The posting, which was made Wednesday, is officially seeking a "director of rodent migration" who will work to advance the city's efforts to address policy matters in the five boroughs related to curbing the recent increase of rats during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin? A background in urban planning, project management or government? And most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy -- New York City's relentless rat population?" the posting reads.

"If so, your dream job awaits: New York's Citywide Director of Rodent Migration."

The tongue-in-cheek posting adds that "rats are not our friend" and are "enemies that must be vanquished."

The role - with an expected pay range between $120,000 and $170,000 -- reports to the deputy mayor for operations and successful candidates are required to be a New York City resident with a bachelor's degree, at least five years of relevant experience and a "swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor and general aura of badassery."

The job posting comes as New Yorkers have increasingly complained about rats.

Data published by the city in July shows that 7,4000 calls about rat sightings were made in the first four months of 2022 alone - an increase of 60% from the same period in 2019. There are 25,000 rat sightings reported to the city in 2021.

In July, a group of New York residents filed a lawsuit seeking an end to the outdoor dining shacks built in the pandemic they say has led to a boom in rats. The eight-page lawsuit, obtained by UPI, was filed against New York State and New York City in the state's Supreme Court.

The residents said the Temporary Outdoor Restaurant program implemented in June 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to "increased and excessive noise, traffic congestion, garbage and uncontrolled rodent populations and the blocking of sidewalks and roadways."

The lawsuit was filed after the New York City Council in February passed legislation to form a permanent program to keep outdoor dining, which had been created as a temporary solution to help restaurants struggling because of lockdown restrictions.

Since those lockdown restrictions have long since been lifted, the New Yorkers said that the city is "abusing its authority" to continue allowing the dining shacks -- many of which have fallen into various states of disrepair.

"Pre-pandemic, I enjoyed my neighborhood's charm, clean and quaint tree-lined streets, parks, and peacefully working in my garden," Brooklyn resident Angela Bilotti said in her affidavit filed with the lawsuit.

"The sheds filling the streets have become nesting grounds for rats. Litter lines the streets as rats tear open the piles of trash left beside the sheds. Storm water collects at the shed walls becoming mosquito breeding grounds, and the stench is horrendous."

Source

Then one clear afternoon, binoculars slung over his shoulder and camera in hand, he watched the mother bird plop a rat in front of her baby. The light was perfect, the owls positioned just right.

It was March 2, 4:25 p.m. Only days before the first death.

Schocken and his wife, Linda, spent many winter hours in the park, a sliver of oaks dripping with Spanish moss at the edge of Tampa Bay. They were part of a collective of photographers who surrounded the "Owl Tree," a knobby clutch of branches next to a parking lot where the birds nested.

Admirers knew the owls like celebrities, learning their patterns—how they were most active around dawn and dusk, how the mother clacked her beak at squirrels that scurried too close, how their deep calls pulsed through the park's canopy. Some gave them names, Oliver and Emily, this year with three babies: Huey, Louie and Daisy (née Dewey, before they figured out the owl was female).

Schocken, semi-retired at 74, felt a mysticism in their presence. He liked when the father owl turned searchlight yellow eyes onto him.

On this afternoon, not long before spring, he lingered under a branch where Emily sat with two owlets. He watched Huey touch the rat's limp back. The mother gazed at her fuzzy-headed baby.

Suddenly, Emily snatched the rat in her talons and flew away. Schocken can't be sure whether she returned to finish the meal. But he knows what happened next.

All but one owl was dead within a month and a half. Each had poison in its body—highly toxic rodenticides that businesses, homeowners and local governments use to kill rats and mice.

Two experts who reviewed necropsy reports for the Tampa Bay Times said the poisons likely caused or contributed to the owls' deaths, adding them to an ever-growing list of unintended victims harmed by the chemicals.

Such poisons routinely sicken other animals, including pets and people, that eat contaminated rodents or come into contact with the baits directly. Yet the strongest substances remain popular and widely available because they quickly erase an expensive problem: uncontrolled rodent populations.

While the federal government and certain industries have maintained that poisons are essential tools, animal advocates question whether they create more problems than they solve. The chemicals interrupt a fragile food chain, killing predators that naturally feed on rodents like raptors, foxes and mountain lions.

The demise of the owl family in Safety Harbor has rattled residents and stoked a grassroots effort to stop people from using some of the most potent rodenticides.

At least two local cities and a county have since switched to options they consider less dangerous. But other pest control and local government workers use the stiffest poisons.

That's left the owl devotees of Safety Harbor with loftier goals.

Eight months after the deaths, they hope to push the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban, or at least severely restrict, certain poisons. The agency is reviewing the risks of select rodenticides this year, providing a rare chance to demand new rules.

A core group of leaders, including Schocken, plan to pepper the government with letters. They've already created educational brochures, with one page centered on the photo of Emily and Huey feeding.

Schocken no longer views the shot as a simple moment between mother and baby. Instead, he sees the picture as a harbinger.

He calls it, "The Deadly Meal."

An unnatural threat

Great horned owls are known as "tigers of the sky," seizing prey with talons far stronger than human hands. They have striking 4-foot wingspans. And few natural rivals.

But rat poisons are hidden and unnatural threats. There's no obvious way for birds to know when rats or mice hold lethal doses.

Oliver, the father owl, lived in Philippe Park for most of the last decade, the photographers said. It's difficult to pinpoint what changed this year, whether a property owner near the park started using a different form of pest control, the owls flew farther to find food, or the poisons accumulated in their bodies and became too much. Philippe Park is run by Pinellas County, which says it doesn't use the most lethal rodenticides in public parks.

Still, a tragic cycle may have played out before. Oliver's old mate disappeared years ago, the photographers said. Three owlets died last year. The conversation around rodenticides, though, didn't really pick up until this past spring.

Two days after Schocken snapped his picture, another photographer found Huey's body on the ground. She gave it to park rangers, who preserved the carcass in a freezer until a bird rescuer arrived.

Fairl Thomas had braced for the moment. The 23-year-old grew up in Safety Harbor in a family that loved nature. Her passion grew as she rescued sick and injured wildlife for volunteer groups—pelicans tangled in fishing lines, turtles hit by cars, birds sickened by rodenticides. She went off to study at Eckerd College and had only recently returned home when she was called to the park.

She drove over and examined Huey. His mouth was pale, a sign of rodenticide exposure.

With her mother's help, Thomas tucked Huey's tiny body into a plastic bag and dropped it into a foam cooler. She shipped it overnight to a state lab so a necropsy could confirm what she already believed to be true.

Thomas posted the news to her Facebook page. "Today we lost one of the precious Philippe Park great horned owlets to what we suspect to be rodenticide," she wrote.

She started talking to photographers and other rescuers about ways to prevent more owls from dying.

But it was too late for Safety Harbor.

A few days after Huey died, a passerby spotted Emily, the mother owl, sitting still in a stand of mangroves. The tide soaked her feathers. Thomas' dad used a net to pluck her from the water.

Typically, birds roll over and kick their feet when someone tries to pick them up, said longtime Pinellas County rescuer Barbara Walker. But with Emily, "there was no fight."

Walker secured the owl in a kennel, she said, then sped home in her minivan.

She laid Emily on a table in her yard and stuck a needle near the bird's thigh. Walker started to pump fluids to hydrate her.

The owl was fading. Her tongue was white. She hooted, then died.

Countless deaths

No state or federal agency can track every rodenticide-related death. Many victims go unrecovered. Without a complete tally, the recollections of rescuers like Walker offer a window into the problem.

Walker can tick off a list of suspected victims: a handful of owls in 2022, including one at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve in St. Petersburg; occasional eagles; about a dozen hawks over the last year. She has preserved some of the birds at the sanctuary where she works until she can pay to have their bodies tested.

Necropsy and toxicology reports cost hundreds of dollars, too much for Walker and other rehabbers to pay every time.

For years, Walker had tried to raise awareness about the dangers of using poisons for rat control. But only after Huey and Emily died did people seem to take notice.

The photographers and other residents coalesced around a new Facebook page: "Safety Harbor Strong Owls & Nature." Some were wildlife lovers, fascinated by birds. Others drew a human story from the owls' plight: Emily and Oliver were just trying to feed their kids when they brought poison into the nest.

The group wanted to channel grief into action, spreading word about the risks of rat poisons and brainstorming ways to get chemicals off the street.

Thomas was direct in her messaging: "Emily's passing was an entirely preventable tragedy," she wrote.

A few commenters replied with laments over the owls. "You will be remembered," vowed Cathy Branch Stebbins, a community advocate and former grant writer who'd come up with the idea for the page.

Hope began to build among members that the remaining owls would survive. The photographers noticed Oliver spent more time feeding the babies. A month passed.

On April 5, someone spotted an owl keeled over in a tree. Its tawny feathers blended into the moss and bark. The county sent over a bucket truck, so a worker could retrieve the body.

Louie.

Three days later, Thomas was planning to meet journalists reporting on the deaths at the park when her phone rang. A visitor had spotted yet another dead owl on the ground.

"It sounds morbid," Thomas said, "but I was hoping it was one of the other chicks."

The father owl's death would leave Daisy orphaned, almost certainly spelling an end to the family's reign in Philippe Park.

She walked up and asked a ranger to show her the body.

Oliver.

Thomas held up the father owl in front of the news cameras and stretched his wings. His head fell limp to one side. His eyes hung half-shut; his tongue dangled from his beak.

Danger persists

Necropsy reports show at least two of the Philippe Park owls suffered internal bleeding, a symptom of rodenticide poisoning. It's unclear where they were exposed because the chemicals are so ubiquitous.

The park is ringed with places where people commonly scatter poisons to keep out rats and mice: homes, apartment complexes, churches, schools, other parks.

Chemicals found inside some of the birds—namely brodifacoum and bromadiolone—are among the strongest available. They're part of a class of rodenticides known as second-generation anticoagulants, which prevent blood clotting and cause rats or mice (and animals that eat them) to bleed to death.

The poisons can work in one dose, while other rodenticides may require a rat to eat multiple times before reaching a deadly level. People turned to such lethal substances in the 1970s, after rodents grew resistant to weaker formulas.

The Times reached out to multiple rodenticide manufacturers for this story; two responded but declined to comment. A spokesperson for one referred a reporter to a trade group, which did not reply to emails or phone calls.

Rats and mice ferry the chemicals up the food chain. Scientists have found rodenticides in eagles, hawks, coyotes and bobcats. They have detected non-deadly levels in endangered Florida panthers, according to the state's wildlife agency.

Animal advocates say it's counterproductive to put so many predators at risk. An owl family can together devour several rats in a day, arguably nature's best pest control.

But asking people to abandon rodenticides is complicated. Humans attract rats and mice, which feed off garbage and take shelter in attics.

Rats near homes and businesses cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every year, the EPA has estimated. They chew through food, wires, walls and pipes. They spread salmonella and plague.

The EPA based its damage calculation on a ratio of one rat for every two people. That would mean more than a million in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties alone. One St. Petersburg sanitation official explained their prevalence by saying wherever a squirrel scampers during the day, there's likely a rat at night.

Even researchers acknowledge rodent control is a conundrum with no easy solution. Killing wild animals is bad, but so are rat infestations.

"I look at the anticoagulant rodenticides as a necessary evil," said Barnett Rattner, an ecotoxicologist who studies wildlife exposures for the United States Geological Survey.

Traps can be alternatives to poisons. But such work is gruesome, said John Elliott, a research scientist who has studied poisonings under the government agency Environment and Climate Change Canada.

People need to dispose of carcasses and sometimes kill rats themselves, when the rodents are left squirming inside a trap.

"As much as anything, putting out bait is easy," Elliott said.

The EPA considers rodenticides "an irreplaceable tool" for knocking back some infestations, including near sewers and farms, said Cathy Milbourn, an agency spokesperson. Regulators have been reluctant to remove second-generation anticoagulants from the market entirely, even though they recognize such chemicals are uniquely dangerous to wildlife.

In 2008, the EPA walked back an idea to only let certified pesticide professionals buy the strongest poisons. The agency received pushback from poultry and livestock companies, which argued the change would burden their businesses.

Instead, the EPA ordered manufacturers to avoid selling second-generation anticoagulants in everyday hardware stores, like Home Depot or Lowe's. Regulators required that some poisons be packaged in bundles of 8 pounds or more, theorizing they'd be less appealing to average consumers sold in bulk at specialty stores.

Select rodenticides still have "restricted use" labels, meaning only professionals can legally use them. But not all poisons carry the designation.

When rodenticides are deployed around homes, the toxic baits—which can look like pieces of bubble gum—are supposed to be tucked inside plastic boxes. The containers are meant to make it harder for children and other animals to access poisons.

Those rules have obvious weaknesses.

People shop online. In many places, anyone with roughly $100 and an Amazon account can order a bucket of highly lethal poison. And rodenticides never truly stay contained in a box.

The chemicals take days to work, affording rats and mice time to walk in and out. Some feed on the poison multiple times, upping the toxic loads in their bodies.

They scurry around, sick and wobbly, easy targets for predators like the Philippe Park owls.

Beyond Safety Harbor

By mid-April, only one owlet remained.

After her family died, Daisy stayed away from the nesting tree. She fluttered between oaks near a historic Tocobaga mound.

Members of the owl group feared she was too young to hunt on her own, bound to die without her parents. They tried to catch her, trading shifts in the park and posting sightings on the Facebook page, which drew more and more followers.

Schocken, the photographer behind the "Deadly Meal" shot, researched rat poisons. He leaned on decades of experience as a chemist in the pesticide industry to label some products too dangerous and others as somewhat safer alternatives. He wanted to dissuade people from choosing anticoagulants.

He posted his recommendations on Facebook and in the brochures, acknowledging they were a compromise. The page's leaders, he wrote, preferred to tell people to stop using all chemicals. Even alternatives to the strongest poisons can hurt wildlife. But he didn't want to be dismissed as "unrealistic."

Some group members reported every rodenticide box they saw. They searched for property managers to convert to less-potent options. They approached pest control companies, handing out their brochures and certificates to anyone who committed to avoiding some of the strongest chemicals. They contacted local governments.

Couch's Pest Patrol, which once handled Safety Harbor's municipal boxes, changed its baits. "Whether it was our box or not, we don't want to be part of the problem," said Mark Lange, the company's manager.

Hillsborough County and Tampa also recently elected to transition to alternatives, spokespeople said.

But for every box of poison the owl supporters got off the street, they knew many remained. The city of St. Petersburg, for example, still uses a highly potent anticoagulant, as do an untold number of pest control operators.

A week after Oliver's death, the owl group's leaders gathered around a picnic table in Philippe Park. They decided knocking on doors in Tampa Bay would only get them so far.

Real power, they knew, lay with the EPA.

The federal agency is required to review rat poisons at least once every 15 years, to make sure the chemicals work without putting humans and the environment at too much risk. Regulators had already begun a review before the Philippe Park owls died.

The EPA expects to share a proposal soon for how it will oversee some of the strongest rodenticides moving forward. Then it should accept public comments for 60 days.

The Safety Harbor owl group hopes to draft a template letter, so supporters can flood the agency with petitions to restrict use of the chemicals. A volunteer is filling a spreadsheet with reports of rodenticide deaths in and beyond Tampa Bay.

"It's not going to be effective if we focus just on what happened in Philippe Park," said Schocken, who lives in Carrollwood.

The group long ago stopped trying to catch the last owlet.

Some think Daisy is dead. Others cling to the idea that she flew to a different family of great horned owls up the road.

With a little more time, they figure, she would have learned to hunt on her own, swooping down from the trees and out over Safety Harbor's narrow streets, her yellow eyes scanning the ground for rats.

2022 Kaiser Health News.

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When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was about time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq kid growing up in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, where a healthy store of beluga meat was part of making it through the winter. Each summer, thousands of these small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not only as a form of sustenance and a trading commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.

Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of only a few hunters who still spend the late weeks of spring, just after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for belugas to arrive. Many people have switched to hunting bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There simply aren’t enough belugas to sustain the community anymore.

In the 1980s, Kotzebue Sound’s beluga population began to dwindle, from thousands to hundreds, and then to the dozens or fewer that visit the region now. Kotzebue is not alone. Although some stocks are healthy, beluga numbers have fallen off in around a half-dozen regions over the last 50 years. Decades ago, hunting, commercial whaling, and other influences pushed the whales toward the brink. Now, even after hunting has ceased in some places, stresses such as climate change, increased ship traffic, and chemical pollutants are a gathering storm that threatens to finish the job.

But some scientists think that understanding how the whales respond to these stresses could end up being as important as understanding the stresses themselves. Belugas, like chimpanzees, birds, humans, and many other animals, create cultures by passing knowledge and customs from one generation to the next. With climate change and other human activities reshaping the world at an alarming rate, belugas will likely have to rely on innovative cultural practices to adapt—genetic adaptation is simply too slow to keep up.

Cultural practices can become rote, however, and just like humans, other animals can hold onto traditions long after they’ve stopped making sense. One key question, according to Greg O’Corry-Crowe, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University, is: Will culture carry the whales through?

“When the change is so seismic, maybe, and so rapid, you’re trying to look for the innovators and the pioneers among the social conservatives,” O’Corry-Crowe said. At the same time, Indigenous people like Schaeffer are facing their own quandary. Continuing to hunt belugas may hurt the whales’ chance of rebounding, but if Indigenous groups give up the practice, they could lose knowledge that’s helped sustain them in the Arctic for thousands of years.

Philosophers and scientists have long suggested that animals can learn. But even in the early 2000s, scientists debated the idea that animals accumulate knowledge over generations. One animal that helped popularize that notion is the killer whale.

Toward the end of the 20th century, scientists realized that killer whales living off the west coast of North America, between Puget Sound and Vancouver, had separated into communities with unique ways and customs. Vocalizations differed, for example. “It’s like some people speak English, some people speak French,” said Hal Whitehead, a biologist who specializes in social structures at Dalhousie University. Pods from the southern end of the range practiced a greeting ceremony, lining up opposite each other and bobbing their heads; those from the north did not. The northern whales, on the other hand, liked to rub their bodies against beaches, presumably to remove dead skin.

Some cultural practices, like which language whales speak, may not have much impact on survival. But others, like techniques for finding food, can be critical. When killer whales go through lean times, scientists can see long-term knowledge at play: Killer whales move in pods, and when food gets scarce, the oldest females move to the front. They’re likely using knowledge from times when conditions were similar—possibly decades earlier—to show younger whales where to find prey. “It’s called the grandmother hypothesis,” said Sam Ellis, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter. He and his colleagues have shown that killer whales with living grandmothers are more likely to survive than those without.

Cultural adaptations have also helped species like belugas and killer whales survive, said O’Corry-Crowe, and behaviors can develop much faster than genes can be revamped. To cope with warming waters, belugas could learn to move to regions that are still cold enough for their bodies (as long as such regions still exist). Otherwise, they may need to evolve to dissipate heat more efficiently—a process that would take at least a few generations and likely much longer. When resources are patchy, “it’s important to remember where they are, and to pass that knowledge on,” he said. But old practices can pose a problem if they don’t allow the group to adapt to new circumstances. When the world changes quickly, “suddenly, you’re let down,” Ellis said.

Whitehead uses the belugas of Hudson Bay, in northern Canada, as an example. At least three populations of belugas migrate to Hudson Bay in the summer, and Whitehead focuses on two: one that goes to the eastern side and one to the western side. Which side a whale goes to is a matter of family tradition that baby belugas learn from their mothers. Decades ago, commercial whalers overharvested the eastern population. Yet new generations of eastern belugas kept following their mothers to that more dangerous side of the bay. The eastern population became dangerously depleted while the western whales thrived.

Over the last few years, the quick pace of environmental change has sparked a string of scientific publications emphasizing the importance of animal culture for conservation. Some conservation groups have begun considering cultural traits to be as worthy of conservation as genetic signatures. The idea, O’Corry-Crowe said, is that maintaining diversity of animal knowledge optimizes opportunities for animals to figure out how to address new challenges, just as maintaining genetic diversity maximizes their opportunities to evolve new physical characteristics.

When a pocket of animals with specialized knowledge is lost, “it’s not like it’s immediately replaced. And so you start to blink out unique cultures,” he said. “And that is a loss of adaptive potential going forward.”

The belugas of Cook Inlet, Alaska, are among those that are in danger of blinking out. That’s why, one sunny afternoon in September 2022, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries biologist Verena Gill climbed into a roughly 7-foot-tall beluga costume, adorned with a scarf bearing the name Betty. Hiking up Betty’s tail, Gill waddled to the side of Seward Highway in Anchorage, Alaska, where she waved her flippers at passing motorists to generate support for the whales.

Cook Inlet reaches in from Alaska’s southern coast like an arm terminating in two talons that wrap around Anchorage, and it’s been a key area in the push to save belugas. Unlike some populations, Cook Inlet’s belugas do not undergo a widespread migration. Rather, they stay in the inlet, where they comprise a genetically distinct population. Overharvesting—from commercial, sport, and subsistence hunting—almost certainly precipitated the decline of Cook Inlet’s belugas, from more than a thousand to around 279 that live there today.

In the early 2000s, the plight of the whales spurred action: The area’s Indigenous groups gave up hunting in 2005. And yet, the whales’ numbers continue to slowly drop. In 2008, the Cook Inlet belugas were listed as endangered. A multitude of threats, including noise pollution, chemical pollution, climate change, and prey declines, have likely swamped any benefit of curtailing hunting, and protections extended to the whales by the Endangered Species Act have not been sufficient. “It’s sort of death by a thousand cuts,” said Gill.

Betty Beluga comes out once a year to help. Locals do, too: For one day each September, Gill and other NOAA Fisheries scientists, volunteers from partner organizations, and members of the public descend on 14 sites in and around Anchorage to see how many belugas they can find. The data they generate could inform research on long-term trends, but the event mostly serves to engage the public in the beluga recovery effort.

The Seward Highway turnoff, called Windy Corner, was the last of five monitoring locations that Gill visited during this year’s beluga count. Passing drivers honked and waved as Gill wrapped up a long string of photo ops with kids, social media appearances—including a livestream from inside the Betty Beluga suit—and mimicking the caws, squeaks, and whistles belugas use to communicate for a local TV news story. The popularity of this event, and other outreach efforts, are part of what gives Gill hope that Cook Inlet’s belugas will recover. When the population was listed as endangered, local stakeholders got angsty about how the listing would affect the area, according to Gill. “It just seemed like a lot of anger and worry, and there wasn’t a love for belugas like there is now,” she recalled. Fourteen years later, many of these same groups partner with NOAA Fisheries in beluga recovery efforts.

But so far, love hasn’t been enough to save the belugas. Worse still, scientists have been unable to pinpoint a particular threat that’s causing them to keep declining, which Gill said makes her “a little despondent.”

She wonders if cultural fragmentation is a missing piece in the puzzle. Cook Inlet’s extreme tides can easily trap belugas on mudflats if the whales don’t know exactly when and where the water level is going to drop. “Maybe this knowledge is not getting passed on,” she said. There’s some evidence she may be right: Jill Seymour, the Cook Inlet beluga recovery coordinator for NOAA Fisheries, pointed out that belugas are now occupying a smaller portion of Cook Inlet than they once did. Seymour thinks this could mean the whales have lost knowledge of how to use other portions, whereas Gill thinks this may be the remaining whales’ attempt to stick together and rebuild a social group. 

Belugas are following a similar trend off the coast of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, said conservation marine biologist Kit Kovacs. Genetics show that Svalbard belugas used to mix with those from the southern Barents Sea, which lies between Svalbard and Scandinavia. But these days, Svalbard’s belugas stick close to the archipelago. One explanation is that when elders in the Svalbard beluga community died, migration routes went with them. “When you lose those matriarchal animals and patriarchal animals, with knowledge of where to go and how to do business, you’re just stuck with whatever knowledge is left,” Kovacs said.

There are some signs that belugas are inventing new cultural practices, and perhaps this mindset will help them survive. When O’Corry-Crowe and his colleagues conduct wide genetic surveys, they sometimes come across whales outside their normal range “and go, wait now, who the heck are these guys?” It seems the whales are exploring. Similarly, Kovacs thinks Svalbard’s belugas might be varying their diets as melting glaciers make their favorite Arctic cod harder to catch.

In Anchorage, the beluga count volunteers were packing up at Windy Corner when a pod of about a half dozen belugas emerged offshore from the eastern edge of the turnoff. As they surfaced for air and then descended again, they appeared to roll through the water like oversized porcelain bowling balls. “They’re not feeding, they’re just traveling,” Gill said. A few minutes later, they were gone.

The continued decline of Cook Inlet’s belugas angers some Indigenous people, who feel that others in the area have not reciprocated the sacrifice they made when they gave up hunting. According to Justin Trenton, the environmental coordinator for the Native Village of Tyonek and a member of the Tebughna Tribe, elders in his community “believe that we’re the only ones that have actually stopped completely affecting them.” After almost 20 years without hunting belugas, everyone who remembers how is starting to age. Trenton worries that the knowledge will be lost.

Up the coast from Anchorage, Kotzebue’s hunters, like Roswell Schaeffer Sr., now face a similar dilemma: Should they also stop hunting belugas? A recent genetic study authored by O’Corry-Crowe and his colleagues shows that a genetically distinct population of belugas lived in Kotzebue Sound before their numbers declined. The authors wrote that the remnants of this group deserve legal protections. Roderick Hobbs, a NOAA Fisheries marine biologist who worked with Cook Inlet belugas before he retired, said he agrees.

In 2016, Indigenous members of the Alaska Beluga Whale Committee—a group of tribal delegates, scientists, government officials, and others—drafted a plan aimed at encouraging belugas to return to Kotzebue. The plan calls for limiting hunting during the early part of the summer, for example, when remnants of the original Kotzebue stock are most likely to visit nearby waters. It permits more leniency during the late summer, when belugas from the healthy Beaufort Sea stock are known to migrate past. “I think it was an outstanding approach,” said Kathryn Frost, a founding non-Indigenous member of the committee and an author on the recent genetic study. But right now the plan is voluntary, she added, and “how you get people to follow the plan is a completely different issue.”

Percy Ballot Sr., a subsistence hunter from Buckland, Alaska, and one of the plan’s architects, said he and many hunters in his area are abiding by the guidelines, even though they limit hunting opportunities that were few to begin with. Beluga hunts from years past—with their collaborative spirit and the joyous feasts that followed—are some of Ballot’s most cherished memories, but, nevertheless, he’s stopped hunting belugas. “You gotta walk the talk, I guess is probably the best way to put it.”

Not everyone thinks giving up hunting is worth the slim chance that belugas will return. If Kotzebue’s belugas were genetically isolated from neighboring populations—as Cook Inlet’s belugas are—then “it would be a clear-cut story,” said Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue and an author on the recent genetic study. But genetic analysis suggests that the remnants of the original Kotzebue belugas have hybridized with other stocks. Because of their slow generation time, rebuilding Kotzebue’s belugas could take decades if not longer, and the resulting population would likely differ from the original stock that scientists set out to save. “If you’re asking people to sacrifice a part of that cultural identity for some unknown benefit—some theorized benefit—I mean, it’s a pretty hard sell,” Whiting said.

In Schaeffer’s eyes, changes in the natural world are making the decision for his tribe. As opportunities to hunt belugas become scarce, young people are losing interest, and so their infrequent attempts are clumsy at best. “They get out in a boat, make a lot of noise, and that’s about it,” he said. It’s a change that he said, “bothers the hell out of me. Because the knowledge is being lost—and rapidly.”

The Mystery of Alaska’s Disappearing Whales

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China has decided to fight widespread anti-Covid lockdown protests by combining the heavy dose of official repression of the past week with a sudden willingness to relieve tight restrictions on movement. 

When demonstrations against the so-called “zero-Covid” policy’s physical restrictions first erupted, President Xi Jinping answered with police repression, echoes of measures common to two other big outbreaks of public displeasure in the post-Mao Zedong era – the Democracy Wall Movement of the late 1970s and the mass Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing, 1989.

Xi mobilized security forces – in this case, municipal police and the paramilitary anti-unrest People’s Armed Police – to break up protests, make arrests and unleash China’s vast surveillance apparatus to identify troublemakers by inspecting mobile phones and internet messages. 

Then, on Thursday, public health officials suddenly announced lockdown relief. Local bureaucrats would be allowed to undo restrictive measures, which had been Xi’s one-size-fits-all weapon to fight the spread of the epidemic.

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, one of the country’s senior health officials, described the disease danger as fading even as a new Covid variant had emerged.  

“The country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens,” Sun said. “More people are vaccinated and experience in containing the virus is accumulated.” 

She made no mention of zero-Covid goals and tactics. Limits on movements in Shanghai and Guangzhou, major city centers of anti-lockdown demonstrations, were immediately lifted, except on persons actually infected. Restrictions in districts of other cities, including Beijing, were also eased.

Democracy Wall. Photo: Wei Jingsheng / Free Asia

The stick-and-sudden-carrot approach has been a common practice of dealing with public unrest since the 1970s, after the fall of Mao and the rise of supposedly pragmatic, less ideological leadership. The Democracy Wall Movement, named after a kind of political bulletin board that stood in central Beijing, was tolerated for a few years.

But then dissidents and common citizens were arrested for demanding deep political changes. The Democracy Wall was dismantled; another was set up in a park three miles away. Whoever wanted to leave a message would have to register with name and address.

The carrot came in the form of capitalist-style economic freedoms. Maximum leader Deng Xiaoping appointed Zhao Ziyang, an economic reformer, to head the Chinese Communist Party and usher in free market economic changes that included the monumental dismantling of communal farms, putting the land into private hands. 

There was, however, one caveat: Political leadership of the party and formal acceptance of Marxist-Leninist rule had to be maintained. 

In 1989, thousands of demonstrators occupied Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square, just outside the Forbidden City, to protest Communist Party corruption, inflation and limits on free speech. Horrified by the fervor of the mostly student protestors and wary of igniting changes such as were occurring in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, Deng dispatched the Peoples Liberation Army to clear the square. 

In the early morning of June 4, hundreds of demonstrators camping in the square were killed – some shot, some run over by tanks. Dozens of activists were jailed; others escaped into exile.

Shortly afterward, Deng doubled down on economic reform, persuaded that increased prosperity would cement Communist rule and promote his drive to build China into an economic powerhouse. Zhao Ziyang, who had supported the Tiananmen protestors, was placed under house arrest for life. Zhao’s replacement, Jiang Zemin, kept to the straight and narrow of party rule while promoting capitalist-style growth and foreign investment.

Since the 1980s, scattered protests have taken place in response to various, if familiar, problems: government corruption, heavy-handed controls and economic problems. But the way that the current anti-Covid protests developed is new, at least for China, and might herald a period of public discourse within Xi’s tightly controlled political galaxy. 

Chinese protesters air their views on the government’s ‘zero-Covid’ restrictions. Image: Screengrab / BBC

The current demonstrations erupted in a world of mobile phones and the internet. Images of a burning apartment building in Xinjiang, which received scant attention in the state media, were spread on cell phone videos.

What the government tried to downplay the event, millions of Chinese could ponder on their own, opening the way for spontaneous response. People in a variety of cities heard that doors in the flaming building were bolted shut by government order or that firefighters were obstructed by roadblocks intended to limit the spread of Covid. The fire disaster become a metaphor for the frustrations with zero-Covid felt by all who had been confined to their apartments for weeks or months, unable to move or work.

The new, dispersed nature of protests makes them harder to tamp down. After two months of tolerance, Tiananmen was cleared by military force in a night. Diffuse and apparently leaderless anti-Covid-restriction protests are harder to counter, at least without quick compromise.

Xi faces a dilemma. He bet on zero-Covid physical control rather than keeping up with boosters, especially among the elderly, and importing foreign-made mRNA vaccines. It’s not clear whether the sudden change of heart on lockdowns – and a concurrent step up in vaccinations – will work, or whether it is just a way to place responsibility for future failure on local officials.

“Citizens are exhausted,” wrote Yves Tiberghien, a professor of political science at Canada’s University of British Columbia. “Omicron virus is set to run rampant. Whether China can find a pragmatic and peaceful way out of its zero-Covid approach remains an open question.”

Xi himself seems not fully confident that Thursday’s lessening of restrictions is enough to quell discontent. He has issued an “emergency response” decree of censorship, including a crackdown on virtual private networks and other means of bypassing online censorship.

It appears that, beyond a Covid surge, the possibility of an epidemic spread of information outside Xi’s Great Firewall of communication control is also a source of alarm.

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The stolen data supply chain begins with producers—hackers who exploit vulnerable systems and steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, bank account information, and Social Security numbers. Next, the stolen data is advertised by wholesalers and distributors who sell the data. Finally, the data is purchased by consumers who use it to commit various forms of fraud, including fraudulent credit card transactions, identity theft, and phishing attacks.

This trafficking of stolen data between producers, wholesalers, and consumers is enabled by darknet markets, which are websites that resemble ordinary e-commerce websites but are accessible only using special browsers or authorization codes.

We found several thousand vendors selling tens of thousands of stolen data products on 30 darknet markets. These vendors had more than $140 million in revenue over an eight-month period.

Darknet markets

Just like traditional e-commerce sites, darknet markets provide a platform for vendors to connect with potential buyers to facilitate transactions. Darknet markets, though, are notorious for the sale of illicit products. Another key distinction is that access to darknet markets requires the use of special software such as the Onion Router, or TOR, which provides security and anonymity.

Silk Road, which emerged in 2011, combined TOR and bitcoin to become the first known darknet market. The market was eventually seized in 2013, and the founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. Ulbricht’s hefty prison sentence did not appear to have the intended deterrent effect. Multiple markets emerged to fill the void and, in doing so, created a thriving ecosystem profiting from stolen personal data.

Stolen data ecosystem

Recognizing the role of darknet markets in trafficking stolen data, we conducted the largest systematic examination of stolen data markets that we are aware of to better understand the size and scope of this illicit online ecosystem. To do this, we first identified 30 darknet markets advertising stolen data products.

Next, we extracted information about stolen data products from the markets on a weekly basis for eight months, from September 1, 2020, through April 30, 2021. We then used this information to determine the number of vendors selling stolen data products, the number of stolen data products advertised, the number of products sold, and the amount of revenue generated.

In total, there were 2,158 vendors who advertised at least one of the 96,672 product listings across the 30 marketplaces. Vendors and product listings were not distributed equally across markets. On average, marketplaces had 109 unique vendor aliases and 3,222 product listings related to stolen data products. Marketplaces recorded 632,207 sales across these markets, which generated $140,337,999 in total revenue. Again, there is high variation across the markets. On average, marketplaces had 26,342 sales and generated $5,847,417 in revenue.

After assessing the aggregate characteristics of the ecosystem, we analyzed each of the markets individually. In doing so, we found that a handful of markets were responsible for trafficking most of the stolen data products. The three largest markets—Apollon, WhiteHouse, and Agartha—contained 58 percent of all vendors. The number of listings ranged from 38 to 16,296, and the total number of sales ranged from 0 to 237,512. The total revenue of markets also varied substantially during the 35-week period: It ranged from $0 to $91,582,216 for the most successful market, Agartha.

For comparison, most midsize companies operating in the US earn between $10 million and $1 billion annually. Both Agartha and Cartel earned enough revenue within the 35-week period we tracked them to be characterized as midsize companies, earning $91.6 million and $32.3 million, respectively. Other markets like Aurora, DeepMart, and WhiteHouse were also on track to reach the revenue of a midsize company if given a full year to earn.

Our research details a thriving underground economy and illicit supply chain enabled by darknet markets. As long as data is routinely stolen, there are likely to be marketplaces for the stolen information.

These darknet markets are difficult to disrupt directly, but efforts to thwart customers of stolen data from using it offers some hope. We believe that advances in artificial intelligence can provide law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, and others with information needed to prevent stolen data from being used to commit fraud. This could stop the flow of stolen data through the supply chain and disrupt the underground economy that profits from your personal data.

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THE VIDEOS ARE as horrifying as they are powerful. A daughter kneels in her mother’s grave, saying farewell for the final time after she was shot dead while protesting. In another, crowds of protesters flee along a train station platform after facing police gunfire; a different clip shows officials beating a woman on the floor outside a shopping center. A father created a video montage of his activist son who has been frequently arrested and imprisoned.  

The videos—all linked to Iran’s anti-government protests—have all been posted to Twitter. They’ve been shared thousands of times and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. However, they are just a small snapshot of the Twitter posts coming out of Iran, as the social media platform has played an important role in documenting the brutality faced by protesters.

Every day for the past two months, countless Iranians have taken to the streets in more than 150 cities to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in the custody of Iran’s “morality police” after they arrested her for not wearing a hijab in public. Protesters have called for greater women’s rights and regime change in Iran. As they have done so, they have been met with increasing violence from Iranian forces. According to the Human Rights Activists’ News Agency (HRANA), more than 450 protestors have been killed, including 64 children. More than 18,000 people have been arrested, the organization says.

Twitter—and social media in general—has been awash in videos appearing to show protesters being attacked by police forces, the bodies of those killed, and people’s injuries. For more than a decade, the social network, now owned by Elon Musk, has been used as a way to document protests and human rights abuses around the world. However, as Musk’s chaotic takeover unravels and key safety teams have been cut, the Iranian protests put fresh light on Twitter’s importance as a platform for information sharing and chronicling events globally.

Twitter has made it possible for the world to see attacks on protesters and revealed the horror of those killed. And in a country where the media is tightly controlled by the government, it provides a lifeline for Iranians to access impartial information. “There is the power of Twitter in terms of how effective it is when Iranians themselves are getting online to express their messages directly to the world,” says Mahsa Alimardani, an academic at the Oxford Internet Institute and senior researcher at digital rights group Article 19 who has studied Iran’s internet controls. “Every day I see a new family member of a political prisoner coming online on Twitter to directly start advocating for their kids.”

Internet experts and others monitoring the protests are concerned that Musk’s takeover of Twitter will damage a key platform for protest and activism at a time when internet freedoms are being curtailed.

For the past decade, Iran has created tools to shut down the internet and block social media platforms. While it has blocked Twitter on and off since 2009, the country’s censorship tools have become increasingly sophisticated. In 2019, it shut down the entire internet as people rallied against rising fuel prices. During the protests following Amini’s death, Iran has targeted its internet controls: Digital curfews have been in place, and WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Viber, and LinkedIn have all been blocked.

“Iran is one of the world’s worst abusers of internet freedom. It ranks down there with China and Russia,” says Cathryn Grothe, a research analyst for the Middle East and North Africa at Freedom House, a nonprofit that produces an annual report on internet freedom. As a result of the curfews and blocks, there has been a surge in Iranians using virtual private networks and censorship circumvention tools to get online.

Twitter isn’t Iran’s biggest social network—WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram are more popular—but as in many other countries, it is used to share breaking news and real-time updates on events. It stops Iran from being an information black hole.

“This is a pivotal space for people to express themselves, to connect with friends and family, to mobilize around demonstrations, and then also to hold governments to account,” Grothe says. “We really are seeing Twitter being used by folks on the ground,” Alimardani says.

Videos and images shared by protesters have been used to shine a light on the actions of the Iranian police forces and officials. A BBC investigation has used social media data to help identify young people and children killed in the nationwide protests.

There is no official record of those who have died during the protests, and HRANA estimates that only 3,400 people who have been detained by officials have been identified. More than 18,000 have been arrested.

High-profile accounts both inside and outside Iran, belonging to those on the ground, members of the Iranian diaspora, and researchers, are sharing hundreds of videos of what is happening in Iran. For example, opposition activist collective 1500tasvir has seen its Farsi Twitter account grow from 55,000 followers in September to around 400,000 followers now. (In the past two months its Instagram account has also jumped from 450,000 followers to 1.7 million.)

“You cannot find any normal or correct news from Iranian TV, because there is no independent platform inside the country,” says Saeed Bagheri, a lecturer in international law at the University of Reading. Bagheri says those using Twitter in Iran have been “really effective in sharing firsthand news about human rights violations and Islamic republics of brutality against peaceful protests.” On November 24, the United Nations opened an investigation into “deadly violence against protesters,” citing images of those who had been subjected to violence. Iranian officials claimed “necessary measures” had been taken by authorities.

However, it is not only Iranian protesters and activists using Twitter. Iranian state-backed actors have a history of trying to use Twitter to manipulate politics. In June 2019, Twitter removed almost 5,000 accounts associated with or “directly backed” by the Iranian government. These accounts—which tweeted around 2 million times—were pushing the views of the Iranian government and used fake profiles to “target conversations about political and social issues in Iran and globally.” 

One Iranian digital propaganda researcher, who asked not to be named for security reasons, says they have been monitoring the most popular Farsi tweets for several months. Before the protests started, they say, accounts that appear to support the Iranian government pushed messages that were justifying its policies. Once the protests started, accounts pivoted to sharing mis- and disinformation about the events, they say. “I have never seen such a big and massive effort in pouring the Iranian Twitterverse with false information. But the regime was not successful in this regard.”

Twitter has long been a place where protests have been organized. However, Musk’s takeover of the platform and the chaotic scenes that have followed—including gutting Twitter’s human rights team—could have real-world consequences where protests are taking place. This could include the ability to keep people safe.

The Oxford Internet Institute and Article 19’s Alimardani says that much of Musk’s time in charge has so far focused on US issues despite the fact that the majority of Twitter users are from outside of the United States. “Iranians don’t care that Elon Musk is waging a war against woke culture in America,” Alimardani says. “Iranians just want to get their message to the world as fast and efficiently as possible.”

Alimardani and Amir Rashidi, the director of digital rights and security at Iran-focused human rights organization Miaan Group, both praise the work of the limited number of people at Twitter who are working on emergency issues and keeping people in Iran safe. However, they say more resources are needed, and it is becoming harder to get answers about more complicated cases. 

“Article 19 is highlighting clear instances of human rights abuses being platformed on Twitter,” Alimardani says. “These conversations are much more difficult and cumbersome to have right now,” Alimardani adds. As highlighted by BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, it took multiple days for Twitter to suspend an account that appeared to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The account, which had 91,000 followers, was allegedly posting images of protesters who had been attacked. It is likely the tip of the iceberg. 

“There are still hundreds of accounts of users that are tied to the state or clearly tied to the security forces that are still posting forced confessions,” Alimardani claims. (Twitter, which is believed to no longer have a communications department, did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.)

Rashidi adds that Musk’s announcement that suspended Twitter accounts would be given an “amnesty” is a particular cause for concern. He highlights pro-Iranian government accounts that have been removed in the past for violating Twitter’s rules. “They were going after activists. They were harassing individuals. They were even putting out videos of forced confessions on their accounts,” Rashidi says. If those accounts return, Rashidi adds, Twitter will be less safe for Iranians.

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MODERATING SOCIAL MEDIA platforms is hard. Just ask the former Twitter employees whose decision to block a 2020 New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter was picked over yesterday in tweets from Substack writer Matt Taibbi.

Or ask Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner and self-declared Chief Twit, who hyped Taibbi’s tweets, which were littered with screenshots claiming to show internal company messages. Despite their billing as evidence of a history of political bias at the company, the records depicted people caught in a trap that now ensnares Musk himself, who must make any tough decisions about what to allow on Twitter.

The tweet thread, which Taibbi dubbed the “Twitter Files,” shows company executives rushing to make a thorny moderation call in a no-win situation. With a presidential election looming, the New York Post reported that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden held evidence that he had inappropriately attempted to broker a meeting between a business client and his father when Joe Biden was vice president of the US.

Emails and messages in screenshots posted by Taibbi show what one executive called a “whirlwind,” as some of Twitter’s policy and trust and safety staffers questioned an initial decision to block sharing of the story for violating the platform’s policy on distribution of hacked materials. (The provenance of the laptop, and whether all the files on it truly belong to Hunter Biden, remains unclear.)

The screenshots showed one staffer warning, “We’ll face hard questions on this if we don’t have some kind of solid reasoning.” A company lawyer opined it was “reasonable for [Twitter] to assume” the material obtained by the newspaper was stolen. Other screenshots showed Twitter executives fielding advice from a Democratic member of congress and tech industry lobbyists.

What did the world learn about Twitter’s handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was “wrong.” Instead, the thread provided fresh fodder for conspiracy theories that have swirled around the laptop saga, including the insinuation—not backed by evidence—that government officials intervened to suppress the Post story. 

Yet the most salient lesson from Taibbi’s thread may apply to Musk himself, who has taken to making big moderation decisions at Twitter almost unilaterally.

In the past two weeks Musk reinstated the account of former US president Donald Trump based on the results of a Twitter poll and unblocked a series of other users previously banned from the site for breaching content rules. Musk also championed the return of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose account was restricted in October after Ye posted an anti-Semitic tweet. (Restricted accounts still appear on the platform, but its users can’t post or interact with them.)

Yet Musk this week announced that Ye would be suspended all over again after tweeting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. His reasoning, which academics and journalists have called out as unclear, was that the post was a breach of Twitter’s rule against incitement to violence.

Like the Twitter staffers who deliberated on the New York Post story in 2020, Musk was caught in a tough spot and appeared to feel under pressure to make a decision. And, as with those past arbiters of Twitter policy, the behind-the-scenes action seemed a little messy.

A text message leaked by Ye appeared to show Musk messaging the rapper directly first, showing that he’s willing to extend personal service to some violators of his moderation policies—even if they are espousing anti-Semitic views. “Sorry, but you have gone too far. This is not love,” Musk told Ye, according to screenshots the rapper shared before his Twitter account was again suspended. “Who made you the judge,” Ye texted back.

Musk’s moderation assignments will only get more complicated from here. The longer he owns the site, the more likely he is to face a challenge with political entanglements. And research has suggested that hate speech has already become more visible on Musk-run Twitter.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about its incitement-to-violence bans and how rules against violators will be enforced. The company has disbanded its communications team.

The Ye controversy gives some insight into what Musk considers speech that crosses the line, says Libby Hemphill, the associate director of the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan. But without a clear and consistent policy and a team making deliberations of the sort shown in the documents published today, making the right call will be even more difficult.

Seeing Musk attempt to tackle some of Twitter’s trickiest moderation challenges single-handedly could encourage other users to push the limits of what the platform will tolerate. Hemphill says some people will wonder what the limits of speech are and whether they’re different for Ye and presidential candidates than for non-famous figures. “That is part of what makes bespoke content moderation by one person non-workable,” she says. “The adversaries will continue to scale and adapt to see what is OK.”

Musk’s work as a moderator has undeniably drawn more attention to the platform he is trying to reinvigorate. So did his participation in the Twitter Files, which he insinuated in tweets might provide evidence, somehow, of a breach of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. “Transparency is the key to trust,” Musk wrote last night. It is unclear whether he will apply the same rule to his own stewardship of Twitter.

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After the sheriff's office posted its "Most Wanted List" for November earlier this week, Christopher Spaulding commented "How about me?" on Wednesday.

The department replied on Thursday, "you are correct you have two warrants, we are on the way."

It later reshared a screenshot of the exchange along with Spaulding’s arrest photo, writing, "We appreciate you for your assistance in your capture!"

Christopher Spaulding asked the sheriff's department on Facebook why he wasn't on their most wanted list.  (Rockdale County Sheriff's Office)

The department thanked the Fugitive Unit for "efficiently" arresting Spaulding who it said had two arrest warrants for felony violation of probation.

It added, "Our Top 10 is compiled based off of the severity of the charges only. By not being on this list does not mean our Fugitive Unit is not looking for you if you have an active warrant."

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The public prosecutor’s office in the southwest German city of Mannheim obtained a warrant for the 72-year-old woman’s arrest and she was brought before the magistrate and investigating judge of Mannheim Local Court on Wednesday.

She was later admitted to a “correctional facility,” the police headquarters and public prosecutor’s office in Mannheim said in a statement.

The woman allegedly turned off the main switch of the oxygen equipment some time before 8:00 pm on Tuesday, “after feeling disturbed by the noise emanating from (it),” the statement said.

“Although the suspect was informed by hospital staff that the oxygen supply was a vital measure, she allegedly turned off the device again at around 9:00 pm,” it continued.

The 79-year-old woman had to be resuscitated and is still receiving intensive medical care.

Oxygen equipment is used to ensure that enough oxygen reaches a patient’s cells and can take different forms, including a nasal cannula, face mask or tracheotomy tube, according to the Cleveland Clinic website.

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According to Kilgore Police Department, one of the victims noticed the suspect "barrelling down on him" but couldn't get out of the way.

"He was shocked to see the driver was a dog!," KPD shared on social media. "Yep, the pooch was actually behind the wheel when the crash occurred."

The investigation revealed the furry friend was sitting in an unoccupied vehicle waiting on his family while they shopped.

"He apparently got a little antsy and bounced around the cab setting this truck in motion," the police continued. "The steering column had some prior damage and this pooch must have placed the vehicle in drive."

Officials added that the dog was also wearing a leash, and it’s believed that he got it caught on the emergency brake and released it.

Dog inside car following crash (Credit: Kilgore Police Department/Jason Romine)

"It doesn't sound feasible but an eyewitness saw the pooch behind the wheel just before the crash. He certainly has a guilty look on his face," officials added.

No one was injured in this crash.

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Steve Jobs obviously didn't build Apple on his own; when he died, the company had approximately 40,000 employees. Since Jobs reportedly interacted with only about 100 employees, Apple naturally employed hundreds of managers.

Here's Jobs, in 1985, on the early process of recruiting and hiring managers:

We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all.

They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything.

I once made the same mistake when I needed to fill a production supervisor position.

The decision eventually came down to two candidates. One had worked in the department for 15 years. He had great technical skills. He excelled at training new employees. He was bright, energetic, and engaging. Even so, the fact he had never held a formal leadership role was a concern. The other had held a variety of leadership positions and had recently led the team that got the plant ISO certified.

So I went the "a good manager can manage anywhere" route and promoted the "professional manager."

Turns out I was right.

And wrong. A good manager can, in fact, manage anywhere, and he was good at managing. He enforced rules. He ensured people followed processes. He conducted performance evaluations, created development plans, tracked results--he definitely filled the role.

But he didn't do the job.

Here's Jobs again:

You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.

In my case, I didn't need someone to manage what we already did. I needed someone frustrated by our current level of productivity. Someone irritated by our current level of quality. Someone annoyed by the fact very few shopfloor employees were being promoted to higher-level roles.

I needed someone who wanted to be a manager because that was the only way they could ensure the crew achieved what it was capable of achieving. I didn't need a production supervisor. I needed someone who wanted to get product out the door more effectively and efficiently, and who had the technical skills to make that happen.

As for leadership skills? Those he could learn. (Great leaders are mostly made, not born.)

Plus, his employees would have likely overlooked his lack of professional manager skills. A 2015 study published in Industrial and Labor Relations Review found that having a boss who excels at "ability to get the job done" has by far the largest positive influence on employee job satisfaction.

As the researchers write, "If your boss could do your job, you're more likely to be happy at work."

The next time you make a promotion decision, make sure you consider the great individual contributor who may not want to be a manager, but desperately wants to get things done.

Because success always comes down to what your business accomplishes.

Not what it manages.

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Why wind energy isn’t living up to its pollution-preventing potential

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Laboratory technicians in France prepare stool to treat patients with serious colon infections by fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), also known as gut flora transplant (GFT) in 2019.

For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has granted approval for a feces-based microbial treatment, which is used to prevent a recurring diarrheal infection that can become life-threatening.

The approval, announced Wednesday, is years in the making. Researchers have strained to harness the protective qualities of the complex, diverse, yet variable microbial communities found in healthy people's intestines and stool. Early on, rich fecal matter proved useful for restoring balance and blocking infection in those whose microbiomes have been disturbed—a state called dysbiosis, which can occur from disease and/or use of antibiotic drugs. But, our understanding of what makes a microbiome healthy, functional, and protective remains incomplete.

Doctors, meanwhile, pushed ahead, informally trying an array of methods to transplant fecal microbiota from healthy donors to the guts of patients—via enemas, tubes through the nose, and oral poop-packed capsules. Fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) have been used to treat various ailments, from obesity to irritable bowel syndrome, to mixed success. But it quickly became apparent that FMTs were most readily effective at preventing recurrent infection from Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile or just C. diff).

C. diff bacteria cause diarrhea and significant inflammation in the colon. Severe infections can be life-threatening. In people with dysbiosis, C. diff can proliferate in the intestines, producing toxins that can lead to organ failure. Older people, those who are hospitalized, and people with weakened immune systems are particularly susceptible to C. diff, which can recur over and over in some vulnerable patients. In the US, C. diff infections are associated with up to 30,000 deaths per year.

With the pressing need for effective treatments against C. diff, regulators were forced to wade through the mucky issue of regulating and standardizing something as unruly and myriad as fecal matter. It also led to years of microbial sleuthing, synthetic slurries, stool donations, and clinical trials.

Solid success

Now, a product has finally floated to the top: Rebyota, a blend of donor stool, saline, and laxative solution given in a single treatment as an enema. It's teeming with heavily screened intestinal microbes at a concentration of 10,000,000 live organisms per milliliter. Its owner, Switzerland-based Ferring Pharmaceuticals, screens donors and their donated stool for a long list of infectious pathogens and other health factors.

In a Phase III clinical trial involving 262 participants—the results of which were published last month—Ferring's scientists reported that treatment with Rebyota led to a higher prevention rate of recurrent C. diff infections than in a placebo group at a rate of 70.6 percent in the treatment group compared with 57.5 percent in the placebo group. Prevention of C. diff was defined as an absence of C. diff diarrhea for eight weeks following treatment or placebo. The treatment was well tolerated, with no serious side effects. The FDA noted that given the variability of fecal matter, there is a potential that it could contain an unforeseen infectious agent or food allergens.

The approval of Rebyota is "an advance in caring for patients who have recurrent C. difficile infection," Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in an announcement. "Recurrent CDI impacts an individual’s quality of life and can also potentially be life-threatening. As the first FDA-approved fecal microbiota product, today’s action represents an important milestone, as it provides an additional approved option to prevent recurrent CDI."

Ferring—which acquired Rebyota in 2018 when it purchased its developer, Minnnesota-based Rebiotix—also celebrated the approval.

“We believe this is a major breakthrough in harnessing the power of the human microbiome to address significant unmet medical needs. This is the first FDA approval of a live biotherapeutic and the culmination of decades of research and clinical development," Ferring President Per Falk said. "Today’s announcement is not just a milestone for people living with recurrent C. difficile infection, but also represents a significant step which holds promise that many other diseases might be better understood, diagnosed, prevented, and treated using our rapidly evolving insights on the role of the microbiome in human health and disease."

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On November 27 and 28, tens of thousands of citizens took part in unprecedented protests in major cities and some 75 university campuses across China, demanding freedom and an end to “zero-Covid” policies. This followed violent clashes in Zhengzhou between fed-up iPhone workers and the police. How did it come to this?

After local prevarication in Wuhan in December 2019 and January 2020 about the seriousness of Covid-19, China resorted to an intense national mobilization campaign to keep the virus under control. This response enabled an economic rebound in late 2020 and 2021.

But China’s zero-Covid response to the Omicron variant after March 2022 has become all-encompassing, unpredictable and economically ruinous. A logic of political control has pushed aside pragmatic health and economic policy. China’s urban public is frustrated.

The nature of the Omicron variant and the political calendar played a role in the intensification of technocratic and digital zero-Covid controls.

Upholding zero-Covid policies became a performance indicator for officials in China’s political system as they jockeyed for positions before the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held from 16-22 October 2022.

Covid-19 was portrayed as a huge threat despite Omicron’s relatively lower pathogenicity compared to earlier variants. Public health measures ramped up, while prominent medical experts and critics of the response were silenced, including former president of China’s Medical Association Zhong Nanshan.

People maintain social distancing as they queue to receive nucleic acid tests for Covid-19 in Huaian in China’s eastern Jiangsu province on August 2, 2021. Photo: AFP

Covid controls became vectors for political control, no matter the mental health or economic costs. When local officials resort to full social control to gain political currency within the Party, as China’s State Council called out in the case of Zhengzhou, it results in policy overreaction, anxiety and uncertainty for the public.

People are repeatedly locked down without prior notice or end dates in sight, as has been the case in cities like Sanya and Guangzhou. Buildings are fenced. People obsess about the color of their electronic health code. And close contacts (mijie) or digitally-determined potential contacts (shikongbansuizhe) are taken to remote quarantine centers (fancang) for 7–10 days under potentially harsh conditions.

Tragedies are multiplying, prominently in the cities of Lanzhou, Guiyang, Sichuan province, and, most notoriously, in Urumqi, with the death of 10 people trapped in a burning high-rise on 24 November.

Individuals’ loss of control over their daily lives proliferates the tang ping (lying flat) attitude. People’s mobility on China’s National Day holiday was disrupted. Businesses cannot plan and China’s youth struggle to find jobs, with youth unemployment sitting at 19%.

Former CCP Secretary of Shanghai Li Qiang presided over the city’s poorly administered lockdown in April. Instead of the policy failures tarnishing Li’s reputation, he was promoted to the second highest position on the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee and is in line to become China’s premier in March 2023.

Omicron’s relatively greater transmissibility but lower pathogenicity ostensibly increased the costs of zero-Covid closures. Yet to local Party bureaucrats, the opportunity costs of zero-Covid measures may be lower than opening up and may be given different weights than they are under democratic political systems. This is because they need to follow the Party’s campaign-style implementation of zero-Covid measures to survive politically.

Other Asian neighbors turned to vaccinations and normalized life during 2022. There was a real cost to this, but one that was seen as lower than the cost of staying closed. For example, between January 1 and November 8, cumulative deaths per million in Singapore went from 147 to 300. This happened despite a capable medical system and relatively high double vaccination and booster rates with mostly mRNA vaccines of around 90% and 79% respectively.

A Chinese woman receives the Sinovac vaccine in Hangzhou, in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, on June 20, 2021. Photo: AFP

In contrast, China’s mortality rate is 3.7 deaths per million. Its double vaccination rate (with non-mRNA vaccines) was 89% in November, but booster vaccine doses have only been given to 57% of the eligible population, leaving China vulnerable to future virus waves. Low public trust in China’s vaccines and an unwillingness so far to import foreign mRNA vaccines leaves China stuck in an Omicron trap.

Six further observations can be made about the politics of China’s pandemic management in 2022. First, the Covid-19 pandemic has become a justification for movement away from China’s past era of reform and opening.

Second, Covid-19 controls were not materially relaxed following the CPC’s 20th National Party Congress. Although China’s National Health Commission released a memo on optimising Covid-19 response measures, there have been few major changes in Covid-19 management so far.

Third, 2022 has exposed China’s deficits in healthcare, welfare and mental health support. It has also demonstrated China’s capacity in surveillance, digital control and policing.

Fourth, the international appeal of China’s human security discourse that emphasizes human life over individual freedom remains doubtful considering the painful human experiences China’s people endure.

Fifth, 2022 has seen a fragmentation and localization of China’s economy, as local officials implement zero-Covid measures in an “overly-firm manner” (zuofeng guoying) to signal political loyalty towards China’s President Xi Jinping.

Human exchanges have been reduced between China and the world (despite a slight loosening in quarantine policies for people entering China), and within China.

Local languages are making a resurgence. Sixth and overall, export-oriented cities like Shenzhen have faced lighter restrictions than financial centers like Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Demonstrators hold up blank sheets of paper during a protest in Beijing on November 28. Image: Screengrab / CNN

At the close of 2022, despite the zero-Covid measures, Omicron is spreading across China. The Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo reaffirmed its policy approach, but citizens are exhausted.

Their anger finally spilled over on November 27–28 in an outburst of social media rebellion and protests across China, taking the party leadership by surprise.

China’s economy is underperforming compared to the rest of Asia for the first time since 1990. Whether China can find a pragmatic and peaceful way out of its zero-Covid approach remains an open question.

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A WEEK AGO, demonstrators took to the streets of the northwestern city of Urumqi to protest China’s strict zero-Covid policy. That night, a much bigger wave of protest crested on Chinese social media, most notably on the super app WeChat. Users shared videos of the demonstrators and songs like “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Misérables, Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” and Patti Smith’s “Power to the People.”

In the days that followed, protests spread. A mostly masked crowd in Beijing's Liangmaqiao district held up blank sheets of paper and called for an end to tough Covid policies. Across the city at the elite Tsinghua University, protesters held up printouts of a physics formula known as the Friedmann equation because its namesake sounds like “free man.” Similar scenes played out in cities and college campuses across China in a wave of protest that has been compared to the 1989 student movement that ended in a bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

Unlike those earlier protests, the demonstrations that have roiled China in the past week were entwined with and spread by smartphones and social media. The country’s government has tried to strike a balance between embracing technology and limiting citizens’ power to use it to protest or organize, building up wide-ranging powers of censorship and surveillance. But last weekend, the momentum of China’s digital savvy population and their frustration, bravery, and anger seemed to break free of the government's control. It took days for Chinese censors and police to tamp down dissent on the internet and in city streets. By then images and videos of the protests had spread around the world, and China’s citizens had proven that they could maneuver around the Great Firewall and other controls.

“The mood on WeChat was like nothing I've ever experienced before,” says one British national who has lived in Beijing for more than a decade, who asked not to be named to avoid scrutiny from Chinese authorities. “There seemed to be a recklessness and excitement in the air as people became bolder and bolder with every post, each new person testing the government’s —and their own—boundaries.” He saw posts unlike those he’d seen before on China’s tightly controlled internet, like a picture of a Xinjiang official bluntly captioned “Fuck off.”

Chinese netizens have built up a sense of what censors will and won’t allow, and many know how to skirt some internet controls. But as the protests spread, younger WeChat users seemed to become unconcerned with the consequences of their posts, one tech worker in Guangzhou told WIRED, calling on an encrypted app. Like other Chinese nationals quoted, he asked not to be named because of the danger of government attention. More seasoned organizers used encrypted apps like Telegram or shared to Western platforms, like Instagram and Twitter, to get the word out.

The anti-lockdown demonstrations began as unofficial vigils for the victims of a fatal fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province. The city had been under Covid lockdown restrictions for more than 100 days, which some observers believe hindered victims trying to escape and slowed emergency responders. Most, if not all, of the victims were members of the Uyghur ethnic minority, which has been subject to a campaign of forced assimilation that sent an estimated 1 million to 2 million people to reeducation camps.

The tragedy came as frustrations with zero-Covid policies were already starting to spike. Violent confrontations had broken out between workers and security at a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou that manufactures iPhones. Scott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, DC, says that when he visited Beijing and Shanghai in September and October, it was clear that people had “grown weary” of measures like regular PCR testing, scanning QR “health codes” to go anywhere, and the constant specter of a fresh lockdown. “I'm not surprised that things have boiled over,” Kennedy says. The government in early November signaled some restrictions would soon loosen, but the Urumqi fire and news that Covid cases were rising again, he says, “pushed people over the edge.”

Like people around the world, Chinese citizens tired of lockdowns turned to their phones to express their anger. Their familiarity with censorship and how to avoid it helped propel the protests and also helped provide inspiration for what might become their enduring symbol. Protesters held aloft white sheets of paper and posted white squares online, a motif seen by many as at least in part a reference to censorship. White is also the color of mourning in China, and the protests are being called the “A4 Revolution, or “white paper revolution” 白纸革命. 

Protesters turned to now-familiar censorship evasion techniques, such as posting screengrabs to avoid text filters or adding filters to videos before sharing to sidestep automated detection systems. Protests were referred to using coded language, such as “going for a walk.”

For Chinese netizens, using puns, memes, and other tricks to evade censorship is old hat, although they are more often used to grumble or vent about the government than to encourage mass defiance. In the past week, they’ve been posting screengrabs of close-captioned music videos, or ironically flooding official posts with comments like “good” or “correct.”

In the past three years, as the domestic internet has become more heavily regulated, people have become more savvy about using VPNs and US social platforms like Twitter and Instagram to access and spread information, says one Chinese national currently in Hong Kong. Chat app Telegram and Apple’s AirDrop local file-sharing feature provide essential ways to spread information about protests, although Apple recently tweaked AirDrop in China so phones are only visible to others nearby for 10 minutes at a time. Collectively, those digital tools fostered widespread awareness and coordination of the protests taking place across China. The movement showed unusual cross-class and cross-ethnic unity, the person in Hong Kong says, with migrant workers, ethnic minorities, feminist groups, and students all joining demonstrations.

Toward the end of last weekend, government efforts to clamp down on the protests were becoming evident—both on city streets and the internet. The Guangzhou tech worker says that on Sunday night when he approached an area where protesters with signs were gathering, there were about 200 police officers on the scene, too, dispersed through the crowd to prevent large groups from forming. He left but heard that later in the night protesters scuffled with police. In the following days, he says, some protesters who were in the area were contacted by police, likely using location data gathered from their phones. By early this week, news wires reported that police were out in force in mainland cities where protests had ocurred, and in some places they were checking people’s phones for VPNs or apps such as Telegram.

Videos of protests had been disappearing from WeChat within hours of the first demonstrations last Friday, but digital censorship—both AI and manual—ramped up across Chinese platforms early this week. The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered platforms and search engines to monitor content related to the demonstrations and remove information about how to use VPNs, sources told The Wall Street Journal. WIRED tested the Chinese term for “white paper revolution” using the blocked keyword search created by Great Fire, an organization that monitors Chinese censorship, and found it was still searchable on the Twitter-like platform Weibo early this week, but by yesterday it was blocked.

By midweek, the streets and social feeds had quieted, and the censorship machine was in high gear when potentially destabilizing news broke: Former president Jiang Zemin had died. He oversaw a time of economic growth and relative openness in the 1990s and early 2000s. Chinese netizens filled WeChat with tributes to the late leader, in an oblique criticism of the current leadership that continued the week’s protests in a subtler form.

Heavy police presence seems to have held off further in-person protests, but activists WIRED spoke to say they will regroup. Local governments have begun easing Covid restrictions, and the central government launched a campaign to vaccinate more elderly people, but the more lasting lessons of the week may be how powerfully social media can help people to spread calls for reform beyond China’s borders and bring divided groups of activists together. Within days, a demonstration commemorating members of a marginalized minority spread across China and inspired defiance from wide swathes of society. Their slogans, songs, and gestures were echoed on university campuses and city streets from Tokyo to London.

At a vigil in New York this week for the victims of the Urumqi fire, WIRED saw people of all ages, speaking mostly Mandarin and English. Some held blank sheets of paper. There were supporters of Taiwan independence, Uyghur rights, and the Hong Kong democracy movement. One person set up a projector and a laptop across the street from the Chinese consulate, projecting “Urumqi” in English and Chinese in white light on the side of the drab gray building. “We’re counting on these people,” the person in Guangzhou told WIRED after viewing photos from New York. The in-person protests may have dried up, but the seeds of a new movement have been planted, he says, and Chinese people have shown that even hamstrung digital tools provide them surprising power.

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According to a new study conducted by Bruce Schatz of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues, passive smartphone monitoring of people’s walking activity can be used to create population-level models of health and mortality risk. The research, which found that smartphone sensors could accurately predict an individual’s 5-year risk of mortality, was recently published in the journal PLOS Digital Health.

Previous research has employed physical fitness tests and self-reported walk speeds to estimate mortality risk for specific individuals. These measures focus on movement quality rather than quantity; for example, assessing an individual’s gait speed has become routine practice in some clinical settings. The rise of passive smartphone activity monitoring makes population-level analysis utilizing similar metrics possible.

Measuring health with a carried smartphone, from the characteristic motion of the human body computed from a phone sensor. Credit: Qian Cheng (CC-BY 4.0)

 

In the new study, researchers studied 100,000 participants in the UK Biobank national cohort who wore activity monitors with motion sensors for 1 week. While the wrist sensor is worn differently than how smartphone sensors are carried, their motion sensors can both be used to extract information on walking intensity from short bursts of walking—a daily living version of a walk test.

The team was able to successfully validate predictive models of mortality risk using only 6 minutes per day of steady walking collected by the sensor, combined with traditional demographic characteristics. Using the passively collected data, researchers were able to calculate the equivalent of gait speed. This value was a predictor of 5-year mortality independent of age and sex with an accuracy of about 70% (pooled C-index 0.72). The predictive models used only walking intensity to simulate smartphone monitors.

“Our results show passive measures with motion sensors can achieve similar accuracy to active measures of gait speed and walk pace,” the authors say. “Our scalable methods offer a feasible pathway towards national screening for health risk.”

Schatz adds, “I have spent a decade using cheap phones for clinical models of health status. These have now been tested on the largest national cohort to predict life expectancy at population scale.”

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The amygdala, a region of the brain, is responsible for strong emotions such as fear. Researchers have recently shown that the amygdala may also be to blame for overeating. Professor Bo Li of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has identified a section of neurons in the amygdala that causes mice to eat fatty or sugary foods even when they are not hungry. Therapeutics targeting these neurons might lead to new obesity treatments with few side effects.

Mice, like the majority of humans, like foods that are high in fat and sugar. Instead of eating these foods to survive, they may do so for enjoyment. They may indulge in these treats for pleasure, rather than for survival. The neurons Li and his colleagues studied trigger this behavior, called hedonic eating.

Li notes: “Even if the animal is supposed to stop eating because they are already full, if those neurons are still active, it can still drive those animals to eat more.”

When the neurons Li studied were inactivated, it protected mice against long-term weight gain. The left image shows lipid droplets (red) in the liver of a mouse that had those neurons turned off. In contrast, the right image shows many more lipid droplets in mice that did not have the neurons turned off. Credit: Bo Li Lab/CSHL/2022

 

According to Li, almost no one succeeds in long-term weight management while treating obesity. Metabolic processes in the body often undo any progress made. Therapeutics may improve the chances of successful treatment, yet many drugs have undesirable side effects.

“The medications currently available to aid weight management can cause significant side effects. So, a more targeted approach is needed,” Li says. “Identifying the brain circuitry that controls eating is important for developing better treatment options for people who struggle to control their weight.”

When the team switched off the specific neurons, mice weren’t drawn to the fatty, sugary foods that had tempted them before. “They just happily ate and stayed healthy,” Li says. “They not only stopped gaining weight but also seemed to be much healthier overall.” Switching these neurons off reduced overeating and protected against obesity. It also boosted the animals’ physical activity, leading to weight loss and better metabolic health.

Li and his team are exploring ways to manipulate the neurons that trigger hedonic eating. The next step, he says, is to map out how these neurons respond to different types of food and see what makes them so sensitive. He hopes this collaboration will lead to new strategies for effective anti-obesity therapeutics.

For this study, Li and CSHL Associate Professor Stephen Shea combined their neuroscience expertise with CSHL Professor Tobias Janowitz’s expertise in metabolism and endocrinology. They also collaborated with CSHL Assistant Professor Semir Beyaz, an expert in gut and nutrition research. It’s part of an ongoing, multidisciplinary initiative at CSHL to research the connections between the brain and the body.

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New research conducted by Dr. Geva Shenkman Lachberg and colleagues investigates the determinants of parents’ desire for more children, as well as whether heterosexual parents want more children than same-sex parents. The study also looked at if there are any differences in the desire for additional children between lesbian mothers and homosexual fathers. Dr. Shenkman Lachberg and his colleagues polled 72 lesbian mothers through donor insemination (36 couples), 78 homosexual dads through surrogacy (39 couples), and 72 heterosexual parents (36 couples) on their desire to parent more children and their preferred number of children.

Dr. Geva Shenkman Lachberg. Credit: Adi Cohen Tzedek

 

According to the findings, there are no differences between the groups in terms of either their desire for additional children or their desired family size. The study’s findings also identified the factors that lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual couples consider when deciding whether to have additional children. The current study is the first of its type to look at how lesbians, gays, and heterosexuals who are already parents vary in their desire for more children.

Israel has one of the highest fertility rates in the Western world, with an average family size of 3.1 children, compared to 1.5 in most European nations. Israel is also regarded as a powerhouse in the field of in vitro fertilization (IVF), with the greatest number of fertility clinics in proportion to its population. In a family-centered culture that encourages high birth rates, the question arises: What factors contribute to the desire to have more children? And what is the ideal number of children in a family?

The main research hypothesis was that, as was the case in previous surveys of lesbians, gays, and heterosexuals without children, lesbians and gays would report a lesser desire to be parents of more children compared to heterosexuals, as well as a smaller ideal family size. This is in light of an awareness of the difficulties involved in LGBT parenting. Previous studies have also shown that heterosexuals without children report a greater desire to be parents than childless lesbians and gays.

The findings of the present study demonstrate that, contrary to the researchers’ hypothesis, there is no difference between same-sex parents and heterosexual parents when it comes to their desire for more children, nor do they differ in their ideal number of children in the family (in the three types of families surveyed, the ideal number was around three children, similar to the national average). The researchers also showed that, regardless of the parents’ sexual orientation, a greater desire for more children was significantly correlated with the parents’ younger age, a low level of affinity to religion, a lower attribution of responsibility to children for misbehavior, and a low discrepancy between their actual and ideal number of children.

The explanation offered by the researchers for this lack of differences is that in Israel, which promotes childbirth and family, lesbians and gays who became parents “broke the glass ceiling” with regard to family. After becoming parents, the societal pressure to have more children appears to be the same, regardless of sexual orientation.

Dr. Geva Shenkman Lachberg, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University: “In recent years, more and more lesbians and gays are becoming parents. In Israel, it has been suggested that parenting in general (regardless of sexual orientation) is the ‘entry ticket to the social consensus.’ However, until now, no study has been conducted comparing lesbian or gay parents with heterosexual parents in terms of their desire for more children or their ideal number of children, as we did here.”

An interesting point that arose from the study is that a low affinity to religion was associated with a greater desire for more children. Previous studies have shown the opposite, that a strong attachment to religion is related to a desire for more children.

The researchers explain this by saying that most of the previous studies that have found a connection between religiosity and the desire to have more children were conducted among heterosexuals and that when it comes to a sample that includes lesbians and gays, it seems that religion, which often does not support their lifestyle, may actually conflict with LGBT identity or LGBT families. Correspondingly, a lower level of importance attributed to religion was associated with a greater desire for more children.

Studies in Israel and around the world have been conducted comparing lesbians, gays, and heterosexuals without children regarding their desire to become parents in the future. These studies have shown quite consistently that lesbians and gays report a desire to parent, though at a lower level than heterosexuals.

The main explanations offered for this were that same-sex parents are aware of the high economic and legal costs associated with fertility treatments, surrogacy, and adoption, are concerned about social stigma regarding their parenthood, and assess their chances of success in becoming parents to be lower in comparison with heterosexuals. Another common explanation is that heterosexuals are under stronger social pressure to be parents than lesbians and gays.

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• Tech layoffs spiked above 50,000 in November, according to the website Layoffs.fyi, as more big companies emphasized the need to slash costs.

• The surge in job cuts has left many visa holders scrambling to find work in order to stay in the U.S.

• Tech companies rely on temporary work visas to hire thousands of foreign nationals each year for specialized roles in areas like engineering, computing and biotechnology.

After years of seemingly boundless expansion, the U.S. tech industry has hit a wall. Companies are in cash preservation mode, leading to thousands of job cuts a month and a surge of layoffs in November.

While the sudden loss of a paycheck can be devastating for anyone, especially during the holiday season, the recent wave of reductions is having an outsized impact on skilled workers who are living in the U.S. on temporary visas and are at risk of being sent home if they can’t secure a new job in short order.

Tech companies are among the employers with the most approvals for H-1B visas, which are granted to people in specialty occupations that often require a college degree and extra training. Silicon Valley has for years leaned on temporary visas issued by the government to employ thousands of foreign workers in technical fields such as engineering, biotech and computer science. That’s a big reason tech companies have been outspoken in their defense of immigrants’ rights.

Workers on temporary visas often have 60 to 90 days to find a new gig so they can avoid being deported.

“It’s this amazing talent pool that the U.S. is fortunate to attract, and they’re always living on the edge,” said Sophie Alcorn, an immigration lawyer based in Mountain View, California, who specializes in securing visas for tech workers. “Many of them up are up against this 60-day grace period deadline. They have a chance to find a new job to sponsor them, and if they can’t do that, they have to leave the U.S. So it’s a stressful time for everybody.”

The already grim situation worsened in November, when Meta, Amazon, Twitter, Lyft, Salesforce, HP and DoorDash announced significant cuts to their workforces. More than 50,000 tech workers were let go from their jobs in November, according to data collected by the website Layoffs.fyi.

Amazon gave staffers who were laid off 60 days to search for a new role inside the company, after which they’d be offered severance, according to a former Amazon Web Services employee who lost his job. The person spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity.

In fiscal 2021, Amazon had the most approved petitions for H-1B visas, with 6,182, according to a National Foundation for American Policy review of U.S. immigration data. Google, IBM and Microsoft also ranked near the top of the list.

The former AWS employee has been in the country for two years on student and employment visas. He said he was unexpectedly laid off at the beginning of November, just months after joining the company as an engineer. Despite Amazon informing him that he had 60 days to find another position internally, the person said his manager advised him to apply for jobs elsewhere due the company’s pullback in hiring. Amazon said in November it’s pausing hiring for its corporate workforce.

An Amazon spokesperson didn’t provide a comment beyond what CEO Andy Jassy said last month, when he told those affected by the layoffs that the company would help them find new roles.

Companies generally aren’t specifying what percentage of the people being laid off are on visas. A search for “layoffs H1B” on LinkedIn surfaces a stream of posts from workers who recently lost their jobs and are expressing concern about the 60-day unemployment window. Visa holders have been sharing resources on Discord servers, the anonymous professional network Blind and in WhatsApp groups, the former AWS employee said.

It had already been a frenetic few years for foreign workers in the U.S. well before surging inflation and concerns of a recession sparked the latest round of job cuts.

The Trump administration’s hostile posture toward immigration put the H-1B program at risk. As president in 2020, Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending work visas, including those with H-1B status, claiming they hurt employment prospects for Americans. The move drew a strong rebuke from tech executives, who said the program serves as a pipeline for talented individuals and strengthens American companies. President Joe Biden allowed the Trump-era ban to expire last year.

Whatever relief the Biden presidency provided is of limited value to those who are now jobless. An engineer who was recently laid off by gene-sequencing technology company Illumina said he hoped his employer would sponsor his transfer to an H-1B visa. He’s here on a different visa, known as Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to work in the U.S. for up to three years after graduation.

The former Illumina employee, who spoke on condition that he not be named, not only has to find a new job within 90 days from the layoff date, but his OPT visa expires in August. Any company that hires him must be willing to sponsor his visa transfer and pay the related fees. He’s considering going back to school in order to extend his stay in the U.S., but he’s anxious about taking on student loans.

Illumina said in November it was cutting about 5% of its global workforce. A company spokesperson told CNBC that less than 10% of impacted employees were here on H-1B or related visas.

“We are engaging with each employee individually so that they understand the impact to their employment eligibility and options to remain in the U.S.,” the spokesperson said by email. “We are working to review each and every situation to ensure great care for those impacted, and to ensure compliance with immigration law.”

The ex-employee said he had dreams of working for Illumina, planting roots in the U.S. and buying a house. Now, he said, he’s just trying to find a way to stay in the country without going deep into debt. In just a matter of months, it’s “like a night and day difference,” he said.

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Money was tight, said mother-of-three Krista Butts, now a middle school academic interventionist who was then out of work.

“We were depending on our church for help with Christmas presents, and we got food baskets from them,” Butts told USA TODAY.

Her husband of 25 years, University of New Hampshire Sgt. Jeff Butts, logged around 80 hours a week with the Exeter Police Department to provide for their young sons – Ryan, now 13; Kyle, 17; and Tyler, 19.

Krista Butts said she had saved enough money to freshen up her children’s looks, and was overcome with emotion after learning her boys’ Great Clips haircuts were prepaid in full.

“I could have kept the money, and I should have probably kept the money,” Butts said. But she didn’t.

That December, the unknown man’s acts inspired the mom and her sons to perform their own kind acts that day and every holiday season moving forward.

Story Credit: usatoday.com

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Brenda Gomez Hernandez, 28, of Concord, told North Carolina Education Officials she bought a Powerball ticket from the QuikTrip store on Warren C Coleman Boulevard in Concord, and she ended up going into labor on Nov. 9, the day of the drawing.

Hernandez delivered a healthy baby girl and just hours later discovered she had won a $100,000 prize in the drawing.

"I feel like she brought me my luck," Hernandez said. "I'm so thankful."

Hernandez said her other two children are also partially responsible for the win.

"I have two sons and I used their birthdays to pick my numbers," Hernandez said.

She said it was a lot of luck for a single day.

"When I found out I cried," she said. "I'm just so excited and happy."

Hernandez said her winnings will allow her to pay off her home.

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Adam Adkisson, who works at the Bellevue store, said he spotted the envelope on the ground in aisle 22.

"I didn't think anything of it at first. I thought it was empty, but I thought I'd go back to make sure and when I picked it up, I could feel that It had stuff in it. It had money," Adkisson told WSMV-TV.

He handed the envelope over to manager Alissa Rocchi, who waited to see if anyone came in looking for it.

"I was the closing manager that night and I noticed it was still here. I thought to myself, oh, my goodness, he or she didn't know they even lost it here. It was just sad at that point," Rocchi said.

Rocchi posted about the envelope on Facebook, omitting certain details so the owner could describe it.

Rocchi said she soon received a message from a man named Mark who said the envelope belonged to his business partner. He was able to accurately describe the envelope so it could be returned to its owner, Johnathon Clayton.

"I was stressing over it pretty bad. So, I am glad that he is a social media guy and was able to see that because I would have never seen it," Clayton said.

Clayton visited the store to personally thank Adkisson for turning the envelope in.

Rocchi praised Adkisson on Facebook.

"Adam did the right thing and I am proud of him," she said.

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Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.

The shift in speech is just the tip of a set of changes on the service under Mr. Musk. Accounts that Twitter used to regularly remove — such as those that identify as part of the Islamic State, which were banned after the U.S. government classified ISIS as a terror group — have come roaring back. Accounts associated with QAnon, a vast far-right conspiracy theory, have paid for and received verified status on Twitter, giving them a sheen of legitimacy.

These changes are alarming, researchers said, adding that they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.

“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.”

Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been vocal about being a “free speech absolutist” who believes in unfettered discussions online. He has moved swiftly to overhaul Twitter’s practices, allowing former President Donald J. Trump — who was barred for tweets that could incite violence — to return. Last week, Mr. Musk proposed a widespread amnesty for accounts that Twitter’s previous leadership had suspended. And on Tuesday, he ended enforcement of a policy against Covid misinformation.

But Mr. Musk has denied claims that hate speech has increased on Twitter under his watch. Last month, he tweeted a downward-trending graph that he said showed that “hate speech impressions” had dropped by a third since he took over. He did not provide underlying numbers or details of how he was measuring hate speech.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk said that the account of rapper and fashion designer Kanye West, which was restricted for a spell in October because of an antisemitic tweet, would be suspended indefinitely after Mr. West tweeted an image of a swastika inside the Star of David.

Changes in Twitter’s content not only have societal implications but also affect the company’s bottom line. Advertisers, which provide about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, have reduced their spending on the platform as they wait to see how it will fare under Mr. Musk. Some have said they are concerned that the quality of discussions on the platform will suffer.

On Wednesday, Twitter sought to reassure advertisers about its commitment to online safety. “Brand safety is only possible when human safety is the top priority,” the company wrote in a blog post. “All of this remains true today.”

The appeal to advertisers coincided with a meeting between Mr. Musk and Thierry Breton, the digital chief of the European Union, in which they discussed content moderation and regulation, according to an E.U. spokesman. Mr. Breton has pressed Mr. Musk to comply with the Digital Services Act, a European law that requires social platforms to reduce online harm or face fines and other penalties.

Mr. Breton plans to visit Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters early next year to perform a “stress test” of its ability to moderate content and combat disinformation, the spokesman said.

On Twitter itself, researchers said the increase in hate speech, antisemitic posts and other troubling content had begun before Mr. Musk loosened the service’s content rules. That suggested that a further surge could be coming, they said.

If that happens, it’s unclear whether Mr. Musk will have policies in place to deal with problematic speech or, even if he does, whether Twitter has the employees to keep up with moderation. Mr. Musk laid off, fired or accepted the resignations of more than half the company’s staff last month, including those who worked to remove harassment, foreign interference and disinformation from the service. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust of safety, was among those who quit.

The Anti-Defamation League, which files regular reports of antisemitic tweets to Twitter and keeps track of which posts are removed, said the company had gone from taking action on 60 percent of the tweets it reported to only 30 percent.

“We have advised Musk that Twitter should not just keep the policies it has had in place for years, it should dedicate resources to those policies,” said Yael Eisenstat, a vice president at the Anti-Defamation League, who met with Mr. Musk last month. She said he did not appear interested in taking the advice of civil rights groups and other organizations.

“His actions to date show that he is not committed to a transparent process where he incorporates the best practices we have learned from civil society groups,” Ms. Eisenstat said. “Instead he has emboldened racists, homophobes and antisemites.”

The lack of action extends to new accounts affiliated with terror groups and others that Twitter previously banned. In the first 12 days after Mr. Musk assumed control, 450 accounts associated with ISIS were created, up 69 percent from the previous 12 days, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

Other social media companies are also increasingly concerned about how content is being moderated on Twitter.

When Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, found accounts associated with Russian and Chinese state-backed influence campaigns on its platforms last month, it tried to alert Twitter, said two members of Meta’s security team, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The two companies often communicated on these issues, since foreign influence campaigns typically linked fake accounts on Facebook to Twitter.

But this time was different. The emails to their counterparts at Twitter bounced or went unanswered, the Meta employees said, in a sign that those workers may have been fired.

The post Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find appeared first on New York Times.

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