Ainda há gente assim, graças a Deus!

Artur Teixeira, presidente da Junta de Freguesia de Boelhe, Penafiel, hipotecou a própria casa para construir um pequeno centro de saúde onde um médico reformado, o Dr. Almiro Mateus, dá consultas gratuitas (notícia da CM TV). Palavras para quê?

Sun Tzu, general, estratega e filósofo chinês, autor de "A Arte da Guerra"

 

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

Gatestone Institute: A Hundred Days after Gaza's October 7 attack

 

    Sir William Shawcross's much delayed and now recent report on "Prevent" - the British Government anti-radicalisation programme - which has documented the failure of efforts at integration and the degree of risk residing within Muslim extremism has secured this disturbing knowledge its place on the public record.

    In a climate of Israelophobia, where moral compasses go haywire, Hamas is not being held to account. Under the guise of "human interest", the BBC repeatedly broadcasts prurient details of injuries to individual children in Gaza. Why? It is designed to shock and anger the listener and to demonize Israel; and it leaves those implications unspoken, hence deniable.

    Predictably, the BBC has presented international law as superior to national law and the International Court of Justice as a higher court than any national court. Neither is true. The former Director of BBC Television asks, "When do individual errors add up to something more? When do 'mistakes' become a clear pattern of institutional bias? These are questions the BBC must answer when it comes to its reporting of Israel's conflict with the terrorist group Hamas." He then lists nine other cases of gross error since 7/10 where the bias has been always the same, namely anti-Israel. "...Is the BBC just unlucky that this keeps happening? The answer is no."

    Hamas has nowhere to hide under Geneva 4. Its crimes are war crimes of the highest order. The ICJ's interim ruling is vexatious and, while unable to make an objective finding, tarnishes that Court by implying that Israel might in the future commit "genocide" when there is neither evidence of intention nor a community which meets the criteria to be victims of genocide. The same day as its ruling, evidence arrived that UNRWA on which in part it had relied had itself now been discredited by evidence of its operatives' involvement in 7/10. This is the latest form of Holocaust denial.

    It is a matter of moral and legal judgment about how a country with high moral standards wages war against a terrorist enemy that has none. The framework for such an assessment has not been satisfactorily spelled out.

64,000 Pregnancies Caused by Rape Have Occurred in States with a Total Abortion Ban, New Study Estimates

 

Researchers calculated the number of pregnancies resulting from rape in states where abortion was banned throughout pregnancy after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, total abortion bans went into effect in 14 states. Nine of these have no exceptions for rape. Now researchers have attempted to quantify the number of pregnancies that have resulted from rapes in states with a total ban—and the numbers they came up with are staggering.

A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and nearly 59,000 are estimated for states without exceptions. The authors calculate that more than 26,000 rape-caused pregnancies may have taken place in Texas alone. The findings were published on Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“Highly stigmatized life events are hard to measure. And many survivors of sexual violence do not want to disclose that they went through this incredibly stigmatizing traumatic life event,” says Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Montana, who led the study. “We will never know the true number of survivors of rape and sexual assault in the U.S.”
The researchers obtained their findings by combining data from multiple sources. Because state-level data weren’t available, the team analyzed national data from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey on intimate partner sexual violence from 2016 to 2017. The researchers also used a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey on criminal victimization. Putting these together, they determined the number of completed vaginal rapes among girls and women of reproductive age—defined as between the ages of 15 and 45 (although some even younger girls and older women are also capable of pregnancy).

The authors generated state-level rape estimates by partitioning the national data according to state-level information from FBI crime reports, which included rapes that were reported to police in 2019. (A high percentage of rapes are never reported to authorities, but the CDC survey attempted to correct for this.) The researchers then calculated the number of state-level rapes that were likely to result in a pregnancy, controlling for the number of months that a total abortion ban was in effect.

The findings suggest that thousands of people who were raped became pregnant in states where abortion was banned. Even in states with exceptions for rape, very few people got an abortion—likely because of fear and intimidation, Dickman speculates. Some pregnant people in states with bans may have traveled out of state to obtain an abortion legally, but some would have needed to travel hundreds of miles—a journey that is impractical or impossible for many people.

The authors acknowledge that their study has some limitations. Their numbers are based on rape data from national surveys that they extrapolated to the state level, based on rates of reported rapes, and the study assumes that these reporting rates are similar among states. Accurate data on rapes and sexual assaults are always hard to obtain because stigma prevents many people from reporting them. As noted, the CDC survey attempted to account for this underreporting in its data, but other sources suggest the rates of rape and sexual assault may be higher or lower, Dickman says.

“The study demonstrates there are a lot of pregnancies that occur after rapes in states where there are abortion bans,” says Amanda Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies abortion and family planning policy but was not involved in the work. Stevenson acknowledges that the authors had to make a lot of assumptions to arrive at their estimates. These assumptions are necessary, however, given the inherent uncertainty around data on rape and conception rates, she adds. “The precise estimate is much less important to me ... than the fact that the number is large,” Stevenson says.

Tanya Lewis is a senior editor covering health and medicine at Scientific American.

Bacteria Make Decisions Based on Generational Memories

 

Bacteria choose to swarm based on what happened to their great-grandparents

Even organisms without brains can remember their past: Scientists found that Escherichia coli bacteria form their own kind of memories of exposure to nutrients. They pass these memories down to future generations, which can help them evade antibiotics, the research team reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

“We typically think of microbes as single-celled organisms [that each] do their own thing,” says Dartmouth College microbiologist George O'Toole, who studies bacterial structures called biofilms. In reality, bacteria frequently survive by working together. Much like honeybees relocating their hive, colonies of bacteria in search of permanent homes will often travel as collective units called swarms.

These swarms can better withstand antibiotic exposure because of their high cell density, making them of particular interest to microbiologists such as Souvik Bhattacharyya of the University of Texas at Austin. He was studying swarming behavior in E. coli when he observed what he calls “weird colony patterns” he had never seen before. By isolating individual bacteria, he and his colleagues discovered that the cells were behaving differently based on their past experience. Bacteria cells in colonies that had previously swarmed were more prone to swarm again than those that hadn't, and their offspring followed suit for at least four generations—about two hours.

By tweaking the E. coli genome, the scientists found that underlying this ability were two genes that together control the uptake and regulation of iron. Cells with low levels of this important bacterial nutrient seemed predisposed to form mobile swarms. The researchers suspect these swarms could then seek out new locations with ideal iron levels, Bhattacharyya says.

Past research has shown that some bacteria can remember and pass to their offspring details of their physical environment, such as the existence of a stable surface, O'Toole says, but this study suggests that bacteria can also remember nutrients' presence. Bacteria, some of which reproduce multiple times per hour, use these details to determine the longer-term suitability of a location and may even settle together in biofilms, which are more permanent.

Microbes other than E. coli probably remember iron exposure, too, O'Toole says. “I would be really shocked if [these results] didn't hold up in other bugs as well.” He hopes that future research examines on a cellular level how bacteria translate iron detection into different behaviors.

Because bacteria are tougher to kill when they form larger structures, understanding why they do so might eventually lead to new approaches for addressing stubborn infections. This research provides an opportunity to develop new infection-fighting treatments, O'Toole says—especially crucial as antibiotics become less and less effective at killing these microbes.

Allison Parshall is a contributing news editor at Scientific American who often covers biology, health, technology and physics. 

Something is wrong on the internet

 

(...)
Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I’ve seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.
(...)
And right now, right here, YouTube and Google are complicit in that system. The architecture they have built to extract the maximum revenue from online video is being hacked by persons unknown to abuse children, perhaps not even deliberately, but at a massive scale. 

I believe they have an absolute responsibility to deal with this, just as they have a responsibility to deal with the radicalisation of (mostly) young (mostly) men via extremist videos — of any political persuasion. They have so far showed absolutely no inclination to do this, which is in itself despicable. However, a huge part of my troubled response to this issue is that I have no idea how they can respond without shutting down the service itself, and most systems which resemble it. 

We have built a world which operates at scale, where human oversight is simply impossible, and no manner of inhuman oversight will counter most of the examples I’ve used in this essay. The asides I’ve kept in parentheses throughout, if expanded upon, would allow one with minimal effort to rewrite everything I’ve said, with very little effort, to be not about child abuse, but about white nationalism, about violent religious ideologies, about fake news, about climate denialism, about 9/11 conspiracies.
(...)
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site

Mais um amigo que partiu...

 

"Ainda que eu ande pelo vale da sombra da morte, não temerei mal algum, porque Tu estás comigo" - (Salmo 23:4) Que descanse em paz, meu grande amigo Jorge Neves. Já só somos dois...

Massacre do Dia de São Bartolomeu e a memória do povo

 

Na noite de 23 para 24 de Agosto de 1572, um massacre de huguenotes (como eram conhecidos os protestantes na França) começou em Paris. O evento desencadeou um verão de horror em inúmeras cidades francesas. Dez mil protestantes foram mortos num período muito curto. A minha avó paterna, uma camponesa analfabeta que vivia numa pequena aldeia da Beira Alta, costumava dizer que nunca teria sorte na vida, porque tinha nascido na noite em que Diabo saiu à rua...