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02/03/2023 ---- 10/03/2023

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10.03.2023
THEME: ENVIRONMENT

An infectious virus has been found frozen alive in permafrost after 48.500 years

Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil, sediment, and rock that remains at or below freezing (0°C or 32°F) for at least two consecutive years. It is found in regions with sub-zero temperatures, typically at high latitudes in the Arctic and subarctic regions and in high-altitude areas. Permafrost is a critical component of the Earth's cryosphere. Its extent and characteristics impact global climate, ecosystems, infrastructure, and human communities. However, with the ongoing effects of global warming, permafrost is melting at an unprecedented rate. This permafrost thawing has severe implications for the environment and the global climate. The thawing of permafrost is a significant feedback loop in the climate system, and its effects can be felt far beyond the areas directly impacted by permafrost. As permafrost thaws, it releases trapped carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect and further exacerbating global warming. Additionally, melting permafrost can cause physical instability of the land, leading to erosion, landslides, and changes in hydrology, which can have severe consequences for human communities and infrastructure in the affected regions.

Permafrost can also contain microorganisms such as viruses that, after lying dormant for ten thousand years, could endanger animal and human health. To better understand the risks of frozen viruses, Jean-Michel Claverie, an Emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine in Marseille, France, has tested earth samples taken from Siberian permafrost to see whether any viral particles contained therein are still infectious. He's searching for what he describes as "zombie viruses", — and he has found some. In his research recently published in the journal Viruses, Claverie and his team isolated several ancient virus strains from multiple permafrost samples taken from seven different places across Siberia and showed they could each infect cultured amoeba cells. That amoeba-infecting viruses are still infectious after so long, and this can be an indication of a potentially more significant problem. Traces of viruses and bacteria that can infect humans have been previously found preserved in permafrost. A lung sample from a woman's body exhumed in 1997 from permafrost in a village on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska contained genomic material from the influenza strain responsible for the 1918 pandemic. In 2012, scientists confirmed the 300-year-old mummified remains of a woman buried in Siberia had the genetic signatures of the viruses that cause smallpox. Understanding permafrost and its complex interactions with the environment is crucial for mitigating the impacts of climate change and adapting to a changing world. The best course of action would be to try and halt the thaw and the broader climate crisis and keep these hazards entombed in the permafrost for good.

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10.03.2023
THEME: POLITICS

Xi Jinping is formally elected president of China for a third mandate

Xi Jinping was born in Beijing, China, on June 15, 1953. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was a prominent revolutionary leader and one of the founding members of the Communist Party of China. In 1969, during the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping was sent to live and work in rural China as part of a government program to reeducate urban youth. He spent several years doing manual labour and studying Marxist ideology. In the 1970s, Xi Jinping returned to Beijing and began his political career in various government positions. He became the party secretary of Fujian Province in 1999. Then he moved on to become the party secretary of Zhejiang Province in 2002.

In 2007, Xi Jinping was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body of the Communist Party of China. He was seen as a rising star in the party and was widely expected to succeed Hu Jintao as China's top leader. In 2012, he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him the supreme leader of China. He became the President of China in 2013. In 2018, the National People's Congress abolished term limits for the presidency, allowing Xi to remain in power indefinitely. Today March 10, Xi Jinping secured a precedent-breaking third term as president of China during a parliamentary session in which he tightened his control of the world's second-largest economy as it emerges from a COVID slump and diplomatic challenges mount. Nearly 3,000 members of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress (NPC), voted unanimously in the Great Hall of the People for the 69-year-old Xi in an election without any other candidate.

During his tenure, Xi has launched a massive anti-corruption campaign, cracked down on dissent and human rights activists, and promoted the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure development strategy. He has also increased China's military assertiveness in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait and implemented policies to strengthen China's economy and enhance its technological capabilities. With this third term confirmation, Xi is taking China on a more authoritarian path since assuming control a decade ago, amid increasingly adversarial relations with the U.S. and its allies over Taiwan, Beijing's backing of Russia, trade and human rights. Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Xi on his third term. The two sealed a "no limits" partnership between China and Russia in February last year, days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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08.03.2023
THEME: WORLD

Political sentencing in Belarus convicts a Nobel Prize for Peace

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe that gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The country has a long and complex history, marked by periods of foreign rule, including Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian, as well as occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II. Since gaining independence, Belarus has been ruled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994. Lukashenko has been accused of human rights abuses, suppression of opposition, and rigged elections. In August 2020, Lukashenko faced a significant challenge to his rule when he claimed a landslide victory in a presidential election that was widely considered rigged. The opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, disputed the result, and large protests erupted nationwide. The protests were met with a violent crackdown by the government. Thousands of people were arrested, with reports of torture and other abuses in detention. The international community, including the European Union and the United States, has condemned the actions of the Belarusian government and imposed sanctions on Lukashenko and his associates.

Ales Bialiatski is a prominent Belarusian human rights activist and the founder of the human rights organization Viasna (Spring). He was born in 1962 in Grodno in the Soviet Union. Bialiatski continued his activism throughout the 2000s, documenting human rights abuses in Belarus and advocating for the release of political prisoners. He also worked to raise awareness of the situation in Belarus internationally, meeting with European Union officials and participating in international human rights conferences. In 2011 he was arrested by the Belarusian government and charged with tax evasion. The charges were widely believed to be politically motivated. During his imprisonment, Bialiatski continued to be a vocal advocate for human rights. He was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize in 2013. He was released in 2014 following a presidential pardon. Since his release, Bialiatski has continued to work as an activist and human rights defender in Belarus. In 2021 he was arrested again as he was among the individuals and organizations targeted by a government crackdown on civil society and the opposition following disputed presidential elections. In 2022 he was awarded the Peace Nobel Prize. Although his international figure is widely recognized worldwide, on Friday, March 2, he was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment. Shortly after, on March 6, the opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who lives in exile, was sentenced to 15 years.

The reactions to the news were quick. A series of mass protests followed met with thousands of arrests, cases of torture, the death of several demonstrators, harsh sentences and forced exile. Tikhanovskaya vowed to continue her struggle and political activities. She labelled the trials a "farce". "Today I don't think about my sentence. I am thinking of thousands of innocents, detained and those sentenced to real prison terms," she said on Twitter. "I will not stop until each of them is released." The EU is following these recent events very closely, condemning Lukashenko's regime and supporting the civil society of Belarus. In general, the international relationship between Belarus and the Western countries is gradually deteriorating on all fronts. The West has imposed several rounds of sanctions against Minsk for its ongoing crackdown after the 2020 elections. However, the regime still enjoys unwavering support from Moscow. Belarus agreed to serve as a staging ground for Russian troops to attack Ukraine in February 2022; however, the Belarusian army has taken no direct part in the fighting yet.

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07.03.2023
THEME: HEALTH

High-fat ketogenic diets are associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases

The ketogenic diet, or keto diet for short, is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that has gained popularity recently as a weight loss and health improvement strategy. The diet involves drastically reducing carbohydrate intake and replacing it with fats to put the body into ketosis. Ketosis is a metabolic state in which the body burns fat for energy instead of glucose, leading to weight loss. However, recent evidence highlights the negative impact that this diet can have on human health.

A recent research led by Dr Iulia Iatan with the Healthy Heart Program Prevention Clinic, St. Paul’s Hospital and the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Heart Lung Innovation in Vancouver found that regular consumption of a diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat was associated with increased levels of LDL cholesterol – or “bad” cholesterol – and a higher risk of heart disease. This study contributes to the scientific literature and suggests the harms outweigh the benefits. In the study, researchers defined a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet as 45% of total daily calories from fat and 25% from carbohydrates. The researchers compared the diets of 305 people eating an LCHF diet with about 1,200 people eating a standard diet, using health information from the United Kingdom database UK Biobank, which followed people for at least a decade. The researchers found that people on the LCHF diet had higher levels of low-density lipoprotein, also known as LDL, cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B. Apolipoprotein B is a protein that coats LDL cholesterol proteins and can predict heart disease better than elevated levels of LDL cholesterol can. The researchers also noticed that the LCHF diet participants’ total fat intake was higher in saturated fat and had double the consumption of animal sources (33%) compared to those in the control group (16%).

After an average of 11.8 years of follow-up and after adjustment for other risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and smoking, people on an LCHF diet had more than two times higher risk of having several major cardiovascular events, such as blockages in the arteries that needed to be opened with stenting procedures, heart attack, stroke and peripheral arterial disease. It is essential to highlight that this study can only show an association between the diet and an increased risk for major cardiac events, not a causal relationship because it was observational. However, their findings are worth further study, especially when approximately 1 in 5 Americans report being on a low-carb, keto-like or full keto diet.

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06.03.2023
THEME: ENVIRONMENT

UN members reach a historic agreement to protect Earth's seas

It is a scientific fact that human life depends on oceans and their biodiversity. In the last decades, an incredible number of species in the sea have reduced in number so much that they are now at risk of extinction. The scientific community found that under business-as-usual global temperature increases, marine systems will likely experience mass extinctions on par with past great extinctions. Therefore, protecting the biodiversity created in the seas in the last 50 million years is now a critical and urgent global matter. In late August, a fifth round of negotiations for a UN ocean treaty to protect and manage the high seas failed in New York. However, last Saturday, March 4, these negotiations concluded positively. For the first time, the United Nations members have agreed on a unified treaty to protect biodiversity on the high seas. This marks the end of 15 years of arduous negotiations and a historic moment for our species' future survival.

The exact content of the treaty has yet to be released. Still, the negotiations focused on four key areas: (1) Establishing marine protected areas for more than 30% of the earth's surface; (2) Improving environmental impact assessments; (3) Providing finance and capacity building to developing countries; (4) Sharing of marine genetic resources - biological material from plants and animals in the ocean that can have benefits for society, such as pharmaceuticals, industrial processes and food. One of the most sensitive issues revolves around sharing possible profits gained from developing genetic resources in international waters, where pharmaceutical, chemical and cosmetic companies hope to find miracle drugs, products or cures. Such costly research at sea is primarily the prerogative of wealthy nations. Still, developing countries want to be included in potential windfall profits drawn from marine resources that belong to no one. Similar issues of equity between the Global North and South arise in other international negotiations, such as on climate change, where developing nations feel outsized harms from global warming and try in vain to get wealthier countries to help pay to offset those impacts.

The treaty now aims to protect the high seas, which begin at a maximum of 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometres, from the coastline and are not under the jurisdiction of any state. Those waters, representing more than 60% of oceans, have long been ignored in environmental regulations. And only around 1% of the high seas are currently subject to conservation measures. Once enacted, the new agreement will create a new body to manage the conservation of ocean life and establish marine protected areas on the high seas. During the conference, global powers also pledged billions of euros worth of funds to help protect the world's oceans. The European Union promised 40 million euros to facilitate the treaty's ratification and to help with its implementation. Beyond that, it has also pledged more than €800 million for ocean protection in general by 2023. There were "341 new commitments" worth nearly €18 billion made at the conference, including almost €5 billion from the United States. Despite the breakthrough in agreeing on the treaty, there is still a long way to go before it is legally agreed upon. The treaty must first be formally adopted at a later session. Then it only enters "into force" once enough countries have signed up and legally passed it in their own countries. Russia was one of the countries that registered concerns over the final text. Governments have to start looking at practically how these measures would be implemented and managed.

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