26 March 21
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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Biden's Inner Circle Maintains Close Ties to Vaccine Makers, Disclosures Reveal
The proposals have been fiercely opposed by American drugmakers, including Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant that Thomas-Greenfield’s former consulting firm has recently counted as a client. Thomas-Greenfield and her number two, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, previously worked for the Albright Stonebridge Group, or ASG, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The firm, which represents Pfizer, specializes in helping large corporations understand and influence international trade policy, including on intellectual property. Many leading figures in Biden’s administration, including key White House advisers, State Department leaders, and health care officials have financial stake in or professional ties to vaccine manufacturers, which are now lobbying to prevent policies that would cut into future profits over the vaccine. ASG in particular has unusual amounts of sway in the Biden administration. State Department officials Victoria Nuland, Wendy Sherman, Uzra Zeya, and Molly Montgomery previously worked at ASG, as did Philip Gordon, Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser. But several others in Biden’s inner circle also have potential conflicts of interest:
The White House has previously said that Lander will be recused from “any such matters related to COVID vaccines” until he divests from his holdings in BioNTech. Asked for comment about other Biden officials, a spokesperson for the administration referred The Intercept to the president’s executive order banning officials from engaging in matters related to former clients for a period of two years. Pressure is growing for a reversal in what some are calling a “vaccine apartheid.” Roughly three-quarters of the available vaccine doses have been distributed to only 10 countries, while current projections indicate that much of the developing world will have to wait years to reach significant vaccination levels. After coming into office, Biden reversed course from the Trump administration and committed $4 billion to COVAX, the international program backed by the World Health Organization and a number of global public health nonprofits, to buy and distribute coronavirus vaccines to countries in need. But the COVAX program, which continues to face underfunding, will not be able to vaccinate 90 percent of people in 67 low-income countries this year. Some developing nations may have to wait until 2024 to achieve adequate levels of vaccination. That disparity has led to increasing pressure to support a proposal led by India and South Africa to temporarily waive patent protections on coronavirus medicines, including vaccines, so that manufacturers around the world quickly ramp up production of generic versions. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizebeth Warren, D-Mass., have pushed for the waiver, along with a growing number of public health, labor, and human rights organizations. “It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere,” said Sanders in a video released earlier this month. The pharmaceutical industry, in a bid to shield an expected financial windfall, has pressed the Biden administration not only to oppose the waiver, but also to impose trade-related sanctions on countries that back the proposal or move to manufacture coronavirus vaccines without permission from patent holders. Early indications suggest that the Biden administration may follow the approach of the Trump administration in opposing any waiver over patent or intellectual property rights. An unofficial readout of the World Trade Organization meeting in February noted the “U.S. reiterated that the intellectual property framework provides critical legal and commercial incentives to drive private entities to undertake the risk and make the appropriate investments.” Still, the administration has made clear it is still reviewing the IP waiver and may consider it at the WTO meeting in April. “The top priority of the United States is saving lives and ending the pandemic in the United States and around the world,” said Adam Hodge, a spokesperson for the U.S Trade Representative, in a statement to The Intercept. “As part of rebuilding our alliances, we are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.” James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit organization that addresses human rights aspects of intellectual property rights and medical innovation, said the Biden administration would soon face several critical moments to shape global vaccine policy, including its decision over the WTO waiver. “These are going to be White House-level decisions,” said Love, noting that his group was hoping for more personnel “on the other side, with a history of being more critical of the drug companies” shaping these policies. “In terms of this administration, knowing these personalities,” he added, “it shouldn’t be typical Washington, D.C., swamp people who immediately, when they’re out of government, go back to making big bucks at powerful corporations like Pfizer.” |
Voters wait in line to cast their ballot early Oct. 12 at the Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia. (photo: Michael Holahan/AP)
Georgia Passes Massive Voter Suppression Law
Stephen Fowler, NPR
Fowler writes:
eorgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed a massive overhaul of election laws, shortly after the Republican-controlled state legislature approved it. The bill enacts new limitations on mail-in voting, expands most voters' access to in-person early voting and caps a months-long battle over voting in a battleground state.
"With Senate bill 202, Georgia will take another step toward ensuring our elections are secure, accessible and fair," Kemp told reporters Thursday evening.
Kemp's remarks during the signing appeared to have been cut short as Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon was escorted out of the building and arrested by Georgia State Patrol. Cannon was seen on video before that knocking on the governor's door as he spoke. According to the Fulton County Department of Public Safety website, Cannon was charged with willful obstruction of law enforcement officers by use of threats or violence and preventing or disrupting general assembly sessions.
The Georgia State Constitution states that lawmakers "shall be free from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly" except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.
The 96-page bill makes dramatic alterations to Georgia's absentee voting rules, adding new identification requirements, moving back the request deadline and other changes after a record 1.3 million absentee ballots overwhelmed local elections officials and raised Republican skepticism of a voting method they created.
Previous plans to require an excuse to vote by mail, as well as restrict weekend voting hours primarily used in larger Democratic-leaning counties, were scrapped amid mounting opposition from voting rights groups, Democrats and county elections supervisors.
On a 100-75 party-line vote, the state House approved SB 202 early Thursday, and the Senate voted later Thursday to agree with the House changes 34-20 on a party-line vote as well.
"Included in SB 202 are topics that are important to all Georgians," Ethics Committee Chair and state Sen. Max Burns said when presenting the bill, ticking through provisions like a new fraud hotline for the attorney general's office to a new expansion of early voting.
Earlier law required three weeks of in-person early voting Monday through Friday, plus one Saturday, during "normal business hours. The new bill adds an extra Saturday, makes both Sundays optional for counties, and standardizes hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
SB 202 also criminalizes passing out food or drinks to voters waiting in line, except for a self-serve water station.
Many of the measures in SB 202 will streamline the election administration process at the local level, such as allowing officials to process absentee ballots sooner, require them to count ballots nonstop once the polls close and allow flexibility with voting equipment for smaller, lower-turnout races. Poll workers could serve in neighboring counties, after the pandemic saw a shortage of trained workers.
Precincts with more than 2,000 voters that have lines longer than an hour at three different points throughout the day have to add more machines, add more staff or split up the poll. The absentee ballot request window is narrower, starting for most Georgians 11 weeks before the election and ending 11 days before.
Third-party absentee ballot applications must be more clearly labeled, and state and local governments are not be allowed to send unsolicited applications.
The bill will also shorten Georgia's nine-week runoff period to four weeks by sending military and overseas voters instant-runoff ranked choice absentee ballots and only requiring in-person early voting starting the Monday eight days before election day.
Democrats opposed several pieces of the bill, including language that removes the secretary of state as chair of the State Election Board, allowing the SEB and lawmakers a process to temporarily take over elections offices and limiting the number, location and access to secure absentee drop boxes.
Drop boxes were enacted as an emergency rule of the SEB because of the coronavirus pandemic, so this codifies their existence, requires all counties to have at least one, and would only allow voters to use the drop boxes during early voting hours and inside early voting locations.
"How does this bill help to build voter trust and confidence?" state Rep. Debbie Buckner said. "The bill adds up to more burdens and cost and returns to old practices that were abandoned years ago for security, convenience and safety."
Voters who show up to the wrong precinct will not have provisional ballots counted, unless it's after 5 p.m. and they signed a statement they could not make it to the correct poll.
A performance review of local elections officials could be initiated by the county commission or a certain threshold of General Assembly members. The SEB could also create an independent performance review board, and no more than four elections superintendents could be suspended at any given time.
Democratic Rep. Kim Alexander said county elections officials shared concern about the timing and the cost of the legislation, including a requirement for more expensive security paper for ballots.
"We have heard testimony from county election officials ... that more time is needed to fully understand the fiscal and logistical impacts the provisions in these bills would have," she said. "Given the substantial changes we'd be making with this legislation, why not take more time to get county input on the proposed legislation and take this up next session?"
In the Senate, Democrats objected to the bill being brought up without a fiscal analysis of the cost to the state and counties, but Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan ruled that the bill did not meet requirements that needed that sort of analysis.
Elsewhere in the bill, the secretary of state will be required to conduct a pilot of posting scanned ballot images from elections, and those images would be public records. Ballots used in the election will have to be on special security paper, which will cost more to use.
Overall, the bill will touch nearly every facet of elections, like a section that aims to provide more information about vote totals as results come in.
As soon as possible, but no later than 10 p.m. on election night, counties must publish the total number of votes cast by each method, and all absentee ballots have to be counted by 5 p.m. the day after the election, otherwise a county supervisor could face the state's new performance review process.
The 20-candidate special election to fill the remainder of Sen. Johnny Isakson's term and accompanying runoff between then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler and current Sen. Raphael Warnock is no more: special elections have special primaries.
Fulton County is no longer be able to use its two mobile voting buses for early voting, as the bill limits mobile polls to emergencies.
Stacey Abrams. (photo: Erik S. Lesser/Shutterstock)
Stacey Abrams on Republican Voter Suppression: 'They Are Doing What the Insurrectionists Sought'
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes:
The ‘coordinated onslaught’ of bills touts the big lie of voter fraud that fueled the 6 January insurrection, says the former Georgia candidate for governor
here may be no politician better suited for a moment when democracy is under attack than Stacey Abrams. A decade ago, when few saw any chance of Georgia becoming a Democratic state, Abrams pushed to invest in turning out Black, Latino and Asian American voters, who had long been overlooked by politicians campaigning in the state.
And when she ran for governor in 2018, Abrams made voter suppression a centerpiece of her campaign, underscoring the way that America fails to live up to the promise of its democracy by denying the right to vote to so many eligible citizens.
Now many of the issues Abrams has been raising for years have exploded and are at the center of American politics. The Guardian spoke to Abrams, who is widely expected to run again for governor next year, about this uniquely dangerous moment in American democracy.
How is what we’re seeing now similar to and different from what we’ve seen in the past?
The coordinated onslaught of voter suppression bills is not the norm.
What’s happened over the last 15 years has been a steady build where we’ve seen bills passing in multiple state legislatures over time. It was absolutely voter suppression, but it was this slow boil. It’s that terrible analogy of the frog in the water as the water starts to boil. Unless this is what you do and unless this is what you pay attention to, folks like me were watching, but it was fairly invisible to the untrained eye that voter suppression was sweeping across the country, especially beyond the boundaries of the south.
What is so notable about this moment, and so disconcerting, is that they are not hiding. There is no attempt to pretend that the intention is not to restrict votes. The language is different. They use the veil, they used the farce of voter fraud to justify their actions. Their new term of art is election integrity. But it is a laughable word or phrase to use. It is designed based on anything but a question of integrity. The truth of the matter is there is no voter fraud. The truth of the matter is we had the most secure election that we’ve had.
And therefore, their integrity is really insincerity. They are responding to the big lie, to the disproven, discredited and, sadly, the blood-spilled lie of voter fraud. And they are responding to it by actually doing what the insurrectionists sought, doing what the liars asked for.
In your view, how linked is this to race? Would we be seeing these kinds of restrictions if there wasn’t that kind of explosion of turnout among Black voters that we saw in the election?
Well, I would say it’s inexorably linked to race, but I want to be really clear. Black voters are of course at the center of the target, but what is happening in Arizona, what is happening in Florida is also attacking Latino voters. They are attacking the energy and enthusiasm of Native American voters. They are attacking Asian American voters. While Black voters are of course at the center because of the historical animus that seems to exist towards our participation in elections, this is also about attacking other communities of color. And we are seeing it being done with an assiduousness and an attention to detail that is, as we said before, unparalleled, except for when you look at the actions of Jim Crow.
And then the corollary is that they are also attacking young people. Because it wasn’t just the increase in voters of color. It was the increase in young people and it’s that cross-pollination of young people of color that I think is also ginning up a great deal of this anger.
What we are seeing are also bills that are designed to thwart young people taking possession of the power that comes with their generational might. They are the largest cohort. And they showed signs of leveraging that in the 2020 election. And now we are seeing a reaction to that, a response, that is lumping them in with every other undesirable voter class, which primarily is driven by race, by age and by income.
What would the implications for our democracy be if these measures pass and are enacted and upheld by the courts?
It would be the exact intention of voter suppression. Which is that we shut duly eligible citizens out of participation in setting the course of the country.
We will not have effective responses to challenges that disproportionately harm communities of color. We will not tackle the existential crises that we face as a nation, as a world. We will not hear conversations in the legislative body about racial injustice, about climate action, about bodily autonomy.
When you can cordon off and extricate entire communities from participation, their voices are not only silenced, the policies that have allowed their participation in just our larger civic life are also chilled.
The larger ethos is this. There are those who say, ‘Well, OK these communities get harmed, it’s a dismal reality, they will not be moved by that.’ But as I keep repeating, when you break democracy, you break it for everyone. Because while they may start with communities of color and young people and poor people, there are intersections in terms of policymaking that affect those who want to be benefited by these processes. And benefited by these policies. They’re not going to stop with simply poor Latino voters. They’re also going to attack wealthy Latino voters who may need to vote in a different way because of the way they make their money.
When you break the machinery, you break it for everyone. When that happens, the durability of our democracy is immeasurably weakened to the place where we become just as vulnerable to authoritarian regimes, just as vulnerable to majoritarian instincts and just as vulnerable to the collapse of democracy as any other nation state.
You were quoted the other day about the need for businesses to come in and play a larger role in taking a stand against some of these measures in Georgia and elsewhere. Have you been disappointed to see the muted stances companies have taken?
As someone who served in the legislature, I am very aware of the delayed engagement that tends to happen with the business community. And so I’m not surprised by the current reticence to be involved. But I am challenging the intention to remain quiet.
We are obliged at this moment to call for all voices to be lifted up. And for the alarm to ring not only through the communities that are threatened directly, but by those businesses that rely on the durability of our democracy.
That’s my point, the fact that no one can escape the scourge. We know that the consequences of a disconnected democracy, the consequences of a lack of civic participation are that we have a weakened civil society. That costs money. When people aren’t invested, when they feel that they have been pushed out of participation, they have no reason to trust or to conform.
And so for the business community, it is a danger to their bottom line, to see a disconnection develop and be embedded in state laws that essentially say to rising populations that ‘you are not wanted and therefore we are not going to countenance your participation’. Because if you tell someone they aren’t wanted they’re going to assume you can’t say anything else to them.
It is a dangerous thing for the business community to be silent.
We have a conservative supreme court, we’re about to undergo another round of redistricting where Republicans have a clear advantage in the states again, a green light to use partisan gerrymandering. The filibuster in the Senate. I think a lot of people look at that and it’s so hard for them to have hope that any of this is going to get fixed – or that there is a path to fixing it. I’m curious what you see when you look at those institutions and how people should think about them as obstacles to achieving full democracy?
I’d begin with the most efficient tool. And that is the filibuster.
There is a credible argument to be made that the exceptions that have already been accepted for the filibuster should apply to protecting democracy.
It is unconscionable that given the visible and ongoing threat to our democracy, that had it’s most tragic example in the insurrection on January 6, it is unconscionable that we would not treat the protection of our democracy as an absolute good that should be subject to an exemption from the traditional filibuster rule.
Every other mechanism will take time. Every other mechanism will require the inevitability of demographic change. This is one piece that will ensure that rather than 100 years of Jim Crow, which is what we had to survive last time Congress abdicated its responsibility with regard to election law, that rather than 100 years of stasis and paralysis and ignominy, that this is an opportunity for us to get it right.
President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: AP)
Bernie Sanders Congratulates Joe Biden for Shedding His Moderate Past
Gustaf Kilander, The Independent
Kilander writes: "Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gave President Joe Biden credit for having the 'courage' to 'act boldly' in a time of multiple crises."
Speaking to The New York Times on The Ezra Klein Show podcast about the passing of the $1.9tn Covid-relief bill dubbed the American Rescue Plan, Mr Sanders said: “I think the moment was ready and then you had a president who, to his credit, as everybody knows, was a moderate Democrat throughout his time in the Senate, who had the courage to look at the moment and say, 'you know what? I have got to act boldly'.”
Mr Sanders added: “What I hope very much is that understanding of the need to act [boldly] goes beyond the American Rescue Plan and that is the path that Biden continues during his administration.”
Comparing ARP to the 2009 stimulus bill aimed at combatting the recession, a bill that was over a trillion dollars smaller than ARP, Mr Klein asked Mr Sanders: “Why are 50 Senate Democrats in 2021 legislating so much more progressively and ambitiously than 59 did in 2009?”
“I think the conclusion from the White House and from Congress is, now is the time to do what the American people need us to do. Let’s do it. And it turned out to be a $1.9 trillion bill which, to my mind, was the single most significant piece of legislation for working-class people that has been passed since the 1960s,” Mr Sanders said.
Progressive wins in ARP include an expanded child tax credit, increased unemployment benefits, and funding for state and local governments. But a big loss for the movement was the removal of the increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 from the current level of $7.25.
“I was bitterly disappointed, obviously, that we lost the minimum wage in the reconciliation process as a result of a decision from the parliamentarian, which I think was a wrong decision. But we’re not giving up on that. We’re going to come back and we’re going to do it,” Mr Sanders said.
Mr Sanders was the favourite of younger voters in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
“I love the younger generation, I really do. And it’s not just because they supported me. People say, ‘how did you get the support of the younger people?’
“We treated them with respect and we talked about the issues to them in the same way we talked about the issues to every other generation that’s out there.”
He mentioned two reasons why he thought so many younger voters cast their ballots for him.
He said: “For a variety of reasons, the younger generation today is the most progressive generation in the modern history of this country. This is a generation that is firmly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobia, anti-xenophobia, a very compassionate generation that believes in economic and social and environmental justice.”
He added: “The second thing you’ve got is ... This is a generation of young people that is really hurting economically. This is the first generation in the modern history of this country where, everything being equal, they’re going to have a lower standard of living than their parents, and that’s even before the pandemic, which has made a bad situation worse.
“This is a generation where, on average, young workers are making less money than their parents. They’re having a much harder time buying a home or paying the rent. This is a generation stuck with a huge amount of student debt.”
Mr Sanders pitched the Raise the Wage Act, which would have raised the minimum independently of the American Rescue Plan, but eight moderate Democrats joined the Republicans in voting it down.
Mr Sanders said that in a 50-50 Senate “any one person could prevent us from moving forward”.
But he said he thinks that “there is an understanding” within the broad Democratic Senate caucus that “despite our differences ... we have got to work with the President of the United States, who I think is prepared to go forward aggressively in a number of issues.
“We cannot sabotage the needs of the American people,” Mr Sanders said.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman. (photo: Caroline Brehman/Getty)
Rep. Jamaal Bowman Introduces Bill Requiring HUD to Classify Broadband as a Utility
Makena Kelly, The Verge
Kelly writes: "As Congress prepares for its next big infrastructure package, money for broadband expansion will likely be included in the process."
or years, the broadband debate has centered around connecting people living in rural and unserved areas across the country. But while some rural Americans don’t have the infrastructure necessary to connect to the internet, other families in urban communities face difficulties affording what’s already available. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) is set to introduce a new measure Tuesday that could help millions of households access more affordable broadband.
“The more access to broadband people have, the more access and opportunity they have to the world beyond where they currently exist,” Bowman told The Verge on Tuesday. “The internet is a library. It’s an encyclopedia. It’s information.”
Bowman’s “Broadband Justice Act,” co-sponsored by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) who chairs a housing subcommittee, would require the Housing and Urban Development Department, along with the Treasury and USDA, to update its utility allowance definitions to include broadband so it can be subsidized for families living in government-assisted housing. Other utilities like gas and electricity are already subsidized in this way. The bill would also create a new grant program to help wire buildings and build out other broadband-related infrastructure.
“There’s a lot of momentum and energy around making this a utility, not just from members of Congress but from organizers on the outside,” Bowman told The Verge. “The grassroots is really behind this.”
The FCC already has subsidy programs, like Lifeline, that make broadband more affordable for qualified households, but it’s been the subject of disinvestment for many years. Many Lifeline subscribers receive poor connections, and according to The Washington Post, many people who qualify for the program refuse to use it due to its insufficiencies.
As Congress prepares for its next big infrastructure package, money for broadband expansion will likely be included in the process. Last week, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) introduced a sweeping broadband package that would invest over $94 billion in building high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas. The Senate Commerce Committee also plans to hold a hearing on broadband expansion this week.
A scene from the trailer for Six Days in Fallujah, which is due to be released sometime this year. (photo: Highwire Games)
Six Days in Fallujah: Yet Another Video Game That Refuses to Question US Militarism
Emad Ahmed, Middle East Eye
Ahmed writes: "First announced in 2009 before being dropped, the Konami video game offering serves as a perfect mixture of ignorance and imperialist propaganda."
n 2009, gaming heavyweight Konami announced it would publish Six Days in Fallujah, a first-person shooter game set during the second Battle of Fallujah - a gruelling struggle between American-led forces and Iraqi armed groups, which lasted six weeks in the winter of 2004.
The offensive involving US and British troops, who eventually captured the city, left at least 800 civilians dead, according to the International Red Cross, making it one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War. Even five years after the battle, plans to release a game centred around the memories of the events created huge controversy, which resulted in Konami dropping the title.
With the local and regional fallout of the Iraq invasion now spanning nearly two decades, the entire episode is seen by many analysts as an unmitigated disaster. It’s therefore even more shocking to see the game return from the dead.
Now in the hands of Highwire Games, a studio made up of the developers behind the popular Halo and Destiny franchises, new publisher Victura announced in February that the game would be released at some point this year.
Given the soul-searching that followed the start of the war and the fact that there is a genealogy linking the invasion and the later development of the Islamic State (IS) group, you would think the creators of the game would have used the decade since it was dropped for some introspection. Instead of going back to the drawing board or dropping the game entirely, however, Victura and Highwire decided to awaken Six Days in Fallujah from its 11-year slumber.
Whose narrative?
There are many reasons to place a permanently suspicious side-eye to this spectacle. Peter Tamte, head of Victura, gave some worrying answers to pop culture and gaming site Polygon in response to the collective scepticism gaming aficionados such as this author have.
“We do want to show how choices that are made by policymakers affect the choices that [a marine] needs to make on the battlefield,” he said, showing some signs of the required self-awareness needed to demonstrate the complexity of warfare. However, he continued: “Just as that [marine] cannot second-guess the choices by the policymakers, we’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war itself was a good or a bad idea.”
It’s this second bit that immediately dissolves all of Victura’s credibility, even more than the cop-out, dual-narrative set-up created by Highwire, where you follow an Iraqi family fleeing from the violence, alongside the shooting gallery offered to the player, through the eyes of an American soldier.
Too often there are people who use the smokescreen of "avoiding politics" to absolve their own political principles from receiving any sort of criticism. The mind bends trying to untangle the cognitive dissonance required to claim a game about an actual war, in which people are shot at and in which people have the choice to shoot, can be anything but political.
The widely condemned disaster of the Iraq War has created a perfect opportunity for an engaging narrative that could expose the flaws not just of the overall war, but specific episodes, such as that of Fallujah.
Instead, Six Days in Fallujah seems destined to fall into a genre of creative output, which compartmentalises, by virtue of its focus on the experience of the US soldier, aspects of war that can never be separated. Every bullet shot has a narrative attached to both the person doing the shooting and the person on the receiving end. Victura and Highwire, by putting players primarily in control of a marine, choose to prioritise one of those narratives over the other. It is therefore the narrative the player experiences - that of the marine - that matters, not anyone else’s.
Highwire’s attempts to placate this concern by pointing to the subplot about a fleeing Iraqi family is simply not enough, abdicating responsibility by creating a false sense of balance. The effect of the war on ordinary Iraqis was about more than just running away from fighting and the impact of this specific battle remains visibly present. In just one example, years after the battle, survivors were giving birth to children with hugely increased numbers of defects and pediatric cancers.
Faux-strategists sitting in armchairs and cheerleaders of the war, as well as those trying to remain "neutral", such as Tamte, aren’t particularly interested in those details. It has ended up making the stories of war they produce - whatever the medium - stale and futile. High-profile developers seem unable to focus on any retelling of the Iraq War solely from the perspective of the ordinary people affected by it.
Since the resurfacing of the controversy, Victura has said that the events portrayed in the game are "inseperable from politics" but added that it has worked to ensure it includes multiple perspectives.
An industry-wide problem
Sappy stories to elicit empathy for US troops have never been the best vehicle to understand the nuances of war, especially in the shooter genre. Back in 2005, Ubisoft brought Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 to the market to prove otherwise. The game was praised for its attention to detail and for allowing players to follow the actual missions of real-life soldiers in World War Two. However, support for the allies in that particular war is much easier to digest for most, principally due to the atrocities blamed on the people they were fighting and the eventual formation of repentant and renewed governments in both Germany and Japan.
Since that release, most big-name studios seemed to have doubled down on creating war-based shooters or military-themed games without any semblance of nuance. Splinter Cell: Double Agent included a storyline of a Pakistani nuclear scientist selling dangerous materials, and eventually having his assassination authorised by the National Security Agency. Spec Ops: The Line follows Afghan-war veterans fighting in a follow-up war in sandstorm-hit Dubai. There was even a Blackwater game, celebrating Erik Prince’s infamous mercenary outfit, which was notably (and mercifully) awarded Giant Bomb’s Worst Game of the Year accolade. And before Call of Duty decided to bring a wrinkly Ronald Reagan back to life in its most recent instalment, it gave players the opportunity to literally blast bullets indiscriminately at civilians in an airport.
Maybe we should be thankful they’re less on-the-nose than 2003’s America’s 10 Most Wanted, which had you capture figures such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This military-video game industrial complex has led to an absurdist Twitter account showing which video games allow you to violate the Geneva Conventions and in what ways.
The silver lining about the ever-increasing ubiquity and mainstream enjoyment of video games is that it has brought huge opportunities for some developers to take creative risks and challenge our views on a range of complex topics. Papers, Please remains one of the gold standards, where you control a border crossing in a fictional Eastern European country, balancing your personal finances and the faceless bureaucratic orders from above in order to survive. But such offerings are exceptions rather than the rule.
In their place, we’re left with games about Arabs, the Middle East or brown people in general where developers aren’t even bothered to get the language right. The most recent example of this has come from the latest Hitman game, with Arabic incorrectly displayed from left to right in nonsense-level translation. As a side note, a previous Hitman game depicted Sikhs being killed in the holy Golden Temple, a highly insensitive choice given the deaths of hundreds of Sikhs at the Amritsar temple in 1984. It goes to show how little of an afterthought non-western cultures are at many gaming studios, where repeated mistakes are often ignored.
The root problem to avoiding military whitewashing, continuous errors and displays of ignorance within the medium is the need for more prominent Arab, African and South Asian gaming studios. These are places that don’t currently have the necessary funding for developers to fulfil their creative dreams, compared to other parts of the world. And although Japan and Europe (especially the UK) have been at the forefront of game development since the beginning, it seems to be a fixation for US developers to continually share stories of heroic troops in combat.
The US army has taken note, attempting to recruit newcomers via Twitch. But the current stalemate of bland-but-popular military games isn’t sustainable in this growing market and eventually it’ll have to make way, hopefully for something original, inclusive and much more exciting.
African elephants. (photo: Ronan Donovan/NatGeo)
Both African Elephant Species Are Now Endangered, One Critically
Rachel Nuwer, National Geographic
Nuwer writes: "Savanna elephants are endangered and forest elephants are critically endangered, according to an official assessment released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature."
For the first time, a major conservation body has recognized the savanna elephant and forest elephant as two separate species—and they’re in dire straits.
lephants have long been thought of as either African or Asian. But there are actually two species of African elephant: The savanna elephant is larger, has curving tusks, and roams the open plains of sub-Saharan Africa. The smaller, darker forest elephant, with straight tusks, lives in the equatorial forests of Central and West Africa.
Now, for the first time, scientists have separately evaluated how the two are faring—and the findings are grim.
Savanna elephants are endangered and forest elephants are critically endangered, according to an official assessment released today by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for its Red List of Threatened Species, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of extinction risk.
“For both species, poaching is still the biggest driver of decline,” says Kathleen Gobush, leader of the new assessments and a member of the IUCN’s Elephant Specialist Group, a group of technical experts focusing on conservation and management of elephants.
“These assessments hopefully will garner renewed attention for the world to double down on stopping the killing, trafficking, and demand for ivory.”
Evidence has been building since the early 2000s that forest and savanna elephants should be split taxonomically into two species. In 2008, when the IUCN issued its last assessment of African elephants, it still considered them a single species, then described as vulnerable to extinction. In the years since, scientists came to recognize that forest and savanna elephants are distinct from each other.
Since the 2008 assessment, an elephant poaching crisis has also gripped Africa. In 2016, researchers reported in the journal PeerJ that between 2007 and 2014, savanna elephants declined by 30 percent in 18 African countries. A 2013 report in PLOS ONE found that forest elephant populations had plummeted by 62 percent in less than a decade.
Poaching peaked in 2011 and since has eased in some places, notably in parts of East Africa. But it persists and is worsening in other regions, especially in Central and West Africa. Meanwhile, elephant habitat continues to be degraded by or lost to human activity.
“The potential positive conservation impact of splitting forest and savanna elephants into separate species cannot be overstated,” says Bas Huijbregts, the African species director at the World Wildlife Fund, who was not involved with the new assessment. “Challenges to both species are very different, as are the pathways to their recovery.”
In particular, the new report should attract more attention to forest elephants. Less visible and easily monitored than savanna elephants, they tend to be overlooked by governments and donors, and their needs are overshadowed by those of their larger cousins, Gobush says. (See National Geographic’s stunning elephant pictures.)
Bureaucratically, the two species have mostly continued to be grouped together, which can hinder conservation efforts for both, says Sue Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York City. “From a legal or regulatory perspective, governments need to catch up.”
A best guess
To arrive at the new findings, Gobush and her colleagues assessed all available data for both species across hundreds of field sites, dating back to the 1960s for savanna elephants and the 1970s for forest elephants.
Using those data, they built a statistical model to estimate population reductions over time. What came to light was that savanna elephants have declined by more than 50 percent over three generations (75 years), tipping them into the endangered category. Longer-lived forest elephant numbers have fallen by more than 80 percent over three generations (93 years), making them critically endangered.
The IUCN relies on a variety of factors to determine an animal’s conservation status, such as how much its numbers and range have dwindled.
“At this point, there can be no doubt that poaching and habitat loss have devastated populations of elephants all across Africa,” says Scott Schlossberg, a data analyst at Elephants Without Borders, a Botswana-based nonprofit, who was not involved with the new assessment. “A few elephant populations are doing well, but the long-term trends for the continent as a whole are poor.” (Read how poaching is on the rise in Botswana.)
If anything, the IUCN findings likely are underestimates because of the scarcity of quantitative data about past elephant populations across the continent, says Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, a nonprofit based in Kenya, who also was not involved with the new evaluation. “The current assessment isn’t absolute and doesn’t pretend to be,” adds Douglas-Hamilton, a National Geographic Explorer. “It’s a best guess of trends.”
Douglas-Hamilton says elephants can bounce back if given the chance. “They can go from high slaughter and almost destruction to strict protection and recovery,” he says.
Kenya’s Tsavo National Park provides an example. Poaching reduced its savanna elephants from an estimated 40,000 in the 1970s to about 6,500 in 1988. Today, elephant numbers in the park have rebounded to about 17,000, a response to anti-poaching measures.
Ivory wars
Rebuilding elephant populations requires protecting their habitat as well as continuing to clamp down on poaching and ivory trafficking, Schlossberg says. The U.S., China, U.K. and many other countries have closed their legal domestic ivory markets.
“Allowing new ivory sales could jeopardize the progress that has been made recently in fighting ivory trafficking,” Schlossberg says. (Learn how human suffering is linked to poaching.)
Among countries that have not closed their legal ivory markets, Japan now has the world’s largest, and Japanese carvers prefer ivory from forest elephants.
That forest elephants are now recognized as critically endangered only emphasizes the heavy toll poaching for ivory continues to extract, Lieberman says.
“All countries that still allow domestic ivory markets, including Japan, need to close their markets once and for all.”
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