Day: June 6, 2021

The U.S. and the European Union voiced concern over Nigeria's decision to indefinitely ban Twitter after the U.S. social media giant deleted a tweet from the president's account for violating its rules.

International human rights groups have also condemned the move, which followed previous attempts by the government of Africa's most populous country to regulate social media.

Nigerian telecoms operators complied with a government directive Friday to suspend access to Twitter indefinitely.

The diplomatic missions of the EU, U.S., Britain, Canada and Ireland issued a joint statement late Saturday condemning the ban.

"Banning systems of expression is not the answer," it said.

"Precisely the moment when Nigeria needs to foster inclusive dialogue and expression of opinions, as well as share vital information in this time of the Covid-19 pandemic." 

"The path to a more secure Nigeria lies in more, not less, communication," it added.

More than 39 million Nigerians have a Twitter account, according to NOI polls, a public opinion and research organization based in Nigeria.

The platform has played an important role in public discourse in the country, with hashtags #BringBackOurGirls after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in 2014, and #EndSARS during anti-police brutality protests last year.

The government's suspension came after Twitter on Wednesday deleted a remark on President Muhammadu Buhari's account in which he referred to the country's civil war four decades ago in a warning about recent unrest.

The 78-year-old president, a former general, referred to "those misbehaving" in recent violence in the southeast, where officials blame a proscribed separatist group IPOB for attacks on police and election offices.

'Misinformation'

"Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand," the president had posted on Twitter.

The presidency denied late on Saturday that the Twitter suspension was a response to the removal of that post.  

"There has been a litany of problems with the social media platform in Nigeria, where misinformation and fake news spread through it have had real world violent consequences," a presidency spokesman Garba Shehu said in a statement.  

Shehu said the removal of Buhari's tweet was "disappointing" and said "major tech companies must be alive to their responsibilities."

Twitter said it was "deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria."

"Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society.

We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. #KeepitOn," the company said in a statement.

"VPN app" was the second most searched trend Saturday on Google in Nigeria, as virtual private networks can enable Twitter users to bypass the ban.

Nigeria warned however that it would prosecute violators.

"Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has directed for immediate prosecution of offenders of the Federal Government ban on Twitter operations in Nigeria," spokesman Umar Jibrilu Gwandu said.

Amnesty International condemned the ban, calling on Nigeria to "immediately reverse the unlawful suspension."

"This repressive action is a clear attempt to censor dissent & stifle the civic space," Human Rights Watch researcher Anietie Ewang said.

Source: Voice of America

Oxygen levels have dropped in hundreds of lakes in the United States and Europe over the last four decades, a new study found.

And the authors said declining oxygen could lead to increased fish kills, algal blooms and methane emissions.

Researchers examined the temperature and dissolved oxygen — the amount of oxygen in the water — in nearly 400 lakes and found that declines were widespread. Their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found dissolved oxygen fell 5.5 % in surface waters of these lakes and 18.6% in deep waters.

The authors said their findings suggest that warming temperatures and decreased water clarity from human activity are causing the oxygen decline.

"Oxygen is one of the best indicators of ecosystem health, and changes in this study reflect a pronounced human footprint," said co-author Craig E. Williamson, a biology professor at Miami University in Ohio.

That footprint includes warming caused by climate change and decreased water clarity caused in part by runoff from sewage, fertilizer, cars and power plants.

Dissolved oxygen losses in Earth's water systems have been reported before. A 2017 study of oxygen levels in the world's oceans showed a 2% decline since 1960. But less was known about lakes, which lost two to nine times as much oxygen as oceans, the new study's authors said.

Prior to this study, other researchers had reported on oxygen declines in individual lakes over a long period of time. But none have looked at as many lakes around the world, said Samuel B. Fey, a Reed College biology professor who studies lakes and was not involved in this study.

"I think one of the really interesting findings here is that the authors were able to show that there's this pretty pronounced decline in dissolved oxygen concentrations in both the surface and (deep) parts of the lake," Fey said.

The deep water drop in oxygen levels is critical for aquatic organisms that are more sensitive to temperature increases, such as cold water fish. During summer months, they depend on cooler temperatures found deeper in the water, but if deep waters are low on oxygen, these organisms can't survive.

"Those are the conditions that sometimes lead to fish kills in water bodies," said study co-author Kevin C. Rose, a professor of biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "It really means that a lot of habitats for cold water fish could become inhospitable."

Other organisms, Rose said, are more tolerant of warmer temperatures found at the surface level and can get enough oxygen by remaining near the surface, where water meets air.

About a quarter of the lakes examined actually showed increasing oxygen in surface waters, which Rose says is a bad sign because it's likely attributable to increased algal blooms — sudden growth of blue green algae.

In these lakes, he said, dissolved oxygen was "very low" in deep waters and was unlivable for many species.

And the sediment in such oxygen-starved lakes tends to give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas, research shows.

Lakes examined in the new study were in the U.S. or Europe, except for one in Japan and a few in New Zealand. The authors said there was insufficient data to include other parts of the world.

Rose said lakes outside the study area probably are experiencing drops in dissolved oxygen, too. The reason, he said, is that warmer temperatures from climate change reduce the ability of oxygen to dissolve in water — its solubility.

"We know that most or many places around the planet are warming," he said. "And so, we would expect to see declining solubility."

Source: Voice of America

South African variant? B.1.351? How about GH/501Y.V2?

Just call it beta.

The World Health Organization is assigning Greek letters to important variants of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

The scientific names are hard to say and hard to remember, WHO said in a statement Monday. And pinning them on the place the virus was first detected is stigmatizing and discriminatory.

Look no further than the sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes since the pandemic began, experts say.

After then-President Donald Trump blamed the pandemic on the "Chinese virus" in a mid-March 2020 tweet, anti-Asian hate speech on Twitter spiked, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health. Other Republicans, including Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Louie Gohmert, picked up the rhetoric.

Attacks on people of Asian descent rose 146% in major U.S. cities between 2019 and 2020, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

It's a pattern historians see over and over.

"Scapegoating and blame are central aspects of any epidemic," said University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel.

In a bubonic plague outbreak in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1901, for example, low-income Black Africans were forcibly removed from their homes to a quarantine station — a precursor to the segregated Black townships of apartheid.

"Plague became an opportunity to animate segregationist and racist responses to the concerns of sanitation and hygiene within the city," Alexandre White, assistant professor of sociology and history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on the university's website.

Plus, it's often hard to know exactly where a disease came from.

Christopher Columbus' crew may have brought syphilis back with them from North America, but "in the 1500s, the Italians called it the French disease, and the French called it the Italian disease," Markel said.

The Russians blamed the Poles. The Poles blamed the Germans. Turks called it the "Christian disease." In northern India, Muslims blamed Hindus, and Hindus blamed Muslims.

The 1918 "Spanish" flu — the last respiratory pandemic on a par with COVID-19 — did not come from Spain, Markel added. Some of the earliest known cases were reported at an Army base in Kansas, but its origins still are unclear.

Even today, Markel said, "finding patient zero only happens in storybooks." Naming diseases

The WHO issued guidelines in 2015 for naming new diseases. In addition to advising against place names, it also recommended avoiding the names of groups of people (Legionnaires' disease) or animals (swine flu).

"This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, former WHO assistant director-general for health security, said in a statement at the time.

"We've seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples' lives and livelihoods."

Better choices include specific terms that describe symptoms. SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) or AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) would be good examples, though they were named before WHO devised the recommendations.

Names based on the germ that causes the disease are good, WHO said. Hence, COVID-19, short for "coronavirus disease 2019."

The first two variants of concern, which first appeared in Britain and South Africa, will go by alpha and beta, respectively. Gamma is the variant first identified in Brazil, and delta was first spotted in India.

The next letters of the Greek alphabet go to variants that WHO considers "of interest" — a step down the worry scale from the variants "of concern."

Names of plants, fruits, lost religions and made-up words were considered before WHO settled on Greek letters, according to Reuters.

Scientists will continue to use labels that describe a variant's lineage, such as B.1.1.7 or P.1.

Source: Voice of America