Hezbollah is Firming Up its Grip on Lebanon

Iranian Oil Smuggling and Naval Piracy Fail to Blunt Sanctions

A Weekly Political News Magazine

The Robots are Coming

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1760- August - 09/08/2019

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be

Issue 1760- August - 09/08/2019

www.majalla.com

Hezbollah is Firming up its Grip on Lebanon www.majalla.com

Editorial A Weekly Political News Magazine

For the past decade, Hezbollah has been trying to consolidate hegemonic power of the Lebanese state, rendering opposition political parties and figures ineffective. Despite the fact that the group and its allies have recently gained the majority of seats in parliament, Hezbollah’s hunger for absolute control has yet to be satisfied. This week’s cover story

by Hanin Ghaddar focuses on Hezbollah’s recent actions to silence opposition voices such as the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Fadwa, a Shiite mother who was recently kicked out of her rental home for posting YouTube videos criticizing Hezbollah.

Iran continues its escalatory activities in the Arabian Gulf, as it recently seized an Iraqi oil tanker. Joseph Braude writes this week on this seizure and the message the Islamic Republic is trying to convey to its Arab allies. Iran appears to grow more hawkish towards its regional partners, as Deputy Secretary-General Nasr al-Shammari of the al-Nujaba Movement (a proxy of Iran) recently said that Iran would topple the Iraqi government if it decides to rebel against the regime. Meanwhile, Iran appears to be smuggling oil to circumvent sanctions, which are expected to shrink the Iranian economy by 6 percent this year.

We are currently living in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution; with each passing year artificial intelligence and robotic technology have been developing at an unprecedented pace. Such advancements have been met with various doomsday predictions in which robots will be taking over jobs, particularly the low skill labor ones. Contrary to such sensationalist predictions, tech experts and academics argue that the rise of AI and automation will create new jobs for people and the public should not be afraid of what the future holds. Yasmine El-Geressi writes on this rapid technological growth and discusses the arguments for and against it.

Shortly after the recent El Paso and Dayton shootings, President Trump placed the blame on video games for glorifying violence to the young audiences. The statement garnered backlash from gamers and game developers alike both of whom have become fed up with the scapegoating of video games. Ali El Shamy argues against claims that video games cause violent behavior, as he cites the work of academics and compares homicide rates of other countries with avid gaming populations to prove that the assertion is a fallacious correlation equals causation argument.

Finally, Bryn Haworth concludes his “The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be” series, as he shifts his focus towards George Orwell’s “1984”.

We invite you to read these articles and more on our website eng. majalla.com. As always, we welcome and value our reader’s feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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Issue 1760- August - 09/08/2019

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng

Editor-in-Chief

Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary

16 White Supremacists and ISIS Recruits Have

More in Common Than You Might Think

Video Games: the Easy Scapegoat for

28 Violent Acts

Will China Crush the Protests in

28 Hong Kong?

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Jeff Bezos: From CEO of E-Commerce to the King of Space 3

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52 Despite Vaccine, Ebola is Spreading

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Girls take part in a national tree-planting drive in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia plans to plant four billion trees as part of a global movement to restore forests to help fight climate change and protect resources. The country says it has planted nearly three billion trees since May. (Getty)

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A model wears Aztec outfit during Grand Carnival as part of the 18th Jember Fashion Carnival 2019 on August 2019 ,04 in Jember, Indonesia. The 18th Jember Fashion Carnival 2019 theme is Tribal Grandeur and consists of eight parades which include Aztec, Hudoq, Karen, Minahasa, Zulu, Mongolia, Viking, and Polynesia. The street carnival claims to be one of the biggest in the world and comprises of more than a thousand performers along 3.6km of road used as the catwalk. (Getty)

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eekly news wrecked and rubble strewn over the pavement.

Victims’ belongings were scattered among the debris. “The initial technical examination also showed that the car contained explosives, and the collision led to their detonation,” a ministry statement said. It said the Hasm militant group was responsible for rigging up the car.

Turkey and US Reach Deal to Manage Tensions Over Kurds

Iran Seizes Iraqi Oil Tanker Smuggling Fuel in Gulf Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized an Iraqi oil tanker in the Gulf which they said was smuggling fuel and detained seven crewmen, Iran’s state media reported on Sunday, in a show of power amid heightened tension with the West. Iran’s state media Press TV reported that the vessel was carrying 700,000 liters of fuel.

The vessel was intercepted near Iran’s Farsi Island in the Gulf, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said. The elite Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has a navy base on Farsi Island which is located north of the Strait of Hormuz.

This is the most recent seizure following Iran’s seizure last month of two tankers. The two

previous tankers, one Panamanian and one British, triggered an escalation in the impasse between the Iran and Western powers after U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal last year.

Turkey and the US have agreed to establish a joint operation centre to manage tensions between US-backed Kurdish militia and Turkish forces in northern Syria. The announcement from the Turkish government came after three days of

Cairo Car Bomb Kills at Least 20 Outside Hospital Twenty people were killed and 47 injured when a car packed with explosives intended for a militant attack blew up outside Cairo’s main cancer hospital on Monday. Officials initially said the explosion was caused when a car driving against the traffic collided with three other cars. The front of the hospital suffered extensive damaged, with an entrance

opposition to India’s removal of a constitutional provision that had allowed the country’s only Muslim-majority state to make its own laws.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have twice waged war over Kashmir and in February engaged in an aerial clash. India, which has been battling insurgents there for 30 years, said the special status had hindered Kashmir’s development and it wanted to fully integrate the region with the rest of the country.Thousands of Indian security forces kept a lid on protests in Kashmir on Wednesday, helped by the continued suspension of telephone and internet services after the Himalayan region’s special status was scrapped this week.

Hong Kong and Macau Affairs office said. he Hong Kong office of China’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday lodged stern representations with the United States, urging U.S. officials to stop sending wrong signals to the “violent separatists” in Hong Kong. More protests are planned in several districts across the city this weekend, starting on Friday, with demonstrators also planning a three-day rally at the city’s international airport.

Two US Mass Shootings in Ohio and Texas Kill 31

Chinese Official Says Hong Kong Facing Biggest Crisis Since 1997, More Protests Planned

tense negotiations with US officials hoping to forestall a Turkish attack on the Kurdish YPG group, which controls large swathes of northern Syria. The defence ministry said in a statement that Ankara had agreed with US officials to “implement without delay” the first measures aimed at eliminating Turkey’s concerns.

The protests in the Asian financial hub began with opposition to a now-suspended extradition law and have evolved into a direct challenge to the city’s government and calls for full democracy. The protests have left Hong Kong facing its worst crisis since it returned to China from British rule in 1997, the head of China’s

A gunman shot and killed 22 people and injured 26 more at a Walmart in the southern border town of El Paso, Texas on Saturday.

The suspect, identified as -21year-old Patrick Crusius, has been charged with capital murder.

Pakistan said on Wednesday it would expel India’s ambassador and suspend bilateral trade with its arch-rival after New Deli stropped its portion of contested Kashmir region of special status. Neighbors China and Pakistan, which both claim parts of Kashmir, have voiced fierce 09/08/19

British PM Johnson Urges Lawmakers to Back October 31 Brexit British Prime Minister urged lawmakers to support an October 32 Brexit, saying they had promised to honour the result of the country’s 2016 decision to leave the European Union. “I think that MPs (Members of Parliament) should get on and deliver on what they have promised over and over and over again to the people of this country: they will deliver on the mandate of 2016 and leave the EU on Oct. 31,” Johnson told reporters. Asked about the prospect of losing a confidence vote in parliament and whether he would then delay an election until after Brexit he said: “We are going to leave the European Union on Oct. 31, which is what the people of this country voted for.”

Pakistan Expels Indian Ambassador as Kashmir Dispute Escalates

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Police say a racist, anti0immigrant document they believe was written by the suspect has a "nexus to a potential hate crime." The fourpage document posted online espouses white nationalist and racist views. Less than 24 hours later, another gunman killed at least nine and injured at least 16 more early Sunday morning in a neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio popular for nightlife. At a news conference on Tuesday, Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said the gunman had "expressed the desire to commit a mass shooting." The FBI said the gunman was "exploring violent ideologies," but added that it had not made a final determination on his motive. A Twitter account that appears to belong to Dayton mass shooter Connor Betts retweeted extreme left-wing and anti-police posts, as well as tweets supporting Antifa or anti-fascist, protesters.

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There are valid fears that if they manage to take the case to the military tribunal, Hezbollah might be able to use its influence to frame Jumblatt, in an attempt to break him, politically and personally.

Hezbollah is Firming up its Grip on Lebanon

As Pressures Mount, Hezbollah Moves to Silence All Opposing Voices

by Hanin Ghaddar Hezbollah does not seem to be satisfied with the current grip it has on Lebanon. Despite winning the 2008 parliamentary

elections and forming a majority government with its allies, Hezbollah still wants it all. They no longer want to tolerate critics or challengers, from the street or from the political class. Two recent developments in Lebanon indicate that

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Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. (AFP)

Hezbollah is heading to silence – or at least weaken – all opposing voices. One is the intensifying campaign against Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, and the other against Shia voices who dare to criticize Hezbollah’s practices within the Shia community.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAIN JUMBLATT The crisis started in Mount Lebanon, where two supporters of pro-Assad Druze MP Talal Arslan, an ally of Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and Hezbollah, were killed in clashes with supporters of Jumblatt, who heads the rival Druze Progressive Socialist Party. The shooting took place while Arslan’s ally Gharib’s entourage was passing through the town of Qabreshmoun.

Bassil, Hezbollah’s main Christian ally, used the incident to consolidate power. After the shooting, Bassil’s bloc demanded the issue be referred to the Judicial Council, an

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extrajudicial body that handles matters of national security.

Jumblatt, along with Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, stood in the way.

Jumblatt›s party says the incident was an exchange of fire initiated by Minister Saleh Al-Gharib›s entourage in which two Jumblatt supporters were also wounded.

In an attempt to calm the tensions, Jumblatt handed two of his supporters, suspected of involvement in the shooting, to the authorities, and demanded that the other side do the same.

Hariri has refused to put the shooting incident on the cabinet agenda because Hezbollah allies had hinted that Jumblatt is culpable and wanted the case to go to a special tribunal.

Having failed, they have been trying to have the case go to a military tribunal, also under their control.

Consequently, the cabinet has not convened since the incident on June 30, causing a paralysis of the discussions on the 2020 budget. In a recent television interview, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Jumblatt and other critics of Hezbollah of conspiring against their socalled axis of resistance. Nasrallah still cannot forget what Jamblatt had said in May 2019, when he challenged one of Hezbollah’s main justifications for keeping its weapons. He said the Shebaa Farms, disputed territory occupied by Israel, was Syrian and not Lebanese as Hezbollah claims.

Jumblatt is also a fierce critic of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and many observers view this campaign as part of a wider campaign to weaken his influence over Lebanon›s Druze community. In addition, Jumblatt is often seen as a champion and protector of Syrian refugees, which both Nasrallah and Bassil are eager to deport. This campaign – for many - resembles previous strategies by Iran and the Syrian regime of branding critics as traitors and make their persecution justified. There are valid fears that if they manage to take the case to the military tribunal, Hezbollah might be able to use its influence to frame Jumblatt, in an attempt to break him, politically and personally.

FADWA’S INCIDENT In a less significant incident, but equally indicative, a Shia

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critic of Hezbollah has been kicked out of her home and out of the town of Debaal in the south of Lebanon where she lived.

Fadwa – a forty-year-old mother – has for weeks been critical of Hezbollah and their supporters from Debaal and her hometown of Majadel. It seems that after weeks of exposing some of these people – with names – she started to receive threats. Instead of stopping her criticism, Fadwa took to social media – mainly YouTube – and voiced more criticism over these threats. She also said that she had tried to go to the local police but nothing came out of it.

During one of her YouTube episodes, she said, “You (Hezbollah) are condemning me for swearing at Hezbollah while everyone else swears at them, but I was the one who dared to speak out.”

A few days later, Fadwa released a new video saying that she and her children have been forced out of their home in retaliation. She included footage that went viral on social media, showing furniture and other items scattered outside her rented house in the town of Debaal.

This incident – although small in comparison - has great implications as it reflects the extent of Hezbollah’s influence in the South, the scope of its power, and its authority over state institutions, such as police stations. However, this isolated incident also reflects the extent of unrest within communities in South Lebanon, due to payment cuts and Hezbollah’s financial crisis.

But for Hezbollah, not a single critic will be tolerated anymore. This increased intolerance towards individual critics is also due to the fact that Hezbollah is more pressured by its own community and is worried that this criticism and freedom to voice it will spread and cause more pressure.

Therefore, kicking Fadwa out of her house and town – although drastic – was specifically made to send a message to the Shia community that anyone who dares to say anything against Hezbollah might face a similar – if not worse – fate.

kicking Fadwa out of her house and town – although drastic – was specifically made to send a message to the Shia community that anyone who dares to say anything against Hezbollah might face a similar – if not worse – fate.

Fadwa’s story was a clear memo that Hezbollah’s redlines shall not be crossed.

WHY NOW? Both these incidents show that Hezbollah needs more control over rhetoric and political life. So why isn’t the party satisfied with the power they have recently achieved – democratically through elections? Wouldn’t it be better to allow a few opposing voices who cannot really challenge or change the political equation?

That might be true if Hezbollah wasn’t facing its own challenges or are concerned about future ones.

One of these upcoming challenges is the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s final decision, which is expected to come out by the year’s end, and is predicted to name certain Hezbollah members. Besides the domestic blow that this might produce, it will probably put Hezbollah under more scrutiny by the international community, mainly Europe, which has not yet listed Hezbollah’s “political wing” as a terrorist organization.

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Video footage showed furniture and other items belonging to Fadwa scattered outside her rented house in Debaal.

(Social media)

Hezbollah is also worried about more US sanctions on Iran – causing more financial problems for the party, and probable sanctions against its Lebanese figures, financiers, and allies.

If Hezbollah’s allies are sanctioned – such as Aounists and Amal members – Hezbollah’s political balance might be shaken.

In addition to these two challenges, Lebanon’s economy is not doing well, and many are concerned of a serious financial collapse where the Lebanese Lira could fall and the government might not be able to pay salaries. Add to that the other pending issues such as electricity, pollution, the garbage crisis, public education, among others. Usually Hezbollah is very good at criticizing the government and encouraging others to speak up against corruption. But that was when Hezbollah was on the side of the opposition.

Today, Hezbollah is the authority and they will be blamed for the government’s shortcomings one way or another. Having Hariri as a PM will work for a while, but everyone knows that Hariri does not really control these decisions. Hezbollah cannot afford more criticism and exposure. Therefore, everyone will have to be silenced,

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This increased intolerance towards individual critics is also due to the fact that Hezbollah is more pressured by its own community and is worried that this criticism and freedom to voice it will spread and cause more pressure. from Jumblatt to Fadwa. * Hanin Ghaddar is the Friedmann Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

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by Joseph Braude As Washington’s net of sanctions continues to tighten, Iran has mounted a campaign of naval and diplomatic brinkmanship toward America’s Arab and European allies. Despite these efforts — and a sophisticated Iranian oil smuggling campaign in Asia — American sanctions are dealing the Iranian economy a series of blows which are proving increasingly difficult to sustain.

IRAN THREATENS EUROPE, IRAQ Iranian President Hassan Rouhani issued an unusually blunt threat on Tuesday in a speech broadcast live on state TV. He reminded the audience that international shipping might not be safe in the Strait of Hormuz oil waterway: “Peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, war with Iran is the mother of all wars.” He also warned that Iran’s military would exact retribution from Western powers “a strait for a strait. It can’t be that the Strait of Hormuz is free for you and the Strait of Gibraltar is not free for us,” Rouhani said.

The statement followed the seizure by the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ naval forces of an Iraqi vessel in the Arabian Gulf. This marked the third such seizure in recent weeks, and a pointed threat at Iran’s Arab neighbors. “The IRGC’s naval forces have seized a foreign oil tanker in the Arabian Gulf that was smuggling fuel for some Arab countries,” said the paramilitary’s forces commander Ramezan Zirahi, according to state-run media. The Iraqi ship was reportedly carrying about 185,000 gallons of fuel, though the nationality of the crew remains unknown. Contrary to initial reports, the Iraqi oil ministry denied having ties to the seized ship.

Iranian Oil Smuggling and Naval Piracy Fail to Blunt Sanctions American Sanctions are Dealing the Iranian Economy a Series of Blows Which are Proving Increasingly Difficult to Sustain 14

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A speedboat of the Iran's Revolutionary Guard moves around a British-flagged oil tanker Stena Impero which was seized in the Strait of Hormuz on Friday by the Guard, in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. (AP)

As if to emphasize Tehran’s indifference to Iraqi sovereignty, this week a crucial Iranian proxy mused publicly about toppling the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Deputy Secretary-General Nasr al-Shammari of the alNujaba Movement remarked during a meeting with former secretary of the Iranian National Security Council Saeed Jalili, “If any Iraqi government takes a step against Iran, it will be toppled in some few ‎weeks.”

Tehran has also maintained a steady drumbeat of threats to exit what remains of the JCPOA unless Europe intervenes to provide more sanctions relief. According to Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, “With the continuation of the inaction of the Europeans in carrying out their commitments [to the nuclear deal] ... Iran will take a third step [in reducing commitments] in approximately one month.” He added, “What is certain is that by putting aside or suspending our commitments we will increase

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Iranian President Hassan Rouhani issued an unusually blunt threat on Tuesday in a speech broadcast live on state TV. He reminded the audience that international shipping might not be safe in the Strait of Hormuz oil waterway: the speed of our nuclear activities.”

IRAN ATTEMPTS TO EVADE SANCTIONS At the same time as Iran’s political echelon is attempting to push back against American containment through military threats or diplomatic maneuvering, massive smuggling efforts are underway to cushion the impact of the sanctions on the Iranian economy. According to efforts by the New York Times to track Iranian shipping, at least 12 Iranian tankers have unloaded oil in Asian and Mediterranean ports since May 2, indicating an ongoing effort to skirt sanctions through illicit smuggling. These efforts so far appear to be local and scattershot, however.

Meanwhile, where the U.S. has discovered sanctions violations, the punitive response has been swift. On July 22, Secretary of State Pompeo announced new sanctions targeting Zhuhai Zhenrong, a Chinese stateowned enterprise, and its senior corporate executive, Li Youmin, for “violating U.S. restrictions on Iran’s oil sector.” According to Mr. Pompeo in a July 25 interview with Bloomberg TV, “We have a pretty good bead on where these ships are moving around… Wherever we find violations, we will do our level best to enforce them completely and thoroughly.”

In the larger analysis, Tehran’s efforts appear to have accomplished little more than slightly mitigating the damage. The IMF estimates that the Iranian economy will shrink by 6 percent in 2019, an enormous contraction equivalent to the steepest decline in US GDP during the Great Recession. Average costs for residential housing in Tehran have soared 91.5 percent in the past year, according to data released by the Iranian Central Bank. Perhaps most critically, the Iranian rial has lost some 60 percent of its value since President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA and re-imposed economic sanctions.

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Terrorism experts, however, say the radicalization process, tactics and narratives used by violent white nationalists are actually strikingly similar to those employed by ISIS. Understanding what the two groups have in common, experts say, can help officials develop a strategy for preventing homegrown extremism.

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"I see extremism as a structure for beliefs," said J.M. Berger, author of the book "Extremism." "We need to do a better job in treating extremism as a universal phenomenon.�

The challenge of combating domestic terrorism and white supremacist violence was thrust into the spotlight after a gunman, who is alleged to have posted a racist screed online, went on a bloody rampage Saturday, killing 22 people in the aisles and parking lot of a Walmart in El Paso. (Several hours later, another shooter, who had reportedly held leftist beliefs, killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio.)

White Supremacists and ISIS Recruits Have More in Common Than You Might Think Understanding What the Two Groups Have in Common Can Help Prevent Homegrown Extremism

by Melissa Etehad On the surface, white supremacists and ISIS recruits would not seem to have much in common. One group embraces a racist, anti-immigrant ideology and is

mobilized by fear that a majority of people in the United States will soon no longer be white. The other group believes it must kill "infidels" and create an Islamic “caliphate."

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Many were quick to point out how the Trump administration has shifted resources away from a Department of Homeland Security program meant to counter violent extremism, including far-right and white supremacist groups, to focus mainly on combating Islamist extremism. On Tuesday, Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, released an action plan to address the threat of domestic terrorism.

Despite their ideological differences, white supremacists and supporters of ISIS derive their strength from a similar narrative: They believe they are in the midst of an existential crisis that threatens their way of life and that the only way to ensure self-preservation is to use violence, experts say.

"These groups have apocalyptic and exclusionist ideologies that are repeated and circulated in order to serve as a rallying point to susceptible individuals," said Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Although there's no magic formula to predict who will be drawn to extremist ideologies, experts have identified broad personality traits when it comes to ISIS recruits and white nationalists: young men who feel alienated, marginalized or lack a sense of community.

Experts have identified broad personality traits when it comes to ISIS recruits and white nationalists: young men who feel alienated, marginalized or lack a sense of community.

One theory that describes how people end up carrying out terrorist attacks is called the staircase model. A Georgetown University psychology professor, Fathali Moghaddam, coined that term in a paper published in 2005.

According to Moghaddam, all members of society start out at the bottom floor and remain there if they feel content with their living conditions. If people feel discontent, they climb to the second level to try to find a solution. At that point, if an individual hits a dead end and continues to feel unsatisfied, he or she might begin to feel angry, frustrated and eager to point fingers at a target, such as a government or religious and ethnic groups. It's at this stage that experts say intervention is necessary.

People who climb to the third floor begin to feel comfortable with the idea of using violence against their perceived threat. Individuals are also susceptible to recruitment at this stage. A person climbs to the fourth floor when he or she is recruited by an extremist group.

At that point, Moghaddam says, there's little that can be done to prevent the person from climbing to the fifth and final floor, which is when violence is used against the target.

There are obviously significant differences between white supremacists and ISIS recruits. One is organizational: ISIS has a leader members can rally around _ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi _ and at one point established a government that administered large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria, albeit for a short time.

The radicalization process doesn't happen overnight.

And just because a person might feel ostracized doesn't mean they'll necessarily succumb to using violence.

White supremacist groups, by contrast, are intentionally decentralized and fragmented.

Law enforcement's infiltration into white supremacist groups in the 1970s and '80s was the catalyst that spurred the movement's leaders to adopt that model.

"The thinking that terrorists appear out of nowhere is misleading. It doesn't occur in a vacuum," Hoffman said.

Since then, leaders of various white nationalist movements,

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such as Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute, haven't had much success in consolidating power when they've tried, said Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical analysis at the Texas-based global intelligence firm Stratfor.

For instance, the 2017 "Unite the Right" march in Charlottesville, Va., brought in an array of far-right groups, but the situation got out of hand when they were confronted by counterdemonstrators. The rally was canceled and violence ensued, culminating in a white supremacist driving into a crowd and killing a counterprotester.

However, Stewart said a decentralized strategy of relying on social media, online forums and private meetings has worked for white supremacist groups.

Three individuals with ties to racist or white supremacist ideology are alleged to have posted on the online forum 8chan prior to killing people: the suspect in the New Zealand mosque massacre of 49 people in March; the suspected gunman in the attack at a Poway synagogue in April; and the suspect in El Paso.

"Social media sites and forums like 8chan act as an echo chamber. People are feeding off the violence," Stewart said.

Hoffman says he worries that the internet and social media sites have sped up the radicalization process. "The

In recent years, ISIS has been following in the footsteps of white nationalist groups when it comes to using social media and online forums to disseminate information, chat with vulnerable individuals and inspire violence on such platforms.

threats from these groups are evolving and moving much faster because of the power of social media in recent years," he said.

Data shows that far right groups have been carrying out deadlier attacks than in the past.

Since the Sept. 2001 ,11, terrorist attacks, far-right groups have killed around the same number of Americans (109) as jihadist groups (107), according to data compiled by New America, a Washington-based think tank.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that we may be witnessing a shift in tactics over the past couple of years," David Sterman, a senior policy analyst at New America, said in reference to an increase in deadly attacks by white supremacists.

For years, counterterrorism experts and government officials have been voicing concern over the increasing threat posed by individuals inspired by far-right and white supremacist groups; a Department of Homeland Security

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Neo-Nazis, alt-Right, and white supremacists march the night before the "Unite the Right" rally, on Friday, Aug. 2017 ,11 through the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. (TNS)

report warned elected officials about the increasing threat of domestic terrorism in 2009.

And FBI data shows that hate crimes increased for the third consecutive year in 2017, up %17 from the year prior.

Red flags popped up again in May when Michael McGarrity, head of the FBI's counterterrorism unit, testified during a congressional hearing that of the roughly 850 domestic terrorism cases the bureau was investigating, %40 involved racially motivated violent extremism, and again last month when FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that a majority of domestic terrorism cases the bureau has investigated are motivated by white supremacy.

In recent years, ISIS has been following in the footsteps of white nationalist groups when it comes to using social media and online forums to disseminate information, chat with vulnerable individuals and inspire violence on such platforms.

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As ISIS's caliphate has withered, the group has been relying less on its leaders to spread ideology and are focusing more on the power of social media to inspire individuals to carry out attacks on its behalf, Hoffman said.

Experts say the threat from ISIS in this country comes mainly from individuals radicalized in the U.S., such as Joshua Cummings, who shot and killed a transit guard in 2017 in Denver, and Corey Johnson, a -17year-old who converted to Islam and, after watching extremist videos, allegedly stabbed three people during a sleepover in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2018.

According to New America, %84 of people charged with ISIS-related terrorism offenses are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, according to New America.

ISIS "is replicating what white supremacists were the first ones to do, whether consciously or not," Hoffman said.

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would allow Hong Kong to extradite residents of the territory to the Chinese mainland, tearing down the last firewall protecting Hong Kong from Beijing. Although Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam agreed to “suspend” the extradition bill on June 15, residents have continued to press their demands, calling for the formal withdrawal of the bill, an independent investigation into police abuses, the dropping of riot charges against protesters, and the introduction of democratic reforms.

On July 21, after activists defaced the national emblem outside of Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong’s Western District, the spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense accused the protesters of “challenging the central government’s authority” and violating the principle of “one country, two systems”—the term used to describe Beijing’s model for ruling Hong Kong since assuming sovereignty over the territory in 1997.

The protesters’ “radical” actions, he said, were “intolerable.”

Then, on July 31, the Chinese military garrison in Hong Kong released a video showing Chinese troops practicing anti-riot drills. In one scene, the troops shouted that “all consequences are at your own risk!” Together, these messages were widely seen as a threat to deploy troops from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Some commentators in the United States have even raised the prospect of another Tiananmen Square.

Will China Crush the Protests in Hong Kong?

Why Beijing Doesn’t Need to Send in the Troops

by Michael C. Davis, Victoria Tin-bor Hui For five months, Hong Kong has seen waves of massive protests and violence in the streets. And for five months, the local authorities, with the backing of Beijing, have responded in increasingly draconian ways—from wielding batons and firing lethal shots at protesters to jailing them on rioting charges—

that have succeeded mostly in inflaming public sentiment. The situation has devolved into a stalemate, featuring escalating protests and brutal clashes between police and demonstrators.

The question on everyone’s mind is if and when the Chinese government will resort to more aggressive means—including use of the military—to end the unrest for good.

The protests began in February in response to a proposed law that

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A riot police officer advances during a demonstration in the area of Sheung Wan on July 2019 ,28 in Hong Kong, China. (Getty)

Yet a military intervention is unlikely. Beijing has greatly benefited from Hong Kong’s ostensible autonomy, enshrined in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the 1990 Hong Kong Basic Law, which established the formula of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.” This arrangement has allowed the city to become the leading financial center of Asia and an important link between the Chinese and global economies. Beijing has a strong incentive to preserve the façade of autonomy in Hong Kong.

What’s more, it already has a tool kit, honed during the 2014 protests known as the Umbrella Movement, to keep Hong Kong in check. Rather than cracking down with its military, the mainland authorities are likely to step up other repressive measures to end the protests and restore comprehensive control without undermining an arrangement that serves them well. Beijing, in other words, doesn’t need to turn to what commentators call the “nuclear option”: it hopes to achieve what it wants at lower costs with tools it has used before.

LAW AND ORDER When, on July 29, reporters asked Beijing’s spokesperson on Hong Kong affairs, Yang Guang, about the prospect of PLA deployment, he replied that “the Basic Law has clear statements on that question, and I have nothing to add.”

Hong Kong Basic Law Article 14 says that the 6,000 PLA troops stationed in Hong Kong (with thousands more across the border in Shenzhen) are there “for defense” and “shall not interfere in the local affairs of the Region.” The law allows the Hong

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Beijing is still unlikely to send in troops. But if it is looking for an excuse to declare an emergency, it will have one—but one that is of its own making.

Kong government to “ask for assistance from the garrison in the maintenance of public order and in disaster relief” but states that on such occasions the PLA must adhere to Hong Kong law.

Article 18 clarifies further that Chinese laws do not apply in Hong Kong, with the limited exception of those listed in Annex III of the Basic Law, mostly relating to national symbols, nationality, and diplomacy. (These exceptions must be enacted locally before coming into force.)

Article 18 provides one major exception. If the National People’s Congress Standing Committee “decides to declare a state of war or, by reason of turmoil within the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region which endangers national unity or security and is beyond the control of the Region, decides that the Region is in a state of emergency, [then] the Central People’s Government may issue an order applying the relevant national laws in the Region.” Short of the Chinese government declaring a national emergency, that is, PLA troops can be deployed in Hong Kong only at the request of the local government. Yet this is much less of a constraint than it might seem. The chief executive of the local government is chosen by a -1,200person selection committee that is dominated by Beijing and generally defers to Beijing’s wishes. If it wanted to, the mainland government could easily direct Hong Kong to request military assistance.

Beijing has refrained from deploying PLA troops not because of constitutional checks but because it has other tools of repression, starting with the police. On July 29, a mainland spokesperson emphasized that the Hong Kong police have Beijing’s full support to “punish violent and unlawful acts” by “radical” protesters. On the same day, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, called for “forceful” police action and attempted to dispel concerns that excessive force could backfire.

Under Hong Kong law, demonstrations are “unlawful” if the police refuse to issue a no-objection notice—the local version of a permit. They have already been making use of this tactic.

They denied a notice to any form of protest in Yuen Long on July 26 and allowed rallies but denied notices to marches on Hong Kong Island on July 27 and August 4, rendering spillovers into the streets illegal. On July 27 alone, they arrested 49 protesters and subsequently charged 44 with rioting.

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olitics

The police have also made use of “forceful” methods. On June 12, when protesters surrounded the Legislative Council to prevent it from deliberating on the extradition bill, the police fired rubber bullets, pepper spray, beanbags, and tear gas into the crowd.

In subsequent weeks, they have begun using sponge grenades.

Officers have been filmed beating protesters with batons and aiming their rubber bullets at protesters’ heads. They have arrested young people at hospitals, making wounded protesters fearful of seeking medical treatment, and have ordered ambulance and emergency medical staff not to treat injuries at protest sites without police approval. They have turned their ire toward journalists, firing tear gas at reporters on July 27 and again on August 4–3, and have begun accusing elected councilors, social workers, and observers from nongovernmental organization of obstructing police action. On July 30, officers pointed guns at protesters and journalists at a demonstration outside the Kwai Chung police station. The same day, an unidentified car threw fireworks into crowds of protesters outside another police station.

Most alarming, the police are credibly suspected of colluding with triads, members of Hong Kong’s organized criminal underworld.

In a July 21 incident, hundreds of suspected triads dressed in white shirts indiscriminately beat locals with wooden sticks and metal rods at the Yuen Long train station. The police did not show up until after the gangsters had left, and senior officers were filmed speaking with the men in white shirts prior to the attack. Suspected protesters (including a nurse who volunteered emergency first aid) have been charged with rioting—which carries a maximum prison sentence of ten years—yet the gangsters have merely been investigated for unlawful assembly, a much less serious crime.

WHOLE-OF-SOCIETY REPRESSION Beijing does not only use force to control Hong Kong; it adopts

Rather than cracking down with its military, the mainland authorities are likely to step up other repressive measures to end the protests and restore comprehensive control without undermining an arrangement that serves them well.

a whole-of-society approach. It used this approach to shut down the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and it will likely do the same to deal with the current anti-extradition protests.

To silence the streets, organizers of the protests—who were calling for “genuine universal suffrage”—were arrested and sentenced to up to 16 months in jail for “inciting nuisance” and “inciting others to incite nuisance.” To cleanse the civil service, law enforcement, judicial institutions, and university councils, Beijing used its handpicked chief executive, who has overwhelming authority over appointments and promotions within the Hong Kong government, to fill these positions with loyalists.

To curb the power of Hong Kong’s elected Legislative Council, the government banned some opposition candidates from running for office and disqualified others after they had been elected.

And to further undercut the courts’ lingering independence, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress took the unusual step of issuing a binding interpretation of local oathtaking requirements while a case to remove legislators who had disrespectfully stated their oath was still pending.

Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong’s Western District—the instrument of Communist Partycontrol—does not intervene only at the top levels of the Hong Kong government. Its influence reaches deep into all 18 of the city’s administrative districts.

It has internal offices for each of the district councils, and each district has representatives of the Liaison Office. These representatives busily attend and organize local functions to

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Members of the territory's medical sector attend a protest in Edinburgh Place in Hong Kong on August 2019 ,2.

(Getty)

buy loyalty. They also mobilize support for Beijing’s favored candidates in elections. Junius Ho, widely accused of being the mastermind behind the mob attacks in Yuen Long, won his legislative seat in 2016 after his opponent withdrew from the race, citing anonymous threats.

WALKING A TIGHTROPE A government accountable to the people could de-escalate the tensions by meeting popular demands. A survey conducted on July 26–24 shows that 73 percent of respondents believe the government should formally withdraw the extradition bill, and 79 percent support an independent investigation into police abuses.

Beijing, however, has clearly indicated that it is going to heighten repression.

So far, verbal threats and physical abuse have only stiffened the resolve of Hong Kong’s people to defend the freedoms they have grown up with. Various professional and community groups—including accountants, architects, civil servants, finance workers, flight attendants, and medical workers—have organized one demonstration after another. Waves of arrests have inspired protesters to surround police stations and courthouses. In the last two weeks, the confrontations between protesters and the police have spread from Hong Kong Island to residential and shopping areas across the territory.

There is some chance that the police and the triads can end the current cycle of protests by arresting, jailing, and roughing up

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Beijing does not only use force to control Hong Kong; it adopts a whole-of-society approach. enough people. However, the people of Hong Kong are turning to other protest methods—such as a general strike, boycotts against pro-Beijing businesses, and targeted support for pro-democracy entities—that are less vulnerable to police and triad brutality.

Most of all, indiscriminate and illegitimate coercion has backfired by creating public outrage against Beijing.

So far, Beijing has succeeded in walking a tightrope: it has maintained Hong Kong’s special status while eroding its de facto autonomy, all without having to resort to extreme measures such as sending in the PLA. But by normalizing police and gangster violence, it has exposed the lie behind “one country, two systems” and its principle of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.” The message that the “radical” protesters—at the high price of police beatings and heavy jail terms—want to send to Beijing is that “if we burn, you burn with us.” Beijing is still unlikely to send in troops. But if it is looking for an excuse to declare an emergency, it will have one—but one that is of its own making.

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ociety At its core, the Forth Industrial Revolution is characterised by a range of new technologies that blur the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds which will exponentially change the way we live, work, and relate to one another. As physical and digital begin to merge, rapid and exponential increases in computing power are propelling developments in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, synthetic biology and robotics, drastically superseding any digital progress made in the past 60 years and creating realities that were previously unthinkable.

While in some ways the 4IR is building on the computerisation of the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century, it is being considered as a distinguishable era. Think of voice-activated assistants, facial ID recognition or digital health-care sensors - this revolution is expected to impact all disciplines and economies and to disrupt almost every industry in every country, creating drastic changes in an unprecedented speed in how individuals, companies and governments operate. The revolution promises gains in scientific knowledge, human health, income levels and the overall quality of life for the world’s population. But like with any seismic shift, there will be winners and losers.

THE RISE OF THE ROBOTS

The Robots are Coming Automation, AI and the Workforce of the Future

by Yasmine El-Geressi The First Industrial Revolution brought about mechanisation using water and steam to power production; the Second used electricity to usher in mass production; the Third was propelled by electronics and information technology which made made automation the new means of manufacture. With each revolution

came shifts to social, economic, environmental and political systems that truly reshaped the course of humanity. Today, humanity is embarking on a period of unparalleled technological advancements that many are calling “the Forth Industrial Revolution,” which, unlike the great revolutions of the past, is much faster, and its economic and social consequences are so farreaching that we can barely conceive them today.

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While the 4IR is expected to unfold over the 21st Century, one of it’s components - automation -has already disrupted jobs and labour markets and is set to drastically change the way we work. The topic of job displacement has, throughout US history, ignited frustration over technological advances and their tendency to make traditional jobs obsolete; artisans protested textile mills in the early 19th century, for example. “Never until now did human invention devise such expedients for dispensing with the labour of the poor,” said a pamphlet at the time. But while in the past technology has always ended up creating more jobs than it destroys, public concern with how robots are replacing human jobs has been growing in recent years as more manual processes become automated.

And as technology continues to accelerate, so will automation.

Amazon’s workforce is already equipped with robots that efficiently perform jobs that were once done by humans. In their workstation, robots carry huge cartons of goods and align them in order of delivery. In 2013, it has 1,000 robots, three years later the numbers

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At its core, the Forth Industrial Revolution is characterised by a range of new technologies that blur the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds which will exponentially change the way we live, work, and relate to one another. went up to 45,000 and today they have over 100,000 robots. While, Scott Anderson, the company’s director of robotics fulfillment, has said that the point at which an Amazon warehouse is fully, end-to-end automated is at least 10 years away, last month the tech giant announced that it will spend 700$ million to train about 100,000 workers in the US by 2025, helping them move into more highly skilled jobs. The New York Times observed that with this program Amazon is acknowledging that ”advances in automation technology will handle many tasks now done by people.”

But with new advances in AI, it’s not just industrial and warehouse robots that will reshape the workforce.

WHICH JOBS ARE MOST VULNERABLE? In a widely noted study published in 2013, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne examined the probability of computerisation for 702 occupations and found that %47 of workers in America had jobs at high risk of potential automation. In particular, they warned that most workers in transport and logistics (such as taxi and delivery drivers) and office support (such as receptionists and security guards) “are likely to be substituted by computer capital”, and that many workers in sales and services (such as cashiers, counter and rental clerks, telemarketers and accountants) also faced a high risk of computerisation. They concluded that “recent developments in machine learning will put a substantial share of employment, across a wide range of occupations, at risk in the near future.”

While no sector will be unaffected by these technologies, PwC has found that areas like health may be relatively less affected due to a greater reliance

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ociety While the 4IR is expected to unfold over the 21st Century, one of it’s components - automation -has already disrupted jobs and labour markets and is set to drastically change the way we work.

on social skills and the human touch. AI and robots will have an important role in health care in future, but more working alongside human doctors and nurses than replacing them. The same would be true in the education sector, according to their analysis. They also found that in the short term, the impact of automation may be low for workers of all education levels, but in the long run that those with lower education levels could be much more vulnerable to being displaced by machines.

delivered locally.

But could this time be different?

Since 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, the number of jobs which AI and machines will displace in the future has been the subject of numerous other studies, surveys, op-eds and policy papers. Subsequent studies put the equivalent figure at %35 of the workforce for Britain (where more people work in creative fields less susceptible to automation) and %49 for Japan.

The McKinsey Global Institute found that the disruption of automation will hit women workers the hardest due to their higher representation in certain fields. It found that between 40 million and 160 million women worldwide may need to transition between occupations by 2030, often into higherskilled roles. Clerical work, done by secretaries, schedulers and bookkeepers, is an area especially susceptible to automation, and %72 of those jobs in advanced economies are held by women.

But other reports provide a more positive take.

The World Economic Forum found that while automation will displace 75 million jobs, it will

A culture of adaptability and lifelong learning will be crucial for spreading the benefits of AI and robotics widely through society, particularly with an ageing population where we need people to be able to work for longer.

The impact of automation this time is broader as the advancements in technology will effect every industry, which was not the case two centuries ago where many workers could switch and adapt from one kind of routine to another. This time around, unskilled workers will need to broaden their skill sets while society will need to rethink how it perceives education, employment and entrepreneurship to stay ahead of technology as it continues to evolve. Another difference is that the shift from agriculture to industry took decades, whereas technology is developing much more rapidly requiring people to learn new skills much more quickly than in the past. generate 133 million new ones worldwide by 2022. Gartner found that AI-related job creation will reach two million net-new jobs in 2002.

Another study by McKinsey Global Institute found that worldwide, with sufficient economic growth, innovation an investment, there can be enough new job creation to offset the impact of automation, although in some advanced economies additional investments will be needed to reduce the risk of job shortages. In the US, there will be a net positive job growth through 2030.

PwC found that AI, robotics, and other forms of smart automation have the potential to bring great economic benefits, contributing up to 15$ trillion to global GDP by 2030. Although this wealth will displace many existing jobs, PwC says it will also generate the demand for many jobs.

But while experts can predict which fields automation might do away with the need for human labour, it is less obvious where technology might create new jobs.

“We can’t predict what jobs will be created in the future, but it’s always been like that,” Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University told the

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Robotic technology and vision systems are tested at a new Amazon fulfillment center on August ,10 2017 in Sacramento, California. (Getty)

Economist. Imagine trying to tell someone a century ago that her great-grandchildren would be video-game designers or cybersecurity specialists, he suggests.

“These are jobs that nobody in the past would have predicted.”

RELOCATION RATHER THAN DISPLACEMENT? Optimistic experts point to examples in the past of where industries declined and new ones emerged to replace them while the prerequisites of employment were redefined. Just as people are concerned about the impact of self-driving vehicles today, a century a go they were similarly concerned about the impact of the transition from horses to cars. But while horse-related jobs declined, entirely new jobs were created in the fast-food and motel industries that arose to serve motorists. Thus, some experts predict that self-driving vehicles will free up more time for people to consume goods and services, increasing demand elsewhere in the economy; and autonomous vehicles might greatly expand demand for products

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Despite the wide range of views expressed, most people will agree that rather than succumbing the doomsday predictions that robots will take over all our jobs, companies and governments will need to work together to make it easier for workers to acquire new skills to adjust to these new technologies through retraining and switch jobs as needed. PwC says that a culture of adaptability and lifelong learning will be crucial for spreading the benefits of AI and robotics widely through society, particularly with an ageing population where we need people to be able to work for longer. Soft skills will also be important in making people adaptable and employable throughout their working lives as the lifespan of any given skill set is shrinking. People will also get to do more work that requires creativity, social and emotional intelligence, and passion.

Although what the future holds is impossible to accurately to predict, it is important that we begin taking steps to prepare for a future where machines become colleagues, as if we don›t begin to adapt to the changes today, it will be challenging to catch up later.

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ociety targeting of video games has made the most headlines in the news media and traction on social media platforms.

This is not the first time that Trump has blamed video games over gun violence (he previously did so back in March 2018) nor is this the first time public discussion has been raised over the negative influences violent games have on youth. The Columbine School shooting in 1999 marked the first time in which video games have been placed under the radar for allegedly inspiring violent acts since both mass murderers happened to be fans of the first person shooter (fps) game Doom. This debate has only become more frequent as realism in games increased and violence became more horrific, in spite of this most psychological studies thus far have concluded that there is little to no correlation between violent behavior in youth and playing video games.

TRAINING AND SIMULATION ARGUMENT

Video Games: the Easy Scapegoat for Violent Acts Why the “Video Game Blame Game” is Still Prevalent

by Ali El Shamy Last Saturday, a young man by the name of Patrick Crusius committed a mass shooting in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas where he murdered 22 people and wounded at least 20 others. Just thirteen hours later, -24year-old Conner Betts opened fire in a popular nightclub district in Dayton, Ohio killing nine people in the process. So far, no evidence suggests that both incidents are related. Crusius posted a manifesto in 8chan just minutes before his act and the document showed that he was a white nationalist who opposed Hispanic migration to the US. As a result, it is safe to say that he specifically chose El Paso since 80 percent of its inhabitants are Hispanic. Meanwhile,

Betts’ twitter feed (which has since been deleted) showed that he had leftist beliefs but police forces have yet to find reason to believe that his attack was ideologically motivated. As two more mass shootings rocked the United States, the usual reactions and arguments on gun reform soon resurfaced. Meanwhile, President Trump publically blamed video games for glorifying violence to young audiences: "We must stop the glorification of violence in our society, this includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.” To be fair, he did also speak of the dangers of online radicalization, white supremacy and mental health in the broadcast, but his

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Screenshot from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (eColiEspresso/ YouTube)

First person shooters are one of the most popular video game genres, for instance Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 was the second best-selling game for 2018. Many have argued that realistic fps games can serve as training simulators which can teach young gamers how to use firearms, some even think that the genre make those who play such games desensitized towards violence. Funnily enough both the US military and the militant group Hezbollah have exploited popularity of the genre, in 2002 the United States Army developed a tactical shooter game called America’s Army. The game is free to download and serves as a recruitment tool for the military. The fifth game in the series is currently in development. Similarly, back in 2003 Hezbollah developed its own propaganda fps called Special Force in which the player plays as a Hezbollah militant battling against the Israeli Defense Forces. A sequel to the game was released in 2007, this time the plot was based on the 2006 Lebanon War. The fact that military and paramilitary forces are using games as recruitment tools can be used as an indicator that games can be warfare simulators, however most academic studies disagree. For instance, a study in Germany published by the Frontiers in Psychology gathered a group of gamers who played violent video games and a control group of non-gamers and both sets of individuals were shown emotionally provocative images while having their brains Fmri (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanned. The scans indicated that both gamers and non-gamers showed similar neural responses to the images. Furthermore, Marcus Schulzke a professor from the University of York also has his doubts that violent video games can encourage children to display violent behavior. It should be noted that Schulzke is in fact an International Relations professor and not a psychologist,

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Many have argued that realistic first person shooter games can serve as training simulators which can teach young gamers how to use firearms, some even think that the genre makes those who play such games desensitized towards violence. however one of his areas of study is how soldiers on the battle line make ethical decisions and he has used such expertize to analyze the influence violent games have on children. With regards to the argument that increased realism in games teaches children to harm others, Schulzke argues that most games, both violent and nonviolent, are far removed from the real world practices they simulate. For instance, a high score on Wii Tennis will not make someone a professional tennis player.

Similarly, Schulzke says that the only realism first person shooters present is the graphical representation of guns, rather than accurate simulation of gun shooting.

As such, it would be fallacious to argue that a child or a young person will learn how to use a gun just by pressing buttons on a game controller or a keyboard.

A common argument that children lack the capacity to distinguish the fantasy world from the real world has also been disputed. Psychology Professor Jeffery Goldstein has said that children are aware that the rules that apply in the video game world do not have the same implications on the real world, for instance children know that the real world doesn’t have a pause button or a reset option.

SHIFTING FOCUS AWAY FROM THE REAL ISSUE It is understandable that some people suspect video games of having a desensitizing impact on impressionable children, after all video game graphics have improved in an unprecedented level and those who still associate video games with -16bit graphics or rough polygons might be flabbergasted at just how lifelike games have become. Moreover, gruesome stages such as the one in GTA: V in which the player is required to torture a captor doesn’t help matters. However, the game industry has long had two detailed yet simple to understand ratings system, the United States has the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) system which has been around since 1994 while the EU has Pan European Game

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ociety

Information (PEGI) was created in 2003. Both boards clearly age mark video games, so there is no excuse for parents to not be aware of such systems. This, of course, is easier said than done since children are considerably more technologically sophisticated than their parents, and the rise of software purchases has made it easier for kids to circumvent parental authority.

For the longest time, this “violent video game blame game� has been and still remains a way of creating a false narrative meant to shift public focus away from the issue of gun reform, and the empirical evidence demonstrates this. According to Newzoo, a website that analyzes market trends, the US has the largest gaming market in terms of game revenue. The countries that follow the US are China, Japan, South Korea, Germany and the UK. If violent video games did indeed cause more acts of violence, then surely the rest of these countries must have frequent firearm homicides, but empirical evidence suggests otherwise. According to World Atlas, the US has a murder rate of 4.7 for every 100,000 people, while that may not seem like much, the UK and China only have a murder rate of 1.0, South Korea has one of 0.9, Germany has one of 0.8 and Japan only has a murder rate of 0.3. Meanwhile, a recent study by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime showed that the vast majority of homicides in the US are by firearms, meanwhile in Europe other mechanisms, such as use of sharp objects, have a larger share of homicide causes (the study did indicate that murders by firearms did cause the largest

Screenshot from GTA: V’s Torture Mission (Spawnster/YouTube)

Screenshot from Doom 1 released in 1993, as the game is over 25 years old it lacks the

share of homicides in Italy and France, but they did not represent the majority). As such, the video games cause murders argument is a faulty correlation equals causation one. What other countries with avid gaming populations have is stricter gun laws that make it harder to purchase firearms, however gun culture in the United States and extensive government lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA) stops substantial government debates on gun law reforms from happening. The graph below from The National Tribune shows the extent of NRA lobbying in the US, and just how much lobbying funds have been increasing. Until legislative changes happen, then homicides are likely to continue in the US and as video games become more realistic they will remain an easy scapegoat for gun violence.

What other countries with avid gaming populations have, that the US lacks, is stricter gun laws that make it harder to purchase firearms.

However gun culture in the United States and extensive government lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA) stops substantial government debates on gun law reforms from happening.

Graphic of annual NRA lobbying since 1999.

(The National Tribune)

Screenshot from Hezbollah's Special Force 2 (Derek Caelin/YouTube)

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conomy Just as the junk food industry has taken a nose dive in the West, soda and snack food sales have burgeoned in emerging markets. cultivate today will have grave policy consequences in the future. Politicians who have benefited from the companies’ largesse will be hard pressed to stiffen regulations limiting the marketing and sale of junk food products. And such limits are critical at a time when obesity and type 2 diabetes are on the rise among children and the poor in countries such as Mexico and Brazil.

STRIKING OUT FOR NEW TERRITORY Just as the junk food industry has taken a nose dive in the industrialized West, soda and snack food sales have burgeoned in emerging markets. Snack food sales increased by %92 in developing nations in 2002, while soda sales recently quadrupled.

Let Them Eat Junk “fast casual” dining options, among other market shifts.

For their part, the soda and snack food companies, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé, have turned to emerging markets to secure profits. And they are doing everything they can to keep their new markets pliable.

in franchises and vending machines in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and India. They are also building political and social alliances that can help them deflect political opposition, duck public scrutiny, and avoid stiff regulations on the sale of their products.

Companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé have worked closely with health-care officials in Mexico to create innovative public health programs, for example, with a focus on avoiding obesity and type 2 diabetes. They have also contributed to anti-poverty and economic development initiatives that help particular politicians deepen their bases of political support. In some cases, the companies have reached out directly to communities. Nestlé won favor among the poor in Brazil by offering a generous employment program. Coca-Cola has underwritten community sports and health-care initiatives in Mexico, making itself a part of the local culture.

The soda and snack food industries are not just investing

The alliances that the snack food and soda industries

Snack and Soda Companies Seek Political Cover in the Developing World

by Eduardo J. Gómez In the United States and Europe, junk food sales have precipitously declined since the late 1990s. Analysts have put the change up to greater health consciousness, increasing labor costs, decreasing purchasing power among the poor, new tastes among millennials, and the rise of

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A man carries a cooler as he passes giant bottles of Coca Cola on a beach in Cancun, Mexico on October ,13 2015. (Reuters)

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There is much to attract the big junk food companies to these emerging market countries. Middle-class consumers are on the rise, and in many cases, even the poor have more to spend thanks to anti-poverty programs. The Internet has raised global brand awareness, allowing foreign companies to quickly and easily gain market share. Snack and soda companies have taken advantage of these trends to open franchises, sell vending machines, and aggressively advertise their products.

They have also apparently determined that they will do all they can to preempt the sort of regulatory and cultural backlash that interfered with their performance in Europe and the United States. To this end, they seek to shape the political and social landscape to their advantage.

Mexico has become a particularly important staging ground for this new mode of business. There, Coca-Cola has built a strong network of supporters within government, ranging from presidents to senior health-care officials. PepsiCo went so far in 2007 as to work with the country’s Secretariat of Public Education to create a school exercise program, Vive Saludable Escuela, which won PepsiCo political favor and burnished its public image. And Nestlé locked

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conomy Mexico, Brazil, and India’s governments have recognized the need to improve public health. But for efforts to that end to succeed, they will have to limit the junk food industry’s relationship with government and civil society.

in the support of former President Enrique Peña Nieto by providing prepackaged biscuits for his government’s antihunger program.

The junk food industry has invested not only in Mexico’s politics but also in its society, with the objective of fending off public criticism and driving sales. Coca-Cola has sponsored sporting events and joined other companies in providing lucrative grants to academic researchers and nongovernmental organizations. Through the Mexican Diabetes Federation, a nongovernmental organization, the soda company has organized prestigious presentations at which scientists emphasize the importance of physical exercise over improved nutrition. At a time when Mexico is battling a major obesity problem, with obesity rates climbing from 10 to 35 percent from 1980 to 2012, the junk food industry has a stake in public opinion on matters of nutrition and health.

A similar dynamic prevails in Brazil, where Nestlé is a particularly powerful player. During the presidential administration of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the Swiss snack company cozied up to and influenced members of Congress, while helping to advance Lula’s anti-hunger program, Zero Fome, by supplying various foods to the poor. In exchange, Lula showered Nestlé with praise, awarding the company the government’s first Zero Hunger Partnership Certificate and helping it open a new factory in the state of Bahia in 2007. For Nestlé, investing in the poor was not only a political win but a means of safeguarding the company’s public image, deflecting criticism, and ensuring

As the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes rise in middle-income countries, the junk food industry’s political and social investments will complicate— and perhaps even reverse—these governments’ willingness to introduce stiffer regulatory policies.

convincing politicians to allow them to regulate the marketing and sale of their own products. The powerful Brazilian Association of Food and Beverage, a junk food lobbying group, has been instrumental in securing this arrangement, which is then overseen by a government-supported organization called the Council of Self-Regulatory Policy. Thus Brazil’s congress has never aggressively regulated the junk food industry’s marketing and sales, nor has it seriously broached the issue of a soda tax.

sales. The company created its own employment program for the poor, called Nestlé AteVc, which offered decent salaries during a recession in 2011, when unemployment was particularly high.

Like Mexico, Brazil has seen a recent rise in obesity, with rates estimated to have risen from 15 percent to 18 percent between 2010 and 2014, due in large part to insufficient physical exercise, poor dietary choices, and greater access to junk food. And as in Mexico, in Brazil, soda and fast food companies have organized national conferences and financed research emphasizing individual responsibility and exercise over nutrition.

These companies have made strong political inroads in India, where Nestlé has a partnership with the national Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSA) to train food regulators. Coca-Cola works with local Indian governments to provide much-needed health-care services (the company won Delhi’s prestigious Bhagidari Award as a result in 2009). And Coca-Cola and PepsiCo agreed to purchase more fruit from Indian farmers in order to support Prime

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Shelves of popular Nestle-made cookies on a Brazilian store shelf.

Minister Narendra Modi’s Made in India campaign, the objective of which is to create an independent, prosperous agricultural sector. PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi has lent public support to Modi’s efforts to revive India’s flagging agricultural sector.

CONSEQUENTIAL ALLIANCES As the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes rise in middleincome countries, the junk food industry’s political and social investments will complicate—and perhaps even reverse—these governments’ willingness to introduce stiffer regulatory policies.

In Mexico just in May, legal efforts to improve the clarity and accuracy of food labels came before the Supreme Court. The court ruled that current labels were sufficiently clear, notwithstanding vehement protests to the contrary from nutrition organizations and academic researchers. The Supreme Court’s decision aligns with the preferences of the industry to leave food labels as they are.

In Brazil, junk food companies have succeeded in

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Finally, in India, the Modi government perceives companies such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo as vital to agricultural development. Delhi therefore has little incentive to effectively limit the marketing and sale of these companies’ products. In fact, Modi’s mandate that all flavored sodas include two percent locally produced fruit ensures that what profits the soda companies also serves the prime minister’s political and economic agenda. The Modi government is considering imposing a junk food “sin tax,” but it fears a backlash from the industry too much to have yet introduced more aggressive marketing and sales regulations.

Mexico, Brazil, and India’s governments have done a commendable job of recognizing the need to improve public health. But for efforts to that end to remain vigorous and independent, the governments will have to limit the junk food industry’s relationship with government and civil society. Such limits are at least as important—if not more so—as introducing “sin” taxes and altering consumer habits. Taking politics seriously means limiting the junk food industry’s interference.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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echnology The public will lose trust in the media and other institutions they rely on for information, including the government, exacerbating the prospects for political paralysis and polarization. stories about complex foreign policy issues. Our results were clear: it can.

A DANGEROUS TECHNOLOGY While the details of GPT2- are highly technical, it is, essentially, a program that uses artificial intelligence to synthesize new text. Given a short prompt, GPT2- can continue the text in the same style. In some cases, the text the software generates is indistinguishable from that written by a human.

The potential for abuse is obvious. The software’s creators at OpenAI worry that bad actors could use GPT2- to automatically generate misleading news articles, abusive social media posts, and spam. Because of this potential for misuse, OpenAI chose not to release the full version of GPT2- to the public. Instead the group released a watered-down version that, while still useful for research, entailed fewer risks.

Not Your Father’s Bots AI Is Making Fake News Look Real

by Sarah Kreps North Korean industry is critical to Pyongyang’s economy as international sanctions have already put a chill on its interaction with foreign investors who are traded in the market. Liberty Global Customs, which occasionally ships cargo to North Korea, stopped trading operations earlier this year because of pressure from the Justice Department,

according to Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Foreign Trade Committee.

The paragraph above has no basis in reality. It is complete and utter garbage, intended not to becorrect but to soundcorrect. In fact, it wasn’t written by a human at all—it was written by GPT2, an artificial intelligence system built by OpenAI, an AI research organization based in California.

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Disinformation is a serious problem. Synthetic disinformation—written not by humans but by computers—might emerge as an even bigger one.

Russia already employs online “trolls” to sow discord; automating such operations could propel its disinformation efforts to new heights.

We conducted a study to see whether synthetic disinformation could generate convincing news

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In its current form, GPT2- cannot easily be configured to convey a specific point of view or make certain arguments. Configuration, however, may not be necessary: depending on the prompt, GPT2- will adapt its tone and topic automatically.

If a prompt describes a fabricated event, as a fake news article might, GPT2- can synthesize additional details and quotes so as to make the fabricated event appear real.

In the end, the exact details of GPT2-’s output are not critical. What matters is that the reader absorbs the lede—the primary fabrication, written by a human to serve the disinformation

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echnology

campaign’s particular interests—and that the synthesized body text appears sufficiently topical and trustworthy to convince the reader that the fabricated event did, in fact, happen.

article about the seizure of a North Korean ship.

From those 20, we selected the three that seemed the most convincing. (The first paragraph of this article is an excerpt from one of those three texts.)

ALL THE FAKE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT

We then put these three articles to the test in an online survey with 500 respondents. We first asked the respondents their opinions of North Korea, as Gallup frequently does. Then each respondent read the first two paragraphs of the New York Times article, followed either by one of the three synthesized stories or by the rest of the original piece.

To test whether synthetic disinformation produced

by GPT2- could sway opinion on complex foreign policy issues of the kind that foreign powers might be especially interested in affecting, we used the publicly available version of GPT2- to generate articles about a North Korean ship seizure.

We selected North Korea because of the long history of tension between Washington and Pyongyang and, hence, the topic’s evergreen relevance. Almost 90 percent of Americans view North Korea unfavorably, but day-to-day concern about the country ebbs and flows: 51 percent of Americans cited North Korea as the greatest enemy of the United States in 2018, but only 15 percent did in 2019. The negative but malleable nature of U.S. public opinion about North Korea made the case an ideal one through which to study the potential effect of weaponized fabricated news stories.

We envisioned a future disinformation campaign in which GPT2- helps scale the production of fabricated news articles. Humans would write the ledes; GPT2- would write the seemingly credible body text. We used the publicly available version of GPT2- to generate 20 texts continuing from the first two paragraphs of a New York Times

Large-scale synthesized disinformation is now possible, and its perceived credibility and potential to spread online rival those of an authentic Times article.

After the respondents read the full text, we asked a series of demographic and opinion questions.

Most important, we asked the respondents if they thought the treatment text was credible and whether they would share it on social media.

We chose The New York Times as the source for our prompt text because of its staid and trustworthy style. We wanted to know whether GPT2- could imitate a Times storyon a complex foreign policy issue and match the credibility score of the real article. Having the ability to convey the authority and credibility typical of the Times would prove particularly useful to a disinformation campaign.

BETTER THAN THE REAL THING? A majority of respondents in all four groups— those who read the original article and those who read each of the three treatment texts—found their texts credible. A staggering 72 percent of respondents in one group reading a synthesized article considered it credible—less than the 83 percent that rated the original New York Times article credible, but still an overwhelming consensus. The worst-performing treatment text duped fully 58 percent of respondents.

The respondents’ interest in sharing the texts they read on social media did not vary much across the four groups. Approximately one-quarter of respondents who read the original New York Times story indicated that they would share the story on social media. Interestingly, the synthetic text

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rated as least credible had share rates statistically indistinguishable from the Times story.

How did our process compare with a real-world synthesized disinformation campaign? Instead of using the full version of GPT2- that OpenAI makes available to researchers, we used the less capable, publicly available version—just as a real-world disinformation campaign would. Our text selection process also matched what a disinformation campaign might do: because the publicly available version of GPT2- cannot produce coherent text consistently, a campaign would need to manually filter out nonsensical outputs (as we did).

Large-scale synthesized disinformation is now possible, and its perceived credibility and potential to spread online rival those of an authentic Times article. As the technology for producing such synthetic texts improves, disinformation will become cheaper, more prevalent, and more automated. When such content floods the Internet,

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Disinformation is a serious problem.

Synthetic disinformation—written not by humans but by computers— might emerge as an even bigger one. people may come to discount everything they read. The public will lose trust in the media and other institutions they rely on for information, including the government, exacerbating the prospects for political paralysis and polarization.

Or worse: people will believe what they read, in which case foreign governments will be able to influence them at high speed and low cost—no St. Petersburg troll farm needed.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1760- August - 09/08/2019

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be

www.majalla.com

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Jeff Bezos: From CEO of E-Commerce to the King of Space London: Majalla Illustration by Ali Minadalou American Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, owner of The Washington Post and founder of the space exploration company Blue Origin. His successful business ventures have made him the richest man in the world.

Jeffery Preston “Jeff” Bezos was born on January 1964 ,12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His biological father, Ted Jorgenson, was one of Alburquerque’s top unicyclists and part of a local troupe the Unicycle Wranglers who put on performance at county fairs and circuses while Jeff was still a baby. Jeff’s mother, Jacklyn Bezos, was still in her teens when she married Ted, and their marriage lasted for little more than one year. Jeff’s father “had a habit of drinking too much,” according to “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” by journalist and biographer Brad Stone. Stone suggests that Bezos’ childhood may have contributed to his obsession with success.

Jeff got straight As in high school and had an early love for computers which led him to study computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation he worked on Wall Street, and in 1990 he became the youngest senior vice president at the investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, at just 30 years old, Jeff quit his lucrative job and chose to make a risky move to open amazon.com, an online

bookstore. He had originally pitched the idea to his former boss, who wasn’t interested. Bezos says he got the idea when he saw the rate at which internet usage was growing and decided to tap into the potentials of the internet market. “I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me,” he said in his 2010 Princeton address.

Jeff managed to raise 1$ million from his family and friends, enough to set up his business in the garage of his Seattle home where he was surrounded by a tremendous pool of hi-tech talent.

The initial success of the company was meteoric.

With no press promotion, Amazon.cpm sold books across the United States and in 45 countries within 30 days. In two months, sales had summed up to 20,000$ a week. Bezos Began to diversify Amazon’s offering with the sale of Music and Videos in 1988, and later clothes, electronics, toys and more through major retail partnerships.

In 1997, Amazon.com went public and in just two years, Amazon’s shares were more than twice of its biggest competitors. A decade later those who had invested in it were multi-millionaires.

Bezos’s strategy was to increase Amazon’s shares as quickly as possible so Amazon could become the ‘World’s biggest anything store’. Amazon’s yearly net sales increased from 510,000$ in 1995 to some 600$ million in 1998 and from more than

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19.1$ billion in 2008 to almost 233$ billion in 2018. In September 2018, Amazon was valued at more than 1$ trillion, the second company to ever hit that record just a few weeks after Apple.

Conquering the internet wasn’t enough for Bezos.

His longterm plan has always been something much bigger - to establish a permanent human colony in space. In 2000, he established Blue Origin, an aerospace company that develops technologies to lower the cost of space travel to make it accessible to paying customers. For a decade and a half, the company operated quietly.

Then, in 2016, Bezos invited reporters to visit the headquarters in Kent, Washington, just south of Seattle. He described a vision of humans not only visiting but eventually colonising space. In 2017, Bezos promised to sell about 1$ billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

As of August 2019, both Bloomberg and Forbes estimated Jeff Bezos' net worth at 110$ million.

One analysis of Bezos' 2018 stock earnings had him taking home roughly 260$ million per day.

After more than 25 years of marriage, Jeff and MacKenzie divorced in 2019 due to Bezos’ affair with another woman. As part of the divorce settlement, Jeff's stake in Amazon was cut from 16 percent to 12 percent, putting his stake at nearly 110$ million and MacKenzie's at more than 37$ billion. MacKenzie announced that she planned to give away at least half of her wealth to charity. Jeff and MacKenzie have four children together: three sons and a daughter adopted from China.

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In the midst of peacetime, we, like the blameless folk of Newport, are being threatened with a wartime economy by a smiling Churchill impersonator who looks and sounds nothing like the original, apart from a bad stoop.

ulture

Final Part

The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be

by Bryn Haworth Time plays some cruel tricks on us all, but few could have imagined that Brexit, having tricked a nation into self-inflicted harm, would end by playing one of its cruellest tricks on our beloved monarch. Queen Elizabeth II might be forgiven for thinking that her time is up and that her long reign is being rounded off, tragedy-to-farce style, with a conventional narrative device of the bookend scene, just so we (her subjects) can have the satisfaction of a neat ending.

Why else, after such a long career of public service, would a woman whose first prime minister was Winston Churchill end up with his impersonator? Not a very good impersonator, to be sure.

It’s true he hunches his shoulders in the same way as the great man used to do, as he bull-doggedly surveyed the smouldering ruins of yet another blitzed neighbourhood, but where’s the cigar, and what’s with the blond wig? He’s a Churchill soundalike who, however grand his diction, could never be mistaken for the great man’s love child, or should that be the great man’s great grand love child? His actual ancestors were on the wrong side at Gallipoli. The Queen must think this is some weird prank that history has devised for her alone, a massive hint that she really ought to have abdicated by now.

If she does, then she greatly underestimates the prankster; she is far from being the only victim of history’s little joke. This week, it was the turn of the inhabitants of Newport in Wales. The Prank Minister showed up, with his trademark stoop and blond

wig, and immediately descended on a local poultry farm for a photo opportunity involving a bird of (as my father used to say) the feathered variety. He is so besotted with his own Churchillian pose, this Prankster-in-Chief, that having grabbed an unfortunate hen he could not resist muttering “Some chicken...” under his breath, though in a rare instance of self-restraint he did not finish the quote.

For those who haven’t recently written a biography of Churchill, let me remind you that the war leader was in Ottawa at the time. The year was 1942, and he was describing the conduct of the French: But their generals misled them. When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken!

[Applause] Some neck! [Applause] And so, fast forward to a Welsh chicken in the summer of 2019. If race memory had told it what Sir Oswald Moseley, our very own black-shirted populist, used to do to chickens – he strangled them for amusement – the Welsh chicken wasn’t letting on. It remained perfectly composed.

We are all in the same remarkable state of calm as that bird.

You could threaten to chlorinate us and we would not flinch. In the midst of peacetime, we, like the blameless folk of Newport, are being threatened with a wartime economy by a smiling Churchill impersonator who looks and sounds nothing like the

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if such a thing were possible, the standards of British journalism – has taken up residence there, nor has he achieved his lifelong ambition. That glum little dwelling in Downing Street has no such occupant, or his live-in girlfriend, just a cat named Larry with his own sardonic Twitter account.

I admit this may not be a mental trick available to the Queen.

She, after all, has to meet the new premier in the flesh. But it has so far insulated me against the unbearable reality that a party of humourless pranksters, not to be outdone by the Italians, or by the desperate citizens of Ukraine, has elevated a comedian – sorry, an Etonian – to the most important position in the land. I simply have not registered that we have a numpty in Number Ten.

NEWSPEAK Spot the one that’s ruffled (Adrian Dennis/PA).

original, apart from a bad stoop. It’s the revenge of the famous English sense of humour, and only that same sense of humour will ever get us through the horrors to come.

All this would be far more distressing if it were not for a certain psychological mechanism to which recent political events have forced me to resort. I have yet to accept that Boris Johnson is Prime Minister. Whenever news anchors say ‘the Prime Minister told reporters’ or ‘Today, the Prime Minister visited,’ my rational mind assures me they are referring to no one in particular, but to a phantom. I simply have not admitted to myself that this dodgy individual has risen to the post of Her Majesty’s First Lord of the Treasury. If the times appear pregnant with possibility, this is undoubtedly a phantom pregnancy. There can be no war in peacetime, I tell myself. The people of Great Britain will not tolerate the proroguing of parliament by an unelected Etonian numpty. Theresa May has left office in order to pursue her hobby of dancing at cricket matches, but she has not been replaced by a scoundrel with a bust of Pericles on his desk who has promised a golden age and sacrificed his money-making ventures to the service of a grateful nation. No man who embodies the phrase “rewards for failure” – having been richly rewarded for a whole string of bad decisions and even worse articles that have lowered,

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Curiously, despite being old Etonians and prognosticators, neither Aldous Huxley nor George Orwell predicted this comic turn of events: that a boy from their school would one day represent the apotheosis, and at the same time the Nemesis, of their country’s famously dark sense of humour.

This may not be surprising. While Huxley wrote with a certain amount of archness and wit, Orwell lacked these qualities almost to the point of renunciation. His muse was an austere one, rather like the love interest in his most celebrated novel, Julia, of whom more anon. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopia so unremittingly grim that any humour belongs to the underclass, the ‘proles,’ rather than to the elite of party members. Its hero, Winston Smith, may well have been named after Churchill, but he has none of his namesake’s humour, nor his facility with words. His diary entries are atrociously written, as if by a virtual illiterate. He may have a residual dream of the Golden Country and wake with the word Shakespeare on his lips, but Winston is already a long way into the indoctrination that will finally claim him. We are not told this explicitly, but he may well be the last of his kind, a doomed remnant of freedom in the totalitarian system of Oceania or, as England is now known, Airstrip One. Orwell toyed with the idea of a different title before his publisher dissuaded him: it was to be called The Last Man in Europe.

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ulture We shall never know. There are those who have called Orwell a Tory anarchist rather than a socialist, and he was certainly socially conservative, but it seems unlikely he was ever a snob.

The novel is definitely of its time. There are bombed streets of the kind Keith Richards remembers playing in. There are shortages of everything, and people smoke bad cigarettes washed down with Victory gin, which makes you gag. There are some uncanny premonitions, such as this from Winston’s diary: Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean (p. 11).

probably have encountered a copy of the Newspeak dictionary.

The character of Syme illustrates the process. A zealot of the new language, though this doesn’t save him from the fate of being ‘vaporised’ later, Syme is working on the definitive Eleventh Edition of the dictionary. Even in the work canteen his enthusiasm for the project means he can speak of little else.

But the startling currency of this is deceptive. Comparing Nineteen Eighty-Four with Brave New World, it is immediately obvious that Orwell’s old tutor has the better claim to prophetic powers. Perhaps North Korea is the only place where people would look at this future and think “Wow, now that’s uncanny!”

We’re getting the language into its final shape… You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them every day…

Nonetheless, the pupil displays little deference towards his former tutor. He puts these words in the mouth of his most sinister character, O’Brien: …the world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined (p. 306) This isn’t just a claim to clearer foresight on Orwell’s part; it’s also a sally of literary criticism. It was Wells who had predicted the brightest futures, made possible by advances in science, and Huxley who had added the ingredient of hedonism, turning dystopia into a vision of our present – at least the present occupied by the super-rich, with their private jets to ferry them from one party in Ibiza to another in Mykonos. Orwell (using O’Brien as mouthpiece) seems to be saying that is all far too hi-tech, because he struggles to see beyond the immediate circumstances of ration books and squalor.

Neither Aldous Huxley nor George Orwell predicted this comic turn of events: that a boy from their school would one day represent the apotheosis, and at the same time the Nemesis, of their country’s famously dark sense of humour.

But perhaps it’s unfair to expect prophecy of Orwell in the first place. He was really engaged in a thought experiment: ‘What if totalitarian communism of the type that has taken hold in Stalin’s Russia and has since swept over half of post-war Europe, came here?’

Ingsoc is the result, or English Socialism. The entire point of this future society is the control of people to the point of reading and dictating their thoughts. The party goes to absurd lengths to suppress aberrant thinking, even placing microphones in the country lanes to detect lapses into unorthodoxy. The Thought Police exist to enforce this. Thoughtcrime is the most serious offence. Through Newspeak, the Party are reducing language to a functional simplicity that will one day have the effect of preventing rebellious thought altogether.

Orwell was convinced that the ability to think subversive thoughts was dependent on the language in which to think them.

In ‘Politics and the English Language’ he saw the various defects of modern English as amounting already to the destruction of thought in a time of dictatorships. You could guard against the laziness of hackneyed phrases, passive voice, circumlocutions and the like, or else you could let …the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

It is at this point that the special connection between politics and

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The future is still what it used to be in North Korea.

the debasement of language becomes clear [my italics].

To a certain extent. By 1984, that extent will be edging towards total.

Orwell also notices the impoverishment of the modern idiom.

He takes a passage from the King James Bible, a translation of Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The language of this passage is timeless and beautiful, yet idiosyncratic and slightly quaint. Orwell then modernises it thus: Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

There are still plenty of people speaking like this – and worse – from our civil servants to people in public relations and marketing.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, a future that has yet to happen, this process of decline has been hastened by the party in a conscious effort to destroy thought. Rather than encountering a rat in his personal Room 101, as his hero does, Orwell would more

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It’s analogous to the degradation of the environment.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course, the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only synonyms, there are also the antonyms... A word contains its opposite in itself.

Take “good” for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? (p. 58) (If you have a word like woke, what need is there for a word like awoken? If you have a phrase like ‘my bad’, what need is there for a phrase like ‘sorry’?)

“Ungood” will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning; or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still… the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

Syme then goes on to describe the new dawn when there will be Newspeak versions of ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron’.

Mercifully, Orwell spares us these bowdlerisations.

BACK TO (RE)SCHOOL The effects of his prep school may have been the most

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ulture boys or extracting information from them.

We do not know much about Orwell’s period (as Eric Blair) at Eton, but there is something very reminiscent of school about the conditions in his great novel. ‘Doubleplusgood’, for example, has an undeniable ring of the school report about it, the experience of being constantly assessed and compared. In fact, the whole of Oceania is like one massive school where it is required forever to be on one’s best behaviour. It is even known as a ‘facecrime’ to allow a discontented expression to pass, however fleetingly, across one’s features. Every move, every word is monitored. Even at home, the telescreen’s eyes and ears are virtually inescapable; in order for Winston to write his diary, he has to hunker down in a concealed corner of his room away from the surveillance. In the next door flat, it is the children who do the spying – on their own parents. The flat reeks of the same boiled cabbage that hangs like a pall over the novelist’s memories of St Cyprian’s, his old prep school.

damaging on Orwell’s mind. In ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ he describes how ‘to survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially criminal’ and that he lived in a world ‘where it was not possible to be good.’ In this extended autobiographical account, he even uses a phrase that prefigures the famous boot stamping on a human face that O’Brien offers Winston as a vision of the future: Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.

What he calls winning here is what O’Brien will refer to as power, and that power is an end in itself. It is achieved by domination. O’Brien is like the headmaster in a school devoted to the destruction of knowledge, a kind of anti-school where pupils’ minds are emptied rather than filled, their critical powers are blunted rather than sharpened, and where the three most important principles (as Tony Blair did not say) are re-education, re-education and re-education.

Could it be that, along with the satire on socialism, Orwell was having a go at the power structures of education? In ‘Such, Such’ he wonders whether, even in more modern times, without ‘God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos,’ it might still be normal for schoolchildren to ‘live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings.’ Schools may change, but schooling will go on.

Eton was to leave fewer scars than the prep school. There is

When people make the effort to see the future, they may be forgiven for actually seeing the past. How else can one be expected to imagine the coming horror?

Winston’s workplace, the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth (known in Newspeak as Minitrue), is still more oppressive.

None of his fellow toilers in this vineyard can be trusted. The canteen, the scene of Winston’s conversation with Syme, resembles a school dining hall – not of Eton College necessarily, but almost certainly of the prep school that inspired Orwell’s greater loathing.

a story that in order to deal with a bully, he and a fellow pupil resorted to the dark arts: The late Sir Steven Runciman, the medieval historian, revealed in a letter written shortly before his death that he and Orwell practised black magic on a wax effigy of Philip Yorke, an older boy who had been threatening and offensive.

They were horrified, however, when Yorke first broke his leg and then, months later, developed leukaemia and died (Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2003).

If Orwell was left feeling guilty ever after, it was for having toppled, and even perhaps slain, a bully. There are worse things to feel guilty about.

Though it might not have been pervaded by the same smell of boiled cabbage as St Cyprian’s, Eton was a hard environment for a naturally independent-minded lover of justice. The tradition of ‘fagging’ was still current in his time there, whereby sixth formers got younger boys to fag for them. Their services might include warming the toilet seat in the winter, on pain of having their heads shoved through it. The phrase beloved by politicians to this day of ‘holding someone’s feet to the fire’ derives from the same ethos, and was taken quite literally as a way of punishing

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Not an easy place to get into; even harder to get out of.

It was Huxley, a fellow Etonian, who picked up on the sadism in the book. He complained that it was inefficient and would not last.

The sadism of a school, however – and a boys’ school at that – has an efficiency all of its own. It is designed to reward endurance. By sticking at it long enough a boy can eventually replace his masters and gain the privileges of the older boy. This all happens within the relatively small compass of six years, with every boy progressing from despised new boy to respected bully. It is a hierarchy that is mirrored in the inner and outer party of the novel, with the proles beneath and kept out of the hierarchy without hope of advancement.

This school system is surely the key to an otherwise mysterious aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four: its seemingly unmotivated violence.

Sadism is all very well, but is it an end in itself when transferred onto the level of an entire society?

The explanations O’Brien gives to Winston (under intense torture) suffer from a murderous circularity: the party seeks to control the individual, yet to do so the individual has to be eliminated. No individual sadist enjoys this process. It is even difficult to imagine Big Brother enjoying it. The subject of the sadism here is the party itself. To remove sadism from the personal dimension in this way, to make it impersonal, is a little bit like the line traditionally used by headmasters before they administered corporal punishment: This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you!

In this manner, the individual sadist is transformed into a functionary of a higher sadism and becomes the masochist. This is precisely the tone of O’Brien in the grim scenes where he finally has Winston in his care. He sounds like the disappointed head teacher when Winston fails to come up with the right

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answer. The torture is really a violent form of examination and assessment that is necessary to turn the raw material of the errant boy into a proper member of the party, but the process of physical violence necessary to achieve this transformation is no source of pleasure to O’Brien – he is capable only of disappointment.

Oh dear, one can almost hear him thinking, you’ve gone and let yourself down again, old chap.

REBEL REBEL Rebel rebel, you›ve torn your dress Rebel rebel, your face is a mess Rebel rebel, how could they know, Hot tramp, I love you so?

(David Bowie) On the very first page we are introduced to the presiding genius of the novel, the ubiquitous Big Brother: The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

Compare this with the moment on page 20 when Winston’s eyes meet O’Brien’s across a crowded canteen; it also has a hint of homoeroticism: Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture. But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew – yes, he knew! – that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.

What Winston does and doesn’t know is one of the threads going through the book. We find later that he knew all along that O’Brien was his mortal enemy. In fact, the relationship with O’Brien is a case of sustained doublethink, since Winston both knows and doesn’t know that O’Brien is not his accomplice and fellow rebel. O’Brien, for his part, has a clairvoyant, quasi-supernatural ability to read Winston’s thoughts, the difference being that he does so without illusion. Is O’Brien a double-thinker? It’s impossible to say for sure.

Later we have this description: O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner.

At this point Winston can only hope that O’Brien is an ally, a man who harbours equally unorthodox thoughts, and yet the eventual discovery that this is far from the case seems hardly to matter. By the end of his savagely painful re-education, far from hating O’Brien for administering the pain, Winston has a ‘deep love’ for him.

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ulture should be neither especially accurate as a prophecy, always assuming one is not living in North Korea, and actually an account of the author’s schooldays. Yet, just as ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ was about as joyful as Joy Division, and just as it was criticised for being an exaggeration of the conditions in a prep school near Bournemouth, so Nineteen Eighty-Four has barely a glimmer of joy in all its pages and some readers have found its regime implausibly brutal. Huxley was one such reader. He felt the sadism was unsustainable. To be fair, so does Winston: ‘It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty,’ he tells O’Brien. ‘It would never endure.’ When asked what will stop it enduring, Winston invokes the Spirit of Man. ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ asks O’Brien, to which his student replies that he does. ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.’ It is a relic of the novel’s original title.

In contrast we know from early on that Winston ‘disliked nearly all women.’ He has a particular dislike, the kind we would now associate with an ‘incel’, for one woman in particular, the one who will eventually become his lover: Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian.

He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

Like Saint Sebastian, notice; i.e. like a helpless, naked man writhing in a loincloth.

It is obviously contagious, this society’s hatred; these ‘hallucinations’ come while the assembled group are engrossed in the Two Minutes Hate. Yet maybe the only relief from the novel’s gloom comes in the shape of Julia, who finds a way to approach Winston and who turns out to be his only kindred spirit, a real rebel. “I’m corrupt to the bones” she tells him before they first have sex. She helps him dodge the microphones and the telescreens, but there is little of the intellectual in her rebellion. “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he tells her. When he reads from the forbidden book, passed to him by a supposed member of the resistance, it explains the world order from the perspective of the party’s history and ideology. Julia, however, falls asleep.

In a sense, so does the reader. How cute of Orwell that he was unaware how bad it looked when his liveliest character found THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM soporific.

It is up to O’Brien to interrupt the lovers’ idyll, but for a while after his imprisonment in the Ministry of Love, Winston preserves

It’s curious that the most famous of all dystopian visions should be neither especially accurate as a prophecy, always assuming one is not living in North Korea, and actually an account of the author’s schooldays.

The last man is destined for death or infantility. In a strange way, Huxley and Orwell might have agreed on this point.

But there is no sense in Huxley’s utopian dystopia that this end will be accomplished by torture, perhaps because he had discovered the perfect infantilism of desire. Just when men and women think they are leaving childhood behind, they are merely swapping one kind of childishness for another. The oppression of childhood and the hierarchies of school come back to haunt the bedroom. This much is harmless between the consenting amateurs of infantilism.

his illusions about him. At last they are shattered when O’Brien walks into his cell: The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O’Brien came in.

Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the presence of the telescreen.

‘They’ve got you too!’ he cried.

‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.

‘You knew this, Winston,’ said O’Brien. ‘Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it – you have always known it.’

Yes, he saw now, he had always known it.

By the time O’Brien has finished with him, he will be a wreck of a man, prematurely aged and almost dead. Then he will hear about the future being the foot stamping on a human face – forever. He will also, incidentally, learn from his Inner Party tutor that “We shall abolish the orgasm.”

One’s schooldays, too, are safely behind one, you would think.

Yet you learn something new every day. Reverse that dictum and you have the horror of second boyhood, the order of events reversed, and the certain prospect of unlearning something every day, helped in this rubbing out of experience by the anti-tutors of ideology. The future is a return to school – to be unschooled.

Nothing like Big Brother

When people make the effort to see the future, they may be

Love is against the rules. Winston will only pass the exam when he wishes the torment of a face-eating rat on Julia, rather than on himself. Yet there is something akin to love between himself and O’Brien. This is a school for boys, after all.

Give me back my broken night, My mirrored room, my secret life, It’s lonely here, there’s no one left to torture…

(Leonard Cohen, ‘The Future’)

There’s no real mystery about the future. So long as you think it will be a new golden age, then you are speaking the glib language of the numpty in Number Ten who likes to keep a bust of Pericles on his desk and imagine that the greatest country on earth will be his legacy.

If, on the other hand, you think the future will not be so good – if, in fact, you’re almost certain it will be doubleplusungood – then it will resemble that thing you fear more than anything, the worst thing in the world, and for George Orwell, the artist formerly known as prep school pupil Eric Blair and as an Etonian, not a comedian, that worst thing was school.

FOOTNOTE: DAVID BOWIE AND NINETEEN EITHTY-FOUR The song ‘Rebel Rebel’ may have neatly encapsulated Julia’s sexiness and her defiance of the rules. However, it is well known that Bowie was unable to persuade Orwell’s widow, Sonia, to agree to a musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bowie was furious. “For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” he told Circus writer Ben Edmonds. “‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It really was like that.” But was it really snobbery? ‘Doubtless, Sonia did hate the idea,’ says Dorian Lynskey,

Sonia, on the other hand, was free spirit enough to hang out with some pretty anarchic personalities. After Orwell’s death, she went on to have affairs with painters, including Lucian Freud, and with a French philosopher. She was also friends with Bacon and Picasso. Maybe she just didn’t rate David Bowie.

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In a song called simply ‘The Future’, Leonard Cohen tells us he’s seen the future, brother, and it is murder. Yet the things he sees are familiar horrors from his own youth. He sees lousy little poets coming round ‘trying to sounds like Charlie Manson’. He sees fires in the road. In the guise of the ‘little Jew who wrote the Bible’ he sees nations rise and fall. And as things slide out of control, he sees ‘your woman hanging upside down, her features covered by her fallen gown’. It’s a vague recollection of the corpse of Mussolini’s mistress, Claretta Petacci, hanging from a meat hook after her summary execution. There had been no trial.

Some people would call that murder.

but then she had approved almost no adaptations in any medium since the fiasco of the 1956 movie and she certainly didn’t meet Bowie, so that anecdote can be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s debatable whether a hypermodern, hedonistic, bisexual rock star would have had better luck with a -70year-old Orwell (The Guardian, 19 May 2019).

I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE, BROTHER: IT IS MURDER

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forgiven for actually seeing the past. How else can one be expected to imagine the coming horror?

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ealth

by Emily Baumgaertner When Ebola broke out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a year ago, the global stockpile of a long-anticipated vaccine was 300,000 doses.

At the time, that seemed like plenty.

But as the virus spreads from the epicenter and threatens to explode across the region, the supply of Merck’s newly developed vaccine — once expected to function as a silver bullet — is dwindling, and likely to burn out before the outbreak does.

Officials have gone head-to-head in a bitter clash over the next line of attack. The country’s health minister stepped down last week rather than bow to international pressure to also start using another vaccine that is much more experimental.

He had banned its use over doubts about its effectiveness. The manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, says it has 1.5 million doses on hand and is ready to start sending them to the region.

Even if there were enough lifesaving vaccines to go around, the region’s violent conflict has made it virtually impossible for health workers to deliver the shots to every relative and neighbor of each Ebola victim.

Despite Vaccine, Ebola is Spreading

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Family members react as they watch a victim of the Ebola virus being buried on May 2019 ,16, in Butembo, theDemocratic Republic of Congo.

(Getty)

“There’s a level of panic lurking just below the surface — or maybe it’s above the surface now,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“No one imagined the level of violence in Ituri and North Kivu” — two eastern provinces — “would be so extensive that they wouldn’t be able to contain this. Now, vaccines have become that much more important In containing the outbreak,” he said.

The Ebola virus causes leaky blood vessels and circulatory failure, which starves the body’s organs of oxygen — leading to shock and multiple organ failure. It spreads directly from person to person through infected blood, sweat and vomit.

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The Ebola virus causes leaky blood vessels and circulatory failure, which starves the body’s organs of oxygen leading to shock and multiple organ failure.

For people who are already infected with the virus, a vaccine can’t help.

During the last Ebola outbreak, in West Africa in 2014 and 2015 , there was no vaccine immediately available, a reality that left every person susceptible. By the end, 28,600 people were infected and more than 11,000 died.

But that epidemic eventually became a testing ground for the Merck vaccine, which had been under development for more than a decade and was deployed to Guinea, where it showed positive results.

The vaccine — called V920 — remains unlicensed but appears to be %97.5 effective, according to early data from the current outbreak.

“These vaccines were the silver lining of the -2014 2015 epidemic, and now they’re tangled up in the internal chaos. It’s a bit of a mess,” Morrison said.

Health workers have administered more than 150,000 doses of the vaccine using a technique called ring vaccination, which prioritizes people who have had exposure to an Ebola victim, followed by expanding circles of their other contacts.

Ideally, the technique barricades the virus and snips each strand of the outbreak’s expanding web. But in a region marked by mass migration, less than a third of all confirmed cases have been linked back to known contacts, according to Doctors Without Borders.

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Merck, which has 245,000 doses currently available for shipment from temperaturecontrolled U.S. warehouses, hopes to triple the cumulative supply to about 900,000 doses over the next 18 months.

But as the outbreak spreads, some models predict the current stockpile could be depleted by the fall.

Production of the vaccine takes about one year — which means the region could see a several-month gap before a new vaccine lot is ready.

“We do project that we are going to run out of vaccine,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told lawmakers in testimony last month.

divide each of the remaining doses by at least half in order to immunize more people.

Merck officials are displeased with the dosesplitting approach, according to two health experts with ties to the company.

Pamela Eisele, a spokeswoman for Merck, said the data showing the vaccine is effective are based on a dose of 1 milliliter. “However, we fully recognize the public health need and the exceptional circumstances that led to the interim recommendation SAGE has made, and we respect that decision,” she said.

In May, WHO also recommended use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

A World Health Organization emergency committee directly acknowledged the shortage of the Merck vaccine supply in a sharply worded statement, calling the current stockpile “insufficient” and asking countries and manufacturers to “immediately take all measures to increase supplies.”

Scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine designed a protocol for getting them to those in need, according to Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the school.

Merck says it is moving production of the vaccine from the U.S. to a new plant in Germany that has not yet gained regulatory approval to ramp up manfuacturing.

Their biggest concern is whether it works. Tests in about 6,000 people have shown that it is safe and that it stimulates production of antibodies against the virus. But there is too little data to know its efficacy.

For now, production will be split between the two small-scale locations, limiting output.

In response to the shortage, WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, or SAGE, recommended in May that health officials

International health experts acknowledge that using unproven vaccines is less than ideal but say there may be no other choice.

But health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo resisted using the vaccine.

Oly Ilunga Kalenga, the health minister who banned it, was also concerned that the vaccine is administered in two doses, more than six weeks apart.

Keeping track of everybody who has been vaccinated — let alone persuading them to return for second shots — is all but impossible in wartorn Congo.

Kalenga also sided with health workers who worry that introducing a second vaccine could undermine public awareness campaigns that are already contending with deep-rooted distrust of authority.

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A vaccine for Ebola is tested on December ,22 2018, in Beni, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Getty)

More than a quarter of residents don’t believe the outbreak is real, and many people see vaccines as a plot to spread a virus, not eradicate it.

Almost immediately, President Felix Tshisekedi consolidated executive control over the outbreak response.

International health experts acknowledge that using unproven vaccines is less than ideal but say there may be no other choice.

In his resignation letter, the health minister wrote that it was “fanciful to think that the new vaccine proposed by actors who have shown an obvious lack of ethics” could have a meaningful impact on containing the outbreak.

“It’s a question of weighing concerns about acceptance and trust against the need for preventing disease,” said Josh Michaud, the associate director of global health policy at Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington. “It’s a balancing act, and as the outbreak expands, the calculation that goes into that equation may change.”

This month, it did. The outbreak reached Goma, less than a mile from the Rwandan border, prompting officials to declare the epidemic an emergency of international concern. From the bustling city of 2 million people, flights, ferries and buses fan out across central Africa.

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But scientists welcomed the opportunity to test the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“The only way to get the key data is to test it in large numbers of the population, and see how it stacks up against the virus,” said Carleigh Krubiner, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington.

“We could have another vital tool in our toolbox for future outbreaks — we just don’t know yet.”