BRITAIN is “on the precipice of an unemployment crisis

BRITAIN is “on the precipice of an unemployment crisis,” the government was warned today, as the biggest rise in joblessness for more than a decade was recorded. The number of unemployed people went up 138,000 between June and August for the largest increase since the summer of 2009, Office for National Statisics data shows. The jobless total is now at a three-year high of 1.52 million as the rate of unemployment jumped to 4.5 per cent, up from 4.1 per cent in the previous quarter. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that the government’s “absolute priority” is trying to protect as many jobs as possible and help workers back into employment. But the government is under attack over its lack of action with unions urging ministers to “act now to protect and create jobs,” including by offering support for the self-employed. Trades Union Congress general secretary Frances O’Grady said that wage replacement should be increased to 80 per cent alongside support for businesses in areas facing local restrictions. “The expansion of the Job Support Scheme is a step in the right direction, but it still falls short. We are on the precipice of an unemployment crisis,” she said. Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds also expressed fears over the end of the furlough scheme on October 31. “Sadly, more people are going to lose their jobs until the government gets a grip,” the Labour MP said. “That means fixing test, trace and isolate, putting in place a proper job-recovery scheme and making clear, consistent and fair funding available to local areas as soon as restrictions are applied. “The Chancellor’s chaotic habit of trying to fix problems of his own making at the last possible minute risks unemployment spiralling to levels we haven’t seen in decades.” The Prospect union backed calls to support the self-employed, with general secretary Mike Clancy noting that the government has been “repeatedly warned” it is not doing enough. Employment lawyers also warned of the bleak reality facing many businesses. Philip Richardson, head of employment law at Stephensons Solicitors, said it remains to be seen whether the flow of unemployment can be stemmed. Redundancies rose by a record 114,000 quarter-on-quarter — to 227,000 — as the coronavirus crisis claimed jobs across the economy.

Henrietta Lacks, who would one day become known for her unintended contribution to medical science.

In 1951, a 31-year-old mother-of-five walked into Maryland’s Johns Hopkins Hospital for what she called “a knot on my womb”. The knot, it turned out, was a virulent cancer that had started in her cervix. She would soon die in agony of the disease, then the number one killer of American women. The woman was Henrietta Lacks, who would one day become known for her unintended contribution to medical science. After her death, scientists would take her cancer cells and reproduce them into perpetuity without her family’s knowledge, using them to investigate diseases from Aids to polio. If Lacks had been given a Pap smear, she may have survived. Developed a decade earlier, the simple screening tool – named after its creator, Greek gynaecologist George “Pap” Papanicolaou – was the newest and most promising technology in early cancer detection. It rose to become the gold standard in cancer screening, and would be instrumental in slashing cervical cancer rates by 70% over the next half century. But its benefits were not applied equally. In the 1950s United States, the face of cancer prevention campaigns was a well-to-do white woman; reproductive cancer in black women was all but invisible. (Even when the magazine Colliers told the story of Lacks, whom they called “Mrs L”, they pointedly left out her race.) Far fewer black women got the test, either because their doctor never offered it or because they didn’t know to ask. You might also like: The woman who changed human fertility forever How a black science pioneer was failed The woman who saved 90,000 infants Yet at the same time that Lacks’ tumour was growing, a gynaecologist named Helen Octavia Dickens was driving around Philadelphia in an American Cancer Society van, giving black women free Pap smears. She parked her van at local churches, and invited women to come inside for what she described as “a painless, simple, five-minute procedure”. Many times she found cancer and was able to operate, turning those patients into lifelong devotees. Getting them to enter the van, however, was no small feat. Besides the silence surrounding cervical cancer, Dickens had to overcome a deep and well-founded distrust of the US medical system. Black women, she knew, had good reasons to be wary of getting a pelvic exam from a (usually) white male doctor. These fears went back to James Marion Sims, the Southern doctor dubbed the “father of modern gynaecology,” who purchased enslaved black women suffering from fistulas to experiment on in the days before anaesthesia.

Judges and Golden Dawn Trial

The panel of three judges in the five-and-a-half-year Golden Dawn trial were in the final stages of determining sentences on Tuesday night after convicting the 68 defendants a week ago. They had heard the sentencing proposal of state prosecutor Adamantia Economou and representations from lawyers for the members of the neonazi party convicted of crimes including murder, attempted murder, and membership and direction of a mafia-type organisation. Ms Economou, whose role is to represent the state not the victims in the process, proposed sentences ranging from life imprisonment for Giorgos Roupakias for the 2013 murder of anti-racist rapper Pavlos Fyssas; through 13 years for Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and six other “directors of the criminal organisation”; to seven years for the “members of the criminal organisation.” Other proposed sentences included six to 10 years for those guilty of the attempted murder of Egyptian fisherman Abouzid Embarak in 2012. Thanasis Kampagiannis, an anti-fascist lawyer acting for the fisherman, said of the proposals: “As expected, the prosecutor’s sentences are less than the maximum provided for. “The maximum for directing a criminal organisation is 15 years. Membership — 10 years. Conspiracy to murder — 15 years. And so on. So these proposals are consciously low sentences, especially for the individual crimes.” Victims’ lawyers and anti-fascist campaigners were urging the court today afternoon to reject Ms Economou’s proposal and instead to deliver maximum sentences in line with what is now majority public feeling in Greece and with the gravity of crimes going back many years. The court did that last week when it convicted the defendants, spurning the prosecutor’s proposal for large-scale acquittals. Particularly disturbing is Ms Economou’s recommendation of sentences of just six to 10 months for the assault upon communist activists of the PAME trade union organisation when three years may be imposed. This touches on a political storm this week. The centre-right New Democracy government is claiming credit for breaking Golden Dawn and that the left is responsible for its rise through the anti-Establishment movement against austerity earlier this decade. But when lawyers acting for the trade unionists called an MP from each of the parliamentary parties to give evidence against Golden Dawn, the only witness to refuse the summons was the one from New Democracy. The party is now home to several former MPs of the far-right party LAOS that was a precursor to the neonazis entering parliament in 2012. At that time, then New Democracy prime minister Antonis Samaras established back-channel communications with Golden Dawn to bring them into a hard-right bloc. In this week of the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Athens by the partisan forces from Nazi occupation, the Greek establishment says there can be no place for “fans of Nazism” in the country. But the trial has touched on the networks of collaboration and sympathy with Golden Dawn on the wider right and in parts of the state. In determining sentences, the judges will also have to decide how strongly they signal that the mechanisms that have incubated the fascist right for decades must finally be torn out.

One million new coronavirus cases in three days More than one million new cases were reported around the world in the past three days, as France, Russia, Nepal and several American states set records for the highest daily number of new infections. India surpassed seven million total cases. The number of new cases is growing faster than ever, according to a Times database. Globally, the U.S. leads with the highest number of infections since late May. But India is on course to overtake the U.S. On Sunday, India reported 74,383 new infections, taking its total past seven million. The U.S. has more than 7.7 million cases. Here are our latest updates and maps of the pandemic. In other virus developments: ■ Cases in Nepal are sharply increasing, overwhelming hospitals. Frontline doctors have also been infected, raising fears that health institutions’ staffing will be hollowed out. ■ South Korea said on Sunday that it was easing social-distancing restrictions, lifting a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people indoors and more than 100 outdoors. ■ The Israeli military began treating civilian coronavirus patients for the first time on Sunday, deploying to an overstrained hospital in the port city of Haifa and opening two Covid-19 wards in an underground campus.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Program Description Join science journalist Paul Tullis and faculty member Amy Orsborn in a conversation with journalist and filmmaker Dawn Sinclair Shapiro, as they discuss Tullis’ recent Bulletin article, "The brain-computer interface is coming, and we are so not ready for it." Tullis is a well-regarded author who has published in outlets such as The New Yorker and National Geographic; Orsborn is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Washington, working at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience. Together, we’ll dive into the progress and pitfalls of a disruptive technology that we know is coming, but aren’t doing nearly enough to prepare for. Speakers Paul Tullis Paul Tullis is a journalist specializing in long form pieces for national magazines. He has written about science, technology, commerce, and their intersections for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Scientific American, Nature, Wired, and others. Most recently, he published his article "The brain-computer interface is coming, and we are so not ready for it" in the Bulletin exploring the potential advances and pitfalls of merging the human mind with a computer one. Paul received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and currently lives in Amsterdam. Amy Orsborn is a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of Washington. She works at the intersection of engineering and neuroscience to develop therapeutic neural interfaces to restore motor function. Her lab explores neural interfaces as adaptive closed-loop systems that engage plasticity in the brain and spinal cord. She designs engineering approaches that shape neural adaptation to improve system performance, and uses neural interfaces as a tool to study brain learning. The lab also specializes in system integration for advancing neurotechnologies to study large-scale neural circuits in non-human primates towards clinically-translatable technologies. Among her honors, she received a L’Oreal USA for Women in Science postdoctoral award, the L'Oreal USA Changing The Face of STEM award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and is an Interdisciplinary Rehabilitation Engineering research fellow. She completed her Ph.D. at the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Graduate Program in Bioengineering, and was a postdoctoral researcher at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. Moderator Dawn Sinclair Shapiro is a filmmaker and journalist. She works in the space between truth and fact to tell stories and create films that meet journalistic standards. After studying Political Science at Temple University, Dawn began her journalism career working for CBS Sunday Morning. She subsequently worked as a producer and writer at Tribune Broadcasting, CNBC, MSNBC, and Dateline NBC. As a producer for NBC Interactive Media, Dawn worked on Everest Assault ’96, editing and maintaining Sandy Hill Pittman’s daily webcast. Her third feature-length documentary, The State of Eugenics (2017) PBS REEL SOUTH, tells the story of how North Carolina overcame partisanship and delivered justice to sterilization abuse survivors. Previously, she directed, produced and wrote the PBS documentary, Inside the Handy Writers’ Colony, and The Edge of Joy, a film documenting maternal health in Nigeria, which The Economist Film Project selected as its debut film. Dawn was awarded a production grant from the MacArthur Foundation for The Edge of Joy, and in 2011, she was honored with the Nafis Sadik Award for Courage from Rotary International.