In a new study based on mouse cells internationally leading protein researchers have identified several new potential targets using state-of-the-art technology, many of which could be employed for future treatment of different types of cancers and diseases.

Protein researchers from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen have used mass spectrometry based proteomics to uncover a number of proteins which could play a critical role propagating signals within cells that can lead to uncontrolled cell growth – one of the hallmarks of cancer.

The study, which has been published in the internationally acclaimed scientific journal Cell Reports, was conducted using mouse fibroblast cells.

The researchers behind the study believe the results may prove important to the development of new so-called tyrosine phosphatase-inhibiting drugs for patients suffering from different types cancer – for example Leukaemia – as well as other types of diseases such as Noonan syndrome.

Globally, cancer is one of the leading causes of death according to the World Health Organization. In Denmark one in every three Danes develops cancer at some point in their lives, according to statistics from the Danish Cancer Society.

Advanced Cell Communication Can Inhibit Cancer Development

The researchers focused on the protein communication and signalling that takes place inside the cells. Misregulation of protein signalling often leads to an increase in the production of tumours. By understanding the mechanisms and regulation of these signals, the researchers can specifically target the proteins responsible with drugs.

Using mass spectrometry proteomics to analyse the proteins of cells treated with various growth hormones in combination with advanced data analysis, the researchers discovered proteins that manipulate the communication processes inside the cells initiated by cell receptors and thus inhibit the development of cancer.

When inhibited the prominent protein tyrosine phosphatase called Shp-2 caught the researchers’ attention.

‘This in fact leads to the deactivation of a very prominent cell growth pathway, which is the main pathway that people often try to target in cancer cells’, Professor Jesper Velgaard Olsen from the research group explains.

100 potential targets

At the beginning of the study, the researchers knew of a handful of proteins which were regulated by Shp-2. However, using the mass spectrometry analyses the researchers discovered around 100 potential new targets, revealing a far more complexity than previously considered.

Now the researchers need to do further studies to determine the role and mechanisms of these proteins. They are already following up on their first results with human cells.

‘Now we are doing follow-up projects, looking specifically at leukaemia, where the cancer cells have mutations in these different receptors which can be regulated by Shp-2’, says Postdoc Tanveer Singh Batth.

Cancer patients are often treated with tyrosine kinase inhibitors, which block pathways inside the cells to inhibit tumour growth. However, many develop resistance to current clinical inhibitors thus there is a substantial need for finding new proteins that can be used as drug targets.

Personalised Medicine

The researchers’ new discoveries can be used in the development of personalised medicine, where preventive treatments can be targeted at the patients’ personal DNA or protein expression profiles.

‘It will be a drug that can be used only in a world with personalised medicine, where it will not be given to for example all leukaemia patients, but only to those with mutations in one of the receptor tyrosine kinases where we now know this Shp-2 protein operates’, says Professor Jesper Velgaard Olsen.

Personalised medicine is gaining ground in Denmark. In 2016 the Government and the Danish Regions launched a strategy for efforts involving personalised medicine. A main part of the strategy is the establishment of a National Genome Center.

Fact Box: The study described in this article was conducted using mouse cells. The researchers use animal models to accumulate more knowledge on the subject, before the test is potentially performed on humans. This means that the same test does not necessarily produce the same results when conducted on humans. The test meets existing laws on animal testing. Far from all studies result in concrete treatment methods, and the process can take several years.

In the last few days, two very different approaches to torture have been on display in the US and the UK.

On Wednesday, the US Senate conducted confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s nomination as the next Director of the CIA, who has attracted widespread criticism since her nomination was announced back in March, for two particularly valid reasons: firstly, because, towards the end of 2002, she was in charge of the CIA’s first post-9/11 “black site” in Thailand, where several “high-value detainees” were held and tortured, and secondly because, in 2005, she was involved in the destruction of videotapes documenting the torture of prisoners, even though a court had ordered the tapes to be preserved.

At the time of her nomination, we signed up to a letter from a number of rights groups opposing her nomination, and also published an article on our website, entitled, The Torture Trail of Gina Haspel Makes Her Unsuitable to be Director of the CIA.

In the run-up to the nomination hearings, on May 7, we were appalled to see Donald Trump tweeting his support for her, stating, “My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!”

Gina Haspel, of course, has “come under fire” not “because she was too tough on Terrorists,” but because she was involved in torture — and Trump’s tweet showed exactly why her nomination shouldn’t proceed, because he evidently equates being “tough on Terrorists” with engaging in torture, even though torture is illegal and its use in the “war on terror” was, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report showed (in the redacted version of the executive summary released in December 2014), horribly brutal, and also produced no information that could not have been obtained through other means (in other words, through non-abusive rapport-building).

On Wednesday in Congress, however, Gina Haspel did nothing to reassure critics that she is fit to lead the CIA. As the Washington Post stated in an editorial, “Gina Haspel fails the test,” “After a 33-year career at the agency, she may be, in many respects, the most qualified person ever nominated to the post, as one Republican senator contended,” but she also has “a dark chapter in her past” — the supervision of the “black site,” and “her subsequent involvement in the destruction of videotapes of that shameful episode.”

The Post’s editorial also stated:

As Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, made clear from the outset, Ms. Haspel needs to clearly repudiate that record. She must confirm that techniques such as waterboarding — now banned by law — were and are unacceptable, and she must make clear that she herself will never again accept orders to carry out acts that so clearly violate American moral standards, even if they are ordered by the president and certified by administration lawyers as legal.

Ms. Haspel did not meet that test. She volunteered that the CIA would not on her watch engage in interrogations; she said she supported the “stricter moral standard” the country had adopted after debating the interrogation program. Pressed by Mr. Warner and several other senators, she eventually said she “would not allow CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal.” What she would not say is that the torture she oversaw was immoral, or that it should not have been done, or that she regretted her own role in it — which, according to senators, included advocating for the program internally.

Gina Haspel’s refusal to condemn the torture program appalled many lawmakers too. As Sen. Kamala Harris explained after the hearing, “Earlier today I asked CIA director nominee Gina Haspel if she believed enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding were immoral. It was a yes or no question. She refused to answer.”

More significantly, Sen. John McCain, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement explaining why he would not be backing Gina Haspel’s nomination:

Today, Gina Haspel testified before the Senate and to the country about her qualifications to lead the CIA. This occasion provided an opportunity to provide details about her experience in the CIA, explain her involvement in the so-called enhanced interrogation program during the Bush Administration, and account for the mistakes the country made in torturing detainees held in U.S. custody after the September 11th attacks. Unfortunately, the testimony the American people heard from Ms. Haspel today failed to address these concerns.

Like many Americans, I understand the urgency that drove the decision to resort to so-called enhanced interrogation methods after our country was attacked. I know that those who used enhanced interrogation methods and those who approved them wanted to protect Americans from harm. I appreciate their dilemma and the strain of their duty. But as I have argued many times, the methods we employ to keep our nation safe must be as right and just as the values we aspire to live up to and promote in the world.

I believe Gina Haspel is a patriot who loves our country and has devoted her professional life to its service and defense. However, Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying. I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advice and consent and reject this nomination.

In addition, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the CIA torture report was produced, also indicated that she would not support Haspel’s nomination. She wrote, “The torture program was illegal at the time based on international treaties the US is signatory to, including the Convention Against Torture and Geneva Convention, but no one has ever been held accountable. Gina Haspel was intimately involved and should not lead the agency.”

The UK apologizes

In the UK, meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May issued an unreserved apology on Thursday to Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, Libyans who were kidnapped and rendered to torture in Libya by the CIA after a tip-off from Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, in 2004. As the Guardian explained, Belhaj was subsequently “tortured and sentenced to death” under Col. Gaddafi, whose regime he had opposed, but “was released six years later.” The newspaper also noted that “Boudchar was four and a half months pregnant when she was abducted. She was released shortly before giving birth.”

The couple had fought for an apology from the UK government “for more than six years after papers came to light during the Libyan revolution that revealed the role played by British intelligence officers in their kidnapping,” as the Guardian also explained.

In the House of Commons, watched by Fatima Boudchar and her 13-year-old son Abderrahim, who had traveled to London for the event, the Attorney General, Jeremy Wright, read out Theresa May’s letter, in which she stated, “It is clear that you were both subjected to appalling treatment and that you suffered greatly, not least the affront to the dignity of Ms. Boudchar who was pregnant at the time. The UK government believes your accounts. Neither of you should have been treated in this way. The UK government’s actions contributed to your detention, rendition and suffering. The UK government shared information about you to its international partners. We should have done more to reduce the risk that you would be mistreated. We accept that this was a failing on our part.”

She also wrote, “On behalf of Her Majesty’s government I apologise unreservedly. We are profoundly sorry for the ordeal that you both suffered and our role in it. The UK government has learned many lessons from this period.”

In Istanbul, where Belhaj received a copy of the letter, he said, “The wording of the apology was heartfelt. There was a feeling of concern, an admission of the shortcomings, an expression of unreserved apology, lessons learned, admission of failings and an expression of disappointment towards the international partners that I was handed over to.” Belhaj always made a point of only seeking £1 in damages from the British government, although, when Jeremy Wright read out Theresa May’s letter, he also announced that Boudchar would receive £500,000 compensation for the UK’s role in her kidnapping and rendition.

Sapna Malik, from the law firm Leigh Day, which represented Belhaj and Boudchar, said, “Today’s candid apology from the government helps restore the humanity and dignity so brutally denied to my clients during their ordeal, and is warmly welcomed.”

Cori Crider, who represented the Belhaj family on behalf of the human rights organization Reprieve, called the extent of the government’s apology “unprecedented.” She said, “It’s broader and deeper and more sincere than any apology we have seen from the war on terror.”

We hope that Gina Haspel is paying attention, and also the US lawmakers who are currently weighing up whether or not to approve the nomination, as CIA Director, of someone who has not issued any kind of apology for her involvement in the crime of torture that continues to damage America’s reputation around the world, and also, we believe, to infect its very soul.

I wrote the above article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

By Hannah Brockhaus

An Australian court will determine Wednesday whether to accept a request by prosecutors for a “super injunction” against all media reporting of upcoming trials against Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, on charges of historic sexual offenses.

If accepted, the proposed injunction request would do more than block the details of the trials from being made public; it would also prevent “any report of the whole or any part of these proceedings and any court documents associated with this proceeding.”

The injunction would apply to “all states and territories of Australia and on any website or other electronic or broadcast format accessible within Australia.”

Similar restrictions kept private the number and details of the charges against Pell during a month-long preliminary hearing, during which the majority of the charges against the cardinal were dismissed.

The 10 remaining charges are likely to be run as two separate trials, Pell’s defense lawyer Robert Richter has said. The cardinal returns to the County Court in Melbourne May 16 for a further hearing, which is expected to determine if there will be two trials, and their dates.

The typical motive for use of a gag order on media is to keep members of a jury from learning prejudicial information about a case, leading to bias; though it can also prevent judges and lawyers from being held accountable during a trial.

“The proposed order is a blanket ban and is the most extreme form of order that can be made,” said Jason Bosland, deputy director of the Centre for Media and Communications Law at Melbourne Law School, the New York Times reports.

“It prevents publication of all details to do with the case, including the fact that proceedings are on foot and, indeed, that a suppression order has been issued,” Bosland said. “You can’t even publish the judge’s name.”

Cardinal Pell will remain on a leave of absence from his Vatican position as he faces charges of “historic sexual offenses” in his home country of Australia, the Vatican announced May 1.

The Archdiocese of Sydney posted last week an article and advertisement to its diocesan news website, the Catholic Weekly, explaining how supporters of Pell may contribute to a legal fund set up on his behalf.

The article, published May 4, stressed that though the archdiocese assists with living expenses, it is not responsible for the cardinal’s legal costs, and that the fund was established separately and is not being run by the Archdiocese of Sydney.

The Catholic Weekly reported that since Pell took leave from his role as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy almost 12 months ago, “many supporters wanted to contribute to his legal costs.”

The fund is being managed by a Melbourne legal firm.

Pell is accused of misconduct dating back decades, during his first years as a priest until he became the Archbishop of Melbourne. He has been accused of groping two boys at a swimming pool in the city of Ballarat during the 1970s, as well as assaulting two members of a choir at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne during the 1990s. More precise details about the charges were not made public.

The cardinal pleaded not guilty to the charges of historical sexual offense and surrendered his passport. The charge of “historical sexual offense” indicates that the alleged crimes happened decades ago. Australian law prohibits details of the charges from being publicly disclosed.

Pell was appointed Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy in 2014. He has been on leave of absence from this position since 2017, when he returned to Australia to face the accusations against him. Pell was the Archbishop of Sydney from 2001-2014, and Archbishop of Melbourne from 1996-2001. He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Ballarat in 1966, and had been appointed an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987.

Pell was first accused of sexual misconduct in 2002, but no charges were filed at that time. In 2013, police in Australia began an investigation into him, before filing charges last year. Pell is reported to be the first cardinal to face a criminal trial for sexual misconduct.

Lawyers representing Pell insist that the charges against him are “impossible” and that he is innocent. Pell himself has repeatedly proclaimed his innocence, saying that he finds sexual abuse to be abhorrent.

“I’m looking forward, finally, to having my day in court,” said Pell in June 2017. “I’m innocent of these charges. They are false.”

Skyrocketing drug prices and the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare are just two of many pressing issues caused by America’s surging baby-boom population, often referred to as the “Silver Tsunami.”

What can be done about it?

In a recent article published in The Elder Law Journal, Sharona Hoffman, the Edgar A. Hahn Professor of Law at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, urges policymakers to focus on the elderly population. “Everyone ages, and everyone has aging loved ones, so this is a personal issue for most of us, even if we don’t want to think about it,” she stated.

“In 2016 voters listed terrorism as their first and most serious national concern, but only 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks between 2004 and 2013, while millions of individuals faced grave difficulties related to aging,” said Hoffman, author of Aging with a Plan: How a Little Thought Today Can Vastly Improve Your Tomorrow (Praeger, 2015).

By 2030, senior citizens will represent more than 20 percent of the United States population, according to the Census Bureau. The looming challenges of an aging population cannot be ignored, Hoffman said.

“If American society does not prepare for the tens of millions of baby boomers who will become elderly in the coming years, the consequences will be grave in terms of suffering, costs and lives lost,” she said.

Next steps

Hoffman offered five specific suggestions to improve conditions for seniors as their numbers continue to increase:

Advocacy organizations and the media should educate the public and policy-makers about the challenges the elderly face and strive to make them a political priority.

Long-term care (home care from aides, assisted living, and nursing homes) must become more accessible and affordable. This could be achieved through long-term care insurance that is subsidized by the government.

The working conditions of professional caregivers must be significantly improved. Consider wage increases, health benefits and paid sick days.

Affordable transportation options should be available to the elderly so they don’t lose their independence if and when they stop driving.

Incentives, such as loan forgiveness programs and higher Medicare payments, should be offered to prospective health-care professionals as encouragement to enter the geriatric field.

The average life expectancy in 2013 was 81 for women and 76 for men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many people, however, live much longer, and experts predict that by 2060, the U.S. population will include 19.7 million individuals who are 85 and older.

That matters for several reasons.

“Americans generally live long past retirement, but all too many do so without adequate financial security, without sufficient assistance from loved ones and in poor health,” Hoffman said. “Meager savings make it extremely difficult for retirees to cover their out-of-pocket medical costs, often reaching thousands of dollars each year.”

And that doesn’t include the extremely high costs of long-term care such as nursing homes, assisted living and in-home care.

Hoffman added that every family should discuss aging and learn about the safeguards that should be put in place. There is much that individuals can do for themselves, such as writing a will and appointing decision-makers for finances and healthcare.

A new study has found that there is an average of 239,000 excess deaths per year of girls under the age of five in India, or 2.4 million in a decade, and excess female child mortality is found in 90% of districts in the country.

The average level of excess mortality in girls aged 0-4 in the study period of 2000-2005 was 18.5 per 1000 live births, compared to the expected mortality of girl children aged under five in areas of the world without known gender discrimination. Around 22% of the overall mortality burden of females under five is therefore due to gender bias.

IIASA postdoctoral research scholar Nandita Saikia said that the new research shows that the burden of excess female deaths in India is huge. It is the first time that the number of excess deaths amongst girls under five in India has been studied at the district level, showing specific geographic patterns of excess female mortality across India’s 640 districts.

In all, 29 out of 35 states in India had overall excess mortality in girls under five, and all states and territories bar two had at least one district with excess mortality. However, the level varies.

The problem is most pronounced in northern India, where the four largest states in the region, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, account for two thirds of the total excess deaths of females under five. In Uttar Pradesh excess female mortality was calculated at 30.5. In Bihar, the rate is 28.5, in Rajasthan it was 25.4, and in Madhya Pradesh, it was 22.1. In parts of western Rajasthan and northern Bihar, excess mortality as a result of gender bias accounts for 30-50% of the mortality rate of females under five.

The worst affected areas are all rural, agricultural areas with lower levels of education, high population densities, low socioeconomic development and high levels of fertility. The researchers say that many deaths of females under five are partly down to unwanted child bearing and subsequent neglect. Higher levels of female literacy and employment in more modern industries is linked to lower levels of excess mortality in females under five.

“As the regional estimates of excess deaths of girls demonstrate, any intervention to reduce the discrimination against girls in food and health care allocation should therefore target in priority regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where poverty, low social development, and patriarchal institutions persist and investments on girls are limited,” said Saikia. “The sustained fertility decline currently observed in North India is likely to lead to a reduction in postnatal discrimination. Unless son preference diminishes, lower fertility, however, might bring about a rise in gender-biased sex selection as was observed 20 years ago in Western India. This reinforces the need to address directly the issue of gender discrimination in addition to encouraging social and economic development for its benefits on Indian women.”

Interestingly, the results do not coincide with areas with known skewed sex ratios at birth, such as Punjab, Gujarat, and Mahrashtra. Co-researcher Christophe Guilmoto from the Université Paris Descartes, France, says that for too long, the focus has been on prenatal sex selection.

“Gender-based discrimination towards girls doesn’t simply prevent them from being born, it may also precipitate the death of those who are born,” he said. “Gender equity is not only about rights to education, employment or political representation. It is also about care, vaccination, and nutrition of girls, and ultimately survival.”

Saikia noted that if there were no excess female deaths in India, the country could have achieved its Millennium Development Goal target on child mortality, of 42 deaths per 1,000 births, very easily.

“Discrimination towards the girl child is not justified. There is a need to change mentality. Rather than discriminating against them it is necessary to raise their value through education and self-dependence,” said Saikia.

By Gjergj Erebara

The opposition Democratic Party on Monday published an intercepted phone call which it claims shows the brother of Interior Minister Fatmir Xhafaj is engaged in drug dealing. The governing Socialist Party claims the attack on Xhafa aims to forestall the country’s EU integration.
DP officials showing alleged interception on 14 Maj 2018. Photo: Democratic Party

Albania’s opposition Democratic Party on Monday followed up its week-long attack on Interior Minister Fatmir Xhafaj by claiming that his brother, Agron Xhafaj, who has a previous conviction in Italy for drug dealing, is still in the same business.

On Monday, the party’s MPs published an undated intercepted conversation, which they claimed showed the brother of the minister speaking with a criminal.

In the conversation, the criminal asked Agron Xhafaj whether he could provide something to which the latter agreed.

Taulant Balla, head of the parliamentary group of the ruling Socialist Party, claimed later that the so-called intercept might be false and added that the attack on Xhafaj was intended to damage Albania at a crucial period, when EU leaders are expected to decide whether to open membership negotiations with Albania and Macedonia. Balla also urged prosecutors to investigate the matter.

Minister Xhafaj took up his post last year after leading the Justice Reform process, a widely praised reform process that aims to clean up the country’s notoriously corrupt justice system. However, the Democratic Party claims Edi Rama’s government is in fact merely taking control of the justice system through the guise of reforms.

Last week, the Democratic Party published an Italian court verdict showing that Agron Xhafa had been sentenced to seven years on jail for drug dealing.

Fatmir Xhafaj acknowledged the existence of the verdict but said he could not be held responsible for his brother’s actions.

“I am unable to understand what problem can arise for me from what my brother did 15 years ago,” Xhafaj said, claiming that his brother had only been 25 at the time, and was “in the wrong place accompanied by the wrong people”.

“What is important is that this government doesn’t shield anyone from the law,” Xhafaj added.

The recently-discovered species Homo naledi may have had a pint-sized brain, but that brain packed a big punch.

New research by Ralph Holloway and colleagues – that include researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa – published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines the imprints of the brain upon the skulls of this species, called endocasts. The research highlights the humanlike shape of naledi’s tiny brain, surprising scientists who studied the fossils. These findings draw further into question the long-held belief that human evolution was an inevitable march towards bigger, more complex brains.

The discovery of Homo naledi by Professor Lee Berger of Wits University and his team at the Rising Star caves in the Cradle of Human Kind in 2013 was one of the largest hominin discoveries ever made and hailed as one of the most significant hominid discoveries of the 21st Century. Berger and Professor John Hawkes who was also part of the original Rising Star team who made the naledi discovery, as well as Professor Heather Garvin from Des Moines University in the US, are associated with the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI), based at Wits University. They are all co-authors of the current study.

In 2017, geologists demonstrated that this species existed in southern Africa between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago–potentially the same time that modern humans first emerged in Africa. This is a puzzle to scientists, who long held that there was only one species in Africa at this late time period – Homo sapiens. How did this species exist alongside others with brains three times its size? The new study suggests that naledi’s behavior may have reflected the shape and structure of the brain more than its size.

The researchers pieced together traces of Homo naledi‘s brain shape from an extraordinary collection of skull fragments and partial crania, from at least five adult individuals. One of these bore a very clear imprint of the convolutions on the surface of the brain’s left frontal lobe. “This is the skull I’ve been waiting for my whole career,” said lead author Ralph Holloway, of Columbia University.

The anatomy of naledi’s frontal lobe was similar to humans, and very different from great apes. Naledi wasn’t alone. Other members of our genus, from Homo erectus to Homo habilis and the small-brained “hobbits”, Homo floresiensis, also share features of the frontal lobe with living humans. But earlier human relatives, like Australopithecus africanus, had a much more apelike shape in this part of the brain, suggesting that functional changes in this brain region emerged with Homo. “It’s too soon to speculate about language or communication in Homo naledi,” said coauthor Shawn Hurst, “but today human language relies upon this brain region.”

The back of the brain also showed humanlike changes in naledi compared to more primitive hominins like Australopithecus. Human brains are usually asymmetrical, with the left brain displaced forward relative to the right. The team found signs of this asymmetry in one of the most complete naledi skull fragments. They also found hints that the visual area of the brain, in the back of the cortex, was relatively smaller in naledi than in chimpanzees–another humanlike trait.

The small brains of Homo naledi raise new questions about the evolution of human brain size. Big brains were costly to human ancestors, and some species may have paid the costs with richer diets, hunting and gathering, and longer childhoods. But that scenario doesn’t seem to work well for Homo naledi, which had hands well-suited for toolmaking, long legs, humanlike feet, and teeth suggesting a high-quality diet.

According to study coauthor John Hawks, “Naledi’s brain seems like one you might predict for Homo habilis, two million years ago. But habilis didn’t have such a tiny brain–naledi did.”

A humanlike brain organisation might mean that naledi shared some behaviours with humans despite having a much smaller brain size. Lee Berger, a co-author on the paper, suggests that the recognition of naledi’s small but complex brain will also have a significant impact on the study of African archaeology.

“Archaeologists have been too quick to assume that complex stone tool industries were made by modern humans. With naledi being found in southern Africa, at the same time and place that the Middle Stone Age industry emerged, maybe we’ve had the story wrong the whole time.”

The average hippo weighs more than 3,000 pounds and consumes about 100 pounds of vegetation daily. This naturally results in large quantities of dung being deposited into the rivers and lakes where hippos spend their days.

In general, the nutrients delivered via hippo dung to such aquatic ecosystems are perceived to be beneficial. For millennia, they provided a natural source of fertilizer that appears to fuel life in aquatic food webs. That may be changing.

In sub-Saharan Africa, deforestation, water-intensive agriculture and now climate change are significantly altering water cycles and causing many rivers to begin to dry. A new study by UC Santa Barbara community ecologist Keenan Stears, with colleagues at UC Berkeley and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, examines how these forces of global change are redefining the way hippos — and their dung — shape the ecology of freshwater ecosystems. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This work explores how hippo dung shapes freshwater chemistry and links these changes to associated patterns of aquatic biodiversity change,” said Stears, a postdoctoral researcher in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology (EEMB). “It also illustrates that the net impact of hippos on river ecosystems is dynamically controlled by river hydrology and reveals the capacity of human disturbances on river flow to drastically alter the role of ecosystem-linking species.”

Stears and his team studied river flow and hippo density in the Great Ruaha River in Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, which protects an area about the size of Connecticut and is home to large populations of some of Africa’s most iconic species. The Great Ruaha River is the backbone of life in this dry region. Since 1993, however, the once constantly flowing river has ceased to flow during the dry season. The researchers tested nearly a dozen attributes of water quality and measured the diversity and abundance of aquatic life in hippo pools over multiple years, both when river flow was high and during dry periods when the river stopped flowing.

“During the dry season when there was no flow, the pools were completely separated,” Stears explained. “We found a huge buildup of hippo dung, and therefore nutrient concentrations within high-density hippo pools. The high influx of nutrients caused the dissolved oxygen concentration to decline to sublethal levels for most fish species.”

EEMB assistant professor Douglas McCauley, a senior researcher on the project, called these results an alarm bell for African wildlife. “Hippos are to Africa what polar bears are to the Arctic,” he said. “Everything we thought we knew about how African ecosystems worked appears to be changing. Global change has turned productive hippo pools, once teeming with fish and life, into fetid black cesspools.”

Only a few species of fish and insects are able to survive in the hippo pools when the river dries, because of extreme losses of dissolved oxygen in these pools. Stears and his colleagues noted large reductions in fish diversity and abundance inside the pools that were overfueled by dung when river flow ceased.

When the rains returned and the river resumed its flow, the researchers saw a reset in many impacts of hippo dung on water quality and biodiversity detected during the dry season.

“This suggests some kind of resilience within the system that allows it to recover after the hydrological disturbance every dry season,” Stears said. “This resilience signifies that there is hope for this system, but without intervention soon, the chronic stress caused by river drying and overfertilizing of hippo dung may cause long-term species loss in this river system.”

According to Stears, the findings from this study highlight the value of accelerating more efficient water-management policies and land-management practices not only for the conservation of hippos but also to ensure the sustained health and functioning of African watersheds in a changing environment.

“A lot of our results directly assess how changing river flow alters the hippos’ influence on the ecological diversity and functioning of watersheds,” Stears said. “However, these findings also call attention to the profound ways in which the dry-season impacts of hippos may influence local communities that rely on rivers as a food source. Tilapia are a commonly consumed fish throughout Africa and, during the dry season, we found that the presence of hippos reduced tilapia abundance by 41 percent across the watershed. That’s not only bound to have ecological consequences but will also impact the human populations that rely on these rivers.”

A new study is suggesting many of the plants and animals that call Latin America home may actually have their roots in the Amazon.

The study, co-authored by Harvard Visiting Scholar Alexandre Antonelli and an international team of researchers, found that a dynamic process of colonization and speciation led to the formation of the American tropics, which is today the most species-rich region on the planet. The study is described in a May 14 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were astonished to detect so much movement across such different environments and over such large distances,” said Antonelli, the study’s lead author. “Up until now, these natural dispersal events were assumed to be quite rare. Our results show how crucial these events have been in the formation of tropical America’s unique and outstandingly rich biodiversity.”

Over tens of millions of years, thousands of species have naturally made their way to new regions, where some of them survived and adapted to new conditions. These adaptations added up, and when the offspring were sufficiently different from earlier generations, new species were formed.

Over time, this dynamic process occurred so many times in the American tropics that the area became the exceptionally diverse region we see today.

To understand that process, Antonelli and colleagues used information on the evolutionary relationships, distribution, and timing of the origin of thousands of tropical species to calculate how often species dispersed into new regions or new environments. Much of this information comes from natural history collections, including specimens at Harvard University Herbaria and the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where Antonelli is currently working.

What they found, he said, is that while all regions in the American tropics have exchanged species with one another, Amazonia stood out as the main source.

“Two main factors seem to explain the key role of Amazonia in exporting so much diversity: its huge area, and the large amount of time that species have existed there. Together, these have increased the chances of species dispersing into new habitats and regions”, says Antonelli.

For all the groups researchers examined – from plants to birds to frogs to mammals, and even frogs, snakes and lizards – Antonelli said that pattern remained essentially the same, suggesting that biotic movements are important for generating diversity among all life forms.

“Most evolutionary research focuses on how new species form. But we want to understand how whole ecosystems evolve, and what makes some regions much more species-rich than others. This is important because it shows us how plants and animals deal with new environments and what factors determine biodiversity”, Antonelli concludes.

This study highlights the far-reaching importance of tropical regions – comprising rainforests, savannas and mountain ecosystems, among others – in sustaining the world’s biodiversity. Most tropical ecosystems are now threatened due to human activities, and many species are on the edge of extinction, further highlighting the need for immediate and widespread protection.

“This study brings together a truly massive amount of data and distills it down in a way that gives crucial insights into the history of biodiversity in the tropics,” said Kyle Dexter, Senior Lecturer in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh and Research Associate at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.” The previous paradigm in the tropics focused on local evolution when explaining high tropical diversity, but clearly there is a shift happening to acknowledge the importance of dispersal, and this study contributes decisively to this shift.”

Going forward, Antonelli hopes to continue to examine the dynamic processes that drive the distribution and evolution of species, especially in tropical regions. To this end, his group is combining data and techniques from several disciplines, from fossils to genomes and from fieldwork to software development.

“Biodiversity is the dark matter of our planet: we know there must be millions of species that we haven’t found yet. Finding, understanding, and protecting this diversity is probably humanity’s toughest but most important challenge”.

To learn about the rise and fall of ancient European civilizations, researchers sometimes find clues in unlikely places: deep inside of the Greenland ice sheet, for example.

Thousands of years ago, during the height of the ancient Greek and Roman empires, lead emissions from sources such as the mining and smelting of lead-silver ores in Europe drifted with the winds over the ocean to Greenland – a distance of more than 2800 miles (4600 km) – and settled onto the ice. Year after year, as fallen snow added layers to the ice sheet, lead emissions were captured along with dust and other airborne particles, and became part of the ice-core record that scientists use today to learn about conditions of the past.

In a new study published in PNAS, a team of scientists, archaeologists and economists from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), the University of Oxford, NILU – Norwegian Institute for Air Research and the University of Copenhagen used ice samples from the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) to measure, date and analyze European lead emissions that were captured in Greenland ice between 1100 BC and AD 800. Their results provide new insight for historians about how European civilizations and their economies fared over time.

“Our record of sub-annually resolved, accurately dated measurements in the ice core starts in 1100 BC during the late Iron Age and extends through antiquity and late antiquity to the early Middle Ages in Europe – a period that included the rise and fall of the Greek and Roman civilizations,” said the study’s lead author Joe McConnell, Ph.D., Research Professor of Hydrology at DRI. “We found that lead pollution in Greenland very closely tracked known plagues, wars, social unrest and imperial expansions during European antiquity.”

A previous study from the mid-1990s examined lead levels in Greenland ice using only 18 measurements between 1100 BC and AD 800; the new study provides a much more complete record that included more than 21,000 precise lead and other chemical measurements to develop an accurately dated, continuous record for the same 1900-year period.

To determine the magnitude of European emissions from the lead pollution levels measured in the Greenland ice, the team used state-of-the-art atmospheric transport model simulations.

“We believe this is the first time such detailed modeling has been used to interpret an ice-core record of human-made pollution and identify the most likely source region of the pollution,” said coauthor Andreas Stohl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist at NILU.

Most of the lead emissions from this time period are believed to have been linked to the production of silver, which was a key component of currency.

“Because most of the emissions during these periods resulted from mining and smelting of lead-silver ores, lead emissions can be seen as a proxy or indicator of overall economic activity,” McConnell explained.

Using their detailed ice-core chronology, the research team looked for linkages between lead emissions and significant historical events.

Their results show that lead pollution emissions began to rise as early as 900 BC, as Phoenicians expanded their trading routes into the western Mediterranean. Lead emissions accelerated during a period of increased mining activity by the Carthaginians and Romans primarily in the Iberian Peninsula, and reached a maximum under the Roman Empire.

The team’s extensive measurements provide a different picture of ancient economic activity than previous research had provided. Some historians, for example, had argued that the sparse Greenland lead record provided evidence of better economic performance during the Roman Republic than during the Roman Empire.

According to the findings of this study, the highest sustained levels of lead pollution emissions coincided with the height of the Roman Empire during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, a period of economic prosperity known as the Pax Romana. The record also shows that lead emissions were very low during the last 80 years of the Roman Republic, a period known as the Crisis of the Roman Republic.

“The nearly four-fold higher lead emissions during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire compared to the last decades of the Roman Republic indicate substantial economic growth under Imperial rule,” said coauthor Andrew Wilson, Professor of the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford.

The team also found that lead emissions rose and fell along with wars and political instability, particularly during the Roman Republic, and took sharp dives when two major plagues struck the Roman Empire in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The first, called the Antonine Plague, was probably smallpox. The second, called the Plague of Cyprian, struck during a period of political instability called the third-century crisis.

“The great Antonine Plague struck the Roman Empire in AD 165 and lasted at least 15 years. The high lead emissions of the Pax Romana ended exactly at that time and didn’t recover until the early Middle Ages more than 500 years later,” Wilson explained.

The research team for this study included ice-core specialists, atmospheric scientists, archaeologists, and economic historians – an unusual combination of expertise.

“Working with such a diverse team was a unique experience in my career as a scientist,” McConnell said. “I think that our results show that there can be great value in collaborating across disciplines.”

The growing demand for children to get involved in organized activities outside of school is placing unprecedented strain upon families.

A new study, published in Taylor & Francis journal Sport, Education and Society, reveals just how significant a role extracurricular activities, such as music lessons and sports clubs, play in family life.

Attempting to understand the impact children’s extracurricular activities is having on family life, researchers interviewed almost 50 families from twelve primary schools in North-West England.

They discovered that the majority of children – 88% – took part in organized activities on four to five days per week, with 58% doing more than one in an evening. Extracurricular involvement was therefore found to dominate family life, especially for families with more than one child.

Consequently, families were spending less quality time together, and parents’ money and energy reserves were often depleted. One mother referred to ‘knackered’ children who ‘don’t get in until 9 or 10pm’, admitting that she was ‘sadly, over the moon’ when something was cancelled.

Explaining these findings, researchers pointed towards growing pressure from fellow parents, children, and schools for children to have a busy extracurricular schedule.

As the study’s lead author, Dr Sharon Wheeler, comments: “We know that parents are particularly keen to ensure their children get on in life. Parents initiate and facilitate their children’s participation in organized activities as it shows that they are ‘good’ parents. They hope that such activities will benefit their children in both the short-term (by keeping them fit and healthy, and helping them to develop friendship groups) and longer-term (by improving their job prospects).

“However, our research highlights that the reality can be somewhat different. While children might experience some of these benefits, a busy organized activity schedule can put considerable strain on parents’ resources and families’ relationships, as well as potentially harm children’s development and wellbeing.”

Although multiple car ownership and a rise in time-poor working mums have increased the accessibility and convenience of extracurricular activities, Wheeler warns parents to be mindful of overdoing it.

“Raising awareness of this issue can help those parents who feel under pressure to invest in their children’s organized activities, and are concerned with the impact of such activities on their family, to have the confidence to plan a less hectic schedule for their children.

“Until a healthy balance is struck, extracurricular activities will continue to take precedence over family time, potentially doing more harm than good.”

New research reveals the growth of carbon production from Chinese exports has slowed or reversed, reflecting a “new phase of globalisation” between developing countries that could undermine international efforts to reduce emissions.

The study, involving researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and colleagues in China and the United States, investigated how complex supply chains are distributing energy-intensive industries and their CO₂ emissions throughout the global South. It found that trade among developing nations – known as South-South trade – more than doubled between 2004 and 2011.

Some production activities are relocating from China and India to other developing countries, such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand, particularly for raw materials and intermediate goods production in energy-intensive sectors.

In turn, the growth of CO₂ emissions embodied in Chinese exports has slowed or reversed, while the emissions embodied in exports, such as textiles, from less-developed regions like Vietnam and Bangladesh have surged.

International trade increased by more than 50% from 2005 to 2015, with approximately 60% of the increase tied to rising exports from developing countries. Yet over the same period, South-South trade grew even faster – more than tripling – to reach 57% of all developing country exports (US$9.3 trillion) in 2014.

Publishing their findings in Nature Communications, the authors warn this trend may seriously undermine international efforts to reduce global emissions that increasingly rely on rallying voluntary contributions of more, smaller, and less-developed nations.

It follows research published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, in which the authors argue that the Chinese export-embodied CO₂ emissions have peaked due to the changing structure of Chinese production. They suggest more attention should be focussed on ensuring countries that may partly replace China as major production bases increase their exports using low-carbon inputs.

Co-author on both studies Dabo Guan, professor in climate change economics at UEA’s School of International Development, said: “The rapid growth in South-South trade reflects a fragmenting of global supply chains whereby early-production stages of many industries have relocated from countries like China and India to lower-wage economies, a trend that has accelerated since the global financial crisis in 2008.

“In addition to their important implications for global economic development, these trends will affect the magnitude and regional distribution of future global CO₂ emissions.”

Relatively little attention has been paid to the rapid rise of South-South trade since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Yet the period since 2009 has also witnessed decreases in Chinese coal consumption that underpin a levelling off of global CO₂ emissions, as well as the forging of the Paris Agreement whereby nations are determining their contributions to the global effort to reduce CO₂ emissions.

“The carbon intensity of the next phase of global economic development will determine whether ambitious climate targets such as stabilizing at 2 °C will be met, and our findings depict the nascent rise of energy-intensive and emissions-intensive production activities in other Asian countries such as Vietnam and Pakistan,” said Prof Guan.

“The success of international climate mitigation efforts may therefore depend on curtailing growth of coal-based energy and emissions in now-industrialising and urbanising countries. Otherwise, countries like China and India may meet their nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement by hollowing out low-value, energy-intensive manufacturing, and offshoring those activities to emerging markets elsewhere in Asia with less stringent climate policy measures.

“Successfully mitigating climate change therefore urgently depends on decarbonising not only energy systems in developed countries but also the entire process of industrialization.”

The researchers used the latest available data on international trade and CO₂ emissions from 2004, 2007 and 2011 to track emissions related to both intermediate and final goods and services from 57 industry sectors that were traded among 129 regions (101 of which are individual countries).

In total, CO₂ emissions embodied in goods and services exported from developing countries increased by 46% between 2004 and 2011, from 2.2 to 3.3 gigatonnes (Gts). Although a substantial and growing quantity of these emissions were represented in exports to developed regions (1.8 Gt in 2004 and 2.2 Gt in 2011, growing by an average of 2.9% per year), the emissions embodied in South-South trade increased much more rapidly: from 0.47 Gt in 2004 to 1.1 Gt in 2011 (1.33% per year). The growth is mainly driven by the increasing export volume and partly offset by a decline in emission intensity.

(Civil.Ge) — Four NATO ships, assigned to the Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2), arrived on a four-day port call in Poti on Georgia’s Black Sea coast Monday.

The maritime group, which includes the British frigate HMS Duncan, Turkish TCG Gemlik, Bulgarian BGS Drazki, and Romanian ROS Regele Ferdinand, is led by Mike Utley, commander of NATO’s SNMG2.

The vessels will stay in Poti port until May 18, and their crews will take part in joint exercises organized by the Georgian Interior Ministry and its Border Police, which aim at increasing interoperability between the Georgia-NATO naval forces.

Temur Kekelidze, head of the Border Police, underscored today that the port call was a confirmation that Georgia’s remained steadfast on its path to NATO membership.

By Fraser Cameron

The European Union has a long tradition of promoting democracy and human rights in Asia, often in informal cooperation with the United States. Until 2014, it seemed that things were moving in the right direction, but since then there has been backsliding in China and several Southeast Asian countries.  Xi Jinping has tightened control in China, the military endures in Thailand, Duterte’s drug purge is ongoing in the Philippines, the Tatmadaw commits ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, Hun Sen and his party have dissolved the opposition in Cambodia, and so on.

The European Union has struggled to cope with this reversal. It has human rights dialogues with China and most countries in Southeast Asia as well as bloc-to-bloc discussions with the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. But the results in these forums have been mixed.

Asian elites often accuse the European Union of lecturing them on human rights. The European Union’s response is that human rights are universal and that many Asian countries have ‘signed up’ to accept such values in numerous UN documents.

This is not to say that the European Union has a clean slate: it is at least partially justified to accuse the European Union of hypocrisy for turning a blind eye to abuses in member states like Poland and Hungary or in countries like Saudi Arabia while it criticises Asian nations. But the hypocrisy only extends so far: the European Union is now taking Poland and Hungary to task for infringing EU norms.

The European Union receives varying levels of support from its member states on human rights. Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have traditionally been the strongest supporters. But Greece and Hungary have both, under pressure from Beijing, blocked critical resolutions aimed at China’s human rights record. Securing a united EU position is unlikely to become easier in the future due to economic pressures that are driving less affluent states closer to Beijing.

The main lever that the European Union has at its disposal is trade sanctions. It has maintained an arms embargo against China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It preserved tight economic sanctions against Myanmar until the country began to democratise. It is now preparing fresh sanctions against those in the Myanmar military involved in atrocities against the Rohingya and against Cambodia for its draconian measures against the opposition. It has suspended trade talks with Thailand until there is a civilian government in power and has refused to continue trade talks with the Philippines.

The European Union has also used its free trade agreement with Vietnam to ensure Hanoi signs up to international agreements on labour standards. Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom is a strong advocate for human rights and is aware of the strong and differing feelings they muster in the European Parliament. These divergent views must be taken into account as it is the Parliament that must ratify all trade deals.

Only Norway, Canada and occasionally Australia and New Zealand support the European Union’s efforts to promote democracy and human rights in the region — and Norway is quite cautious after receiving lengthy political and trade sanctions from China when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Despite professing support for human rights, neither Japan nor South Korea is prepared to criticise countries in Asia. Neither is India, the largest democracy in the world. Among Asian nations, only Indonesia and Malaysia have joined the European Union in making critical comments about the plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and they did so to support their domestic agendas.

The biggest problem is the lack of support from the United States. With Donald Trump in the White House, Washington no longer places emphasis on human rights except when specific issues contravene US interests — North Korea being the most recent example. China has been given a free pass, and authoritarian leaders from Southeast Asia have been feted without a word about their human rights records. During his visit to Manila in November, Trump described President Duterte as a ‘good guy’ and did not utter a word of criticism about extra-judicial killings.

Unlike the European Union or the Obama administration, Trump has shown no interest in tying trade deals to human rights. Even when the United States does make public statements about human rights (as Rex Tillerson did in Myanmar in November), it tends not to follow up because of a desire to continue selling US military equipment. There are strong ties between the Pentagon and local militaries throughout Asia that continue to influence the US approach to human rights.

This change in US attitudes puts the European Union in a difficult situation. It does not wish to push the Philippines, Thailand or Myanmar into the hands of China and thus lose all influence. Local leaders also ask the European Union why it continues to push its normative agenda when the United States has ceased to do so.

The European Union is exposed. It has lost an important ally and there are only a small number of like-minded countries prepared to offer support. It is also striving to ensure a united EU voice regardless of whether or not individual member states are pursuing their own economic interests.

Despite these difficulties, the European Union cannot give up on its treaty-based normative agenda and should continue to link trade deals to human rights and speak out on abuses. It has already issued three critical statements on China in 2018. But its human rights advocacy may have to arrive in a different form: there is likely to be less lecturing and more focus on practical issues such as training judges and journalists, supporting law schools and exchanging information on good governance.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg praised France for its important contributions to collective security and for its role as a champion of multilateralism. Mr Stoltenberg started a two-day visit to Paris on Monday by meeting the French minister for the armed forces Florence Parly. They discussed NATO’s continued adaptation to face current security challenges, as part of preparations for the Alliance Brussels Summit in July.

Addressing a conference organised by the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Secretary General highlighted France’s participation in the NATO battlegroup in Lithuania and in the Baltic Air Policing mission, as well as France’s leading role in the fight against terrorism, including in the Sahel and Levant. He praised France for its investments in defence, with a clear commitment to reach 2% by 2025. “France is champion of multilateralism. And, at a crucial time for multilateralism, I count on France to help strengthen multilateral institutions like NATO,” Mr. Stoltenberg said.

Together with Minister Parly and the North Atlantic Council, the Secretary General met the President of the French National Assembly François de Rugy to kick off the first Conference on the Cyber Defence Pledge.

On Tuesday (15 May 2018), the Secretary General will meet President Emmanuel Macron.

The shared economy has not lived up to its presupposition of sharing. Instead, shared economy business (SEB) has generated at least three distinct types of garbage – physical, environmental, and moral. Moreover, it also promotes a social sickness of privatising profits and socialising problems in the real economy. For it to be sustainable, disruption is unavoidable.

By Christopher H Lim*

In the past decade, the shared economy business (SEB) has grown from its humble beginnings based on the online market place into a major disruptive force in our global economy. Mastercard had projected that the market size of SEB would reach at least US$400 billion by 2020 (in the shared transportation and shared accommodation alone).

Current SEB typically exploits the demand-supply gap with digital platforms. These platforms reduce business overheads and capital expenditure (CAPEX) requirements, replacing the string of middlemen in the value-chain. Through these platforms, individuals can also start their own businesses and supplement their income based on arbitrage of underused assets, be they professional services, cars, houses or time, without the full financial burden as in the traditional business model. With all these benefits, should economic planners and policymakers the world over push for the adoption and expansion of SEB for economic development?

Shared Economy Business = Garbage for the World?

The shared economy is a model broadly used to describe peer-to-peer economic transactions using a community-based online platform. SEB is a business model focused on the sharing of underutilised assets in ways that increase efficiency.

While the SEB in theory sounds like the panacea for future economic development, empirical evidence indicates otherwise. Attempts at running SEBs had resulted in the creation of garbage for society: namely physical garbage; delayed and unseen environmental garbage; and moral/social garbage.

Bike-sharing businesses like Ofo, Obike, and Mobike provide a healthy and zero-carbon alternative to getting around in big cities. However, the attractiveness of its business model coupled with low entry barriers ($45 per bike as of 2016), resulted in excess supply of dockless bikes, cluttering up public space (in Los Angeles), increasing pressure on city infrastructure (in Singapore), generating garbage and wasting resources, as evident in the bicycle graveyard in Xiamen.

Similarly, ride sharing is supposedly good for big city life as it reduces car population and hence carbon emissions. As in the case of Singapore, we observe the reverse. While overall vehicle population has decreased by two percent since 2013, petrol consumption has increased, and the private-hire (ride-sharing) vehicle population has quadrupled.

Furthermore, commuters who would otherwise travel via public transport would opt for ride-sharing due to relative low cost and the convenience of point-to-point travel. The increase in car-use has resulted in the creation of environmental garbage with a delayed effect like slow-acting poison, with costs we will only see in the future.

Other indirect costs are also often overlooked such as moral hazards and a deteriorating social fabric. For example, the sheer size of AirBnB’s user base makes it next to impossible for platform owners or authorities to police undesirable social elements and criminal activities; the history of the firm is rife with social and legal abuses, ranging from racial discrimination, last minute cancellations, money laundering, and bogus listings. The lack of regulation and enforcement on AirBnB’s platform has also resulted in the illegal conversion of rentals into temporary brothels and drug dens.

Shared Economy Worse?

The amount of garbage generated by the business models of the SEBs not only casts aspersions on the shared economy’s claim of sustainability but also its feel-good factor. This is the feel-good of increased sociability and mutual benefits that business owners, users, and community all stand to gain from such cooperation.

In reality, profits are privatised and problems are socialised. The sickness was also observed in the financial sector during the last global financial crisis. Is this infection spreading to the real economy? This tragedy of the commons stem from the current design of the SEB model, which fundamentally suffers from a “genetic disorder” as it lacks a “lysosomal function”.

Lysosomes in cells are essentially “garbage collectors”. When unwanted proteins and other cellular wastes build up in cells, they rely on their lysosomes to rid of waste and keep the cells healthy. If the cell’s lysosomes are absent or do not function, they become intoxicated. Children who inherit lysosomal diseases experience a range of disorders affecting their organs. If left untreated, it can be potentially fatal.

Likewise, these costs arise largely due to the current business model of the SEB where the end game is to maximise profit, and reduce everything into a transaction. This is also in part due to the trust business owners and users placed in the digital platform, which is assumed to work all these out in the backend.

Create “Lysosome” For SEBs?

Given the garbage created by the shared economy, regulators will have no choice but to institute tough controls which may end up stifling its innovative spirit and creative entrepreneurship. This has already been observed in the bike-sharing industry, where regulators have imposed geo-fencing to dis-incentivise irresponsible parking behaviour.

While regulation seems effective, such interventions are akin to prescribing drugs to treat symptoms of lysosomal disorders, which may not cure the root of the disease.

For the SEB to be truly sustainable, business operators/owners need to “genetically modify” the SEB model with a “lysosomal” function – where garbage of all types will be eliminated instead of socialised, with full transparency.

This can be done with reference from the circular economy philosophy: Not only should SEB owners think about extracting surplus value from unused assets, they should also consider how their businesses could create synergies with each other. They should do so by cooperating and forming strategic alliances to maximise asset utilisation and minimise waste.

For example, bike-sharing companies that face problems with chaotic bicycle parking could form strategic alliance with other business operators such as convenience stores, supermarkets, cafés, etc. with nearby bicycle parking lots, incentivising users to return them there for a discount on certain products/services.

This would not only reduce the need for regulators to step in and impose compliance costs of both businesses and government, but also transforming the current challenges of the SEB into business opportunities for other unrelated but like-minded business owners in the community.

Once the SEB fixes its “lysosomal disorder”, this could potentially trigger more creative solutions for other business entities and SEBs in the whole economy, and truly promote an appropriate business model for a sustainable economy.

*Christopher H Lim is Senior Fellow in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Vincent Mack is Associate Research Fellow in the EDC’s Office.

National Accountability Bureau is working overtime to ‘fix’ the former prime minister and his family.

By Sushant Sareen

From the time Pakistan’s corruption watchdog, National Accountability Bureau (NAB), came into existence, through its various avatars, it has served as a handmaiden of the powers-that-be to either fix political opponents or make them pliable. With the “deep state” having turned against Nawaz Sharif, the NAB has been virtually transformed into “Nawaz Accountability Bureau” and is now working overtime to “fix” Sharif and his family and cronies.

Fixed match

In recent months, while there has been a lot of focus on the dubious role of the Pakistani judiciary in fixing the political match against Sharif, the insidious role being played by the chairman of NAB, retired Supreme Court judge Javed Iqbal, as a political hitman has escaped attention.

Ever since he was appointed as the NAB chairman, he has had the Sharif family in his crosshairs. Ironically, the Sharifs had acquiesced to his appointment. It appears they were taken in by his reputation for being something of namby-pamby.

But they clearly ignored his reputation for also being a slimeball for whom principles were a matter of convenience, and morality fungible.

When Musharraf imposed emergency in November 2007 and sacked the Supreme Court judges, Javed Iqbal quietly accepted the position of the chairman of the Press Council. After the judiciary was restored he once again became a Supreme Court judge.

During a hearing in the “missing persons” (enforced disappearances) case, when asked why he didn’t summon the heads of the intelligence agencies or the generals who are responsible for human rights violations, Iqbal said that last time the judges had the temerity to do such a thing the generals sent them back home, and therefore no one should expect the judiciary to go down that path again!

In fact, as head of the commission appointed to examine enforced disappearances, he has done more to cover up the brazen violation of human rights by Pakistan Army than to hold it to account for kidnapping and murdering Pakistani citizens.

With such a man now heading NAB, it is a no-brainer that his strings are being pulled by the khaki-clad puppeteers that want him to go after Sharif with the zeal of a new convert.

Ever since he has assumed the mantle of Pakistan’s anti-corruption czar, Iqbal has opened a plethora of cases/inquiries against Sharif and people associated with him, including officials.

Some of these cases were more than 20 years old, and many had been closed years ago. But until a few days back, even if the evidence was extremely flimsy and the allegations completely motivated, an argument could still have been made to support the enquiries that had been initiated against Sharif and his cronies.

Overzealousness can, however, easily backfire if the intentions are ignoble and objective is nefarious. The NAB has now badly exposed itself by initiating a money laundering inquiry against Sharif based on fake news peddled by an obscure columnist in a rag of an Urdu paper.

The thing is that fake news or alternate facts sound credible if it plugs into a narrative that is being furiously and fervently hustled and is readily lapped up by its consumers, including those occupying high offices. This is exactly what has happened in the latest money-laundering inquiry against Sharif.

Old story

Sharif is already being tried in a NAB court on charges of money laundering. His detractors have long accused him of having business interests with India which they allege (without offering an iota of evidence) are dearer to him than his country.

He has been accused of hiring Indian technicians (some of them alleged RAW agents) to work in his factories. Against this backdrop, an old report — the story first appeared in the Pakistani press in December 2015 — that the World Bank (WB) has estimated that Pakistanis sent $4.9 billion (Rs 32,900 crore) in remittances to India, was resurrected to tighten the noose around Sharif’s neck.

Subsequently, this was extrapolated by Pakistan’s legion of conspiracy theorists to insinuate that Sharif was laundering money to India. It is this report that has now been picked up by NAB to inquire into Sharif’s financial dealing with India.

The only problem for NAB is that this whole story has no feet to stand on. In fact, the Pakistani central bank has on at least two occasions debunked the entire story and pointed out that the WB estimate contained in the “Remittances and Migration Report” was based on the seriously flawed methodology used in an earlier working paper titled ‘South-South Migration and Remittances’.

The problem in the methodology was that people who migrated during Partition were viewed with the same lens as other migrants, many of whom were economic migrants who sent remittances to their home countries. In the case of the Partition migrants, neither this assumption, nor this causation held.

Serious question

In any case, the WB report was about remittances. It took the feeble and flaky minds in Pakistan to equate remittances with money laundering. Worse, it required a particularly maleficent mindset to accuse Sharif of being involved in this activity.

The column on which this inquiry is based was published in February last and alleged that in 2015-16, $4.9 billion was transferred to Dubai and from there to the Indian treasury.

It goes on to assert that this transfer was discovered when the WB conducted an audit of the State Bank of Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves! For any government agency to initiate an inquiry on the basis of such utter tripe is nothing short of making a fool of itself before the entire world.

What is more, it doesn’t just reveal the astounding ignorance and malevolence of NAB officials, it also exposes the viciousness of the ‘deep state’ that is ready to descend to any level to finish Sharif.

More than anything else, this latest attack launched just a few weeks before the general elections, raises serious questions about not just the witch-hunt against Sharif in the name of accountability, but also the very credibility of the elections.

This article originally appeared on DailyO.

By Britta Petersen

The news of Donald Trump pulling the United States out of the nuclear deal with Iran has been dreaded but long expected in Europe – and yet it comes as a shock. It lays bare the uncomfortable truth that neither the charm of French President Emmanuel Macron, who was seen hugging and kissing with Trump just two weeks ago, nor the “unforced force of the better argument” that German Chancellor Angela Merkel might have tried to exert in her meeting with the US President in favour of the deal, was of much help. The European toolbox seems exhausted.

But it would be too early to ring the death bell for European diplomacy. On the contrary, this will have to be its finest hour because there is more at stake than just self-respect. It took Europe, that is the EU and the so called E3 (the member states that participated in the negotiations: the UK, France and Germany) more than 10 years to come to reach an agreement with Iran. A deal that was less than perfect, as all negotiated deals but it fulfilled its purpose.

Abolishing the so called Joint Comprehensive Plan for Action (JCPOA) unilaterally is an incredible affront to Europe, that once was the closest ally of the US. As if this is not enough, the newly appointed US-Ambassador to Germany, Richard Allen Grenell, even rubbed salt into the wound by asking German companies doing business in Iran to “wind down operations immediately”.

A statement that triggered a tartly response from German diplomat and Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger: “My advice, after a long ambassadorial career: explain your own countries’ policies, and lobby the host country – but never tell the host country what to do if you want to stay out of trouble. Germans are eager to listen but they will resent instructions.”

But there is more at stake for Europe than the painful process of realising that the transatlantic partnership cannot be taken for granted anymore. It is clear that “negotiating a better deal” with Iran, as Trump wants to make people believe, is out of question given the long and difficult history of the JCPOA.

Instead, the region is facing the risk of a nuclear arms race or even war between Israel and Iran. If Trump attempts more steps towards “regime change” in Tehran, a further destabilisation of West Asia is guaranteed. For Europe, this would not only result in even more refugees. Germany, for example, already hosts the largest community of Iranian exiles, around 120,000. A war in Europe’s immediate neighborhood puts its own security at risk.

The EU therefore needs to unite and unanimously condemn the US decision to withdraw from the deal. Europe has to reject any attempt to re-open negotiations and instead demonstrate to Iran that it is willing fight for the deal so that Tehran in return will have a motivation to adhere to it. Europe must also reach out to difficult partners, especially China and Russia, who are parties in the deal and to friends such as India, who have an interest in the stability of the region and who want to lower the risk of nuclear proliferation.

Europe will also need to beef-up its diplomacy in the West Asia and play a far more proactive role in the region This might be all very uncomfortable and not save the deal in the end. But no state can choose its neighbours and if your closest ally lets you down, it is high time to develop a plan B.

North Korea has canceled a summit with South Korea and has threatened to call off a summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un over American military drills with South Korea, according to South Korean media reports.

Pyongyang has canceled talks with Seoul due to ongoing Max Thunder military exercises between the South and the US, Yonhap news agency cited North Korean media. The drills have been described by the North as a rehearsal for invasion of the DPRK and a provocation amid warming inter-Korean ties.

AFP reported that North Korea has also threatened to scrap the highly-anticipated summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The meeting is scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.

The news comes as a blow after the historic talks between the leaders of two Koreas in April and the meeting between Kim and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo said Sunday that any deal paving the way for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula will have to include certain US safeguards, and reassurance that Kim won’t become a target of yet another regime change attempt.

Pyongyang had scheduled the dismantling of its nuclear bomb test site to take place between May 23-25, North Korean media reported on Saturday.

Reports that the talks have been suspended come just hours after Seoul and Pyongyang agreed on Tuesday to hold high-level inter-Korea talks on May 16. The leaders were planning to discuss steps needed to follow the plan of the peninsula’s denuclearization.

Wednesday’s now suspended talks were to include a 29-strong delegation from North Korea led by Ri Son-gwon, chairman of the ‘Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the country’ along with a five-member South Korean delegation, led by Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon.

The Max Thunder 18 drills are one of a number of joint military drills carried out by South Korea and the US in the Korean peninsula. North Korea has long viewed these drills as a show of aggression towards Pyongyang.

The two-week Max Thunder 18 air drills kicked off on Friday, with over 100 planes taking part, including F-22 fighters and B-52 bombers, Yonhap reported last week.

“Through this practical exercise, the air forces of South Korea and the US plan to improve aerial operations techniques,” an anonymous South Korean official told Yonhap.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is on a diplomatic tour to save the 2015 nuclear deal after the US withdrawal from the pact, said he had a “good and constructive” meeting with EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini.

Speaking to reporters after his intensive talks with Mogherini in Brussels on Tuesday, Zarif said, “It was a good and constructive meeting.”

“We have started working to reach the guarantees,” he said, referring to Iran’s demand that the remaining parties to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) should ensure Tehran’s interests will be protected.

“We are on the right track… to make sure that the interests of the remaining signatories of the JCPOA, especially Iran, will be guaranteed.”

The Iranian top diplomat further stressed the need for all parties to the JCPOA to completely implement the agreement and said the two sides agree that Iran should benefit from the JCPOA.

The foreign minister is in Brussels on the final leg of a whirlwind diplomatic tour, which has already taken him to Beijing and Moscow.

He is gauging international readiness to guarantee Iran’s interests if it decides to remain in the nuclear pact a week after US President Donald Trump announced that the US was walking away from the JCPOA.

In a speech from the White House last Tuesday, Trump accused Iran of sponsoring terrorism and seeking nukes before announcing the US withdrawal from 2015 agreement between Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).

Following the controversial decision, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Iran weighs plans to remain in the agreement with the other five parties, provided that they ensure full benefits for Iran.

In a speech on Wednesday, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei urged that any decision to keep the deal running without the US should be conditional on “practical guarantees” from the three European parties to the JCPOA.