Extremists See Coronavirus as an Opportunity

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1798- May - 01/05/2020

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng As the world deals with the Coronavirus pandemic, Islamist terror groups have been exploiting the preoccupation of governments to make a rapid resurgence. In Iraq, one of the states where ISIS first emerged, the group has been ramping up its attacks. One of the reasons why jihadists groups have been rising again is due to the fact that many Western states have been withdrawing their troops from jihadist hotspots, in fears that they might get infected with the Coronavirus. Yasmine El-Geressi writes this week’s cover story, which focuses on the resurgence that many of these terror groups are making, and how each group is following a different comeback strategy.

US-Iranian tensions haven’t subsided despite of the pandemic. While the US is still prioritising slowing down the spread of the Coronavirus and reopening the economy, it is still taking steps to prevent Iran from pursuing any aggressive action in the region. Joseph Braude writes on Mike Pompeo’s efforts to persuade the UN to renew the arms embargo in Iran, and how the Iranian regime is making slow efforts to ease social distancing measures that have been put in place since mid-April.

As countries around the world are looking to ease social distancing measures, some governments have been considering issuing “immunity passports” to those who have recovered. Individuals with such certifications would be free to go back to work, use public transport…etc. Ali El Shamy writes on whether or not this would be an effective way for governments to ease lockdown measures, as the WHO has warned that there is no evidence to suggest that people can’t catch COVID-19 twice.

In many Western states, ethnic minorities have been disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus. Yasmine ElGeressi writes on why those from non-white backgrounds are more likely to be severely affected by the virus and die from it, as she cites socioeconomic disparities to be one of the main culprits.

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Editor-in-Chief

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

22 ?Can You Catch the Coronavirus Twice

Issue 1798- May - 01/05/2020

Tightens Binds of Containment 14 US on Iran as Virus Rages

are Ethnic Minorities More 16 Why Vulnerable to Coronavirus?

Time for an Independent 32 It’s Coronavirus Review

38 Rise Up for Your Health

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Kim Jung-un: The Rise of a North Korea’s Secretive Dictator 3

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Debt Could Cause Emerging 28 Chinese Markets to Implode

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Mosque staff participate in special prayer during the eve of Ramadhan on April 23, 2020 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Getty

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A mask-clad Muslim worker prays near a mosque on the first Friday of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, amidst a curfew due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, in Dubai on April 24, 2020. Getty

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10. Yemen has been mired in war since the Houthi group ousted the internationally recognised government from power in the capital Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led alliance to intervene in March 2015. The conflict has shattered health and sanitation systems and authorities lack testing capabilities.

Ten Egyptian Army Members Killed or Wounded in a Bomb Attack

After U.S., Israeli Pressure, Germany Bans Hezbollah Activity, Raids Mosques Germany banned all Hezbollah activity on its soil on Thursday and designated the Iran-backed group a terrorist organisation, a much-anticipated step long urged by Israel and the United States. Police also conducted early morning raids on mosque associations in cities across Germany which officials believe are close to the heavily armed Shi’ite Islamist group. Security officials believe up to 1,050 people in Germany are part of what they describe as Hezbollah’s extremist wing. The move means that Hezbollah symbols are banned at gatherings and in publications or in the media and Hezbollah assets can be confiscated, said the ministry, adding as it is a

Ten Egyptian army members including an officer were killed or wounded on Thursday when a bomb exploded in an armoured vehicle south of Bir al-Abd city in the Northern Sinai region, a military foreign organisation, it is not possible to ban and dissolve it. Israel, which with the United States had been pushing Germany to ban the group, praised the move.

Yemen Reports First Two Coronavirus Deaths, Braces for More Yemen reported multiple coronavirus infections and deaths linked to the disease for the first time and an official in the southern port of Aden said the number of cases was very likely to increase in the coming days.

The United Nations has said it fears the novel coronavirus could be spreading undetected in a country where millions face famine and lack medical care after Yemen reported its first case of COVID-19 in the southern province of Hadhramout on April

spokesman said in a statement. He did not specify how many had been killed in the attack, which not immediately claimed by any group. Militants loyal to ISIS are active in the strategic border region. Egypt has been fighting Islamist insurgents who have killed hundreds of police and soldiers in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula since the ousting of Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 following mass protests against his rule.

Libya’s Eastern Leader Haftar Says Army to Take Formal Control Libya’s eastern-based military leader Khalifa Haftar said on Monday his Libyan National Army (LNA) was accepting a “popular mandate” to rule the country, apparently brushing aside the civilian authorities that nominally govern eastern Libya.

Haftar, who launched a war a year ago to grab the capital Tripoli and other parts of northwest Libya, was already widely understood to control the parallel administra-

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tion that rules in the east. Libya has been split since 2014 between areas controlled by the internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli and the northwest, and territory held by eastern-based forces in Benghazi.

United States condemned the attack late on Tuesday, which State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said claimed “the lives of dozens of people shopping in the central market as they prepared to break the Ramadan fast.”

Bomb Blast Kills 40 People in Syrian

France and Italy in Recession as Spain Sees Record GDP Decline

At least 40 civilians were killed, including 11 children, when a bomb detonated in the northern Syrian town of Afrin on Tuesday, the Turkish Defence Ministry said, blaming the attack on the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia. In a statement on Twitter, the ministry said the blast occurred in a crowded area in Afrin’s centre. A video shared by the ministry showed black smoke billowing in the air while ambulance and police sirens wailed in the background. The

France and Italy entered a recession in the first three months of this year while Spain’s GDP plunged sharply, new data on COVID-19’s impact on European economies indicates. French GDP fell by 5.8 per cent in the first quarter, “the biggest drop” since 1949 the country’s INSEE statistics agency said on Thursday as it unveiled its first estimate. Italy’s GDP decreased by 4.7 per cent compared to the previous quarter,

the ISTAT statistics agency announced on Thursday. If the estimate is confirmed, it would be the worst reading since 1995, when Eurostat began its monitoring. The Spanish economy contracted by 5.2 per cent compared the previous quarter, the INE statistics agency said on Thursday, This is the worst reading since records began in the 1970s.

Trump Says He Won’t Extend Distancing Guidelines as Death Toll Passes 60,000 Donald Trump has said the federal government will not be extending its coronavirus social distancing guidelines once they expire on Thursday, even as the number of Americans who have died of coronavirus surpassed 60,000. The country has recorded 60,207 deaths from coronavirus, and 1,030,487 cases of the virus have been confirmed in the US according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The US accounts for around one-third of all confirmed cases worldwide. The US has now lost more people to coronavirus than the Vietnam war. Over the country’s nearly two decades of involvement in Vietnam, 58,220 Americans were killed.

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Coronavirus Provides a Window of Opportunity for Islamist Extremists While the Pandemic Undermines the International Effort Against Extremism, Terrorists Seek to Further Their Ideological Goals 10

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Left to operate without being pressured and chased from hideout to hideout, ISIS has been getting more ambitious at local level in Iraq. its followers to repent because the coronavirus was a punishment from God for non-Muslims, ISIS told its followers to show no mercy and launch attacks in this time of crisis. In its Al-Naba newsletter, the former caliphate said that supporters should take maximum advantage while the national and international security regimes that help keep the group in check are about to be overloaded. Though the group has recommended that members do not travel to western countries to launch attacks, it has said that those already present should act.

A report by the International Crisis Group said that Al-Naba editorial’s exhortation to violence is not news for the former caliphate, but what matters instead is “what the group is capable of and what its operating context allows. If that context becomes more permissive – as this editorial anticipates – ISIS can better organise and execute resource-intensive, complex attacks, at substantial human cost.”

This was the essential message of Crisis Group’s 2016 report, “Exploiting Disorder: al-Qaeda and the Islamic State”: the growth of jihadist groups in recent years has more often been the result of war and chaos than its primary cause. ISIS, for one, became a global threat largely by taking advantage of local conflict and state failure in Syria, only to then rampage through Iraq and attempt to export its model globally.

ISIS slogans painted along the walls of a tunnel used by militants as an underground training camp in the hillside overlooking Mosul, Iraq, March 4, 2017. Reuters

by Yasmine El-Geressi While governments around the world are still trying to contain the coronavirus pandemic, opportunistic Jihadists and other militant extremists, adept at exploiting confusion and chaos to further their ideological goals, are seeing the world health crisis as a window of opportunity. While COVID-19 has killed more than 200,000 people worldwide, there have been relatively few cases in regions where Islamist extremist groups have their strongholds, such as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula and the Sahel region of North Africa. Still, terrorist groups are using the upheaval from the pandemic as a chance to win over more supporters, strike harder than before, and justify their narratives of hate, division, and enmity.

Examples of this have already been seen from ISIS and AlQaeda in their coronavirus messaging. In addition to urging

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According to the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), it’s easy to see why ISIS would want to exploit any opening it can: “The U.S. and its allies have systematically targeted ISIS’s international terrorist wing, thereby limiting the jihadists’ ability to launch spectacular attacks in the West.”

Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, released a five-plus page statement calling on civilians in Western nations to convert to Islam during the coronavirus pandemic. According to Thomas Joscelyn, executive director of the Center for Law and Counter-terrorism at (FDD), “Al-Qaeda portrays the virus as Allah’s retribution, arguing that the West is immoral and [in decline]. Therefore, according to the group, Western citizens should convert to Islam which is supposedly superior with respect to hygiene and morality.”

In Somalia, the leader of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s branch in

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East Africa, said the group rejoiced in the suffering of the US and its European allies. “Coronavirus has uncovered the weakness of those who claimed to be superpowers such US, France, Italy, Germany and Britain,” Fu’ad Mohamed Khalaf told a congregation in a mosque in an al-Shabaab-controlled area of southern Somalia, according to the group’s news channels.

The FDD’s Joscelyn noted that al-Shabaab, which controls swaths of territory and is fighting local government forces backed by US airstrikes and other African troops, “blames African forces for supposedly spreading the virus throughout the region and claims it is providing educational instruction to Somalis concerning how to deal with it.”

“This is an example of how Shabaab is attempting to portray itself as a responsible governing body,” he continued.

“The Taliban is doing the same thing in Afghanistan, releasing photos and statements on COVID-19 that are intended to [enhance] its legitimacy as an Islamic emirate.”

As well as providing an opportunity for militants, the pandemic may undermine the international effort against Islamist extremism as governments re-task their military capacity to support the public health response, making countries even more vulnerable to attacks, some experts say.

“It is almost certainly correct that COVID-19 will handicap domestic security efforts and international counter-ISIS cooperation, allowing the jihadists to better prepare spectacular terror attacks and escalate campaigns of insurgent warfare on battlefields worldwide,” the International Crisis Group said.

As well as providing an opportunity for militants, the pandemic may undermine the international effort against Islamist extremism as governments re-task their military capacity to support the public health response.

Iraq, where the pandemic has prompted the UK, France and Spain to withdraw their troops, citing the risk of contagion and a related pause in the training of Iraqi forces, has seen a surge in attacks by ISIS this month. The Crisis Group says that if international Coalition support, already destabilised by U.S.-Iran tensions, “is further endangered by coronavirus and Coalition member countries’ understandable tendency to retrench, an Iraqi state that is itself grappling with an outbreak will likely struggle to contain ISIS insurgents as well.”

The Iraqi military are meanwhile distracted by disaster relief, enforcing a nationwide curfew, and looking after their own health and that of their families. Left to operate without being pressured and chased from hideout to hideout, ISIS has been getting more ambitious at local level. “In Khanaqin District, close to the Iran-Iraq border, IS quadrupled its average number of mortar and rocket attacks in March and combined the bombardments with sustained machine-gun fire and ground assaults on security force outposts,” wrote Michael Knights, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in Politico.

Knights predicts that ISIS’ next steps involve “disruption to

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Soldiers from the Mozambican army on patrol amid rising Islamist attacks. (Getty)

Terrorist groups are using the upheaval from the pandemic as a chance to win over more supporters, strike harder than before, and justify their narratives of hate, division, and enmity.

Project, which tracks extremists’ activities worldwide. “That will be unbelievably bad.”

A U.S. Africa Command spokeswoman, Lt. Christina Gibson, told The Associated Press that “while the size and scope of some AFRICOM activities have been adjusted to ensure the safety and protection of forces — both U.S. and partner nation — our commitment to Africa endures.” She did not give details of affected operations but said AFRICOM still has about 5,200 forces on the continent at any given time.

security force clearance operations will increase IS’ ability to make advanced roadside bombs in its hideouts and use these weapons, and other harassment tactics, to keep the security forces buttoned down in their bases.”

If left unchecked, the insurgents will become the local power brokers, and it will no longer be possible to claim that IS’ days of territorial control are over. This, he says, is how the former caliphate will knit itself back together, one village at a time. “This is exactly how it happened in 2012-14, after the previous U.S. withdrawal,” he said.

There are signs elsewhere that the militaries of the US, Britain and other countries are also pulling back because of the virus, leaving a possible opening for the extremists. That’s a particular danger in Africa’s hot spots of the Sahel, the Lake Chad region and Somalia, where the U.S. military already worried allies in recent months by contemplating cuts to focus on threats from China and Russia.

“Any state that was interested in pulling back in Africa will take the opportunity to do so,” said Clionadh Raleigh, executive director of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data

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Though analysts say it is too soon to point to attacks that could be blamed specifically on militants exploiting the coronavirus, more than 50 people were massacred in an attack in northern Mozambique by Islamist extremists suspected to be part of the ISIS after locals refused to be recruited to its rank, it was reported on April 22. Almost a month earlier, on March 24, ISIS insurgents took over a strategic port in Mozambique and hoisted their flag in what may herald the establishment of a new outpost for the so-called caliphate.

On the same day, the faction of ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram led by Abubakar Shekau killed ninety-two Chadian soldiers in an ambush around the Lake Chad area, and at least forty-seven Nigerian soldiers died in northeastern Nigeria in in their deadliest assault yet against the military of Chad.

Similarly, jihadists affiliated to al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine soldiers in Mali on March 19.

To manage the risk of escalation in these tense regions, the Crisis Group has urged governments to keep peace efforts and conflict prevention efforts alive and to maintain back channels. “Crisis Group has argued that coronavirus could even be a chance for “humanitarian de-escalation”, between the U.S. and Iran in particular. The flip side, though, is that if this pandemic disrupts existing international cooperation – or even sparks new conflict – ISIS is poised to capitalise.”

The group says that harm will require continued international counter-ISIS cooperation and support for the front-line countries that have suffered most at the hands of an enemy whose “chauvinist, intolerant ideology is the opposite of the sort of humanitarianism this moment demands.”

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US Tightens Binds of Containment on Iran as Virus Rages Owing to the Depredations of the Coronavirus, Tehran’s Options for Counter-escalating are Limited 14

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by Joseph Braude Over the last week, Washington has turned its eye once more to tightening the binds of containment, in response to Iranian provocations in the Gulf, moving to extend a UN arms embargo and deliver a sharp warning to Iranian naval commanders. Owing to the depredations of the coronavirus, Tehran’s options for counter-escalating remain limited. The Iranian government appears consumed with the complications of gradually re-opening sickened cities and the consequent depletion of its treasury.

Shoppers clad in protective gear, including face masks and shields and latex gloves, due to the COVID19- coronavirus pandemic, walk through the Tajrish Bazaar in Iran’s capital Tehran on April 2020 ,25 during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. (Getty)

40-45 percent of Tehran city residents are now living under the poverty line and in dire need of imminent financial support from the government

AMID CORONAVIRUS, U.S. ADMINISTRATION TIGHETENS CONTAINMENT

to exercise all of our diplomatic options to ensure the arms embargo stays in place at the U.N. Security Council.”

On April 15, when Iranian gunboats approached within 50 yards of two American vessels practicing coordinated operations in the Gulf, U.S. President Trump tweeted, “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea.” Asked for commentary, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper refused to divulge details, but confirmed the administration’s posture: “I’m not going to get into the exact tactics, but they need to be well-warned, the Iranians, that we are not going to tolerate that behavior.”

CORONAVIRUS CIRCUMSCRIBES IRANIAN OPTIONS

The President’s declaration, in the view of some outside experts, sends a signal to Tehran that American military capabilities will not necessarily be bound by the logic of “strategic patience” espoused by the last administration. “These exercises show U.S. forces can go on the offensive against Iranian small boats, rather than simply defending against them,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst for the Hudson Institute who formerly served as special assistant to the chief of naval operations. In previous years, the U.S. Navy’s tactical doctrine hinged on “deck guns and onboard helicopters, which can be overwhelmed by a large boat swarm.”

In another line of effort, reports emerged that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is drafting a legal argument, based on the text of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, that would give the U.S. standing at the Security Council to call for an extension of the arms embargo on Iran, currently slated to expire in October, as well as re-impose sanctions for Iranian violations of the JCPOA. As Pompeo told the paper, “We cannot allow the Islamic Republic of Iran to purchase conventional weapons in six months. President Obama should never have agreed to end the U.N. arms embargo.” He added, “We are prepared

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Despite efforts by Iran’s President and Supreme Leader to put the coronavirus in the rearview mirror, Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi said on Monday that a partial lifting of COVID-19-related restrictions on social and economic life does not mean “going back to normal,” and public health officials would re-impose those restrictions if the country witnesses a renewed spike in the number of infections and deaths. Since April 12, Iran began easing its lockdown, permitting designated factories, businesses, and other public spaces to re-open, despite widespread concerns about rebound. According to Health Ministry officials, some 60 Iranian cities, including most of the nation’s provincial capitals, remain in critical condition and continue to register high numbers of new infections and deaths.

Iran’s options for countering Washington and its allies have been significantly hampered by the economic fallout from the pandemic. According to Tehran City Councillor Mohammad Javad Haqshenas, 40-45 percent of Tehran city residents are now living under the poverty line and in dire need of imminent financial support from the government.

At the same time, the collapse of the oil market and much of ordinary economic activity have translated into a sharp decline in the Iranian government’s tax and oil revenues, placing a low ceiling on the levels of financial assistance Tehran can credibly offer to people in need. As if to underscore the government’s newfound austerity, on Sunday President Rouhani called on the wealthy to donate food and money to those in need: “We must all help not to let anybody’s table remain without iftar.”

Why are Ethnic Minorities More Vulnerable to Coronavirus?

Inequality, Comorbidities, Public-Facing Jobs and Language Barriers Mean Some Groups are More Likely to Bear the Brunt of the Virus 16

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People from minority communities are also less able to socially distance as they often live more closely together than in the general population. people from such groups make up only 14 per cent of the population of England and Wales, for instance. The first 10 doctors in the UK reported to have died from Covid19- were all BAME and analysis suggests 60 percent of the total number of deaths among NHS staff with the disease are from a BAME background.

The UK is far from the only country where people from black and minority ethnic groups have been disproportionately affected. When Norway’s public health experts began looking into the backgrounds of those infected by coronavirus, they found that born in Somalia have infection rates more than 10 times above the national average. In the US, black Americans represent around 14 per cent of the population but 30 per cent of those who have contracted the virus. In the US, in Chicago, as of early April 72 ,2020 percent of people who died of coronavirus were black, although they only make up one-third of the city’s population. Similar reports have emerged from New York, Detroit and New Orleans.

The first ten doctors to die in the UK were all from BME backgrounds.

by Yasmine El-Geressi During the coronavirus epidemic, people from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) face a disproportionately high risk of death from coronavirus, according to emerging data. Recent figures compiled by the UK’s Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre suggests that of nearly 5000 people critically ill with covid19in England, Wales and Northern Ireland whose ethnicity was known, 34 per cent were from BAME backgrounds. New NHS England figures also reveal that, of the 13,918 patients in hospital who tested positive for Covid19- up to April ,17 16.2 per cent were of BAME background. But

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The pandemic sheds new light on how racial dynamics manifest in ways that are complex and not entirely understood. An international research effort is under way to examine genetic differences that make some people more likely than others to be infected with the virus or to develop severe symptoms. In the UK, the Department of Health and Social Care announced on 16 April that a review would be conducted, to investigate why BAME people were being affected disproportionately.

While it is not yet clear why communities with proportionally higher number of BAME inhabitants appear to be dying at higher rate,

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scientists have already highlighted factors including the increased underlying health conditions among BAME people, such as heart conditions, type 2 diabetes and respiratory issues.

The black population, where the discrepancy appears to be greatest, is particularly afflicted with hypertension. Diabetes is three-fold higher in this ethnic group, according to The Guardian.

Both of those conditions will increase your risk of death once you’ve got Covid.

There are also concerns that social and economic inequality, which impacts minority communities more starkly, could be playing a role. In many majority-white countries, people from other ethnic and racial minority groups have less access to economic resources – such as high-earning jobs.

That economic vulnerability often translates to food insecurity and a lack of access to consistent nutrition, has a number of consequences, including higher risk of underlying health conditions “There have been health inequalities that have existed in the [BAME] population but what is being reflected in this pandemic is that those inequalities are actually coming out,” Wasim Hanif, professor of diabetes and endocrinology at University Hospital Birmingham told The Guardian. He added: “Deaths happen in relation to complications related to diabetes all the time, as with cardiovascular diseases and cancers, but they have never hit the headlines and that’s the effect we’re seeing now.”

There are healthcare disparities as well. In the

In the US, in Chicago, as of early April 72 ,2020 percent of people who died of coronavirus were black, although they only make up one-third of the city’s population.

US, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans are less likely than whites and Asian Americans to have health insurance.

Racial biases also play a role. US surveys have found that medical staff are more uncertain and less communicative with non-white patients than with whites, according to the BBC. People from minority communities are also less able to socially distance as they often live more closely together than in the general population.

BAME families are more likely to have multigenerational – grandchildren, parents and children – overcrowded homes than white counterparts.

In the UK, just under a third of Bangladeshi households are classified overcrowded, as are 15 percent of black African households, according to government statistics. Meanwhile, only 2 percent of white British households are classified as overcrowded. Chinese households in the UK also have higher rates of elderly people living with children.

People from BAME backgrounds are also

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Nurses and healthcare workers mourn and remember their colleagues who died during the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (which causes COVID19-) during a demonstration outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on April 2020 ,10 in New York City. (Getty)

concentrated in essential roles public-facing jobs such as transport and delivery drivers, shop keepers, as well as health and social care, where they risk greater exposure to the virus. One in five people working for the NHS in England, for example, is from an ethnic minority background, however these numbers are even higher when we look solely at doctors and nurses. 26.4 percent of Transport for London staff are from BAME groups. People of colour are also substantially more likely to be unemployed, underemployed or precariously employed, which makes them especially likely to undertake hazardous temporary or gig economy work like delivering food. In the US, farmworkers are often undocumented migrants from Latin America with little control over safe working conditions.

It can be difficult to ensure physical distancing in the fields, isolation in the farmworker camps, or proximity to medical facilities, according to the BBC. Even language barriers have had a marginalising

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There are also concerns that social and economic inequality, which impacts minority communities more starkly, could be playing a role. effect. Much of the initial public health guidance around Covid19- has been in dominant languages, points out Salman Waqar, an academic GP registrar at the University of Oxford and the general secretary of the British Islamic Medical Association. “There needed to be a better understanding at the beginning of this pandemic that these messages may not necessarily get through to the grassroots,� he told the BBC. Dr Sheikh-Mohamed, a doctor working in Norway, told the Finanical Times the authorities made a mistake by relying solely on written material that many in the Somali community could not understand.

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Iran and the Coronavirus Crisis

by: Elie Fawaz

The Iranian regime is a criminal government that will gladly sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of the Iranian people.

It is for this reason that European governments need to sanction the regime and work closely with opposition forces within and outside Iran. Only then will this regime, which poses a threat to the people of Iran and its neighbours, be ousted

It is evident today that the Iranian regime has been lying about the number of Coronavirus deaths in the country. In the beginning of the crisis, Iran has been following the strategy of lying about how bad the situation was, and downplaying the crisis. It did so by claiming that the virus was a conspiracy targeted towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. The regime then deliberately underreported the true number of deaths in the country. What the regime didn’t consider was the fact that in this age of independent record keepers and social media, hiding true statistics such as these has become virtually impossible.

We can now safely say that the Iranian regime is directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians since it underreported Coronavirus cases and failed to take necessary measures to stop the spread of the virus. But why did the regime go through so much trouble to hide the true case and death figures in the first place? Well the first answer to that question is that totalitarian dictatorships, like the one that is ruling Iran, are not known for being transparent as they always strive to hide information from their people. There might be a latent answer to this question as well. Before the virus hit Iran, it was undergoing two major events; it’s annual celebration of the Islamic Revolution and the 2020 legislative elections.

First of all, the revolution celebration was necessary because the regime was faced with mass protests a few months prior in November 2019. The protests happened as a result soaring petrol prices, which saw a 300 per cent increase. As such, the regime needed to use these celebrations to send a strong message to the people, who have been suffering from deteriorating living conditions since the 2009 “Green Revolution”. The military parades were also a message to the outside world stating that despite the tough sanctions that the Trump administration has placed, the regime was still in full control of the country.

Secondly, the regime was adamant that the legislative elections needed to take place and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei went as far to say that “Iran’s enemies” were exaggerating the dangers of the virus to scare Iranians away from voting booths. The Iranian regime has been silent on the dangers that the virus poses on the public, and a result of such negligence the virus rapidly spread across the country and thousands of innocent people lost their lives. To this day, the regime is still not transparent to its people, as it downplays the real number of victims.

The Iranian regime’s decision to hide the real statistics has placed its regional allies, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, in danger since these countries have still not halted flights to and from Iran.

This has caused the virus to spread to these countries, and when the Lebanese health minister was asked why flights haven’t been stopped, he said that it was because of “political reasons”.

Another reason for the regime’s secrecy is due to fear of how the public would react to the real statistics. This might trigger a second wave of mass protests, something that the regime wants to prevent. The prospects of more mass protests is real especially since the people have been asking why Khamenei and his allies haven’t spent part of their fortunes to save the lives of infected Iranians, rather than spending it on military adventures in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

The regime isn’t spending money to save lives because it is benefitting from the Coronavirus crisis. This is because it has been exploiting the pandemic to call for the easing of the Trump administration’s sanctions. However, if the regime does get an ease of sanctions and international aid, then it will use it to fund its terrorist activities at home and abroad and for economic alleviation, rather than healthcare funding.

The Iranian regime is a criminal government that will gladly sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of the Iranian people. It is for this reason that European governments need to sanction the regime and work closely with opposition forces within and outside Iran. Only then will this regime, which poses a threat to the people of Iran and its neighbours, be ousted.

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Can You Catch the Coronavirus Twice?

Conflicting Reports on Coronavirus Relapses Raise Concerns Over Lockdown Alleviations 22

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As part of their plans to loosen social distancing measures and reopen their economies, some governments are considering issuing “immunity passports” or “immunity certificates” to those who have recovered from the coronavirus.

However, as several countries are now drawing up plans to ease lockdown measures, the question of whether or not people can develop immunity from the virus will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

HOW IMMUNITY FROM VIRUSES IS BUILT Viral immunity is a bit of a finicky phenomenon.

For some reason, our bodies can build long life immunities to some viruses, while they struggle to do the same for other viruses. If a human is infected with the chickenpox once, he or she will never catch again during their lifetimes.

Nevertheless, our immune systems have trouble with other viruses, for instance influenza A viruses have a high rate of reinfection.

A driver scans a QR code of a local app to track personal data for the COVID19containment in Zouping in east China›s Shandong province Tuesday, Feb. 2020 ,18.

(Getty)

by Ali El Shamy On February 2020 ,27, some news reports emerged that a woman in Osaka, Japan had tested positive for Coronavirus for a second time after seemingly making a full recovery.

Naturally, this raised concerns over whether or not people can get re-infected with the virus, thereby implying that the world might be in for a long battle with COVID19-. Since then, few reports have indicated that the Coronavirus has a high reinfection rate, having said that there is still much we don’t know about this new virus and for the past few weeks governments have been preoccupied with reducing the spread of the virus, while scientists have been busy trying to find treatments and/or a vaccine for the virus.

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When a virus enters the body, two processes occur. The first process is carried our by innate response mechanism of the immune system, which produces macrophages, neutrophils, and dendritic cells to slow down the viruses spread in the body. This innate mechanism is non-specific and will be triggered once any virus is detected, moreover it might even be successful in stopping infected people from developing symptoms associated with the virus. A problem with this innate response is that it doesn’t ensure future immunity from the virus.

The second mechanism that comes after this process is the adaptive response, which develops antibodies that will bind to the virus and fight it, and T-cells might even be produced to eliminate

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cells that are infected with the virus. If the adaptive response is strong enough, then it will have built a lasting “memory” that will enable our immune systems to quickly recognise and destroy the virus should it re-enter the body.

This adaptive response is not a quick process, according to a science report published in the BBC; it can take up to 10 days for our immune systems to produce the anti-bodies against the virus. Furthermore, evidence has shown that the patients who have recovered from bad cases of the virus are the ones who develop the strongest immune response against it. Not enough evidence sufficiently demonstrates that a recovered patient who only showed mild symptoms has built a similar robust immune response.

IMMUNITY PASSPORTS: AN ABSURD IDEA IN THE MAKING Earlier in the year, the British government attempted to tackle the pandemic through a strategy of herd immunity. Herd immunity was seen an alternative strategy that would help keep the economy moving despite the pandemic. However, after it became evident that the strategy would have a devastating toll on human life the government made a U-turn and implemented lockdown measures in a matter of days. As of the writing of this piece, the only other major Western state that is following

Korean scientists refuted the prospects of Coronavirus relapse, stating that recovered patients were testing positive again because the tests “were picking up dead virus fragments”.

the herd immunity strategy is Sweden. While the idea of herd immunity might have seemed scientifically sound on paper, it did raise many ethical questions as it made it seem like governments were treating the pandemic as a controlled lab experiment rather than a crisis that is costing human lives.

Tough the strategy of herd immunity has for the time being been shelved, there is a new idea floating around that is based on the idea that some people have built an immune response to the virus.

As part of their plans to loosen social distancing measures and reopen their economies, some governments are considering issuing “immunity passports” or “immunity certificates” to those who have recovered from the coronavirus. Those with the certificates would be allowed to go back to work, since, in theory, he or she would not be at risk of reinfection.

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Employees work on the production line of the Ichroma Covid19- Ab testing kit used in diagnosing the coronavirus (COVID19-) at the Boditech Med Inc. headquarters on April 2020 ,17 in Chuncheon, South Korea. (Getty)

The World Health Organization warned against the idea as it stated that there still wasn’t enough evidence demonstrating that people can’t be infected again with the virus.

While this seems like a good way of easing lockdown measures, some have raised concerns over individual privacy. For instance, the health apps in China ask users to provide them with contact details, passport information and medical certification. The apps also store a person’s travel history, to indicate if they have travelled to a COVID19- hotspot or if they may have been in contact with a person who has contracted the virus. Some users have also complained over the lack of transparency of how the apps work and asked what kind of user information it stores.

There is also the second question of whether or people actually build immunity to the virus WOULD IMMUNITY PASSPORTS WORK not in the first place? As the novel Coronavirus is still a new virus, there is still much scientists In China, where the virus originated from, don’t know about how it behaves. Earlier in authorities have issued phone apps that April, the Korean Centres for Disease Control can be seen a prototype form of immunity and Prevention reported 260 “relapsed” cases passports. In the apps, individuals are given of Coronavirus, which again raised questions different QR codes that are colour coded. over COVID19- immunity. However, by the People who are assessed to be healthy are end of the month Korean scientists refuted given a green QR code, which enables them the prospects of Coronavirus relapse, stating to travel freely within the province. Yellow that recovered patients were testing positive QR codes mean that the person may have again because the tests “were picking up dead come in contact with someone infected with virus fragments”, thus giving false positives. the virus, while a red code means that they As such, those people had fragments of the are sick with the virus. People who are given virus, but weren’t actually sick. Nevertheless, yellow QR codes need to self-quarantine, once news broke out that governments were while those with red QR codes need to considering “immunity passports”, the World undergo supervised quarantines. The app is Health Organization warned against the idea as now being used in more than 200 Chinese it stated that there still wasn’t enough evidence cities, and it is being rolled out to the rest of demonstrating that people can’t be infected the country. again with the virus.

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Hezbollah is on the Verge of Having Complete Hegemony over Lebanon

by Alia Mansour

Hezbollah is currently exploiting peoples’ economic misery to rally them against the banking sector. However, it is Hezbollah that was the main cause of the current economic crisis

Over the past two decades, Hezbollah has been actively enforcing its hegemonic rule over Lebanon. Its journey to become the sole ruler of Lebanon began with the UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which was adopted in summer 2004. The Resolution called for the disarmament of all militias within Lebanon, supported the Government of Lebanon’s full sovereignty and authority over Lebanon, called for the withdrawal of foreign forces and called for free elections conducted according to the Lebanese constitution and without the inference of any foreign interference or influence. In spite of these stipulations, it soon became clear that the country would face harrowing times. A few months later, former Prime Minister Rafic El Harriri was assassinated. A number of Lebanese politicians would face similar fates, while continuous terrorist attacks would disrupt the daily lives of Lebanese civilians. International pressure and grassroots campaigns persuaded the Assad regime in Damascus to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, this would provide Hezbollah with the freedom to manoeuvre and start its take over project. Eventually, it would slowly but surely take full control of the political institutions within the Lebanese state.

In July 2006, Hezbollah would go to war with Israel a war that would take a heavy toll on the Lebanese economy. To this day, Lebanon is still suffering from the economic costs of the war. Whenever said costs are brought up, Hassan Nasrallah, always gives his famous reply “if I only knew” implying that he would have never went through with the war had he known how it would impact the economy. Soon after UN Security Council Resolution 1707, Israel stopped its attacks and Hezbollah started moving towards central Lebanon after previously only being confined at its headquarters in Southern Lebanon. In May 2008, Hezbollah’s militias would occupy Beirut and Mount Lebanon in protest of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s decisions to dismiss the head of the airport security apparatus, Brigadier General Wafik Choucair, and dismantle Hezbollah’s telecommunications network. In spite of using brute force, the group could not get all the power it desired. As such, it exploited the political deadlock in Lebanon to get more provisions during the Lebanese National Dialogue Conference was held in Doha between 16 May and 21 May

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2008. These talks resulted in the Doha Agreement, in which Hezbollah stipulated that it would withdraw forces in Beirut and Mount Lebanon provided that a neutral independent candidate is elected president of Lebanon, a tripartite government (consisting of 16 cabinet members, 11 opposition members and three members nominated by the president) is formed, and most importantly said opposition would have the power to veto any decision made by the governing cabinet. As most of the opposition at the time was allied with Hezbollah, the agreement effectively gave the group the power to control the government’s decisions.

As usual, Hezbollah didn’t keep its end of the deal as its ministers as well as the ministers from the Free Patriotic Movement and the Amal Movement all resigned from their posts. This resulted in the collapse of Saad El Hariri’s government since 1/3 of its ministers handed in their resignations. Subsequently, Hezbollah militias stormed Beirut and began attacking civilians and members of parliament, moreover the group refused to endorse Najib Mikati as Prime Minister.

This wouldn’t be the last time in which Hezbollah caused a political deadlock, in 2014 Michel Soluieman’s tenure as president ended. As such, it came time for the parliament to vote for a new president, but Hezbollah would come in the way of the proceedings in order to ensure that its ally, Michel Aoun, was chosen for the post.

After two years of political upheavel, Hezbollah got its way and Aoun became the new President of Lebanon.

The President’s office wasn’t enough for Hezbollah, as it was an ardent supporter of the “my way, or the high way” philisophy. Hezbollah members and allies already made up a third of the governing body, but that wasn’t enough for the group which wanted more control over the Council of Ministers. To achieve this goal, Hezbollah introduced a new electoral law based on propertional representation which resulted in more Hezbollah and Hezbollah-allied politicians getting elected into the council. The reason Hezbollah was able to introduce new electoral laws is twofold, first some of the group’s opponents were naïve towards the implications the new law would have and second other opponents were afraid

of Hezbollah’s threats of not holding elections at all if its rules aren’t put in place.

Recently, a pro-Hezbollah government came into power with the ascension of Hassan Diab as Prime Minister.

As such, Hezbollah is now in full control of the three branches that make up the Lebanese government, and as it stands the only sectors that remain out of the group’s grip is Lebanon’s free economy and banking sector.

Hezbollah has exploited the October 17 Uprising and the country’s poor economic and living conditions as an impetus to battle the banking sector head on. It should be noted that Hezbollah’s fight against the banks didn’t happen overnight, as it has for years been taking measures to tame them and make them a weaker institution.

Currently, Lebanese banks are taking stringent measures at the expense of civilians, and of course Hezbollah is tacitly approving of such measures.

Up until 2016, Hezbollah has been on an ongoing conflict with the banking sector, particulalry the central bank and its leader Riad Salameh. At the end of 2015, former US President Barack Obama signed in a new law which extended sanctions that would reduce funding for Hezbollah’s terrorist activities. The law enforced sanctions on any foreign monetary institution (such as banks) from funding the group or laundering money to Hezbollah. Soon after, the head of the Lebanese central bank announced that it would comply with the US’s new law, and would place sanctions on one hundred institutions and individuals associated with Hezbollah.

A few days later Hezbollah bombed the headquarters of BLOM Bank. The operation was not meant to cause any casualties and was instead meant as a warning against these sanctions, and BLOM Bank was targetted since it was the first bank to implement the new US law.

Today, Hezbollah is pushing the banking sector towards its policies. For instance, it persuaded the current Diab government to suspend payments of its Eurobond debt; the government took this decision without consulting the creditors of the debt. The government would also go on to refuse working with the International Monetary Fund to find ways out of the crisis, “We will not accept submitting to (imperialist) tools ... meaning we do not accept submitting to the International Monetary Fund to manage the crisis,” Hezbollah deputy leader Naim Qassem said. Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah would go on to say that the group’s position “is not toward the Fund as an international financial institution but on the terms offered to Lebanon.” He then emphasized that the group was doing this for the good of the people, as it sought to

tackle the banks’ monopoly over their money.

Afterwards, Hezbollah did a ferocious media campaign against the banking sector. Due to the woeful economic conditions in Lebanon, the campaign succeeded in rallying people against the sector. As a matter of fact, many of those who oppose Hezbollah joined the rallying calls against banks.

Many political and banking sources have recently warned against Hezbollah’s plans to takeover the country’s economic apparatus, just as it recently did with both the political and security apparatuses, respectively.

There have been several signs of a Hezbollah takeover of the economy, for instance the scarcity of US dollars in the market has caused most commercial establishments to cease their operations. This is because they no longer have the liquidity needed to import and export goods.

Moreover, these firms find themselves unable to carry out operations based on bank transfers and credits. Hezbollah has exploited this by importing Syrian and Iranian goods across illegal border crossings, these goods are given to merchants who are tied to the group. As a result, Hezbollah is able to sell goods and products in the market without any competition from other merchants or businesses. In doing so, Hezbollah addresses its funding troubles since now they can circumvent sanctions, which prevented it from gaining funding from banks and businesses. At the same time, the group has created a demand for Iranian and Syrian goods, which is beneficial to both the Iranian and Syrian regime as they now have a means of bypassing sanctions.

It should be noted that Hezbollah has always been receiving funding from Iran. According to the Sanctions and Illicit Finance Centre at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies (FDD), Iran has been transferring bags filled with money to Hezbollah via Syria. The group also gets funding through its illicit activities, or from its supporters in Africa who also transfer cash in luggage, which aren’t searched since Hezbollah controls all the airports in Lebanon.

Hezbollah is currently exploiting peoples’ economic misery to rally them against the banking sector. However, it is Hezbollah that was the main cause of the current economic crisis. Its calls against the banks are not for the benefit of the people, but rather the benefit of its hegemony over the country. Over the years, no unified opposition force has been able to halt Hezbollah’s quest for unchallenged power. It is now only a matter of time until Hezbollah has full control over Lebanon, and by that time the country’s ruling body will be fully committed to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Hezbollah is now in full control of the three branches that make up the Lebanese government, and as it stands the only sectors that remain out of the group’s grip is Lebanon’s free economy and banking sector

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Chinese Debt Could Cause Emerging Markets to Implode Beijing Needs to Help Its Poor Borrowers Through the Pandemic 28

01/05/20

China has provided nearly half of all new loans to nations considered to be at a high risk of default.

But not all countries will bear the pain of the global recession equally. Low-income countries suffer from poor health infrastructure, which inhibits their ability to fight off the coronavirus, and many of them had dangerously high debt levels even before the pandemic necessitated massive emergency spending. Foreign investors are now withdrawing capital from emerging markets and returning it to the rich world in search of a safe haven. As a result, countries such as South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria are seeing their currencies plummet in value—making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to service foreign loans.

An investor watchs the electric board in a stock market in Huaibei, Anhui province, east China on 20th Feb 2016. (Getty)

by Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca The novel coronavirus has brought the world economy to a grinding halt. Global growth is set to fall from 2.9 percent last year into deep negative territory in 2020—the only year besides 2009 that this has happened since World War II. Recovery will likely be slow and painful. Government restrictions to prevent the virus from resurging will inhibit production and consumption, as will defaults, bankruptcies, and staffing cuts that have already produced record jobless claims in the United States.

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Faced with the threat of financial ruin, poor countries have turned to multilateral financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The IMF has already released emergency funds to at least 39 countries, and by the end of March more than 40 more had approached it for help. The World Bank has fast-tracked $14 billion for crisis relief efforts. Yet even as they offer extraordinary amounts of aid, the IMF and World Bank know that these sums won’t be nearly enough. For that reason, they called on Group of 20 creditor nations to suspend collecting interest payments on loans they have made to low-income countries. On April 15, the G-20 obliged: all of its members agreed to suspend these repayment obligations through the end of the year—all members except one, that is.

China signed on to the G-20 pledge but added caveats that make a mockery of it. China is effectively excluding hundreds of large loans extended through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for infrastructure development. “Preferential loans,” such as those made by the Export-Import Bank of China (EximBank), “are not applicable for debt relief,” declared the Beijing mouthpiece Global Times the day following the G-20 announcement.

EximBank has financed over 1,800 BRI projects

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in dozens of countries. By continuing to demand interest payments on the loans, China will force poor nations to choose between servicing debts and importing essential goods such as food and medical supplies.

?PREFERENTIAL OR PREDATORY Based on information we have gathered from a wide range of sources, we estimate that between 2013 and 2017, China loaned out more than $120 billion to 67 mostly developing nations through the BRI. Exact figures are impossible to come by because of the opacity of these lending agreements. But the growth in lending that China reported for 2018 and 2019 suggests that these countries’ BRI debts today total at least $135 billion.

Numbers like these place China in the top tier of international lenders. As of 2017, Pakistan, for example, had borrowed at least $21 billion from China, or 7 percent of its GDP. South Africa had borrowed about $14 billion, or 4 percent of its GDP. Both countries, like many others, owe far more to China than to the World Bank. Other countries owe even more to China as a percentage of GDP. We estimate that by 2017, Djibouti’s debts to China totaled 80 percent of GDP; Ethiopia’s amounted to almost 20 percent of GDP. And Kyrgyzstan, one of the first countries to receive the IMF’s coronavirus funds, owed China more than 40 percent of its GDP. Since 2013, China has provided nearly half of all new loans to nations considered to be at a high risk of default.

China charges substantial interest on its loans. Although Beijing calls its rates “preferential,” some BRI projects, particularly large ones, carry interest rates more than three percentage points above

If the developing world can’t service its debts, the global health and economic crisis will only worsen.

Chinese banks’ own cost of capital—or roughly four to six percent. World Bank dollar loans to low-income countries, by contrast, typically have rates just above one percent. And given that China itself is one of the World Bank’s largest borrowers, with $16 billion in loans outstanding, the country is effectively borrowing cheap from the developed world and relending, through the BRI, at a significant markup.

AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE China’s low-income borrowers rely on dollars,

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Sri Lankan road construction workers construction labourers works along a road in Colombo on August 2018 ,5.

(Getty)

These countries are not the only ones that will suffer, however. Even if defaults begin in just a few countries, they will spread widely as investors flock to U.S. Treasuries, German Bunds, gold, and other traditional safe havens. As of early April, foreign investors had already withdrawn more than $96 billion from across emerging markets—a rate of outflow well above that which greeted the last financial crisis. As a result, South Africa’s rand and Brazil’s real have each plummeted 25 percent so far this year. Additional capital outflows will push these currencies down further, sending costs for essential imports soaring. Food prices are already spiking across Africa. The United Nations projects that the continent will need to spend an additional $10.6 billion on health care this year to address the pandemic, with foreign medical supplies and pharmaceuticals accounting for much of that.

Further capital flight thus means greater malnutrition, faster disease transmission, and more migration.

In short, if the developing world can’t service its debts, the global health and economic crisis will only worsen. China, where the pandemic began, has certainly taken an economic hit. But with more than $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves and a currency that has held steady throughout the crisis, it is far better positioned to weather the storm than most of its borrowers. Those borrowers, with currencies plummeting, capital fleeing, and dire medical costs looming, are in no position to make BRI repayments to China.

Although commentators have long likened the BRI to a Marshall Plan for developing nations, euros, and other major foreign currencies to pay the two initiatives could not be more different for imports and to service debts. But many lack in approach. The scale of the financing may be sufficient reserves to cover both. Zambia, a BRI comparable (U.S. Marshall aid was worth about client that has borrowed over $6 billion from Chi- $145 billion in current dollars), but the simina, has enough reserves to cover only two-thirds larities end there. Marshall aid was all grants, of the foreign payments it needs to make over the whereas BRI funding is nearly all debt. That coming year. Imports and debt service over the debt is now smothering developing nations as next year are set to wipe out South Africa’s total they struggle to emerge from a devastating panreserves. Should these countries default on their demic. Rather than adding to their woes, China sovereign debt, which looks increasingly likely, should do its part to help lift these nations out of they would be locked out of international credit crisis. It can start by declaring a complete moramarkets and unable to run the budget and trade torium on BRI debt repayment until at least the deficits needed to curb the pandemic. middle of 2021.

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It’s Time for an Independent Coronavirus Review The World Health Organization and Its Member States Must Learn From Their Mistakes 32

01/05/20

As the pandemic takes a heavier toll on low- and middle-income countries in the coming weeks, the shortcomings of national and multilateral public health systems will be on full, painful display.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization and other world leaders about the coronavirus outbreak during a video conference at the Elysee Palace, on April ,24 2020 in Paris. (Getty)

fight against the disease.

China, the United Nations, and the WHO all favour accountability later. “Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement on April 14. China’s Foreign Ministry echoed that sentiment a few days later, tweeting that nations facing a pandemic “should assist each other in solidarity and coordination instead of pointing fingers or holding anyone accountable.” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has welcomed a review of his agency’s performance “in due course” but emphasized that the focus now must be on staying united, saving lives, and stopping COVID-19.

Halting the pandemic that is ravaging much of the world should be everyone’s top priority, but delaying an independent review of national and internaby Thomas J. Bollyky and David P. Fidler tional responses won’t slow the spread of the disease. Waiting to initiate such an inquiry will only The coronavirus pandemic is perhaps the defining deprive the WHO and its member states of valustruggle of our era, but the global response to it has able feedback that could help them improve their stalled over a question of scheduling. The United responses and save lives. Waiting will also inhibit States and Australia want accountability now: for international cooperation at the G-7, G-20, and whoever originated the virus, for China’s initial at- other global institutions whose efforts are needed tempts to cover up the outbreak, and for the World to develop and equitably deploy COVID-19 drugs Health Organization’s controversial handling of the and vaccines, remove the export bans and other pandemic. U.S. President Donald Trump is with- disruptions to the global supply chain for masks holding funds from the already resource-strapped and personal protective equipment, and ultimately, WHO, pending a review of the UN agency’s con- get the global economy growing again. Without duct during the crisis. This week, his administra- a credible independent review at the multilateral tion even blocked a joint commitment by the G-20 level, individual states will likely organize their to strengthen the WHO’s mandate and arm it with own inquiries, which could further politicize the additional resources to coordinate the international pandemic and heighten international tensions.

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LINGERING QUESTIONS Trump’s attacks on the WHO and China may well be intended to distract from his administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic, but moderate Republicans and even a few Democrats have echoed elements of his criticism. Some foreign leaders have also found fault with the international response to the coronavirus and the WHO’s response, in particular. Citing what he described as the agency’s overly cozy relationship with Beijing, Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso dubbed the WHO the “Chinese Health Organization.” Other critics allege that the WHO was too deferential to China in the early days of the outbreak and failed to alert the world as quickly as it should have. These allegations are contested, but they have persisted. Australia, for example, has joined the United States in calling for an independent inquiry into the origins and spread of the virus, including what the WHO did to stop it.

Yet the pandemic has exposed problems that extend far beyond China and the WHO. Many nations, including high-income countries, such as Italy, Spain, and the United States, displayed an astonishing lack of preparedness for an outbreak on the scale of COVID-19. These failures can’t be blamed on the WHO. The sorry state of countrylevel preparedness has contributed to harmful political and public health decisions, including the imposition of controversial travel bans and export restrictions on scarce medical supplies. Rich nations have turned inward and battled one another

A concerted strategy should bring about the end of this pandemic and better prepare the world for the next one, at the level of both countries and international organizations.

for resources, leaving the poorest nations to fend for themselves. As the pandemic takes a heavier toll on low- and middle-income countries in the coming weeks, the shortcomings of national and multilateral public health systems will be on full, painful display.

Rather than allowing the pandemic to divide them, states and international organizations need to come together to tame the coronavirus and resurrect the global economy. Doing so will require a political strategy that both meets the immediate public health demands of fighting the pandemic and begins the needed assessment of this epochal global health crisis.

USEFUL ANSWERS A concerted strategy should bring about the end of this pandemic and better prepare the world for the next one, at the level of both countries and international organizations. To that end, the UN secretary-general should establish—with the back-

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This picture taken on April 2020 ,24 shows a sign of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva next to their headquarters, amid the COVID19- outbreak, caused by the novel coronavirus. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP)

sponse informed a major organizational overhaul at the WHO. The agency created the Health Emergencies Program, strengthening its scientific, medical, and public health capabilities in anticipation of serious outbreaks of infectious disease. Because of these reforms, the WHO was better able than it otherwise would have been to respond to COVID-19: the agency is now advising ministries of health through its country offices and supplying working test kits, masks, and personal protective equipment to low-income countries upon request.

Where needed, it is deploying doctors and scientists to countries with weak health systems to help them control the virus.

An interim assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic response could help the WHO and national governments make important adjustments in real time.

Because of concerns about its independence, the WHO should not organize the review, however.

As a member-state-driven organization, the WHO is constrained in its ability to assess countries’ responses and publicize their shortcomings. For this reason, the UN secretary-general should authorize a review by an independent, high-level panel of outside experts.

That panel should begin work as soon as possible so that the lessons and best practices it identifies can inform the coronavirus response as it unfolds. ing of major regional organizations, such as the The UN secretary-general should appoint a COVAfrican Union, the Association of Southeast Asian ID-19 special envoy to support the panel’s work Nations, and the European Union—an interim, in- across the multilateral system and with individual dependent review of the COVID-19 response. The countries. The envoy should report to the secreaim should be to establish facts that can aid the tary-general, rather than the WHO, as he or she works with governments, troubleshoots problems, fight against this disease and future ones.

Interim assessments have proved beneficial during and provides information and advice to the panel. previous outbreaks. The WHO’s performance in Finally, a blue-ribbon scientific advisory committhe early days of the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak tee should support the panel with published reports in West Africa was disastrous, but member states on technical matters. didn’t abandon or defund the agency; they rightly A credible, science-based independent review proconcluded that its emergency functions needed to cess may not be enough to convince all governbe assessed, reformed, and strengthened—not un- ments and their leaders to prioritize defeating the dermined. Even as the Ebola outbreak still raged, coronavirus over political point scoring. But such WHO member states adopted a resolution estab- a review can still improve pandemic response both lishing an assessment panel of independent out- now and in the future. It can also force the naside experts. The panel examined all aspects of tions currently attacking the WHO to back up their the WHO’s response to the outbreak, including rhetoric with credible reform proposals. Calling the compliance of member states with the Interna- those attackers’ bluff might be the first step toward tional Health Regulations, the treaty that governs a more cooperative international approach to the coronavirus. If there was ever a need for coordipandemic prevention, detection, and response.

The panel’s interim assessment of the Ebola re- nated global action, it is now.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1798- May - 01/05/2020

Revenge of the Pangolin ? www.majalla.com

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ealth

Rise Up for Your Health The Sit-and-Rise Test Helps Assess Your Physical Function

by Harvard Men’s Health Watch

next to you.)

Try this without touching your hands or knees to the floor: from a standing position, sit on the floor with your legs crossed or straight out. Now stand up again. (This is not an easy movement for many people, so for safety do it with someone

How did you do? Did you struggle? Did you need to put your hand or a knee on the ground?

Could you not get up? “There are many ways to gauge your level of physical function, but this simple sit-and-rise

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movement can reveal much about your current strength, flexibility, and perhaps even longevity,” says Eric L’Italien, a physical therapist with Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Center.

GRADE YOURSELF Once you are familiar with the test, do it again and grade your effort. Beginning with a score of 10, subtract one point if you do any of the following for support as you sit or stand: • place your hand on the ground • place your knee on the ground • place your forearm on the ground • place one hand on your knee or thigh • use the side of your leg for support • lose your balance at any time.

As an example, if you sat with no problem, but had to use either a hand or a knee to get up, take off one point. If you had to use both your hands deduct two points. If you also used both knees deduct another two points.

If you can sit and stand with no assistance, you score a perfect 10. If you cannot get up at all, your score is zero. “Ideally, you want a score of eight or higher,” says L’Italien.

A TEST FOR WEAKNESS

Woman performing weighted lunges in warehouse gym. )(Getty

Your number can help you gauge your current physical ability and highlight areas you need to improve. Yet the sit-and-rise test was initially designed to predict longevity in older people. For a study published in 2012 in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers had 2,002 adults ages 51 to 80 do the sit-and-rise test and then followed them for about six years.

As an example, if you sat with no problem, but had to use either a hand or a knee to get up, take off one point. If you had to use both your hands deduct two points…..

If you can sit and stand with no assistance, you score a perfect 10. and core strength, balance and coordination, and flexibility,” says L’Italien. Weakness in one or more of these areas can make people less active and could lead to falls. It also can make it harder to enjoy everyday activities, like playing with grandchildren or gardening.

If you have trouble with the sit-and-rise test, that does not necessarily mean you have a shorter life span. Instead, think of it as an opportunity to improve your physical health, says L’Italien.

“Repeating the test at regular intervals can help you track your progress,” he notes. Even if you currently do reasonably well on the test, practicing it can enable you to find weak spots before they worsen.

IMPROVE YOUR SCORE The test is not for everyone. For instance, someone with a sore knee, arthritis, or another kind of limitation would have difficulty doing the test with little or no assistance.

The researchers found that participants who’d scored the lowest - zero to three points - were five to six times more likely to die over the follow-up period compared with those who scored eight to 10 points.

If you want to improve your performance, here are two exercises L’Italien recommends that can help increase your score. He suggests adding them to your regular workout routine. If you are just starting out, perform them twice a week and build from there.

This was only one test, and the study looked at an association and not cause and effect. Still, the results did highlight how specific weakness may foreshadow a decline in one’s health.

“Performing the sit-and-rise test requires leg

Lunges. Doing lunges helps with leg strength, flexibility, and balance.

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart.

2. While keeping your abdomen tight and your

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H

ealth

back in an upright position, step forward with one leg and bend it until your knee is aligned over the front of your foot. The trailing knee should drop toward the floor.

3. Hold for a few seconds, and then return to the starting position. Repeat with the opposite leg forward.

Your number can help you gauge your current physical ability and highlight areas you need to improve. Yet the sit-and-rise test was initially designed to predict longevity in older people.

4. Do five to 10 repetitions with each leg to complete a set. Perform two to three sets.

Modification: Stand next to a wall for hand support if needed. Or, for an extra challenge, hold small hand weights during the movements.

Plank. This move helps strengthen a weak core.

1. Lie face down with your forearms resting on the floor.

2. Raise up your body, so it forms a straight line from your head and neck to your feet.

3. Tighten your abs and try to hold this position for 10 to 30 seconds.

4. Rest and then repeat. Do two to three planks in total. Work up to holding each plank for 30 seconds to a minute.

Modification: To make it easier, hold the position while leaning against a counter or table at a 45° angle. You can also hold the plank from a full push-up position if resting on your forearms is uncomfortable.

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Man uses digital tablet to lean plank )position. (Getty

C

ulture

Of Cannibals: Part Five

Revenge of the Pangolin?

by Bryn Haworth Asked for her opinion regarding the coronavirus which had just appeared in China, Dame Jane Goodall, the conservationist and expert on chimpanzees, said it was nature’s way of ‘fighting back’. Can we be surprised if the non-humans we persecute take their revenge?

The scene is the north of Russia somewhere. The beaches in this remote spot always attracted walruses in their thousands, but now, owing to the retreat of the ice, there is only dry land for them to rest on, and so little of it that some of these lumbering creatures have struggled up the cliff to get away from the crowds.

Here, far from the edge of the sea, they find themselves in the company of polar bears. Now a walrus has tusks that could gore a bear, but up here on the clifftops they are vulnerable, as there is no open sea to escape to afterwards. Despite their poor eyesight, they can see the bears closing in. The walruses panic. Able to smell the sea beyond and associating it with safety, they tumble over the edge and plummet towards it, bouncing against the jagged rocks in helpless freefall.

Soon a heap of dead walruses, some crushed by the ones that fell, has accumulated at the edge of the sea.

The polar bears suddenly have more than they could possibly eat – some two hundred carcases litter the

shoreline.

This scene of self-destruction appeared in the episode of Seven Worlds, One Planet devoted to the continent of Asia and has caused a great deal of distress to viewers. My wife and I were two such viewers. As the story unfolded, we watched in stunned horror.

I remember when I used to turn to nature programmes for some kind of relief. In turbulent times, they were the antithesis of news. Here were these creatures behaving in the same way they had behaved for millions of years. It was so comforting, and to add to this feeling of deep time, you could rely on the soft tones of Sir David Attenborough – more soothing than a mug of hot cocoa, as he described their ingenious methods of camouflage or bizarre mating rituals – to soothe a mind battered by the shocks of modern life.

All this has changed.

Now, I find that instead of going to a nature documentary in the expectation of relief, I have to brace myself, in the same way I would for the crime scene in a Nordic noir. It’s worse than that, however, as I can’t entirely rationalise away a guilty feeling when I see a turtle suffocated by plastic litter, or the last surviving great white rhinos, as if I am the criminal here, and the cameras are forcing me to

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Walrus, before taking the plunge

revisit the scene of my own crime.

Nor do the animals always provide the comforting sight of behaviour and adaptations that have their origins deep in primordial time. Instead, one can watch polar bears adapting to the rapid changes as the ice melts, hanging about on a rock for the right moment to leap onto an unsuspecting beluga whale. It’s more disturbing somehow when, like the walruses, you know they’re improvising.

When was it, exactly, that nature programmes became so dark? Of course, they were never Disney. Even in the earlier versions, Bambi would quite often get it in the neck in a manner devoid of sentimentality. There was always a fair chance that the placid, cud-chewing herbivore, probably still in its age of innocence, would get mauled to death by a big cat, at which point my wife would say “Nature is so cruel!”

Big cats still pick off the stragglers and the weaklings.

Meanwhile, somewhere in London’s underground tube system, two scrawny mice duke it out for bread crumbs: It’s all very distressing if you’re of a nervous disposition, but nowadays the feeling that nature has blood on its hands is long gone. Instead, we are the criminals, the

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I remember when I used to turn to nature programmes for some kind of relief. In turbulent times, they were the antithesis of news. It was so comforting, and to add to this feeling of deep time, you could rely on the soft tones of Sir David Attenborough to soothe a mind battered by the shocks of modern life. All this has changed. ones red in tooth and claw. In the advanced stages of the Anthropocene, several chapters into a great mass extinction, everything looks like our fault, and objecting to the way big cats exploit the weaknesses of their victims, or malnourished mice resort to fisticuffs, sounds like misplaced sentimentality. I tend to assume that, in one way or another, human beings are the true culprits.

A MISANTHROPIC SCHOOLBOY If, in this tendency to blame humans, I seem very on trend, it comes from a longstanding prejudice. When I was a boy, I took a huge interest in nature. I read about it and wrote about it in my spare time. I collected the Brooke Bond Tea cards of exotic birds and pretended that the best-looking ones were avian emanations of my favourite girls at school. It was a kind of reverse anthropomorphosis. The illusion brought the girls closer, at least in my fervid imagination. It’s also quite possible that I took what is now a discredited slang term for girls rather too literally, but that was then.

My relationship with nature really took off, however, when my father dug a pond in the back garden. Once it was filled with water and pondweed, I lay on the lawn studying it. Every twitch of pondlife entranced me.

During one particular summer’s afternoon, I watched, riveted, as a mosquito hatched on the surface of the water. The whole process took half an hour or more as it dragged its winged body free of the larval husk.

Even in the absence of orchestral accompaniment and a soothing voiceover, I was mesmerised.

They were sturdy too, for froglets. The local flies had no cause for anxiety. A diet of raw meat had created monsters that turned their noses up at the normal fare.

These boy-made froglets could have torn the livers out of the local cats. It’s clear that I had tilted the balance of the local ecosystem in favour of the amphibians, but what would you expect, I’m only human.

As I hit my teens and we moved to the countryside, my interest in birds, once confined to Brooke Bond tea, began to predominate. I learnt how to find their nests in the spring, but never stole the eggs: I was very moral. For the same reason, the persecution of crows by the local farmers outraged me. They would hang dead birds from the gate posts, pour encourager

That same year, I kept frog spawn in an aquarium.

When they hatched, the tadpoles clung onto their eggs, jet black and motionless, like little punctuation marks.

Soon as they began to wriggle about, I fed them on raw liver hooked on a cotton thread dangled in the water and watched as, day by day, their tails shrivelled and their legs grew. I was so successful at rearing them, we soon had a plague of froglets in the neighbourhood.

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Sam Rowley’s winning shot for Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Frog spawn

in the drizzling rain, people set off from Hyde Park and played birdsong on their mobiles along Piccadilly.

By the time we had all amassed at the entrance to Downing Street, the sound of birdsong was deafening.

There were further speeches, but nothing could touch that alien sound for eloquence. It was as if Whitehall had been rewilded.

Nightingale in full song

les autres. Whether this worked I can’t say, though it did seem to depend on the crows having a concept of death and the ability to think ‘If I stay here, it could be me next.’ Corvids are smart, but perhaps not as smart as Ted Hughes would have us believe, and this chain of reasoning seemed like a big ask. I think it was the barbaric gibbeting of these birds that bothered me more than the actual shooting of them. It felt medieval.

The countryside is definitely not for wimps and there would be far worse to come, but those gibbeted crows have lingered in my mind. As I learnt more about human indifference and habitat-destruction, my outrage began to include anyone who menaced the natural order. I still feel this way. The mere thought of ignorant Maltese hunters exterminating the turtle doves as they fly over from Africa is enough to depress me. It’s decades since I last heard turtle doves in an English hedge. We are all the poorer.

When George Osborne, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke of plans for a housing estate in Kent being hindered by ‘feathered obstacles’ it felt even worse. He was talking about nightingales, for pity’s sake. Given the nightingale’s extraordinary song and its unique place in English poetry, his sneer betrayed a kind of wilful philistinism. Now, his political descendants content themselves with building unnecessary and expensive railway lines through ancient woodlands in the nesting season. Morality – of the environmental or any other kind – is not a Tory attribute.

I went on a march recently to protest against the destruction of British wildlife. After a few speeches

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Early on, long before George Osborne was tall enough to reach the dispatch box, I had developed such a partisan view that I saw the human species as an evolutionary aberration without which the world would have been a far better place. It remains my default position. It’s not that I see myself as a complete misanthropist, which for the Greeks meant a hater of all mankind. Sir David Attenborough is a man, and I don’t hate him. Mind you, he’s not just any man, but a naturalist who has put his head above the parapet and told the unfashionable truth that the very success of our species is the main threat to our continued survival So no, I don’t hate Sir David. Like any normal person, I adore the man, and despite my long-held preference for the female of the species, there are plenty of men I have a lot of time for. In a certain mood, I can even accept Muddy Waters insisting that, by sheer force of his libido, he can make the moon come up two hours late, or James Brown sobbing ‘This is a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing, not one little thing, without a woman or a girl…’ Possibly, that was just an excuse for a humble brag about how men made the cars, the trains, the ships, the electric lights and even children’s toys, purely to please her indoors. Oh, and men also made the money to pay for all these goodies.

But it wouldn’t mean nothing, etc.

Brown and Waters were writing for another century, of course, around the same time as the moon landings and all that libidinal rocket science. In these shambolic, apocalyptic times, with cities choking on carbon monoxide or (not so long ago) the smoke from bush fires, the oceans filing up with plastic waste and billionaires owning more than entire countries, the world isn’t so unquestionably the divine creation of men. It’s left up to a schoolgirl to save it.

As a schoolboy, back at the time of the moon landings, I was trying my best. The way in which I nurtured those froglets was well-intentioned. Still, it may have seriously upset the delicate balance of my

back garden’s biosphere. I wanted to assist Mother Nature by increasing frog numbers. Perhaps it was childish of me to think she needed my help, or that assisting one part of the biosphere would leave the rest of it intact. One messes with these things at one’s peril.

If I was so keen to make myself useful, maybe I should have confined my actions to dropping a little Pepsi on the ground before I drank it, the way the indigenous tribes drop a little chicha before they drink, to propitiate Pachamama. Even that would have tilted the balance somewhat, assuming the Pepsi was discovered by ants.

?A WORLD WITHOUT US Which brings me back to that guilty sensation when I watch nature documentaries. If humans are so destructive, how could one ever atone? Doing nothing, or reducing one’s impact to the minimum, is a deceptive virtue, as omitting to act also has consequences. Those monks of the Jain persuasion mess with the natural order of things every time they swerve to avoid stepping on an ant. If your only goal is to step lightly, rather than trample the dreams of Pachamama, then you can’t win, you will trample her dreams anyway.

Though the urge to minimise one’s impact on the planet may not have much hold over mega-rich partygoers who jet between Ibiza and Mikonos so as not to miss out on any fun, it does appeal to a certain

kind of modern ascetic. When Les Knight (‘I campaign for the extinction of the human race,’ Guardian, 10 January 2020) decided the world’s population was unsustainable, for instance, he had a vasectomy to demonstrate that he would not be adding to it.

First blush, that seems like a noble and principled decision to have taken. There are too many people for the planet to sustain. Snip. But, as I say, virtue can be deceptive. What if Mr Knight only succeeded in depriving the world of children who would have shared, and maybe gone on to promulgate, his views?

It may not be enough for one man to believe in the extinction of the human race. It may require future generations to make us believe in it.

And then there is one further twist, the fact that the characterisation of Nature as a ‘mother’ is no more based on scientific fact than the belief in Pachamama.

Nature is arguably just as annihilating as ‘she’ is nurturing. Marina Hyde seemed to be alluding to this in a typically sardonic reflection on the Australian apocalypse; I mean the one they had last year, about three apocalypses ago for those who are keeping count: ‘Watching the unprecedented fires provokes a strong sense that the Earth is bored with the series, and is fast-forwarding to the end. In fact, there’s a school of thought that says we should stop having the climate

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The wandering goats of Llandudno

emergency discussion in terms of us killing the planet, and reframe it to acknowledge that it will be the planet killing us.’

If this was a feasible view, it would certainly rid us of the present guilt complex. Alright, we shat in our own nest, but even the likes of Andy Coulson deserve a second chance. The earth is not playing fair. Frankly, it needs to look at itself in the mirror.

‘Instead of seeing Mother Nature as a sort of ethereally benign matriarch, it would probably get more people in the right headspace if we thought of her as Medea, or Karen Matthews’ (Guardian, 17 January 2020).

Adoration of the Mystic Lamb

(Medea is shorthand for very poor parenting skills, and for those who are unfamiliar with the name, Karen Matthews was emphatically not a paragon of nurturing motherhood) This is humour, right?

I doubt Marina Hyde was seriously suggesting we could start viewing the planet as the problem, especially in view of the Guardian’s official policy of calling what’s going on a crisis and an emergency. Perhaps those most deeply in denial about climate change being induced by humans could use a bit of victimhood. The rest of us must live with the guilt.

The idea of the planet killing us because we are killing the planet comes closer to reality. We are caught in a slower version of mutually assured destruction, but the foe is no longer soviet communism. It’s the deceptively cuddly koala bears, representing Mother Nature, while on the opposing side it’s the Australians, her victims, but also a nation over-fond of coal mining. It seemed far way, this antipodean apocalypse, but both parties were caught in a life-and-death struggle that we knew would be coming soon, to an environment near you.

The idea of the planet killing us because we are killing the planet comes closer to reality. We are caught in a slower version of mutually assured destruction, but the foe is no longer soviet communism.

It’s the deceptively cuddly koala bears, representing Mother Nature.

A SHEEP FOR OUR TIMES If anyone outside Australia is still in any doubt that this is indeed the apocalypse, they need look no further than Ghent in Belgium. There, in St Bavo’s Cathedral, stands a famous altarpiece. It was painted in oil, back in the early fifteenth century, by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and has at its centre a scene that comes from the Book of Revelations, known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

So far, so apocalyptic. But this is no ordinary lamb.

You might say it’s a lamb dressed as mutton, as it has long outgrown the gambols of its ovine childhood. It stands with heraldic poise, its left side facing us, on a raised platform surrounded by angels, and from its front a jet of blood arcs through the air before falling into some kind of chalice positioned beneath. This is a reminder of the ‘cannibalistic’ rite that Marcos Zapata would relocate to Cusco. Why the brothers depicted a fully-grown sheep is a mystery, but what is even more enigmatic is the gender of the animal, which is more ewe than ram, since the creature has no horns. Instead, from its head radiate rays of light.

It has been said that the city in the background is Jerusalem, and that the source of light in the picture, being divine, means there are no shadows in the brightly lit scene. I’m not so sure, as there seem to be shadows if you care to notice them, yet the rays of light fanning across the picture from the dove of the Holy Spirit hovering above the skyline advertise the mystical geometry. Our angle on events is not human.

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It’s as if we are hovering above them like a second dove, or else a drone. The fact that the oil paints were applied onto a chalk background may explain the marvellous luminosity.

All of this had been evident for many years, but when a restoration was attempted and the over-paint on the head of the lamb/sheep was removed – an apocalyptic action in itself, since the word ‘apocalypse’ means to uncover or disclose – the original features freaked out a good few impressionable souls on Twitter. This animal, which is supposed to represent Christ, no longer has eyes at the sides of the head like a normal sheep. They have moved round to where they might be expected to

sit in a human face and now stare at every believer and non-believer in the vicinity.

Reactions have varied. Some people just laughed it off, comparing the humanoid sheep to a botched restoration of Ecce Homo in Spain known as Ecce Mono (Behold the monkey).

It was an unfair comparison, as the Spanish image was the result of misguided over-painting, rather than

Maybe our forefathers had it right about omens. There’s usually some kind of freakish behaviour involved, though not necessarily on the part of the beasts. After all, what could be more freakish than a bunch of besuited rentier capitalists watching as a waiter slits a pangolin’s throat, then helping eat these harmless nocturnal mammals to extinction?

Before and after

Ecce mono

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pangolin

of peeling away the later additions.

Others found the gaze of this domesticated animal deeply unsettling. Could this really be a normal example of the beast that gave us the word ‘sheepish’?

Its expression is so self-possessed. Those eyes, that gaze, are not sheepish at all; they are knowing. They seem designed to follow you around the nave. Like the grandest of possible inquisitors equipped with a face-recognition camera, they know more about your identity than they should, as if the world has ended and this scarily perceptive sheep is already sorting the nicer ones, the sheep no less, from the errant goats.

Takes one to know one. Or as that sage, Jonathan Jones, puts it: ‘…this knowing, anthropomorphic face is not meant to be just any sheep. It is a symbol of Jesus – and he was more man than baa-lamb. Then again, he was neither.

Or both. And God besides’ (Guardian, 22 January 2020).

Pity the poor art critics, for they have to wade through this kind of theological quagmire on a regular basis, just to earn a crust. Compared with them, the bishops have it easy, telling people whether they can or cannot have intimate relations with each other according to so few sentences in the Bible you can read them sitting on the throne and still have time to finish Hello! magazine. Perhaps art critics are the only people who still concern themselves with the niceties of theology.

But was Jesus also female? It’s possible that Jones missed the most remarkable thing about this portrayal, though it would not have surprised the Incas from

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the Cusco school, for whom a feminine deity was the starting point.

If gender assignment is an aspect of the apocalypse, we are in for a lot of confusion, so here are a few of those tell-tale, end-of-days signs to watch out for: if it’s not scrawny guinea pigs, it’ll be transsexual sheep, and if it’s not horses eating each other, it’ll be polar bears jumping onto the backs of beluga whales. Or bat soup.

And if none of the above, it will be pangolins, those same freaky creatures with the dubious distinction of being the world’s most trafficked animal: ‘Though it is true that pangolin scales and meat are advertised as a sort of folk medicine in mainland China, statistics suggest the real key variable are the effects of globalisation, which have enriched the country’s business classes. Price for the animal have climbed from 14$ a kilo in 1994 to more than 600$ today, while illegal shipments at the border exceed ten tonnes. Customers ordering wildlife often do so in order to flaunt their wealth or to celebrate a good day on the stock market’ (Andrew Liu, Guardian, 10 April 2020) Maybe our forefathers had it right about omens.

There’s usually some kind of freakish behaviour involved, though not necessarily on the part of the beasts. After all, what could be more freakish than a bunch of besuited rentier capitalists watching as a waiter slits a pangolin’s throat, then helping eat these harmless nocturnal mammals to extinction?

Did I say harmless? Perhaps rolling themselves into a ball wasn’t the pangolins’ only method of selfdefence. This particular chapter of natural history is still being written.

Po

rt

ra

it

Kim Jung-un: The Rise of a North Korea’s Secretive Dictator Majalla: London

of the Central Military Commission.

Kim Jong-un is thought to have been born on 8 January 1982 but some accounts have said he was actually born the following year, with his birth year having been changed to bring it in line with the 40th birthday of his father Kim Jong-il. He is thought to be the second of three children, with an older brother, Kim Jong-chul, who was born in 1981, and sister Kim Yo-Jong who was born in 1987.

Kim Jong-il, North Korea›s «Dear Leader», was in the process of grooming Kim as his successor when he died in December 2011. North Korea›s cult of personality around Kim Jong-un was stepped when he took over from his father. He was hailed as the «great successor to the revolutionary cause of Juche», «outstanding leader of the party, army and people» and «respected comrade who is identical to Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il», and was made chairman of the Kim Jong-il funeral committee. The Korean Central News Agency described Kim Jongun as «a great person born of heaven», a propaganda term only his father and grandfather had enjoyed, while the ruling Workers› Party said in an editorial: «We vow with bleeding tears to call Kim Jong-un our supreme commander, our leader.»

In 2012, state media reported that Kim was married to Ri Sol-Ju, with the marriage having been arranged

by Kim Jong Il back in 2009. It’s thought the couple have three children, although this remains unconfirmed. In the same year, Kim assumed the title of marshal of the North Korean army, the highest military rank in the country.

The early years of Kim’s reign were characterized by a ruthless consolidation of power and the sharp acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The U.S. Department of Defense’s 2016 report on North Korea’s military capability described the violent means Kim has used to gain and hold power since assuming control in 2011.

Kim “has solidified his grip on power by embracing the coercive tools used by his father and grandfather.

His regime has used force and the threat of force,”

Called «Pak Un» and described as the son of an employee of the North Korean embassy, Kim and his siblings attended an English-language international school in Switzerland, near Bern.

They are said to have a close relationship as a result of their years studying in isolation together from 1996 to 2000. Some former classmates described him as a quiet student who spent most of his time at home, but had a sense of humor. «He was funny,» former classmate Marco Imhof told The Mirror in 2011. «Always good for a laugh.» «He had a sense of humor; got on well with everyone, even those pupils who came from countries that were enemies of North Korea,» another former classmate told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. «Politics was a taboo subject at school ... we would argue about football, not politics.» He later returned to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where he attended the Kim Il-Sung Military University.

In 2009, Kim was appointed to the state’s National Defense Commission. The next year, he was promoted to the rank of four-star general and was named vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and

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combined with suppression of dissenters, to “coopt” the state military and elites, grow military defense capabilities and challenge the U.S. and its South Korean allies, the report said.

Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea has continued to develop nuclear weapons. By 2017 North Korea had conducted a total of six nuclear tests, including at least one of a device that North Korean officials claimed was small enough to mount on an intercontinental ballistic missile. With a significant part of the mainland United States now theoretically within range of a North Korean nuclear attack, a war of words erupted between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump with the US to threatening a ‘massive military response’ against North Korea should it try anything. However, Kim has also had two historic meetings with Trump in 2018 and 2019, with denuclearisation on the agenda.

Although the first summit was hailed a success, the second ended without an agreement – with reports that North Korea recommenced work on its missile testing sites soon after.

While Washington and P’yŏngyang engaged in a steady exchange of insults and bombastic rhetoric, Kim was initiating an unlikely charm offensive at home. The election of Democratic Party of Korea candidate Moon Jae-In as president of South Korea in May 2017 had opened the door for possible reengagement between North and South Korea. On April 2018 ,27, Kim and Moon met for a historic summit at the “peace village” of P’anmunjŏm. It marked the first time that the leaders of the two Koreas had met face-to-face in more than a decade.

In April 2020, his conspicuous absence from celebrations marking his late grandfather›s birth anniversary fuelled speculation in the media and among pundits about the strongman›s health and whereabouts. A Hong Kong TV broadcaster reported

that Kim had gone to a hospital for a cardiovascular surgery on 12 April, but according to CNN reporting from U.S. agencies monitoring intelligence from North Korea, by 21 April Kim›s state was in «grave danger» from the surgery. South Korea›s foreign

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policy advisor Moon Chung-in issued a statement on 26 April that «Kim Jong Un is alive and well.”

The speculation surrounding his condition raised the intriguing question of who would take over, with the most likely heir being his sister Kim Yo-Jong.