Tag: Social Change

  • Reforming the World Bank

    In this brief published by the Center for Global Development, the authors discuss the calls for setting a reform agenda for the World Bank aimed at “enabling the institution to respond to today’s global development challenges.”

    “The reform agenda is being negotiated by representatives of World Bank shareholders and the institution’s management, which  put forward an evolution roadmap laying out key issues for discussion. Among these issues is whether the World Bank should take on a bigger and stronger role in addressing major global challenges. The United States has been a leading voice in the push for World Bank evolution […]. However, some shareholders have voiced concerns that the evolution agenda could detract from the bank’s core development mission or create financing trade-offs in the absence of significant new resources.”

    Read/download the full document here.

  • Einstein on Socialism

    In this essay, titled “Why Socialism?,” Albert Einstein expressed his thoughts on socialism. The essay “was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949). It was subsequently published in May 1998 to commemorate the first issue of MR‘s fiftieth year.” 

    Monthly Review is “an independent socialist magazine” that started publication in New York City in May 1949. 

    A short excerpt from the essay: 

    “Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. 

    This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. 

    I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.” 

    Read the full essay here.

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Global History of Sugar

    This book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Ulbe Bosma’s book The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environmentover 2,000 Years.

    Earlier scholarship had established decades ago that “early modern European aristocrats […] decorated their salons with sugar sculptures” while “millions of enslaved men and women, overwhelmingly of African origin, […] were overworked so mercilessly on Caribbean plantations that they regularly lost fingers, arms, or even their lives when they collapsed on whirring mill machinery or fell asleep atop boiling vats of sugarcane juice.” 

    According to the reviewer, “Bosma breaks some new ground” by adding to previous scholarship: 

    “The World of Sugar brings Asia to the forefront, particularly India, China, and—a little later—the Indonesian island of Java. A sophisticated sugar economy existed in Bengal and North India by the time Marco Polo visited in the 13th century. It employed professional boilers and entrenched systems of monetization and wage labor within the village economy. […] Ming China became a global hub of sugar trade, with cane dominating the landscape, and with new technological innovations—perhaps introduced by Egyptians in the early Islamic era—increasing the efficiency of refining. Elsewhere, Barbarossa, fresh from crusading in the Holy Land in the mid-12th century, brought skilled Syrians to breathe new life into the sugar economy of Sicily.”

    The reviewer shares some interesting tidbits about the global history of sugar from Bosma’s research: 

    “In the late 1600s, sugar confectioneries were introduced into Siam by a Catholic woman of Japanese and Portuguese descent, Marie Guyemar de Pinha (also known as Marie Guimard in French), who married the king’s Greek prime minister. Two centuries later, a sugar planter like Leonard Wray could effortlessly move between the Malay Peninsula, Natal (in today’s South Africa), and the American South, receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III and conducting sugar experiments under the auspices of the former governor of South Carolina.”

    Since at least the “early 20th century onward,” the problems with the sugar industry have been far from secret:

    “Sugar was only profitable when churned out in mass quantities: consequently, sugar industrialists deliberately overproduced, which artificially drove down prices (and workers’ wages). Governments, meanwhile, helped save corporate sugar from a race to the bottom. They realized that national sugar industries, increasingly financed by Wall Street and the City of London, were “too big to fail” and thus protected them behind stout tariff walls. Today, national governments spend around $50 billion a year to subsidize the global overproduction of a commodity responsible for serious health epidemics.”

    Apparently, “Bosma is hopeful that movements such as conscious capitalism and green capitalism will prod the global sugar industry into reform: he establishes a parallel with the consumer-driven activism of the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.” But the reviewer argues that “[f]or products of mass consumption like sugar, conscious capitalism remains a fringe movement”: “The abolitionist movement, as Bosma notes, was itself undone by consumer demand for cheaper (and thus slave-produced) sugar.”

     As Bosma’s own scholarship shows, “the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 was followed, a bit more than a decade later, by the resumption of British mass imports of slave-grown sugar from areas beyond London’s imperial control” like Brazil and Cuba. Similarly, “Saint-Domingue sugar workers might have cast away their chains during the Haitian Revolution, but French planters simply carried those chains across the Windward Passage to Cuba, where they got to work establishing a new, brutal sugar frontier powered by yet more slaves.” 

    Read the full book review here.

  • Including the Global South in Science Writing in the West

    In this piece for The Open Notebook, which “is widely regarded as the leading online source of training and educational materials for journalists who cover science,” freelance science and technology journalist Karen Emslie talks about coming to the realisation that the Global South is under-represented or often completely absent from science writing and reporting: 

    “As a Scottish journalist reporting predominantly for publications in the United States, I have spent most of my career writing in English and interviewing expert sources in Europe and the U.S. That has been the easy path for me and many others. After all, most leading scientific journals are published in English; many studies’ corresponding authors are in the U.S. or Europe. And it generally takes less time for me and other English speakers to connect with sources in these countries than in others where we might run up against language and cultural barriers.”

    As she points out, this is an important issue because its consequences “aren’t just about a loss of narrative detail—they risk misportraying what science is, and whom it is done by.” 

    Realising that she “wasn’t entirely sure where to start looking for geographically diverse scientists to talk to,” Emslie sets out to remedy the situation. To that end, she shares “a few tips to leverage some of the tools and strategies you probably already use in cultivating sources.” 

    Furthermore, she has compiled a nonexhaustive yet growing “sampling of directories and other resources that can help reporters find expert sources around the world, with a particular focus on regions of the Global South.” 

    Read the full article and access the directory here.

  • On Female Friendships

    This piece on writingwomen.co talks about female friendships as “toolkits against patriarchal harms” and “meditative spaces for healing.” 

    A short extract: 

    “The most unusual characteristic about female friendships is that, unlike other bonds and relations, they don’t require an incubation period to develop. We as women connect instinctively at moments when making connections are the most difficult task otherwise- raising an eyebrow at each other after sensing the danger, holding hands while crossing roads, sending congratulatory messages after a scary presentation, offering sanitary napkins at the oddest moments; there is so much that women do for each other even without asking. The sense of doing it for the other and yet for ourselves, without any conditions and expectations has a deeply healing effect.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Saving the Public Sphere from the Onslaught of Digital Media

    In this piece, Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine, discusses what some respected thinkers are saying about how to approach “the infopocalypse,” which Aviv Ovadya of Harvard has described as “a catastrophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no one believing anything or everyone believing lies.”

    The piece argues that “democracy cannot survive this failure of the marketplace of ideas because it disables the formation of any shared ground where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole.”

    The main problem that the piece is trying to highlight is that “the digital media ecosystem disempowers the public sphere.” The author writes:

    “Without institutions and practices that can establish and preserve the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for democratic discourse.”

    His suggestion for creating such institutions and practices:

    “[…] new mediating institutions, such as citizens’ assemblies, that encourage and enable civil discourse and consensus formation at the same virtual scale as social networks, are more necessary than ever because the forces of fragmentation have never been greater. Mending the breach of distrust between the public and institutions of self-government in the digital age can only happen by absorbing the wired activation of civil society into governance through integrating connectivity with common platforms for deliberation.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Importance of David Graeber's Work

    In this tribute to the late David Graeber, leftist magazine Red Pepper asked activists and academics “what David Graeber’s work meant to them.”

    The responses make for interesting reading. Like: 

    “As David wrote: ‘The difference between a debt and an obligation is that a debt can be precisely quantified.’ Whereas debts are impersonal financial instruments, obligations trigger a chain of generosity: gifts and favours of similar, but not identical value, to be granted, not immediately, but at some appropriate time in the future, according to the needs of the recipient and resources of the obliged. Obligations bring us together; debts divide us. Systems of credit and debt have been used to manage our economic affairs for millennia. But David showed us that we are perhaps the first civilisation to orgy in the credit system without having in place the checks and balances that protect the poor from catastrophe.”

     and 

    “The English word ‘free’ derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’— unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends, because the enslaved cannot make commitments or promises. One of the earliest words for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom. They would cancel all non-commercial debts and in some cases allow those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.” 

    Read all the responses in full here.

  • Civil Society Urges EU to Invest in Non-commercial Digital Commons and Infrastructure

    More than forty civil society groups recently released this statement as a response to the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade, which was signed in December 2022. 

    The signatories of the statement “welcome the attention to sustainability and the need to avoid environmental harm” in the EU declaration and highlight “the growing recognition that there is a need for alternatives to the dominant commercial platforms and the extractive practices that dominate the online environment today.” 

    The central argument of the statement is this:

    “To create more socially-oriented and climate-friendly digital spaces and ensure the sovereignty of communities and our societies as a whole, Europe needs to invest in digital commons and public digital infrastructures.”

    “As a concrete first step” towards that end, the statement proposes that “the EU and its Member States should set up a European Public Digital Infrastructure fund” which “should be tasked with supporting the development and maintenance of digital public infrastructure that delivers public value by providing citizens and institutions with alternatives to commercial digital infrastructures.” 

    Read the full statement here.

  • Amnesty Releases Report on Taliban's War Crimes in Panjshir

    As this article reports, Amnesty International has published a new report that claims “[t]he Taliban have committed the war crime of collective punishment against civilians in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province.” 

    The area has a number of “members of the security forces of the former Afghan government” who “fled to Panjshir with equipment and arms, and joined the National Resistance Front (NRF).” 

    This has led to a retributive crackdown in the area by the Taliban resulting in “torture and unlawful killings,” “[m]ass arbitrary arrests and detention intended to intimidate local population,” and detainees being “subjected to extrajudicial executions.” 

    As the article states:

    “While many of the acts taken by Taliban forces individually constitute war crimes, the entirety of those acts – plus the additional arbitrary detentions and restrictions on the civilian population – also constitute the war crime of collective punishment.”

    Read the Amnesty International article covering the report here. Read the full original report here.

  • What is Black Sociology?

    This post on the blackfeminisms.com blog is a useful short introduction to Black sociology.

    According to the author: 

    “Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses.”

    The post gives a quick outline of the historical evolution of Black sociology, along with some of the key figures associated with it.

    Read the full blog post here.

  • The Long Road to Peace in Colombia

    This piece in The New Humanitarian, “the trusted news source on humanitarian crises,” by Bogotá-based journalist Joshua Collins is a useful resource in understanding the durability and effectiveness of long-term peace efforts. The writer reports on the aftermath of the 2016 peace deal in Colombia: 

    “Despite a historic peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) ending more than a half-century of civil war in 2016, conflict has been surging since in many rural areas of the country. 

    New armed groups have moved into the vacuum left behind when FARC fighters laid down their weapons and are now vying for territorial control with other older criminal organisations, with the lucrative production and smuggling of cocaine continuing to drive the violence.” 

    Even though the government of Gustavo Petro, famously the first leftist President of Colombia, “announced ceasefires with four of the five largest armed groups in Colombia,” the problem is that “none of the groups signed official written agreements.”

    Civil society organisations were reportedly “cautiously supportive of the ceasefire strategy.” While the government had claimed that the ceasefires “will allow for much-needed assistance to reach civilians in conflict zones,” humanitarian organisations raised questions about “whether they will actually improve conditions on the ground for civilians.” What makes matters worse is that many of the affected regions “are also effectively stateless as they’ve been neglected for decades – across administrations – by the national government in Bogotá.” 

    The scale of the problem is sobering: 

    “The UN estimates that 7.7 million Colombians are in need of some type of immediate humanitarian assistance, including hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered due to rising levels of conflict in recent years, in particular displacement and confinement.”

     The issues raised in the article take on more significance in light of recent reports that “[t]he administration of Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced it is suspending a ceasefire agreement with a rebel group accused of killing four Indigenous people in a recent attack.” 

    Read the full article in The New Humanitarian here.

  • Degrowth and the UK Economy

    This article in The Conversation discusses the current state of the UK economy and the idea of degrowth that has been gaining traction around the world in the recent past. 

    The author points out that the two main political parties of the UK are presenting economic growth as a solution to the country’s current economic problems based on “conventional economic wisdom that “growth, growth, growth” increases incomes and standards of living, employment and business investment.” But according to the author, “economic growth on its own is not going to solve these multiple and intersecting crises.” 

    The article goes over some of the main ideas behind the degrowth movement, like “abandoning our obsession with growth at all costs” and instead “orienting the economy towards social equality and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and democratic decision making.” 

    The author argues that while “for many people the word smacks of misery and the type of frugality they are trying to escape from during the cost of living crisis,” actually “degrowth, if successfully achieved, would arguably feel better than a recession or a cost-of-living crisis.” 

    Importantly, “degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth”: 

    “Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the environmental and social consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies.

    Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • FAO Facilitates Japanese Aid to Boost Paddy Production in Sri Lanka

    According to this report, the Government of Japan, “through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),” is to provide $ 4.6 million “to strengthen the production capacity of smallholder paddy farmers in identified districts of the Dry and Intermediate Zones of Sri Lanka.” Reportedly, “[s]mallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable rural communities, predominantly cultivating rice for self-consumption.” 

    This comes in the wake of recent food shortages in Sri Lanka. According to the report: 

    “Together with its partners, FAO in Sri Lanka is addressing urgent food security needs, protecting the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers and fishers in the most affected districts while promoting agriculture, including in urban settings.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Education in Indonesia

    This article in Inside Indonesia discusses the “[l]egacies of Indonesia’s authoritarian past” in how “the Indonesian government continues to exert influence over how knowledge is consumed and produced within academic institutions.” 

    According to the author, “the state’s education policies have actively enforced an ideology of neoliberalism.” The author is concerned that “[a]cademics are shaping their ways of producing knowledge to conform with the expectations of a growing neoliberal authoritarian state.” This is concerning because: 

    “Knowledge that is produced within a neoliberal authoritarian environment deprives people of their economic and political rights, sustaining the state’s power. Controlling the people who produce knowledge is to control knowledge.”

    But the author draws hope from “the many examples of collective forms of education and knowledge production” and “a number of examples of collective resistance” to the Indonesian government’s authoritarian “marketisation of curriculum.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Socialist Software Engineers

    This article in The Drift magazine talks about “a non-negligible number of the people who write software for a living” being socialists, though not “as many as the right would have you believe.” 

    Calling it “the engineer’s predicament,” the author talks about such coders developing a desire to “to put their politics into code”: 

    “They want to write software that will facilitate the creation of worker cooperatives, seed the internet with self-governing platforms, and equip movements and municipalities with tools for democratic decision-making and participatory governance.”

    Elaborating on the article’s theme after sharing some facts about the history of “highly skilled workers in capital-intensive industries who had radical politics,” the author concludes: 

    “This is the greatest dilemma faced by socialist software engineers: in working against the grain of their technological heritage, they may also be working to bring about a world in which technology matters less.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Senegalese Parliament Refuses to Make Existing Anti-gay Laws Harsher

    As reported on Erasing 76 Crimes, ” [a] news site [that] focuses on the human toll of 68+ countries’ anti-LGBTI laws and the struggle to repeal them”:

    “On Friday, April 28, Senegal’s Parliament rejected a series of proposals, including a text that would toughen the criminalization of homosexuality, already punishable by one to five years in prison and a fine (Article 319 of the Penal Code, dating from 1966).”

    Even though the existing anti-LGBTI laws were not repealed, activists have welcomed this move considering the wave of anti-gay hysteria sweeping through some African countries.

    It is promising that the Senegalese “[p]arliament had already rejected a similar bill in January 2022” and that one legislator was quoted as saying “[w]e don’t need a law based on emotions that fills up our prisons.”

    Read the full report here.

  • End of the Road for Erdogan?

    Is Recep Tayyip Erdogan about to lose political control in Turkey? The Economist sounds optimistic.

    As this article points out, Erdogan has had a tight grip over power in his country:

    “He was jailed and barred from public office, yet managed to overturn the ban and came to dominate Turkish politics. He has won five parliamentary elections, two presidential polls and three referendums. He has even faced down a military coup.” 

    And yet, the article reports, “the polls suggest that the united opposition could wrest control of parliament from Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party and its allies” in the upcoming elections and “Erdogan himself appears to be trailing in the presidential election to be held on the same day.” 

    And as this article, also in The Economist points out, “[w]ere he to lose, it would be a stunning political reversal with global consequences” and it could provide a reason for hope for democrats around the world: 

    “The Turkish people would be more free, less fearful and—in time—more prosperous. A new government would repair battered relations with the West. (Turkey is a member of NATO, but under Mr Erdogan has been a disruptive actor in the Middle East and pursued closer ties with Russia.) Most important, in an era when strongman rule is on the rise, from Hungary to India, the peaceful ejection of Mr Erdogan would show democrats everywhere that strongmen can be beaten.” 

    Read these two opinion pieces on the upcoming Turkey elections in The Economist here and here. 

  • The Conflict in Myanmar

    According to this report in The Diplomat, “a group of Myanmar’s neighbors, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos, seem adamant about treating the junta like a single sovereign entity and nursing it back to strength.” This is the same “military junta that attempted to seize control of Myanmar in February 2021.” 

    While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had “been placed by the United Nations and the wider international community in the driving seat of international Myanmar policy,” had been “inching towards a more moderate and critical position on Myanmar,” Thailand is reported to have “launched a separate track of talks aimed at undermining this approach.” 

    According to the author, an obvious flaw in this approach is that the “junta is just not able to implement its political or economic decisions across most of the country’s territory.” Some maps are said to “demonstrate just how limited the Myanmar army’s movement has become since the coup, as a result of the widespread nationwide uprising.” Having been on the ground, the author reports: “The situation varies greatly on the ground, but the maps provide an accurate bird’s eye picture.” 

    Meanwhile, the army has resorted to all sorts of violence including rape and terror attacks. “Millions of people in resistance areas live under constant remote surveillance by drones, knowing that at any moment this could be followed by a devastating air force sortie.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Bernie Sanders Calls for A Reduced Workweek

    In this piece for Leftist magazine Jacobin, philosophy professor and author, Ben Burgis argues in support of Bernie Sanders renewing “his long-standing call to reduce the workweek to thirty-two hours.” 

    Burgess discusses state-level efforts in California and the federal attempt in Congress to make this reduced workweek a reality. “Right now, these efforts face an uphill battle to say the least.”

    Burgis writes: 

    “There was a 299 percent increase in labor productivity from 1950 to 2020. As Senator Sanders rightly suggests, the benefits of that increase largely went to the top of society. It certainly didn’t automatically generate a shorter workweek.”

    and

    “Technology and productivity have advanced to an astonishing degree since President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the limitation on how many hours workers can be made to spend on the job if they want to be able to make a living has stayed in place.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Flood Mitigation in New Zealand

    This report in Stuff, a news portal in New Zealand, covers local environmentalist Tom Kay’s presentation to government officials “about the importance of rethinking natural disaster mitigation” in light of “a series of devastating floods” over the past five years.

    It raises concerns about “the country’s preoccupation with draining” wetlands having a direct correlation to increased flooding as wetlands “act as buffer zones, or sponges.” 

    Straightening rivers and lining them with stopbanks are said to have “proven disastrous for wildlife and humans alike” as river straightening has destroyed “natural habitats for many fish species” and stopbanks “ultimately elevate water levels above the floodplain.”

    Deforestation, which causes “more water to flow off hillsides,” combined with all the above factors, “has created the perfect storm” resulting in more frequent and more devastating floods, the report argues.

    Read the full article here.

  • Rising Debt Servicing Costs Eating into Government Revenues in Poorest Countries

    This piece in the Financial Times reports how studies from across the ideological spectrum, by Debt Justice campaign and the IMF, show that “[l]ow-income countries will face their biggest bills for servicing foreign debts in a quarter of a century this year, putting spending on health and education at risk.”

    The report says: “The figures — the highest since 1998 — follow a steep rise in global borrowing costs last year, when central banks sought to counter high inflation with rapid rate rises.”

    Some argue that this may call for debt relief at a large scale like when “[m]ultilateral lenders and foreign governments led by the IMF and the World Bank delivered far-reaching debt relief around the turn of the millennium.” The argument goes that this may even require “changes to laws governing bond contracts in England and the state of New York to force private creditors to take part in debt cancellation.”

    Sri Lanka, having been in the news for some time now due to its financial troubles, “faces the steepest schedule of external repayments, equal to 75 per cent of government revenues this year. The country is unlikely to meet those payments following a default on its external debts last year.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Politically Motivated Anti-gay Hysteria in East Africa

    In this “letter” for BBC, Sammy Awami, a freelance journalist based in Tanzania, talks about the “wave of anti-homosexuality sentiments sweeping through” East Africa. 

    Awami argues, as have others, that this anti-gay sentiment is being whipped up “by politicians and political parties who have not delivered on their promises to their voters.” Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo is quoted as making a similar argument in a tweet: “There is currently no anti-gay hysteria in African countries with high economic growth rates or which are able to manage their debt”. 

    About the bogus claim of homosexuality being un-African, Awamy writes: 

    “It is interesting that these politicians ignore the fact that it is actually the harsh anti-homosexuality laws – not homosexuality – that were imposed on us by the colonial government. 

    Indeed, the original anti-homosexuality law was first introduced across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda by the British colonialists, after successfully using it in India about 150 years ago.” 

    Read the full article here. 

  • Generative AI in Finance

    This report in Forbes covers the research paper released earlier by Bloomberg introducing BloombergGPT, which applies ChatGPT-style machine learning techniques to financial datasets, those available in Bloomberg’s own vast repertoire and beyond. 

    Forbes‘s “back-of-napkin cost estimation” speculates that just the cost of Amazon Web Services cloud computing used to generate these models would have been to the tune of “$2.7 million to produce the model alone.” 

    After listing the datasets that were used to train these models, the report goes on to speculate about the uses that BloombergGPT could potentially be put to, like drafting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, researching companies, individuals, and their linkages, drafting market reports and summaries, fetching financial statements etc.

    Read the full Forbes report here. Read the Bloomberg announcement of BloombergGPT here.

  • Countering Fake News and Ideological Bias in Reporting

    Ground News is an interesting effort to counter fake news and ideological bias in reporting. According to their website: 

    “Ground News is a News Aggregation platform that helps users expand their view of the news and easily compare how a story is being reported across the political spectrum. We identify all news articles written on a story and arrange the organizations reporting on the event into categories of political bias, geographic location, and chronology. News is aggregated from over 50,000 news sources, including many alternative, independent sources that aren’t confined to the mainstream news narrative. This puts our community in a position to choose and easily compare the news they want to read, not just have it pre-selected for them by algorithms designed to drive clicks.”

    Some features on both the website and app versions are behind a paywall, but either version can be used/downloaded for free. 

    Visit the Ground News website here.

  • The Urgent Need to Significantly Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions

    In this article for Nature, climate scientist David Ho re-iterates his long-standing argument that while there is no denying “the need to develop CDR (carbon dioxide removal) methods over the longer term”, urgently cutting down emissions is important because currently available CDR methods will not remove enough carbon dioxide to be able to compensate for the levels of emissions. 

    Ho argues: “We must stop talking about deploying CDR as a solution today, when emissions remain high — as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts.” 

    This is necessary because: 

    “Developing methods to verify that CDR works is a major challenge. It will be many years before we have the science to tell us which methods work and whether they harm or benefit the environment.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Exxon's Climate Change Predictions and Climate Change Denial

    This piece by Grist is a useful short introduction to the oft-quoted fact that oil and gas corporation ExxonMobil historically funded some of the most accurate climate change predictions long before most of the world was talking about climate change. And yet, they went on to fund and spread climate change denial in the public domain for decades, knowing full well that said climate change denial was not backed even by their own research.

    Watch the video version of the piece on Youtube here. Access the video and transcript on the Grist website here.

  • The CERN of AI Research

    Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) has launched this petition to “democratize AI research by establishing an international, publicly funded supercomputing facility equipped with 100,000 state-of-the-art AI accelerators to train open source foundation models.” They are calling such a proposed facility “a CERN for open source large-scale AI research and its safety.” 

    Significantly, the petition has this to say on AI Safety research: 

    “The proposed facility should feature AI Safety research labs with well-defined security levels, akin to those used in biological research labs, where high-risk developments can be conducted by internationally renowned experts in the field, backed by regulations from democratic institutions. The results of such safety research should be transparent and available for the research community and society at large. These AI Safety research labs should be capable of designing timely countermeasures by studying developments that, according to broad scientific consensus, would predictably have a significant negative impact on our societies.”

    LAION’s website describes them as a non-profit “aiming to make large-scale machine learning models, datasets and related code available to the general public.”

    Read the full petition here. Read more about LAION’s work and philosophy on their team blog here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.