Britain -- Out of the Woods?

"More and more of us are benefiting from protection the vaccine gives us against this awful disease. [The presence of antibodies in the general population represents a] measure of the protection that we have collectively built up right across the country."

"Our vaccination program is bringing back our freedom, but the biggest risk to that progress is the risk posted by a new variant."

"We're working on our plans for booster shots, which are the best way to keep us safe and free while we get this disease under control."

"These further 60 million doses will be used, alongside others, as part of our booster program from later this year, so we can protect the progress that we've all made."

Matt Hancock, British Secretary of Health

"We are doing everything we can to make sure the most vulnerable are protected from COVID-19 now and in the future."

"Our brilliant vaccines taskforce has secured an extra 60 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines to support our booster program, which will be developed in line with the advice of our experts."

"In the meantime, we are making great progress with our vaccination rollout and I urge everybody to get their vaccines as soon as they are eligible."

Nadhim Zahawi, Vaccines Minister, Britain

A volunteer paint hearts on the National Covid Memorial Wall on the Embankment in central London. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Israel is the first nation on the globe to have opened up, returning to as close to normalcy as possible in the wake of a hugely successful mass vaccination scheme, to achieve vaunted herd immunity. Isolated cases of COVID-19 still emerge, hospitals still accept a trickle of patients, but those in ICUs have been dramatically reduced. No one will overlook the sacrifices in terms of untimely deaths, or of badly impacted health and lingering health effects, but for all intents and purposes the emergency has concluded, and life has returned ... to normal.

 

Britain now, after undertaking a massive inoculation program, feels itself just about ready to follow suit. Of course the world cannot be a virus-safe environment as long as there are serious hot-spots such as Brazil and India where massive daily case tallies and an incredibly unbelievable death rate from COVID carries on. Life comes with no guarantees, however; nature is at the helm and the control wheel and humanity reacts. The toll has been dreadful, but science and the brilliance of researchers has given humanity a way out of this pathogenic pestilence. And Britain feels itself on the cusp of rescue.

 

Seven in ten British adults have now been identified as having developed antibodies against COVID-19. Some 68 percent of adults, according to latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, have some level of protection now against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, achieved through either vaccination or by prior infection with COVID. It took a mere month for the level of immunity to rise even as infections wane; attributing the increase in antibodies universally in the country to its rapid vaccination rate.

 

The high antibody count has outdistanced the modelling by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies which earlier in the month suggested that fewer than 45 percent of the population by June 21, when lockdown restrictions are set to be eased, would be protected. Over 20,000 people were tracked by the ONS to measure blood antibodies with rates seen to be highest among oldest age groups, targeted for priority vaccination, and likeliest to have had two doses. 

Reuters

 

In England, roughly 87 percent of all over-70s have developed antibodies. Antibodies, however, are not the sole part of the immune system to respond to the vaccine. "There are other parts of the immune system that will also respond to vaccination that aren't picked up in antibody tests", advised Sarah Crofts, senior statistician for the COVID-19 infection survey. Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, revealed it was as yet unknown how far antibodies protected against new variants.

 

Trials are now in the process of examining the potential for "mix and match" combinations of different vaccines even as it was announced that 60 million additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been secured to be used for booster shots with the intention of protecting against new variants, in the fall. Reassuringly, new data from Public Health England reveals that one dose of a vaccine reduces household transmission of the virus by up to half.

 

PA Media

"The scale of ... resistance is a marker of the extent to which COVID anxiety has permeated the scientific and policy communities, as well as the general public."

"There is a constant search for bad news and worst-case scenarios -- third waves, variants, long COVID, events in Brazil or India -- rather than a focus on the documented achievements of the vaccination program."

"It would be foolish to rip up the present guidance tomorrow, or even on May 17. By June 21, however, all the most vulnerable people in Britain will have been offered two doses of the vaccines, with enough time for immunity to develop. They will be as protected as they will ever be."

"It is time to acknowledge the low level of vulnerability in a vaccinated population."

Robert Dingwall, Professor of Sociology, Nottingham Trent University

A Global Disaster

Waiting to receive Covid-19 vaccinations in Mumbai, India, on Monday.   Credit...Divyakant Solanki/EPA, via Shutterstock

"The current wave is particularly dangerous."

 "It is supremely contagious and those who are contracting it are not able to recover as swiftly. In these conditions, intensive care wards are in great demand."

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal

 

"[The world is entering a critical phase of the pandemic and needs to have vaccinations available for all adults as soon as possible]."

"This is both an ethical and public health imperative."

"As variants keep spreading, this pandemic is far from over until the whole world is safe."

Udaya Regmi, South Asia head, International Federation of Red Cross, Red Crescent Societies

 

"As India did that, [halting vaccine exports to retain supplies to inoculate its population], the pipeline of vaccines dried up for COVAX."

"I don't know who did the maths, but someone did the maths wrong."

"And the decision to go exclusively with the Serum Institute of India and not provide the license to more manufacturers has proved deadly for the developing world [in a shortage of vaccines for re-distrition]."

Leena Menghaney, Médecins Sans Frontières, New Delhi

 

"The ferocity of the second wave did take everyone by surprise."

"While we were all aware of second waves in other countries, we had vaccines at hand, and no indications from modeling exercises suggested the scale of the surge."

K. Vijay Raghavan, principal scientific adviser to the Indian government

 

"The situation is horrible, absolutely terrible ... Everyone is afraid, every single person."

"People are afraid that if I am talking to a person, maybe I won't get to talk to them tomorrow or in the near future."

Manoj Garg, resident, New Delhi

AstraZeneca doses manufactured in India arriving in Kathmandu, Nepal, in January.  Credit...Niranjan Shrestha/Associated Press

In January, when the Indian government appeared satisfied that it would be able to control the initial outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it enacted strict orders for its population to remain at home to venture so far and no further from their homes, and only for essential business. The infection rate in India's largest cities wasn't as disastrous as it might have been, given crowded living conditions and matters appeared to be well in hand. As one of the world's largest producers of vaccines, India also magnanimously began donating vaccines to its less-well-off neighbours.

It's a familiar scene; countries that succeeded in gaining a level of control over the global pandemic looked outside their borders at neighbours struggling to achieve what they did, and generously offered assistance. Some countries when China was in the throes of the first infections with the pathogen that originated in Wuhan, sent respirators, masks and anything else they had to give assistance, at a time when their own countries had not yet been engulfed by the fast-spreading virus that all too soon hit Europe and North America, sending Italy and Spain into a headspin.

Things have not proceeded well for India. To a good degree perhaps it was predictable; in fact India with its great population of 1.35 billion people was initially thought of as a potential tinderbox of opportunity for any threatening virus, and it seemed puzzling at first that it hadn't exploded into a firestorm of cases. It's almost as though the virus has a sense of dramatic timing, keeping the world in suspense, and then striking. It has struck India through a second venomous wave that seems unstoppable.

 

India is now experiencing what Italy did a year ago, in the shortage of hospital beds and medical oxygen. Italy became a symbol of the worst that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could inflict on humanity, but worse was to come when the U.S. and Brazil began their own epic struggles for survival against a beast of a virus. The world was given a hopeful boost of encouragement at early news that vaccines were in development, and then a vision of recovery as a handful of pharmaceutical manufacturers saw their products succeed in third level trials leading to approvals for mass inoculations.

 

Confidence was high for those countries with vaccine-producing facilities and the logistics of production and distribution and contract-signing proceeded apace. With India's own national vaccine producer on contract with AstraZeneca and the assurance that it could handle the demand for its product both at home and abroad. Now, however, for a week of succeeding days hundreds of thousands of new COVID cases have been logged for the world's second largest population. There are now 18 million in India infected with COVID-19.

 

Each day over 300,000 people test positive for the virus. The health facilities and crematoriums are working on overdrive and they are still being overwhelmed. On Wednesday alone, 360,960 new cases of COVID were tallied, horrifying India itself and the world around it, impelling other nations to begin sending relief to India, medical equipment, medical oxygen, respirators, personal protection equipment. The numbers are staggering, but according to experts these are not true numbers which are in fact, many times greater than the official tallies.

 

Yesterday alone, 3,293 Indians died of COVID-19. There is one death from COVID reported in Delhi state every four minutes. Ambulances convey bodies of COVID-19 victims to temporary crematorium facilities set up in public parks, parking lots and anywhere else they can be installed to relieve the pressure. Bodies are burned on funeral pyres set up in row after row. 

 

A mass cremation this week in New Delhi for people who died from the virus.  Credit...Atul Loke for The New York Times

In the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon, Genesis hospital informs families they must take their family members elsewhere in view of its supplies of oxygen fast depleting. "The hospital is trying to get fresh oxygen but we are told we have to make alternative arrangements", stated Anjali Cerejo who must now attempt to find another bed elsewhere for her father who had been admitted to the hospital which now is unable to keep him as a patient. 

There is a burgeoning black market in operation however, where scarce supplies, including medical oxygen can be had at prices far, far in excess of what their usual rate is. For those who can afford those astronomical prices there may be a hope, but for the vast numbers of other afflicted people when the public hospitals and clinics are unable to respond, there is no hope. 

 

It is a scene of bedlam as people are lined up on trolleys, in cars and rickshaws with their family members holding oxygen cylinders for them, desperately awaiting an empty bed in the hospital.

India, according to the World Health Organization's weekly epidemiological update, accounts for 38 percent of the 5.7 million cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide last week. The B.1.617 variant of the virus that surfaced in India has a higher growth rate than other variants in the country, according to early modelling, suggesting increased transmissibility. 

India's best hope lies in vaccinating its vast population, in experts' opinion. Registrations were open for everyone in the population above age 18 to be vaccinated. Ironically and tragically, the world's biggest producer of vaccines is vastly short of stocks to inoculate the estimated 600 million people now eligible, added to the efforts to inoculate India's elderly, and those with other compromising medical conditions.

Several states in India have reported a shortage of coronavirus vaccine doses. AP Photo: Rafiq Maqbool

"I think the highest priority, you know, to be quite frank, has to be India."

"I mean, their situation is so desperate and the cases continue to rise [validating the decision to retain vaccines produced in India to be used in India]."

"This is a crisis now at a global level [but countries in Africa awaiting doses supplied to COVAX by India must wait]."

Salim Abdool Karim, epidemiologist, Columbia University 

The Serum Institute in Pune, India, is the world's largest vaccine maker. Supplied: The Serum Institute

China: Energy Use and Climate Show-and-Tell

The closing meeting of the fourth session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 11, 2021. Leaders of the Communist Party of China and the state Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan attended the meeting, and Li Zhanshu presided over the closing meeting and delivered a speech. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

 

"One of the main constraining factors in China’s quest to raise living standards, modernize, and become a major world power has been a persistent shortage of energy."

"Energy shortages have greatly hindered the industrial, agricultural and social development of China."

Elspeth Thomson, economic historian

 

"The discovery and development of the supergiant Daqing and Shengli oilfields in the 1960s briefly promised to end the country’s heavy reliance on coal, and even turn China into a major oil exporter."

"By the late 1980s, however, production from Daqing and Shengli was peaking, and no further readily exploitable major discoveries had been made, forcing a renewed focus on coal."

"In 1993, China turned into a net oil importer as domestic consumption outstripped domestic production, and the gap has grown steadily since."

"China had become the largest importer in the world by 2019, importing more than 10 million barrels per day, and relying on imports to meet almost 75% of its consumption".

"For similar reasons, China has also become one of the world’s largest natural gas importers, relying on imports to meet more than 40% of its domestic needs."

"The problems with relying on coal as the primary source of energy have been well understood by Chinese and international policymakers since at least the 1980s".

"Moving huge volumes of unwashed and unprocessed coal from mines to power plants has put immense pressure on the country’s rail network and periodically contributed to congestion."

"Coal’s contribution to urban air pollution, acid rain, and climate change was extensively analyzed in a landmark report on 'China: Long-Term Development Issues and Options' published by the World Bank in 1985."

John Kemp, Reuters market analyst

"China’s coal activities remain a large concern and are inconsistent with the Paris Agreement. It would need to phase out coal before 2040 under 1.5˚C compatible pathways, but it appears to be going in the opposite direction. After lifting a previous construction ban on new coal plants in 2018, China has rolled back policies restricting new coal plant permitting in each of the last three years. By mid-2020 China had permitted more new coal plant capacity than in 2018 and 2019 combined, bringing its total coal capacity in the pipeline to 250 GW, and brought 10 GW of new plants online. China is going against the global shift away from coal and now possesses roughly half of the world’s coal power capacity as well as coal-fired power plants in development."

Climate Action Tracker

photovoltaic panels lined up in the rising sun in Shangzhang township, Xianju county, Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, China.- Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images) 

The West, fully invested in Climate Change and the need by governments worldwide to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions in aid of fostering a healthier environment and off-setting rising emissions leading to weather patterns that threaten world stability, looks to China, the world's largest emitter by far of carbon dioxide emissions to make good on its pledges in a collaborative effort to firm up commitments in the greater interests of saving the planet.

 

China has made promises and been happy to make some strides in public relations moves to demonstrate its sincerity in pledging its commitment to effecting a reversal of its colossal emissions in a common strategy to fight climate change. What it has also cagily offered is negotiations of a sort whereby the West will put a rein on its human rights charges in exchange for good news from Beijing on its climate/energy intentions.

 

Prepared to make firmer commitments as long as trade sanctions targeting Xinjiang Province and the slanderous charges of genocide against the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs commences to its satisfaction because after all, Beijing is as committed to battling climate change, cleaning up the environment, as it is to upholding human rights as a highly principled government. So, thus the choice, pull back on sanctions for the compliance so urgently needed with China buying in to climate pledges.

 

That does create a bit of a dilemma for Beijing, one that it prefers to keep close to its vest. Since China has strategic objectives to meet, and it cannot reach those goals by decreasing its C02 emissions, simple as that. The gargantuan consumer production behemoth that has cornered the world market in inexpensive and wide-ranging product manufacturing cannot continue to uphold its commitment to remaining the world's premier factory-linked shipper without vast stores of energy.

 

It is hugely dependent on foreign oil and gas sources and its National Development and Reform Commission is tasked with ensuring that those energy supplies continue unobstructed by do-good environmental pledges. The National People's Congress heard from the National Development and
Reform Commission in its 2020 annual report pledging to "ensure energy security" to "improve our contingency plans in response to major changes in supply and demand at home and abroad".

 

Xi Jinping,  Congress, Great Hall of the People,  Japan Times

 

March 5 saw the current year's report delivered to the People's Congress giving short shrift to climate change and promising weak commitments to decarbonization. The priority was securing energy supplies, and to "boost oil and gas exploration and development" while "systematically increas[ing] our ability to ensure the supply of coal". The huge smoke stacks adjacent every manufacturing plant throughout China are going nowhere.

The international community of sport enthusiasts may or may not recall the Beijing Olympics where it was necessary to order production facilities to shut down for days in hopes of clearing the air of effluent and making for some reasonable visibility in view of the constant yellow 'fog' that obscures normal sightlines in the metropolis and entirely reflective of the dismal air quality in China's many megalopolises, home to much of its 1.4 billion population.

China's foreign oil dependence reached 50 percent for the first time, in 2008, and by last year it had reached 73 percent dependence. China's oil imports increased by 7.3 percent in 2020 while its domestic production rose merely 1.6 percent; self-sufficiency its goal but hardly achievable as its energy need continues to rise exponentially in lock-step with the Chinese Communist Party's drive for world domination in production, communication, technology and AI inventiveness. 

What really concerns China is that its oil and gas imports mostly must make it through the South China Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, connecting the Indian Ocean to the Pacific to transit China's imported oil. Sea lanes in the control of other states vexes China. The prospect of potential conflicts with Taiwan, Japan, India, even the United States cause for concern. The Suez Canal blockage served as a urgent reminder to China to guarantee its energy-derived security.

Militarization of the South China Seas where the world's largest navy patrols, to protect oil and gas tanker routes into China. Claims of its ownership of disputed areas with its neighbours encompassing, land, sea and air all play in to China's concern over its undisputed future destiny as a world giant in influence and control of the global community. 

From Turkmenistan to Xinjiang, overland oil and gas routes from Russia and Burma, China aggressively develops assurances of energy provision. Oh, and from Iran too, of course, helping it through its own sanctions. And its most secure and dependable energy source? Why, coal, of course, dredging coal out of its very own mines and financing and installing new coal mines abroad. Coal which still accounts for a massive share of China's energy consumption.

China's gigawatt power of new coal-fired installations represents over three times the new capacity built in the entire rest of the world, with another 247 gigawatts planned or in development. The proposed additional coal plants represent 73.5 gigawatts of power, fully five times what the rest of the world combined proposes. But then, a superpower not quite oblivious to the concerns of its critics for the most part, expertly plays the game of 'we're with you' on climate change.

 

 

India/Israel, A Tale of Two Nations

"One of the countries in which the pandemic is spreading brutally is our friend India. On behalf of all ministers and citizens of Israel, I would like to send our condolences to my friend, Indian PM Modi, and to the citizens of India over the tragic loss of life happening there. I have instructed the head of the National Security Council to render such assistance as may be requested. I hope that there will be an international effort, in which Israel is ready to be a full partner, to stop this tragedy."

"We are ahead of all other countries vis-à-vis the rate of fully vaccinating our citizens and this is very impressive. Even as we rejoice here, we still understand that large sections of humanity are suffering greatly. In any case, we are ready to help with whatever may be necessary."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

 

There is great friendship, recognition and empathy between Israel and India. One, a tiny state whose presence on the world stage is both a rebuke to the world where diaspora Jews have always been marginalized, held in contempt, ostracized, denied official status, villainized and persecuted through the ages to the present time. In returning to its historical Judaic homeland, reclaiming its heritage and geography, Jews throughout the world are invited to return to a place of welcome, safety and security.

That, in any event, is the purpose and reason for the re-establishment of the State of Israel. Propelled by a 20th Century genocide of state-organized annihilation of Europe's Jews that was so successful, 80 years later the global Jewish population has not been able to match its numbers pre-Holocaust. The first reaction of Israel's Middle East neighbours was rejection of its presence, and exile of the millions of Jews who had lived in adjoining countries for thousands of years.

In the same year that Israel reasserted itself as a sovereign nation, India was torn apart when its Muslim population asserting a need for its own sovereignty on religious grounds, saw Pakistan born as Britain withdrew as a colonial power. Just as Israel in its infancy was met with conflict when the combined armies of some of its neighbours sought to destroy the nascent state, the division of India resulted in a paroxycsm of deadly violence between Hindus and Muslims with the exchange of populations.

Israel has lived ever since 1948 with the presence of two governments, led by Fatah and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip whose aim is to destroy Israel's presence and claim the entire geography that was offered through a Partition plan by the United Nations which Jews accepted and the Palestinians declined. Pakistan's ongoing hostility of a most incendiary, deadly nature, fed by both countries claiming Kashmir as their own, reflects an intractable enmity constantly threatening India with terrorist attacks and war, just as Israel faces the same from its Palestinian neighbours.

Both Hindu-dominated India and Judaic Israel have similar cultural values, and both are democracies. Israel's small size and its central government has made possible by a far-sighted prime minister, a swift response to the deadly coronavirus that is ravishing the globe's human populations. An agreement with a leading manufacturer of pharmaceuticals which had successfully tailored a vaccine against COVID provided Israel with a sufficient quantity of vaccine doses to undertake a huge and speedy vaccination of its population.

Israel's population size of 9 million people, can hardly be compared to India's massive 1.3 billion population, an unwieldy number in a large geography with varied languages, ethnic groups, cultures and lifestyle mode. Three quarters of India's population lives rurally and traditionally. Although India is one of the world's leading vaccine manufacturers the logistics involved in speedily vaccinating such an immense population is mind-boggling. Culture and tradition inform the Indian way of life, as does the size of the population leading to intensely crowded communal living conditions.

While Israel's population is now wildly celebrating its timely rescue from the stifling confinement brought on by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, opening restaurants and places of entertainment and Israelis may now socialize unmasked in public with life returning to normal in an atmosphere of herd immunity, India, teeming with humanity in its great crowded metropoli and countrysides alike, is in the throes of an utterly uncontrolled massive invasion of a deadly pathogen.

"We were quickly vaccinating the population, and at the same time, we were dealing with huge numbers every day. And then all of a sudden, there was a breaking point [when the 'R number' trended low]", explained Israel's Health Minister Yuli Edlstein. "You are reaching a threshold that is very close to herd immunity. We're seeing an explosion of other patients now -- everyone who was afraid to come in [to hospital] before [now arriving for mundane medical procedures]", said Yoram Weiss, director of Jerusalem's Hadassah University Medical Center.

A hospital staff member checks oxygen cylinders inside a hospital in Srinagar, India-controlled Kashmir, on Sunday. India’s crematoriums and burial grounds are being overwhelmed by the devastating new surge of infections tearing through the populous country with terrifying speed, depleting the supply of life-saving oxygen to critical levels and leaving patients to die while waiting in line to see doctors. (Mukhtar Khan/The Associated Press)

This, at a time when India has been forced to stop exporting vaccines to sources outside the country to conserve it for desperately needed vaccinations throughout its own interior. When the hospitals already crowded beyond saturation are running out of oxygen and are unable to treat seriously ill COVID patients. When extemporary sites in public parks, parking lots and anywhere else available are being turned into vast cremation sites.

India's new coronavirus infections hit a record peak for a fifth day, reporting 352,991 cases in the last 24 hours, with the overwhelmed graveyards and crematoriums a stark symbol of the crisis. Here, health workers and relatives carry the body of a COVID-19 victim for cremation in Jammu, India, on Monday. (Channi Anand/The Associated Press)

 

Brainy Battlefield Weaponry, IAI

 

The AI ‘super-brain’ will use an array of high-powered sensors to help tanks and robots patrol battlefields and find enemy targets

"We are not very far from the basic level of getting an automatic awareness picture [of the battlefield]."

"If you ask me [when it will happen], at the end of 2021. I think with 90 percent accuracy that the answer is positive."

Colonel Eli Birenbaum, head, IDF military architecture department

"Ethics is 100 per cent at the heart of what we’re doing. We have a legal and ethical framework that got written and developed with the best ethicists and moral philosophy in the world, [and] which was developed before we coded any algorithms for the project."

"If we want this system to actually sit [with] someone who can use this in combat, what does it need to do? What does it legally have to do? And, then what, ethically, do we want it to do?:

"I had thoughts about conflict experience. I knew at a minimal level that [ethics] are very important. And, then the Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence Cooperative Research Centre [TASDCRC] had a parallel research program led by UNSW where they had an emphasis on looking at certain ethics problems associated with AI. Trusted Autonomous Systems have a significant research program underway where they had an emphasis on both ethics and law associated with AI."

?This is currently being refocused as an ethics uplift program and guided by a recent Defence report, A Method for Ethical AI in Defence. And they were interested in really good use cases that they can actually apply their ethics theory to products."

"We identified that there were a large number of casualties that were from friendly fire in conflict. There were a number of individual cases where there were large amounts of collateral damage in both Afghanistan and Iraq. There was a fuel tanker incident in Afghanistan where 200 civilians were killed. There was a case involving an AC-130 where 60 civilians were targeted by gunship at a hospital."

"We understood based on conflict there were a lot of flaws with [human decision-making], and the consequences were really bad. We sort of said, ‘Well, how can we use autonomous vision systems to help a human take that tactical pause and actually look at the situation and have something else help them look at the situation, so they can make a better-informed decision'?"

"We had a small background using vision-based artificial intelligence for drones, but not in terms of how we can exploit that artificial intelligence to achieve a better outcome." 

"That’s a person. That’s a child. That person’s got a gun. That person’s got a Red Cross. We actually go through a variety of scenarios and we are consistently looking based on our data set and our use cases: what is the best network to run in a given situation? Sometimes it’s a hybrid of two different techniques, because they want the best of both worlds in some instances — speed and accuracy of the AI."

"How you can ensure that your data is very well validated and very well represented. And then, the third aspect is ensuring that you are using the best algorithms or techniques possible for the vision-based protection."

"About five PhDs, and 10 years of development expertise have supported the project. There’s three things that are super important to our product. One is the accuracy of our vision-based AI — that we are at the edge with the best possible products. And, then once we run it through one network, we cross check it against another network as well. And, this all happens behind the scenes."

"You have to train the network with really good data that’s well-balanced and unbiased."

Stephen Bornstein, CPEng, Israel Aerospace Industries

Athena's AI software classifies a vast array of battlefield objects

 Israeli advanced technology is in the process of developing an AI "super-brain", using an array of high-powered sensors to help guide tanks and robots in their patrol of battlefields and to pinpoint enemy targets. The project has named its artificial intelligence Athena, after the Greek Goddess known for association with the attributes of wisdom, with handicraft, and with warfare. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) is in the early stages of development of a program that could be deployed within the space of a future decade.

 

Imbuing robots and military tanks and other equipment with a "brain" to function at a powerful speed in detection and decision-making that no human brain can match. A recent demonstration took place as an instructional tool and public relations gambit of the use by tanks in a combat scenario of this specialized "brain". Israel Carmel tanks were fitted with the AI, the size of a smart-phone, which collected data gleaned from infrared and radar sensors, to tag enemy fighters deep underground and within battlefield buildings.

 

 

 

It took but an instant for the data to be beamed to the commanding officer, then tansformed into a "battle menu", offering the most efficacious methodology of attacking the identified targets. The tanks' fire control and manoeuvre systems can also plug into the Athena brain permitting targets to be attacked automatically. There is also the option available for the commanding officer to produce the final decision on how to proceed, overriding the AI's instant automation attack mode and re-directing it as needed.

 

Athena's AI software classifies a vast array of battlefield objects

IAI is Israel's state-owned defence firm. It is considering fitting the Athena to robotic vehicles which could automatically patrol border fences, searching for intruders. AI defence systems are anticipated to enable Israel's armies to become more efficient, since the machines have the capacity to analyze a battlefield, generating a tactical battle plan far more expeditiously than a human mind is capable of doing.

The Israel Defence Forces are exploring AI warfare through its senior officers' involvement; some aspects of the technology could be usable for real-world situations as early as next year, according to Colonel Birenbaum, head, IDF military architecture department. What the Athena device represents is one of a number of "AI weapons" now in development around the world; which are rarely discussed in public as a matter of national security.

Fitted here on a surplus M-113, Elta’s CARMEL solution fuses several operationally proven ELTA products managed by Athena, an autonomous C6I and combat management system, and can be fitted to any armored vehicle of comparable size. (IAI photo)

"There is a bit of an arms race underway between the U.S. and China, while the Russians are also doing a lot of experiments, but are quite a bit further behind", Dr.Jack Watling, an expert on land warfare at the Rusi defence think tank in London, noted. "It is realistic, and very much available, but not necessarily deployable. And this is partly because militaries are not necessarily sure of the ramifications of using it."

In the U.S., military cadets are programming tanks with algorithms in practise sessions, where balloons are popped, the balloons representing enemy soldiers. Last November the head of the British armed forces speculated that "robot soldiers could represent as much as a quarter of the military", by the time 2030 rolls around. The rumour is that Israel made use of an AI-powered machine gun last year to assassinate one of Iran's top nuclear scientists.

Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, head of Iran's nuclear program, was killed, reportedly, by a satellite-controlled machine gun with artificial intelligence used to target him specifically. Seated beside him in the vehicle where he was killed was his wife, who was untouched, emphasizing the split-precision capability of the AI-guided gun. 

 

The Iranian authorities have put out conflicting accounts of how the scientist was killed   Reuters

Silent No More!

 

"The recent legal ruling in France sets a dangerous precedent that murderous anti–Semitism can go unpunished. It is a shocking blow not only to the family of Sarah Halimi and to French Jews, but to anyone who cares deeply about combating racism, anti–Semitism and intolerance. It must not go unchallenged."

"By bringing our voices together and speaking in one unified voice, we can make a powerful statement to the world that anti–Semitism will not be excused or tolerated."

Sacha Roytman-Dratwa, director, Combat Anti–Semitism Movement

 

"Sarah Halimi was murdered for clearly anti-Semitic motivations, for the sole reason that she was a Jew."

"This was a despicable murder that harmed not only the victim herself and her family, but also the entire Jewish community’s sense of security."

"The way to confront anti-Semitism is through education, zero tolerance, and heavy punishment.This is not the message that the court’s ruling conveys."

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Hayat

 

"It’s not for me to comment on a court ecision, but I would like to express to the family, to the relatives of the victim, and to all our Jewish citizens who were waiting for a trial, my warm support and the Republic’s determination to protect them."

"[France] does not judge citizens who are sick, we treat them… But deciding to take drugs and then ‘going crazy’ should not, in my opinion, take away your criminal responsibility."

"I would like Justice Minister [Eric Dupond-Moretti] to present a change in the law as soon as possible."

French President Emmanuel Macron

Justice for Sarah Halimi placards, April 2021 (Crédit : Consistoire israélite du Haut-Rhin)

"It comes from a very good, honourable place of not wanting to overgeneralize, but sometimes it can go too far."

"What’s a fair critique is that mainstream politicians have not figured out a genuine way to address, aside from security measures, the legitimate problem of anti-Semitism in France today – including in certain areas of France’s Muslim population."

Ethan Katz, history of Jewish-Muslim relations in France, professor of history, University of Cincinnati

There has always been an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in France, the European country that has hosted Jews for over a thousand years. Until recently, French Jews lived in a country that claimed to value its Jewish population, where fifty percent of Europe's Jews lived, a half-million, after the Holocaust years. The current atmosphere is of a growing narrative and reality of a “nouvelle antisémitisme” emanating from within the nation’s Arabo-Muslim population (~5.7 million, or 8.8% of the total French population), characterized by hostility at best, violent, public attacks in the worst-case scenarios.  

Tensions between Muslim and Jewish groups in France are not of Jewish making, but arise from a deep sense of Islamist hostility to the presence of Jews -- anywhere, overlapping the rage over the presence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The situation is historically problematic. Traoré’s murder of Sarah Halimi results from this history.  The French court and court-appointed psychiatrists saw fit to overlook this history, the vicious antagonism emanating from some portions of the Muslim-French community toward French Jews. 

The court preferred, in its secular wisdom, to make use of a centuries-old idea in France linking cannabis consumption to high rates of insanity and violent criminality among Muslims to 'understand' and excuse the anti-Semitic criminality of the torture and murder of Sarah Halimi, a defenceless, elderly Jewish woman who lived alone and was vulnerable to the religion-inspired hatred of her 27-year-old neighbour, a man who had a violent criminal record, and was intent on satisfying his urge to kill a Jew, and chose the most convenient one available to him.

Years after her suffering through a vicious beating that broke every bone in her face, before her assailant threw her over the balcony of her appartment to her death, the French court rendered its official opinions on Traoré’s sanity and deliberately perceived criminal culpability. Originally, François Molins, prosecutor in Paris’s second district, had stated the attack did not constitute an anti-Semitic hate crime, declaring Traoré unfit for trial as a result of an acute episode of cannabis-induced psychosis; the die was cast.

What is the value of a human life? A gentle, elderly Orthodox Jewish woman who is also a physician and a teacher is murdered by an inveterate criminal addicted to a huge daily intake of a psychotropic substance further fuelling his hatred of a religion and ethnicity that has been the occasion in the past of his issuing threats against her. When he was finally realizing his cherished goal of murdering her, he exulted "Allahu Akbar!", and as he beat her mercilessly he chanted chapters from the Koran.

An initial psychiatric evaluation by psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Zagury reported: “Today, it is common to observe, during delusional outbreaks…in subjects of the Muslim religion, an anti-Semitic theme: The Jew is on the side of evil, of the devil. What is usually a prejudice turns into delusional hatred.” He concluded that Traoré’s murder of Sarah Halimi "constituted a delusional if anti-Semitic act." In the years since then, nothing much has changed; the original conclusions remained and fed the response of the court.

People gather to ask justice for late Sarah Halimi on Trocadero plaza in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris [Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/AFP]

Since Sarah Halimi's murder, quite a few French Jews decided France no longer afforded them the security it guaranteed for its citizens, and have moved elsewhere, many to Israel. France no longer ranks as the country with the third-largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and the United States. A recent report of a survey of eleven European countries found France to be identified as the most dangerous place in Europe for Jews. 

"The derailment inflicted by the high court is revolting."

"Indeed, we live in a country, France, where a man who throws his dog from his fourth floor is sentenced to a year in prison, whereas if he murders an old Jewish woman, he may face no consequences whatever."

Jewish French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy

Indonesian Tragedy At Sea

"If it’s an explosion, it will be in pieces. The cracks happened gradually in some parts when it went down from 300 metres to 400 metres to 500 metres. … If there was an explosion, it would be heard by the sonar."

"We have found several pieces and parts that are believed to be parts or components that are attached to the submarine that would not come out of the ship if there had not been pressure from outside or a crack in the torpedo launcher."

"With the authentic evidence we found believed to be from the submarine, we have now moved from the `sub miss’ phase to `sub sunk'."

Indonesian Navy Chief of Staff Adm. Yudo Margono

A submarine missing since Wednesday off the coast of Bali with 53 people on board has been lost, the Indonesian navy said on Saturday.  EPA

"[The crew could still be found alive]."

"But if the submarine is in a 700-nmetre sea trough, it will be difficult for them to survive because underwater pressure will cause cracks and ruptures of the steel hull."

Connie Rahakundini Bakrie, Indonesian defence expert

"When you factor in the oxygen levels for the actual number of crew and then the time it takes to locate, assessment of recovery, then engagement in that recovery that timeline looks even longer."

Natalie Sambhi, expert on Indonesian military and security, Verve Research

"We've indicated that we will help in any way we can."

"We operate very different submarines from this one, but the Australian Defence Force and Australian Defence organization will work with defence operations in Indonesia to determine what we may be able to do."

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne

Time has not been on the side of rescue operations in the urgency of the missing Indonesian Navy submarine with 53 crew aboard missing since Wednesday, lost in the Bali Sea. Speculation with respect to the outcome of the disaster rests on two crumbling pillars; either oxygen would be depleted leading to death, or the submarine has already been crushed by immense water pressure.

Search helicopters and additional ships heading to the area where contact was lost with the KRI Nanggala-402 on Wednesday left Bali and a Java naval base. The head of the Indonesian submarine fleet was aboard the 44-year-old refurbished submarine as it prepared to conduct a torpedo drill. Officials feel that if the submarine was still intact it would have sufficient air to last only until Saturday at dawn.

"So far we haven't found it ... but with the equipment available we should be able to find the location", advised Achmad Riad, spokesman for the Indonesian military. Six tonnes of equipment was flown to a base to assist with the search, which included underwater balloons to help lift the vessel. There is speculation over whether the submarine had lost power during its dive and was unable to carry out emergency procedures, descending to a depth of 600 -- 700 metres, well beyond survivability limits.

Indonesian Navy Chief of Staff Yudo Margono announced that an aerial search had earlier spotted an oil spill close by the last location of the submarine, where an object with "high magnetic force" had been seen "floating" at a 40 to 100 metre depth. A depth of up to 400 metres could be withstood by the diesel-electric-powered submarine, but any greater depth could be fatal in the Bali Sea where depths of over 1,500 are known. Commander Harry Setiawan, commander of the Indonesian submarine fleet was on board.

The submarine, in active service in Indonesia since 1981, underwent a refit in South Korea in 2012, which brought it to good condition. Australia, India, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States all have sent specialized vessels or aircraft to Indonesia's aid in response to its assistance request. U.S.Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in speaking with his Indonesian counterpart offered undersea search assets, along with the U.S. military's P-8 Poseidon aircraft assisting in the search for the submarine.

 

The two Australian Navy ships heading toward the search area included a frigate with a helicopter and special sonar capabilities. The Indonesian fleet has five submarines in operation. It has planned to modernize its defence capabilities for some time, in recognition that some of its equipment suffers from elderly fatigue, a result of which has been a few fatal accidents in recent years.

The "Untouchable" Chief of Defence Staff

"I was not to mention certain things about our relationships, our personal lives. The consequences were always the same -- that I had to stay silent."

"Definitely, he gave me very many consequences if I was not following his orders."

"He fathered two children to me."

"I definitely feel like there will not be justice for me, and that’s OK because if my coming forward can change everything for other women to come forward and change our policies, that's OK with me."

"I was first in the infantry when we were allowed to join, and I knew I was taking a hard road."

"Women are often looked down on, or shuffled out of positions quickly if they speak the truth. The guilt women feel also puts them in a prison, where they are made to feel shame, and that's by the very institution that they're committed to serve, and still want to serve."

Major Kellie Brennan, Canadian Armed Forces

Maj. Kellie Brennan told the House of Commons status of women committee on Thursday that she was subject to unfair power imbalances throughout her years with the Canadian Armed Forces.

For years there have been allegations that the Canadian military is rife with sexual harassment. Pledges were made on the part of Ministers of National Defense, of the heads of the military, that the situation would be investigated and if charges were found to be accurate, committees would be set up to examine the situation further and make recommendations that would have the effect of purging the military from situations and enlisted female members of the Armed Forces would no longer suffer gender discrimination and unwanted sexual harassment.

 

When General Jon Vance, former Chief of the Defence Staff stepped down at the end of his mandate in that position, he was replaced by another general, who, like Vance, pledged he intended to fully involve himself in ensuring that the service would be freed of sexual harassment against its female members. Soon after General Vance stepped down, it became public knowledge that  he was being investigated for his own behaviour of sexual impropriety.

 

And soon after that Vice-Admiral Art McDonald, who had succeeded General Vance as Chief of the Defence Staff, was also being investigated for the very same reasons. It didn't stop just there; other high-ranking and prominent officers in the military were also revealed to have had inappropriate sexual contact with women under their command, and Vice-Admiral McDonald too stepped down from the position he had so recently been installed in.

 

Ironically, one of the major complainants, Major Kellie Brennan, who had been coerced by General Vance into a two-decade-long sexual alliance, stated that the night before Vance had been sworn in as Chief of the Defence Staff in July of 2015, he wanted to have her opinion on the text of a speech he was prepared to deliver the following day where he planned to condem inappropriate sexual behaviour, warning it would not be tolerated under his command.

 

Then-Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance responds to a question during a news conference Friday, June 26, 2020 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

 A House of Commons committee set up to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct in the military has been interviewing witnesses, and Major Kellie Brennan was one of those witnesses, one of many although her case would appear to be quite unique since it involves a twenty-year liaison with her commanding officer. Hugely inappropriate, if not illegal under military rules, engagement between a superior officer and someone under his command. Major Brennan testified hearing General Vance boast of being untouchable, that he 'owned' the military police in the process of investigating charges of sexual misconduct against him.

The Commons Status of Women Committee heard from Major Brennan that the former Chief of the Defence Staff ordered her to lie when being interviewed by military police investigating her allegations of impropriety against the general. Throughout their 20-year intimate relationship, she stated she felt she had little choice other than to continue, as a result of his senior rank, revealing that Vance fathered two of her children, testifying as well that he had not provided any financial support for those children.

A military police unit, the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, is in the process of investigating General Vance on the basis of those and other allegations, just as they are investigating his successor in the position of Chief of the Defence Staff, and other high-ranking officers, all accused of sexual misconduct. Major Brennan explained that after she had been interviewed by the CFNIS she asked whether they would investigate Vance properly in view of his elevated position, but no answer was forthcoming.

"As [Vance] told me, he was untouchable. He owned the CFNIS. I feel there will not be justice for me". She had turned audio recordings, texts and emails over to the CFNIS to aid in their investigation, but she had little-to-no confidence that the investigation would be carried out in a neutral and professional manner. The Status of Women Committee and the Commons Defence Committee both have been holding hearings into sexual misconduct in the Canadian Forces allegations. 

In a February 21 interview on Global News, Major Brennan provided details of her 20-year relationship with Vance. She emphasized that it was common knowledge among senior military leaders that they had such an inappropriate relationship; she had herself informed some of those senior military leaders. The committee also heard from Major Brennan that she had worked with Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan in Toronto at a time when he was in the military -- both of them under General Vance -- before Sajjan's appointment as Minister of National Defence.

Harjit Sajjan, an elected Liberal Member of Parliament whom Prime Minister Justin Trudeau named in 2015 to the Cabinet position of Minister of National Defence, was "under control", General Vance had informed Major Brennan. 

 

As Chief of the Defence Staff, Vance had notoriously thrown his then-second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Mark Norman 'under the bus' as a sop to a furious Justin Trudeau who accused the Vice-Admiral of having divulged Cabinet information to the press over a badly-needed supply vessel for the Canadian Navy that the Liberal government was planning to cancel.

 

Restoring a Pre-Holocaust Lost Population

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob.  AP Photo/Yad Vashem Photo Archives

"The Jewish population has not returned to what it was before the war, so this is quite impressive to think that the Holocaust of the Jews is still visible. The damage is still visible and not yet recovered to its early dimensions."

"[Declining numbers in countries are attributed to] low birth rates, frequent intermarriage, identificational drift, aging, and emigration."

"[COVID-19] caused dramatic increase in the cases of death and decline in certain parts of the world, slowing [the] rate of growth." 

"Jews who also hold another religious identification [are excluded from the tally along with] non-Jews of Jewish ancestry [and non-Jews with] family connections to Jews."

"[A result of living in contemporary society is] much greater interaction with different groups. We wish to keep a definition which is more or less similar to what the situation was in past generations."

"If you wish to compare [the Jewish] population of today with a population fifty or 100 years ago, these interactions did not exist very much." 

Sergio Della Pergola, professor emeritus, co-author, annual survey, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Israel: 6,153,500 (grew 10.2%)
United States: 5,700,000 (grew 5.1%)
France: 453,000 (shrank 5.6%)
Canada: 395,000 (grew 5.3%)
United Kingdom: 290,000 (shrank 0.3%)
Argentina: 180,300 (shrank 0.8%)
Russia: 172,000 (shrank 11.3%)
Germany: 116,000 (shrank 2.5%)
Australia: 113,400 (grew 1.3%)
Brazil: 93,200 (shrank 2.2%)

"The large Soviet Jewish population in areas that the Germans failed to occupy began to leave in the late 1970s because of discrimination in the U.S.S.R. and the possibility of a better life abroad."

"Similar stories on a much smaller scale occurred earlier in several Soviet bloc countries."

Professor Daniel Stone, study of Jewish history in the Soviet Union, University of Winnipeg

 

"Throughout history, the inherent weakness of a landless and powerless minority vis-a-vis territorially based societies and their constituted powers often put the Jewish people in a condition of dependency and instability, and translated into powerful ups and downs in the Jewish presence."

Institute for Jewish Policy Research study

The results of a demographic study of worldwide Jewish populations illuminates the fact that world Jewry has failed, over the course of 80 years since the beginning of the Second World War, to restore its presence to pre-Holocaust numbers. A reality that testifies to the success of the Nazi plan to destroy the presence of Europe's Jews. Europe, before the war, held a major share of the world's population of Jews. At the present time, Jewish presence in Europe totals 1.3 million, roughly 0.1 of its entire population. And of that number the presence of Jews in Europe is shrinking with time. 

 

Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned.  AFP/Getty Images

Two of every three Jews living in Europe during the war years was caught up in the vast genocidal project of Nazi Germany to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, an ambition that succeeded in annihilating six million Jewish children and adults. A systematic, collaborative plan that succeeded so well that numbers have still not returned to what they were pre-Holocaust. At the current level, the Jewish global community numbers almost 15 million people. In 1939 that number was 16.5 million, according to the World Jewish Population report of 2020.

 

Hebrew University of Jerusalem carries out an annual survey, drawing on data it finds available on 100 countries in a count of the core population of ethnic and religious Jewish numbers. Israel was seen with a strong positive growth rate in its Jewish population, an estimated 3% yearly growth, given a high birth rate and immigration. Stable or declining figures were seen elsewhere. Overall, there was a 92,400 increase from 2019 figures to 2020 in Israel. 46 percent of the world's Jewish population lives in Israel, with the United States accounting for 39 percent. 

 

German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops.  OFF/AFP/Getty Images

Canada is identified as one of the few countries where its demographic of Jews has been on a slow increase, centering in the Greater Toronto area, which includes people coming from "Russia, Israel and Iran". Canada is home to an estimated 400,000 Jews, representing the fourth-highest concentration of Jews in the world, according to the report. Most other countries' Jewish population were found to be in decline, to which "low birth rates, frequent intermarriage, identification drift, aging and emigration" are mostly attributed.

Israel's 'law of return' enables those of Jewish descent to immigrate, contributing to Israel's growth rate within the general population. Approaching numbers that existed before the catastrophic death toll of the Holocaust years "may take decades" more, the report stated. The population of Jews in Europe is lower than it has been in over a thousand years, and is declining further, according to a study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, issued in 2020. Some nine percent of the global Jewish population lives in Europe. It was almost 90 percent in the late 19th Century.

 

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier.   AP Photo/USHMM/LOC

France, the United Kingdom and Germany host most of the European Jewish population. Eastern Europe records the largest losses, much of it occasioned after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. A large majority of East European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, leading to many survivors vacating territories post-WWII they considered to be hostile to their presence. Those Jews who lived in Poland, and Soviet citizens had the highest casualties during the Holocaust, according to figures produced by the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Close to two million Jews in the past half-century, left Eastern Europe, in search of better opportunities, while countries in Western Europe saw a loss of some 8.5 percent of their Jewish populations.