The Reason Review — July 2017
While many of the most prominent headlines this month deal with subjects that have become regulars in our periodical overview of news — a new instalment in the Trump saga, fresh menace from North Korea, China continuing its disregard for basic human rights — there’s also a handful of stories that have come straight out of left field.
July has seen London beset by acid attacks, we could be staring down the barrel of a vicious gonorrhoea epidemic, and a single piece of gloomy environmental writing has had the global scientific community up in arms about how we talk about and deal with the crises facing our climate… again. So dive in — the water’s only getting warmer!
Acid Attacks
The rise in acid attacks in the UK has been a worrying trend dominating headlines this past month. East London in particular has seen a sharp spike in incidences that have left victims with life-changing injuries.
Incidents began to escalate on the evening of July 12, when a series of five attacks took place within an hour in the London borough of Hackney. Two young males approached a moped rider and doused him with acid, stole his vehicle and rode away before carrying out another four attacks. The suspects have since been arrested and charged, but for legal reasons — both are minors — have not been named.
One of their victims, delivery driver Jabed Hussain, organised a protest the following week outside the houses of parliament in which hundreds of moped and scooter riders called on the government to do more to protect them. Delivery drivers in particular were said to be too scared to work after dark.
“We are scared,” said Hussain in an interview with The Guardian. “[The] government’s not taking enough action, [the] government’s not providing enough police. I am a victim of an acid attack, I don’t want anyone else to experience the feeling of it. I felt fire on my face … Who is going to give us our dignity? I want to ask the prime minister, who is sleeping [on the job] right now.”
In separate incidents later in the month a paramedic was hailed by three men and attacked with a corrosive liquid on her way to respond to a call in Tottenham, and two men were doused with acid while they sat in their car on Bethnal Green.
Although July has seen a particularly worrying increase in acid attacks, statistics show that cases of attacks with corrosive substances have almost doubled between 2015 and 2016, to more than one incident per day.
There is also evidence linking the recent spate of attacks to gang violence, with named suspects in attacks frequently occurring on the Met Police’s gang matrix. The Met has suggested the rise may be due to tougher sentencing on knife and gun violence and a clamping down on access to these dangerous weapons. Acid on the other hand, remains an easy substance to get hold of, and it is legal to carry corrosive substances in public. The ease with which it can be purchased has been criticised by campaigners who note that the government’s Deregulation Act 2015, made it significantly simpler to acquire corrosives and other such dangerous substances.
I Did Not Have Inappropriate Relations With that Country
Next to the healthcare debates, a prolific, unrivalled use of Twitter, and what some commentators are referring to as a “war on the media”, the ongoing Russia investigation is proving to be one of the defining stories of the Trump presidency thus far.
We’ve covered Comey’s firing and Jeff Sessions’ testimony on the hill — both of which pertain to the ongoing Trump-Russia imbroglio — in previous Reason Reviews; but this month, new information surfaced that has dragged the POTUS’ son, Donald Jr., into the mix, as well as Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner.
The New York Times reported that Donald Jr. met with Russian Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June of last year, just two weeks after his father had officially secured the Republican nomination. Veselnitskaya — who has been characterised by some as a “trusted Moscow insider” and by others as a “low-level lawyer” — supposedly represented access to “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton]” and which would come from the “Russian Crown Prosecutor” as a sign of “Russia and it’s government’s support for Mr.Trump”. The meeting was brokered by Rob Goldstone, a former journalist and music publicist for Emin Agalarov — son of Russian real estate developer Aras Algalarov, who previously worked with Trump at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.
In true Trump spirit, Junior released the full email chain, as well as his own statement, on his Twitter account.
If you’re slightly confused, we don’t blame you; this is a story that evolves hour-by-hour. Recent developments have shown that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior White House advisor, as well as then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, were also at the June 9th meeting.
Kushner in particular is of great interest to Robert Mueller — the special counsel who’s running the Trump-Russia investigation. Mueller is probing into Kushner’s finances and is also investigating the four meetings he held with Russian officials last spring.
After a closed-door meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee on the 24th of July, Kushner made a statement to the press which included the following excerpt: “Let me be very clear: I did not collude with Russia, nor do I know of anyone else in the campaign who did so.” Interestingly, many news outlets have picked up on the fact that the rest of his statement, rather than contesting the subject of the Veselnitskaya meeting — which has shifted several times — simply sought to distance himself from the quandry as much as possible.
But what’s the key takeaway from all of this? Essentially, the Trump Jr. meeting and the revelations that have followed are the biggest indicator yet that, despite Kushner’s words, there may have been some sort of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And though this is not likely to directly lead to calls for impeachment, Professor Allan Litchman — dubbed the “prediction professor” — lists this scandal, as well as multiple other transgressions, as key touchpoints in what he predicts will likely be the president’s demise.
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Launch
Kim Jong-un’s nuclear ambitions took a significant step forward at the start of the month, with the apparent testing of North Korea’s first long-range ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile].
The reclusive country’s latest launch was carefully timed to coincide with US celebrations of Independence Day on July 4. While President Trump took to his favourite social media haunt to mock Kim, questioning whether Dear Leader “has anything better to do with his life”, other authorities were more frivolous in their response. Of particular note, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, warned that the test was a “clear and sharp military escalation”, adding that diplomatic solutions to North Korea’s armament were swiftly running out.
“The United States is prepared to use the full range of our capabilities to defend ourselves and our allies,” said Haley. “One of our capabilities lies with our considerable military forces. We will use them, if we must, but we prefer not to have to go in that direction.”
Meanwhile, North Korea’s state-run news agency delivered a taunting message to its international rivals. “American bastards [will] be not very happy with this gift sent on the July 4 anniversary,” declared North Korean news media, apparently quoting Kim.
“We should send them gifts once in a while to help break their boredom.”
In the weeks that followed, the South Korean government took the rare step of proposing peace talks with its communist neighbour, an offer that ultimately received no reply from Pyongyang. Instead, a second launch followed at the end of the month — one that seemed to show that North Korea is now capable of hitting mainland US cities.
In the wake of this latest test, US fighter jets deployed over South Korea in a clear show of force. On the (nominally) diplomatic front US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Russia and China of being “the primary economic enablers” of North Korea’s missile program, a move that seems unlikely to win much support from Washington’s traditional rivals — although Trump does appear to have secured an ally in Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan.
Following a 50-minute call between the two leaders, Abe told reporters that Trump would take “all necessary measures” to protect the US and its allies.
You’re Not Gonorr Like This
Untreatable strains of gonorrhoea are on the rise in 50 countries around the globe, according to a report published by the World Health Organisation in July.
Research by the WHO examined data from 77 countries. Of these, almost two thirds revealed cases in which extended-spectrum cephalosporins or ESCs — the only remaining class of antibiotic that can treat the STI — proved to be ineffective.
“Every time you introduce a new type of antibiotic to treat it, this bug develops resistance to it,” said Dr Teodora Wi, medical officer, human reproduction, at the WHO.
In three countries, in Japan, Spain and France, there have been cases of gonorrhoea that were completely untreatable. But Dr Wi explained that the same strain may have reached other nations.
“These cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhoea is actually more common.”
One piece of good news emerged in the wake of this research: as reported by New Scientist, an outdated vaccine for meningitis B may hold the key to preventing an epidemic. The bacteria that cause meningitis B share 80 to 90% of the same protein sequences as those that cause gonorrhoea, giving them similar vulnerabilities.
Scientists at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio have been studying a meningitis B vaccination conducted in the 1990s using a now-defunct vaccine known as MeNZB. Studies show that the 15,000 patients treated were 31% less likely to contract gonorrhea.
The researchers believe that treating sex workers and other high-risk groups with MeNZB may help to control the spread of gonorrhoea — but these groups are also among the hardest for doctors to reach.
Gonorrhoea now infects an estimated 78 million people every year, according to the WHO.
We Need to Talk About Climate…Again
On July 9th New York Magazine ran an editorial by David Wallace-Wells that read as an extended listicle of the factors which may end humanity as we know it: heat death, the end of food, climate plagues, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, poisoned oceans, and our inability to see any of this coming. It was a pretty bleak read, but managed to capture the imagination of an enormous audience and thrust climate change back into our collective consciousness at a time when it appears to be falling off the political agenda. “Even when we train our eyes on climate change,” wrote Wallace-Wells, “we are unable to comprehend its scope.”
Perhaps more extraordinary than the bleak conclusions drawn by the article was the rate at which both pundits and scientists in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and on Twitter, responded and retaliated to the claims it made. Penn State’s Michael Mann — usually a fierce critic of climate sceptics — took to Facebook to criticise the scientific legitimacy of the piece. “The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century,” he wrote. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”
In some instances, Mann and other members of the scientific community, called Wallace-Wells out for grossly overstating the evidence of various studies he cited. New York Magazine has since published a fully annotated and cited version of the piece addressing some of their concerns — and it still seems pretty haunting.
What Wallace-Wells’ piece really brought to light was how difficult humanity finds it to talk directly about climate change. Even among those of us that accept its existence and continued effect on the planet, there are numerous factions still fighting over what the future might hold and how best to deal with it.
Robinson Meyer explores the issue in-depth in an editorial for The Atlantic, Are We as Doomed as That New York Magazine Article Says? “No one knows how to talk about climate change right now,” he begins. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally.”
Death of a Chinese Dissident
Outspoken political dissident, Nobel laureate, literary critic, poet, writer, and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo succumbed to terminal liver cancer this month, dying in a Shenyang hospital under police guard.
No stranger to internment during his career of defiance, most recently Xiaobo was imprisoned on Christmas Day, 2009 for attempting to “subvert” China’s one-party state. Subversion, some commentators argue, is a loosely-defined charge which allows China’s communist party to imprison its political opponents at will.
In late June Xiaobo was granted medical parole and released from jail as his condition had deteriorated significantly. Though the State faced pressure from the international community to allow him to travel abroad for treatment, Chinese medical experts insisted he was “too ill” to do so.
The prisoner of conscience had long been an erudite critic of, and on-the-ground activist against a repressive Chinese state. After receiving his PHD in 1988, Xiaobo became involved in the pro-democracy movement which was gaining momentum in Beijing. This movement culminated in the Tiananmen Square protests, commonly known in China as the June Fourth Incident.
Xiaobo joined the legions of students, intellectuals and activists in the square, embarking on a three-day hunger strike which challenged a government that had implemented martial law, and was gearing up to use force to break up the protests.
In absentia, Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights”. In his acceptance speech, Xiaobo cited June Fourth as a turning point in his life; the moment at which he was compelled to step away from his academic platform and pursue, inexorably, the difficult path of a political dissident.
Though Xiaobo’s path came to an end on the July 13, his legacy lives on; Hu Ping, a long-time friend of Xiaobo, remarked: ““Liu Xiaobo is immortal, no matter whether he is alive or dead. Liu Xiaobo is a man of greatness, a saint.”
Xiaobo is survived by his wife Liu Xia, though ever since the Nobel Peace Prize commendation in 2010 she has been under strict house arrest. Amnesty International’s campaign demanding her release has received increased attention since her husband’s death, but as of now the artist, poet, and activist remains under the watchful eye of the government.
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