Turkey wildfires: Despair and questions as forests burn
Devastating wildfires have tore through forests and villages, killing at least eight people and burned through huge tracts of land.
Al Jazeera – Turkey’s southern coastline is burning. On the wooded hills of Antalya’s Manavgat district, plumes of thick smoke appear in the sky one after another as each time a forest fire is brought under control, another seems to ignite.
A blood-red sun shines through the sallow haze and as visibility clears, the charred, skeletal remains of what were forests and villages are revealed. This, many believe, is just the latest sign the world is entering an era of climate crisis, and Turkey is not prepared for it.
Over the past six days, 132 destructive blazes have raged through southern and other parts of Turkey, killing eight people and burning at least 118,789 hectares of land, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.
While controversy is rife, with many in Turkey believing the fires are the result of “sabotage” – a theory encouraged by many politicians – they coincide both with months of severe drought and extreme temperatures.
Wuhan: Chinese city to test entire population after virus resurfaces
BBC – Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan will begin testing its entire population, after a handful of positive coronavirus cases were detected there.
Wuhan has recorded seven locally transmitted cases – the first local infections in more than a year.
The city of 11 million people shot into the spotlight after the coronavirus was first detected there in 2019.
China is currently seeing one of its biggest outbreaks in months, with 300 cases detected in 10 days.
Some 15 provinces across the country have been affected, which has led to the government rolling out mass testing measures and lockdown restrictions.
Authorities have attributed the spread of the virus to the highly contagious Delta variant and the domestic tourism season.
The announcement in Wuhan came as China reported 90 new virus cases on Tuesday.
The National Health Commission said 61 of these were locally transmitted – compared with 55 local cases a day earlier.
RT – New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced an aggressive new strategy to get people vaccinated against Covid-19, confirming that activities like indoor dining and attending gyms will soon be exclusively for the inoculated.
“The only way to patronize these establishments indoors will be if you’re vaccinated,” the mayor announced on Tuesday, citing concerns over the fast-spreading Delta variant.
American Medical Association urges shocking change to birth certificates
WND – The transgender campaign to legitimize life under gender dysphoria and normalize the strategic mutilation of body parts argues that sex is not male or female, but how a person feels.
Now the American Medical Association has launched a surprising advocacy that aligns: a move to eradicate the male or female designations on birth certificates.
“Assigning sex using binary variables in the public portion of the birth certificate fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity,” claimed Willie Underwood II, who wrote Board Report 15 for the AMA.
The report startingly claims “there is no clear standard for defining sex designation” on those legal documents.
Further the AMA charges that “a person’s gender identity … may not always correspond with their sex assigned at birth,” and in most states those who choose a transgender lifestyle already can have their designations changed.
But that isn’t enough, the report said.
“Race” has been dropped because of the potential for discrimination, but “sex” still is included … “despite the potential for discrimination.”
“Designating sex on birth certificates as male or female suggests that sex is simple and binary,” the report said. But there are individuals with “intersex variations,” and others who “identify as transgender.”
“For these individuals, having a gender identity that does not match the sex designation on their birth certificate can result in confusion, possible discrimination, harassment and violence whenever their birth certificate is requested,” the report says.
Therefore, “it is the recommendation of the AMA’s LGTBQ Advisory Committee that our AMA should advocate for removal of sex as a legal designation on the public portion of birth certificates. Assigning sex using a binary variable and placing it on the public portion of the birth certificate perpetuates a view that it is immutable and fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.”
WebMD earlier report that pesky “male” or “female” designators on a birth certificate “can lead to discrimination and unnecessary burden on individuals whose current gender identity does not align with their designation at birth, namely when they register for school or sports, adopt, get married, or request personal records.”
Jeremy Toler, MD, a delegate from GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality, warned the world still is a place “where it is unsafe in many cases for one’s gender to vary from the sex assigned at birth.”
But, the report said, Robert Jackson, an alternate delegate from the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, opposed the campaign.
“We as physicians need to report things accurately,” Jackson said. “All through medical school, residency, and specialty training we were supposed to delegate all of the physical findings of the patient we’re taking care of. I think when the child is born, they do have physical characteristics either male or female and I think that probably should be on the public record.”
National Review commented, “It is astonishing how the transgender moral panic has swept actual science aside. … The AMA wants biological sex recorded for the former as a private matter of record-keeping. But it will now urge that birth-certificate forms carry no designation of sex to prevent future discrimination based on identity and to allow the person to decide later what sex they really are.”
The commentary said, “So, the AMA has gone full bore and irrationally woke, participating in the herd stampede that is the transgender moral panic.”
IMF Creates Record $650 Billion Slush Fund For Pandemic Relief
ZeroHedge – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved a record $650 billion in special drawing rights (SDRs) to ‘help nations dealing with mounting debt and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic,’ according to Bloomberg, which notes that it’s the largest resource injection in the organization’s history.
The creation of the reserve assets — known as special drawing rights — is the first since the $250 billion issued just after global financial crisis in 2009, with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva billing it as “a shot in the arm for the world” that will help boost global economic stability. –Bloomberg
“The SDR allocation will benefit all members, address the long-term global need for reserves, build confidence, and foster the resilience and stability of the global economy,” said Georgieva, framing it as a “shot in the arm for the world” which will contribute towards global economic stability.
“It will particularly help our most vulnerable countries struggling to cope with the impact of the covid-19 crisis,” she added.
According to the report, the plan has been in the works for more than a year – as early progress was beset with delays after the Trump administration (the IMF’s largest shareholder) blocked it early last year after then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin insisted that the funds wouldn’t actually end up with the nations that need it most.
This, of course, radically changed under Mnuchin’s successor, Janet Yellen – as the fund revisited options for rich nations to redistribute wealth to ‘vulnerable and low-income countries.’ At present, reserves are allocated to all 190 members of the IMF in proportion to their quota, while around 70% will go to the G20 largest economies. Just 3% will go to low-income nations.
As Bloomberg explains, that’s about to change.
Overall, 58% of the new SDRs go to advanced economies, with 42% for emerging and developing economies. So of the $650 billion, about $21 billion go to low-income countries and $212 billion to other emerging market and developing countries, without counting China, according to U.S. Treasury Department calculations.
The Group of Seven advanced economies in June endorsed a plan to reallocate $100 billion of new SDRs to poorer countries, but the G-20 in July only specified support for a general allocation of $650 billion in SDRs, without detailing how much would re-lent. –Bloomberg
The reallocation will help impoverished countries in Africa, which will receive roughly $33 billion of the new SDRs – made possible by a commitment from France to reallocate their SDRs. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has insisted in the past that a full quarter, around $162 billion, should be allocated to African nations – and called on rich countries to donate, not lend, their SDR allotments.
Twitter Partners with Big Media to Combat ‘Misinformation’
Breitbart – Twitter is partnering with Reuters and the Associated Press in a new scheme to combat alleged “misinformation,” following in Facebook’s footsteps by outsourcing part of the company’s “fact-checking” to corporate media organizations.
The goal, according to Twitter, is to help the company feed “reliable content” to its users, although the news organizations will not be involved in removing alleged “misinformation” from the platform, a role that remains the purview of Twitter’s powerful Trust & Safety team.
According to Twitter, the partnership with AP and Reuters is aimed at “ensuring that credible information is available in real time around key conversations as they emerge on Twitter, especially where facts are in dispute or when Twitter’s Curation team doesn’t have the specific expertise or access to a high enough volume of reputable reporting on Twitter.”
Twitter also says it wants to “contextualize” emerging conversations, and anticipate the conversations before they start.
Twitter says one of its goals is “proactively providing context on topics garnering widespread interest including those that could potentially generate misleading information. Rather than waiting until something goes viral, Twitter will contextualize developing discourse at pace with or in anticipation of the public conversation.”
Tom Januszewski, VP of global business development at the AP, said: “We are particularly excited about leveraging AP’s scale and speed to add context to online conversations, which can benefit from easy access to the facts.”
Unlike Facebook, Twitter has maintained its own fact-checking regime instead of outsourcing the task (and responsibility for the results) to third parties. During the 2020 election, President Trump was repeatedly fact-checked by the platform, while misinformation from the left, as well as Chinese propagandists, often got a pass.
Electronic Frontier Foundation – The forthcoming Senate draft of Biden’s infrastructure bill—a 2,000+ page bill designed to update the United States’ roads, highways, and digital infrastructure—contains a poorly crafted provision that could create new surveillance requirements for many within the blockchain ecosystem. This could include developers and others who do not control digital assets on behalf of users.
While the language is still evolving, the proposal would seek to expand the definition of “broker” under section 6045(c)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to include anyone who is “responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets” on behalf of another person. These newly defined brokers would be required to comply with IRS reporting requirements for brokers, including filing form 1099s with the IRS. That means they would have to collect user data, including users’ names and addresses.
The broad, confusing language leaves open a door for almost any entity within the cryptocurrency ecosystem to be considered a “broker”—including software developers and cryptocurrency startups that aren’t custodying or controlling assets on behalf of their users. It could even potentially implicate miners, those who confirm and verify blockchain transactions. The mandate to collect names, addresses, and transactions of customers means almost every company even tangentially related to cryptocurrency may suddenly be forced to surveil their users.
How this would work in practice is still very much an open question. Indeed, perhaps this extremely broad interpretation was not even the intent of the drafters of this language. But given the rapid timeline for the bill’s likely passage, those answers may not be resolved before it hits the Senate floor for a vote.
Some may wonder why an infrastructure bill primarily focused on topics like highways is even attempting to address as complex and evolving a topic as digital privacy and cryptocurrency. This provision is actually buried in the section of the bill relevant to covering the costs of the other proposals. In general, bills that seek to offer new government services must explain how the government will pay for those services. This can be done through increasing taxes or by somehow improving tax compliance. The cryptocurrency provision in this bill is attempting to do the latter. The argument is that by engaging in more rigorous surveillance of the cryptocurrency community, the Biden administration will see more tax revenue flow in from this community without actually increasing taxes, and thus be able to cover $28 billion of its $2 trillion infrastructure plan. Basically, it’s presuming that huge swaths of cryptocurrency users are engaged in mass tax avoidance, without providing any evidence of that.
Make no mistake: there is a clear and substantial harm in ratcheting up financial surveillance and forcing more actors within the blockchain ecosystem to gather data on users. Including this provision in the infrastructure bill will:
- Require new surveillance of everyday users of cryptocurrency;
- Force software creators and others who do not custody cryptocurrency for their users to implement cumbersome surveillance systems or stop offering services in the United States;
- Create more honeypots of private information about cryptocurrency users that could attract malicious actors; and
- Create more legal complexity to developing blockchain projects or verifying transactions in the United States—likely leading to more innovation moving overseas.
Furthermore, it is impossible for miners and developers to comply with these reporting requirements; these parties have no way to gather that type of information.
The bill could also create uncertainty about the ability to conduct cryptocurrency transactions directly with others, via open source code (e.g. smart contracts and decentralized exchanges), while remaining anonymous. The ability to transact directly with others anonymously is fundamental to civil liberties, as financial records provide an intimate window into a person’s life.
This poor drafting appears to be yet another example of lawmakers failing to understand the underlying technology used by cryptocurrencies. EFF has long advocated for Congress to protect consumers by focusing on malicious actors engaged in fraudulent practices within the cryptocurrency space. However, overbroad and technologically disconnected cryptocurrency regulation could do more harm than good. Blockchain projects should serve the interests and needs of users, and we hope to see a diverse and competitive ecosystem where values such as individual privacy, censorship-resistance, and interoperability are designed into blockchain projects from the ground up. Smart cryptocurrency regulation will foster this innovation and uphold consumer privacy, not surveil users while failing to do anything meaningful to combat fraud.
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