artist and the place where his Arcadian theme ‘came to its inglorious end.’ Where does he get this somewhat magisterial view from? It’s hard to remember, in an age when art has so completely gone off the rails, that there was a sense back then of a linear progression.

Take Hilton’s description of what happened to Picasso when he dabbled in the ballet: ‘various things – the war, Braque’s departure, the sheer impossibility of maintaining Cubism on a high level – combined now to slacken Picasso’s impulse to make progressive art.’

Is it just me, or doesn’t that reference to ‘progressive art’ sound oddly old-fashioned, quaint almost, from the vantage of an art world frequented by people like Jeff Koons? In the present situation, judged by Hilton now, we would all look

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like slackers. Is it possible there are artists in Germany who still think like this? There are none here, that’s for sure, nor are you likely to find them in New York or Paris.

Here are two more assertions from Hilton: ‘…unfortunately or not, there is never any room for humour on the highest levels of art, nor for parody.’

And again, ‘...the wish to shock … is clearly a miserable artistic ambition.’

Fifty years on, these fossilised views sound quaint beyond belief. It has taken half a century for art to capitulate, utterly, to the temptation that seems to haunt Picasso’s worst work, the descent into caricature or in-joke. The idea of progress is gone. In its place is the hollow laughter of a banana stuck to a gallery wall, or a graffito translated to a big auction house that shreds itself. Look at the ceramics and perhaps the quaint art critic was right: Picasso was heading that way. But what Hilton mistook for the old boy’s senility, was in fact a premonition of things to come.

One is bound to ask, given the manifold disappointments that this great modern artist served up on his very own ceramic plates, whether anyone actually likes Pablo Picasso anymore. Ask this question of an expert in the auction houses and, if they spare you the fancy talk, they will simply quote the prices back at you. Take this delicate, rather sparse

landscape, which in all probability took him just under ten minutes to paint:

Very expensive daub (1963)

Landscapes were really not Picasso’s forte. He was far happier holed up in his studio where his latest model could disrobe, though with a piercing stare like his, he could probably have saved her the trouble. This landscape is exceptionally poor. It is what the art connoisseurs know, technically, as a daub, yet it is on sale at Christie’s for between 2,500,000 and 3,500,000 pounds.

So yes, miraculously, people still like him, as an investment. It really doesn’t matter much what he did in his ‘progressive’ phase, as no one believes in artistic progress anyway. Besides, even Picasso’s senility is an improvement on the collective senility that is contemporary art. The fact

Nonetheless, in terms of any political message left in Guernica, this superimposition of Pollock was the equivalent of the Spanish state’s Pact of Forgetting. It finally nullified what was already a compromised attempt at political statement and commemoration.

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Picasso struggling through a nasty bout of Pollock

Guernica light bulb

is, we can’t really see him anymore, so many dejected installations and Rauschenberg clutters down the line, so many lights wittily turning on and off. The lineage has been erased. The line of contact that he held onto, with classical myth in his Arcadian pictures, with masters like Rembrandt in the Vollard Suite, has snapped.

After visiting the Academy, I went off to find the small Sprovieri Gallery nearby. It was not easy to locate, but there – near David Bowie’s telephone kiosk, the one on the cover of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ – I eventually tracked down a contemporary version of Guernica. At the top of a narrow stairway, partially obscured by a pillar, hung on a stark white wall, was a different Guernica, black and white like the original, but barely discernible (i.e., even more illegible) beneath a superimposed Jackson Pollock.

In the leaflet that went with the work I found a statement by the artistic group responsible, Art & Language, extracted from an essay called, appropriately enough, Making Meaningless: ‘For us, Conceptual Art was never a mature professional style but a black box (or a black box in a black box); what is sometimes called “a genuine historical moment” changing forever what happened “next”. What happened in that moment inaugurated a process and a project. And it was given to this project to recognise that there continue to be baffling relations between text, pictures and painting, and that the expulsion of the two latter from the purview of the artist is a cheap closure which fails to recognise the constructedness [sic] of the world… Art & Language’s practice has been project-like and essay-like. And this entails that it must be a critical practice… a collaborative practice. Work,

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in the sense of non-wordy action and its consequences, is embedded and then re-embedded in conversation, until the edges of what is work and what isn’t work vanish and ten reappear in different places.’

Understandably, I was none the wiser after reading this, so I sought further guidance from Simone Acca at the gallery, who kindly informed me in an email: ‘The reason behind the choice of Picasso’s Guernica and Pollock’s style lives in the possibility to create, embodying the two, a monstrous clash of two culturally and artistically asymptotic things. The main theme remains that of “disguise”: what do we lose of Guernica when it is restaged as a Pollock, and what do we lose of Pollock when his work is restaged as Guernica?’

I wrote back to say I reckoned Picasso had definitely come off worse from the encounter, but when I looked at my photo, taken at an angle to avoid the pillar, I could see more of his work than I’d noticed at the time.

Nonetheless, in terms of any political message left in Guernica, this superimposition of Pollock was the equivalent of the Spanish state’s Pact of Forgetting. It finally nullified what was already a compromised attempt at political statement and commemoration. But who, in all honesty, could care less about a dated lament over a forgotten war? And so what if Pollock effortlessly won the day? He only did so at the expense of losing his own meaning too.

‘Picasso and Paper’ is at the Royal Academy until 13 April 2020

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Is Intermittent Fasting Safe for Older Adults?

Learn the Risks Before Diving into this Experimental Eating Style 44

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While intermittent fasting shows promise, we don›t have solid evidence about the benefits or how fasting might affect older adults. you eat - and sometimes both. There are several approaches.

In alternate-day fasting, you eat normally every other day. On days in between, you eat just %25 of your daily calorie needs, in one meal.

So if you consume 1,800 calories on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you›d eat a -450calorie meal (and nothing else) on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

In the 5:2 approach, you eat normally for five days in a row; then for two days in a row, you eat just 400 to 500 calories per day.

In the 16:8 approach, each day is the same: you fast 16 hours in a row, and then eat normally within an eight-hour period, like between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

?WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS

by Harvard Health Letter

The benefits of intermittent fasting seem to affect many aspects of health. These effects could theoretically result from the flipping of a metabolic switch.

Intermittent fasting is a popular eating strategy being studied in labs and practiced in kitchens across the world. And it›s more than a fad.

Restricting your calories or mealtimes may have the potential for many benefits, such as weight loss and reduced risk of various diseases. We don›t have much evidence, however, about intermittent fasting›s effect on the health of older adults.

«Fasting leads to lower levels of glucose [blood sugar]. In response, the body uses fat instead of glucose as a source of energy, after turning the fat into ketones,» explains registered dietitian Kathy McManus, director of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women›s Hospital. This shift from glucose to ketones as a source of energy also changes body chemistry in healthy ways.

WHAT IS INTERMITTENT FASTING

Regular fasting in animals is associated not only with weight loss but also with lower blood pressure and heart rate, reduced insulin

Intermittent fasting restricts when or how much

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resistance, lower «bad» LDL cholesterol levels, higher «good» HDL cholesterol levels, and less inflammation. Some studies also have found improved memory.

Intermittent fasting is also associated with a longer life span, at least in animals. Why? Recent Harvard research suggests that intermittent fasting may allow the energy-producing engines (mitochondria) of each cell to produce energy more efficiently and remain in a more youthful state.

«By eating in the day, you›re not challenging the mitochondria at night, when they›re supposed to be doing other things,» explains Dr. William Mair, a researcher and associate professor of genetics and complex diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. «But we have many unanswered questions.»

POTENTIAL RISKS While intermittent fasting shows promise, we don›t have solid evidence about the benefits or how fasting might affect older adults. Human studies have looked mostly at small groups of young or middle-aged adults, for only short periods of time.

But we do know intermittent fasting could be risky in some cases. «If you›re already marginal

Restricting your calories or mealtimes may have the potential for many benefits, such as weight loss and reduced risk of various diseases.

as far as body weight goes, I›d be concerned that you›d lose too much weight, which can affect your bones, overall immune system, and energy level,» McManus says.

Dr. Suzanne Salamon, associate chief of gerontology at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, expresses another concern: «People who need to take their medications with food - to avoid nausea or stomach irritation - may not do well with fasting.

Also, people who take heart or blood pressure medications may be more likely to suffer dangerous imbalances in potassium and sodium when they›re fasting.»

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Intermittent fasting may also be harmful if you have diabetes and need food at certain times or take medication that affects your blood sugar.

?STILL WANT TO TRY IT If you›re thinking of trying intermittent fasting, especially if you already have health conditions such as diabetes or heart disease, talk to your physician.

McManus advises easing into the diet. «Slowly reduce the time window for eating, over a period of several months,» she advises.

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Also: continue your medication regimen as recommended by your doctor. «Taking medications doesn›t break the fast, and neither does having calorie-free drinks like water or black coffee,» says Dr. Alexander Soukas, an endocrinologist and molecular geneticist with Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

What if you do need food with medication?

«Perhaps you can try a modified fast. I suspect it would still do a lot of good for people who are overweight,» Dr. Salamon says. «Just work with your doctor on a plan that will benefit your health without risking it.»

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Get Your Museum Fix Here Six Google Art Discoveries For Your Coronavirus Quarantine

by Jessica Gelt Coronavirus closures may mean months could pass before you can stand in front of a

museum masterpiece again. If you have time on your hands and a deep need for cultural sustenance and succor, be it for yourself or your children, it’s time to get familiar with a

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Thank Google not only for all of those interactive exhibitions but also for Art Zoom videos that play like mini documentaries, zeroed in on tiny details of famous canvases and narrated by famous musicians including Jarvis Cocker and Maggie Rogers. website on your laptop or desktop, but the project is at its immersive best when engaged via the Google Arts & Culture app, which you can download for free on your smartphone or tablet. The great joy is its ability to transport you into the textural world of a piece of art.

Zoom into brushstrokes, skate across oceans of color or a tap on a screen and explore the universe contained in the blue-green pigment of a single painted eye.

Images are accompanied by explanatory text, and you can spend days diving into the collection of any given partner institution.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is pictured here on April 2016 ,28. (Dreamstime/ TNS)

resource so obvious it’s not: Google Arts & Culture.

This Google project launched nearly a decade ago, and while you likely were forgetting about it, the platform expanded exponentially.

It now features thousands of high-resolution images from more than 1,200 museums globally, including the National Gallery in London, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

You can visit Google Arts & Culture as a

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Here we’ve rounded up some of our favorite virtual exhibits on the platform. It’s also worth noting that the websites of local institutions like the Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County promise robust online options to help us in our coming weeks of collective isolation.

But for now, here are six ways to let Google be your global museum.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: Take a virtual trip to the Netherlands and this museum, which offers one of 17 collections of Van Gogh paintings in the Google project.

You can see amazingly detailed images of more than 160 artworks, including sunflowers, self-portraits and his famous “The Bedroom.”

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You also can click into the story, “Which Books Did Vincent Van Gogh Read?” Scroll through Van Gogh paintings inspired by the literature he favored, including “The Vicarage at Nuenen,” which captures the moody, windswept home where Van Gogh’s parents lived and where the young painter first grew to love the moralistic tales of Charles Dickens.

Uffizi Galleries, Florence: Take a virtual tour of one of Italy’s most famous museums, featuring up-close looks at the museum’s interiors and the stunning masterpieces on its walls, including Michelangelo’s “Doni Tondo” and Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”

(The magnification of the latter is so powerful, you can see cracks in the paint of her eyelids.)

Wander placid hallways and corridors, and gaze out a window at the Ponte Vecchio bridge, which straddles the picturesque Arno River.

Guggenheim Bilbao Museum: Get up-close and personal with a selection of modernist triumphs inside the Frank Gehry-designed landmark in Spain. “Masterpieces From the Collection” has art from the mid20-th century to the present: Mark Rothko, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yves Klein and Willem de Kooning, revealed in luminous layers.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington: You can take a digital walk

If you have time on your hands and a deep need for cultural sustenance and succor, be it for yourself or your children, it’s time to get familiar with a resource so obvious it’s not: Google Arts & Culture.

through “African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era and Beyond,” featuring work by black artists from the 1920s through the 2000s. This exhibition explores the Harlem-based portrait photography of James VanDerZee, the lush brushstrokes of James A. Porter and the expressionistic folk art of William Henry Johnson, as well as a trove of others works relating to race, identity, politics, culture and family.

Museo Frida Kahlo, Mexico City: “Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Frida Kahlo’s Wardrobe” is an intimate study of the fascinating, highly stylized clothing and

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A man standing in front of the painting «Verkündigung an Maria» uses a mobile device to watch a detail of the art work on a high resolution photograph on September 2018 ,11 at the Bode museum in Berlin.

- Berlin›s State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) and Google Arts & Culture announced to develop their cooperation in order to make accessible the museums› collections to a wider public. (Getty)

accessories that defined the look of the famous Mexican painter. Kahlo’s life was forever altered by a bus accident that displaced three vertebrae and left her in pain for the rest of her life. Crutches, elaborate leather corsets, a prosthetic leg in a gorgeous red-leather boot embroidered with silk thread — they’re all on digital view, as are a slew of Kahlo’s traditional Mexican dresses. Just as Google’s zoom feature provides a revelatory look at paintings, the blown-up photography here can reveal, say, the tiniest beads adorning a very Frida blouse. It feels like an in-person experience.

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Art Zoom: Thank Google not only for all of those interactive exhibitions but also for Art Zoom videos that play like mini documentaries, zeroed in on tiny details of famous canvases and narrated by famous musicians including Jarvis Cocker and Maggie Rogers. A prime example: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Tower of Babel” as examined by Feist. The Canadian singer-songwriter takes us inside her interpretation of one of Bruegel’s most famous works, which she notes stands 5 feet, 1 inch high — almost as tall as the singer herself.

Originally published in the LA Times

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Bill Gates: The Billionaire who invests his Fortune to Help Fight Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease

by Moncef al-Mazghany -1 More than Just a Businessman Everyone knows who Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft is. However, Gates is more than just a businessman, he’s also a programmer, a computer scientist, a humanitarian, an inventor, a bridge player, an investor, an actor, a husband, a father and one of the world’s richest men.

-2 Early Life Bill Gates was born to a rich family on Friday October 1955 ,28 in Seattle, Washington, USA. His father, William Henry Gates the Second, was a business lawyer and his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a general manager of several companies and banks.

-3 Early Love For Computers In 1968 at the age of 13, Gates enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school in Seattle. It was there where he discovered his love for computer programming and with his childhood friend, Paul Allen; he wrote his first programme, which was a game of tic-tactoe. From there, he and Allen founded a school club called the Lakeside Programmers Group. The club was small, but it would go on to have a big impact in the tech industry, as most of its members became head programmers for influential start-ups and companies.

-4 University and Programming In 1973, the -18year-old Gates enrolled at Harvard University where he met with Steve Ballmer, the future CEO of Microsoft. However, Gates’ time at

Harvard was short-lived as he soon dropped out to focus on honing his computer programming skills.

-5 Founding Microsoft Shortly after dropping out, Gates and Allen founded Microsoft on April 1975 ,4. Microsoft’s earliest breakthrough was a programming language called the Microsoft BASIC, which was used, in a number of home computers such as the Commodore 64, the IBM PC and even the Apple II. In 1984, Microsoft created its own home computer system the MSX-DOS that was its own version of the DOS operating system. Then, on November 1985 ,20 Microsoft released the first version of its Windows operating system the Windows 1.0. The operating system would prove to be successful, as it became a household name in most homes, schools and offices.

Windows 98, XP and 8 were all very popular in the PC market and this popularity continues to this day with Windows 10. Since the 90s, Windows PCs have dominated the market and their place at the top of the pyramid is still intact.

-6 Marriage and Domestic Life In 1994, Bill married Melinda French and together they had three children: Jennifer Katherine, Phoebe Adele and Rory John. Jennifer Katherine would meet the man of her dreams in a horse-riding club.

Her fiancé, Nayal Nasser is an Egyptian millionaire, equestrian and Stanford graduate.

-7 Ninety-five Per cent of His Fortune Like most parents, Gates could have spent all his money on his kids. But given his mass wealth he worried that that would have spoiled them. As such,

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he decided to spend most of his money on charity.

In 2006, Gates donated 95 per cent of his wealth to fight disease and illiteracy in the global south.

He also wanted to help poor children continue their education and as such, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated 9.26 billion dollars to help 55 million children around the world.

-8 Viruses not Nuclear Warfare Did Gates predict the coronavirus pandemic? In a 2015 Ted Talk, Gates hold a huge audience that when he was young, the catastrophes they were afraid of was nuclear warfare. But today, nuclear warfare is the least of his worries, what concerned him more was a viral outbreak.

-9 Gates Predicts the Future In that same Ted Talk, Gates said: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war, not missiles, but microbes.” Gates noted that many countries worked for years to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and needed to give similar attention to a massive mobilization against a killer virus.

“We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” he said, echoing warnings in recent years from infectious disease doctors. “We’re not ready for the next epidemic.”

-10 Doing His Part Bill Gates recently donated 50 million dollars to help find the cure for the coronavirus. Once this crisis ends, Gates will surely go down in history as one of the most important figures that helped the world in its global battle against the coronavirus.