作者：Flipboard

CNN / Maureen O’Hare / Sep 16, 2020
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/scenic-airport-landings-2020/index.html

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The world’s most scenic airport airport approaches, as ranked annually by booking platform PrivateFly, are this year looking more glorious than ever.

More than 6,000 frequent fliers and aviation enthusiasts took part in the 2020 poll, with voting taking place in February and March, just before travel restrictions to fight Covid-19 were introduced around the world.

The winner, for the third year in a row, is Ireland’s Donegal Airport. On the island’s northwest coast, there are sweeping views of rugged coastline, pristine beaches and the steep slopes of Mount Errigal on the approach to this regional airport in Carrickfinn.

While the top spot was held by an old favorite, there are six new entries in this new year’s top 10.

The highest new entry is Tanzania’s Msembe Airstrip, in second place, which serves East Africa’s Ruaha National Park.

Skiathos Alexandros Papadiamantis Airport, at number three, is also making its debut. The airport on the Greek island of Skiathos, in the Aegean Sea, is popular with planespotters thanks to its short runway and close proximity to a public road.

“Many of us have flown less frequently this year, but these ultimate destination landings are a welcome reminder of the uplifting power of travel and aviation — and a jaw-dropping inspiration for some memorable future flights,” Adam Twidell, CEO of the UK-based booking platform for private jet charters, said in a press release.

Florida’s Orlando Melbourne International Airport was the only top 10 entry for the United States, holding onto its ranking as the fourth most scenic airport view in the world.

“First, you see the beautiful Atlantic Ocean and then pass over the Indian and Banana Rivers,” one 2019 voter said of this descent.

“Then, there is a pass over the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where you may get a glimpse of a rocket on a launch pad.”

Scotland’s Barra Airport approach, which offers stunning coastal views, slipped down three spots to fifth place, while Bora Bora’s Motu Mute Airport is ranked sixth best in the world. It’s built on a island on a crystal-blue lagoon in French Polynesia.

St Maarten’s Princess Juliana International Airport, where planes swoop low over Maho Beach, is at number eight, and the Seychelles’ Praslin Island Airport at number nine.

The top 10 was rounded out by two new entries: Dubai International Airport and Fiji’s Nadi International Airport.St Maarten’s Princess Juliana International Airport, where planes swoop low over Maho Beach, is at number eight, and the Seychelles’ Praslin Island Airport at number nine.

The top 10 was rounded out by two new entries: Dubai International Airport and Fiji’s Nadi International Airport.

For the first time, the poll also revealed the highest-ranked airport by region. The Asian winner, Malé (Velana) International Airport the Maldives, was the only one not to also break the top 10.

The airport is a base for Trans Maldivian Airways, the world’s largest seaplane operator, which is famed for its unconventionally clad “barefoot pilots.”

New York Times / Norimitsu Onishi / Sep 15, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/world/europe/coronavirus-europe.html

PARIS — In the early days of the pandemic, President Emmanuel Macron exhorted the French to wage “war” against the coronavirus. Today, his message is to “learn how to live with the virus.”

From full-fledged conflict to cold war containment, France and much of the rest of Europe have opted for coexistence as infections keep rising, summer recedes into a risk-filled autumn and the possibility of a second wave haunts the continent.

Having abandoned hopes of eradicating the virus or developing a vaccine within weeks, Europeans have largely gone back to work and school, leading lives as normally as possible amid an enduring pandemic that has already killed nearly 215,000 in Europe.

The approach contrasts sharply to the United States, where restrictions to protect against the virus have been politically divisive and where many regions have pushed ahead with reopening schools, shops and restaurants without having baseline protocols in place. The result has been nearly as many deaths as in Europe, though among a far smaller population.

Europeans, for the most part, are putting to use the hard-won lessons from the pandemic’s initial phase: the need to wear masks and practice social distancing, the importance of testing and tracing, the critical advantages of reacting nimbly and locally. All of those measures, tightened or loosened as needed, are intended to prevent the kind of national lockdowns that paralyzed the continent and crippled economies early this year.

“It’s not possible to stop the virus,” said Emmanuel André, a leading virologist in Belgium and former spokesman for the government’s Covid-19 task force. “It’s about maintaining equilibrium. And we only have a few tools available to do that.”

He added, “People are tired. They don’t want to go to war anymore.”

Martial language has given way to more measured assurances.

“We are in a living-with-the-virus phase,” said Roberto Speranza, the health minister of Italy, the first country in Europe to impose a national lockdown. In an interview with La Stampa newspaper, Mr. Speranza said that though a “zero infection rate does not exist,” Italy was now far better equipped to handle a surge in infections.

“There is not going to be another lockdown,” Mr. Speranza said.

Still, risks remain.

New infections have soared in recent weeks, especially in France and in Spain. France recorded more than 10,000 cases on a single day last week. The jump is not surprising since the overall number of tests being performed — now about a million a week — has increased steadily and is now more than 10 times what it was in the spring.

The death rate of about 30 people a day is a small fraction of what it was at its peak when hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 died every day in France. That is because those infected now tend to be younger and health officials have learned how to treat Covid-19 better, said William Dab, an epidemiologist and a French former national health director.

“The virus is still circulating freely, we’re controlling poorly the chain of infections, and inevitably high-risk people — the elderly, the obese, the diabetic — will end up being affected,” Mr. Dab said.

In Germany, too, young people are overrepresented among the rising cases of infections.

While the German health authorities are testing over a million people a week, a debate has started over the relevance of infection rates in providing a snapshot of the pandemic.

At the beginning of September, only 5 percent of confirmed cases had to go to the hospital for treatment, according to data from the country’s health authority. During the height of the pandemic in April, as many as 22 percent of those infected ended up in hospital care.

Hendrik Streeck, head of virology at a research hospital in the German city of Bonn, cautioned that the pandemic should not be judged merely by infection numbers, but instead by deaths and hospitalizations.

“We’ve have reached a phase where the number of infections alone is no longer as meaningful,” Mr. Streeck said.

Much of Europe was unprepared for the arrival of the coronavirus, lacking masks, test kits and other basic equipment. Even nations that came out better than others, like Germany, registered far greater death tolls than Asian countries that were much closer to the source of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, but that reacted more quickly.

National lockdowns helped get the pandemic under control across Europe. But infection rates began rising again over the summer after countries opened up and people, especially the young, resumed socializing, often without adhering to social-distancing guidelines.

Even as infections have been rising, Europeans have returned to work and to school this month, creating more opportunity for the virus to spread.

“We control infection chains better compared to March or April when we were completely powerless,” said Mr. Dab, the former French national health director. “Now the challenge for the government is to find a balance between reviving the economy and protecting people’s health.”

“And it’s not an easy balance,” Mr. Dab added. “They want to reassure people so they’ll go back to work, but at the same time, we have to make them worried so that they’ll keep respecting preventive measures.’’

Among those measures, masks are now widely available across Europe, and governments, for the most part, agree on the need to wear them. Early this year, faced with shortages, the French government discouraged people from wearing masks, saying they did not protect wearers and could even be harmful.

Wearing a face covering has become part of the lives of Europeans, most of whom last March still regarded with suspicion and incomprehension mask-wearing tourists from Asia, where the practice has been widespread for the past two decades.

Instead of applying national lockdowns with little regard to regional differences, the authorities — even in a highly centralized nation like France — have begun responding more rapidly to local hot spots with specific measures.

On Monday, for example, Bordeaux officials announced that, faced with a surge in infections, they would limit private gatherings to 10 people, restrict visits to retirement homes and forbid standing at bars.

In Germany, while the new school year has started with mandatory physical classes around the country, the authorities have warned that traditional events, like carnival or Christmas markets, may have to be curtailed or even canceled. Soccer games in the Bundesliga will continue to be played without fans until at least the end of October.

In Britain, where mask wearing is not especially widespread or strictly enforced, the authorities have tightened the rules on family gatherings in Birmingham, where infections have been rising. In Belgium, people are restricted to limiting their social activity to a bubble of six people.

In Italy, the government has sealed off villages, hospitals or even migrant shelters to contain emerging clusters. Antonio Miglietta, an epidemiologist who conducted contact tracing in a quarantined building in Rome in June, said that months of battling the virus had helped officials extinguish outbreaks before they got out of control, the way they did in northern Italy this year.

“We got better at it,” he said.

Governments still need to get better at other things.

At the peak of the epidemic, France, like many other European nations, was so desperately short of test kits that many sick people were never able to get tested.

Today, though France carries out a million tests a week, the widespread testing has created delays in getting appointments and results — up to a week in Paris. People can now get tested regardless of their symptoms or the history of their contacts, and officials have not established priority tests that would speed up results for the people at highest risk to themselves and others.

“We could have a more targeted testing policy that would probably be more useful in fighting the virus than what we’re doing now,” Lionel Barrand, president of the Union of Young Medical Biologists, said, adding that the French government should restrict the tests to people with a prescription and engage in targeted screening campaigns to fight the emergence of clusters.

Experts said that French health officials must also greatly improve contact-tracing efforts that proved crucial in reining in the spread of the virus in Asian nations.

After the end of its two-month lockdown in May, France’s social security system put in place a manual contact-tracing system to track infected people and their contacts. But the system, which relies greatly on the skills and experience of human contact tracers, has produced mixed results.

At the start of the campaign, each infected person gave the contact tracer an average of 2.4 other names, most likely family members. The campaign improved steadily as the number of names rose to more than five in July, according to a recent report by the French health authorities.

But since then, the average figure has fallen gradually to less than three contacts per person, while the number of Covid-19 confirmed cases has increased tenfold in the meantime, rising from a seven-day average of about 800 new cases per day in mid-July to an average of some 8,000 per day currently, according to figures compiled by The New York Times.

At the height of the epidemic, most people in France were extremely critical of the government’s handling of the epidemic. But polls show that a majority now believe that the government will handle a possible second wave better than the first one.

Jérôme Carrière, a police officer who was visiting Paris from his home in Metz, in northern France, said it was a good sign that most people were now wearing masks.

“In the beginning, like all French people, we were shocked and worried,” Mr. Carrière, 55, said, adding that two older family friends had died of Covid-19. “And then, we adjusted and went back to our normal lives.”

The New York Times / Ilana Kaplan / Sep 12, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/style/paris-hilton-documentary.html

Lounging cross-legged on her bed at home in Beverly Hills and wearing a turquoise hoodie, Paris Hilton appeared at ease. There were none of the affectations that have defined her public image for two decades: the flat baby voice, the tiny, shimmering outfits, the faux ditziness, the stance that everything cool was “hot.”

“I built this kind of shield around me and kind of this persona, almost to hide behind, because I’ve been through so much where I just didn’t even want to think about it anymore,” Ms. Hilton, 39, said over Zoom. Behind her stood a towering mirror illuminated by a sea of LED lights that refracted off her platinum hair like diamonds.

Before there were influencers, there was Paris Hilton: a beautiful blank slate of a person onto whom all kinds of ideas and brand sponsorships could be projected. She was the celebrity burnished, if not created, by a sex tape. She was the face of the Sidekick (and the victim of a Sidekick hack that brought more of her personal life into the public eye). She was a reality star, trying her hand at manual labor as a rich person. She recorded music, modeled, appeared at parties, made TV cameos, wrote an advice book. And she was mercilessly criticized, written off as “famous for being famous.”

Regardless of whether that characterization was fair at the time, it seems pretty hard to defend these days. Ms. Hilton spends more than 250 days of the year traveling the world as a D.J., raking in a reported $1 million per gig. She oversees more than 19 product lines, including fragrances, clothing (for humans and pets) and accessories. And so many people are now famous for being famous, she might now seem more venerable pioneer than contemptible fly-by-night.

Now, moreover, she’s ready to talk about the past. On Sept. 14, the documentary “This Is Paris” will be released on YouTube. It aims to crack the facade she created in the aughts, focusing instead on the decade that preceded her fame.

Ms. Hilton said that she gave the director, Alexandra Dean, full creative control over the project. “It was really difficult for me because I’m so used to having so much control and ‘The Simple Life,’ just having everything perfect and edited,” she said. “And with this, I had just to let go of all that control and let them use everything.”

There are moments of opulence in the film — jet-setting around the world, endless racks of gowns and stilettos and closets stacked with jewelry she’s never worn — and she’s quick to remind that she’s “never been photographed in the same thing twice.”

But at the heart of the documentary is trauma, stemming from Ms. Hilton’s years spent in boarding schools for troubled teens. The last one she attended was Provo Canyon School, a psychiatric residential treatment center in Utah, where she would spend 11 months.

“They just assumed it was like a normal boarding school because that’s the way that they portray it to parents and people who are putting their children in these places,” Ms. Hilton said of her parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton (her mother appears in the documentary). Before the making of the film, Ms. Hilton had never told her family about what happened to her.

The night she arrived at Provo, Ms. Hilton recalls in the documentary, she was taken from her bed as if she was being kidnapped. She said she and her peers were routinely given mystery pills, and when Ms. Hilton refused to take them, she would be sent to solitary confinement for sometimes 20 hours at a time without clothing. She also claims emotional, verbal and physical abuse from teachers and administrators. “It was just like living in hell,” Ms. Hilton said.

The school has noted on its website that it changed ownership in 2000, after Ms. Hilton was a student. A representative from Provo said the school does “not condone or promote any form of abuse.” They added that “any and all alleged/suspected abuse is reported to our state regulatory authorities, law enforcement and Child Protective Services immediately as required.”

In the years since, Ms. Hilton has grappled with nightmares and avoided therapy, which played a big part in her residential treatment programs. “From being at Provo and those types of schools, just the therapists in there I felt were just not good people,” she said. “I just have never, ever trusted them.”

The experience broke other forms of trust, too, Ms. Hilton said. In the documentary, she can be seen installing spyware in her house before her boyfriend stays there while she’s out of town.

“That definitely affected me in my relationships because I just didn’t know what real love was, and from being abused, you just get kind of used to it almost where you think it’s normal,” Ms. Hilton said.

Later events reinforced that belief. When a sex tape of her and her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon was leaked online without her consent in 2003, the footage received widespread attention, and subjected Ms. Hilton to ridicule.

“To have that come out, such a private moment, and for the whole world to be watching it and laughing like it’s some sort of entertainment, was just traumatizing,” Ms. Hilton said. Still, in some ways, the exposure turbocharged her career as something other than an heiress, leading to reality show gigs and other deals; her friend and former assistant, Kim Kardashian, followed the same path to worldwide fame a few years later.

“Kim and I have been friends since we were little girls and have traveled the world together,” Ms. Hilton said. “I could not be more proud of everything she has accomplished.”

Publicly, Ms. Hilton has not always voiced support for women who have come forward with stories of abuse. But since she told the reporter Irin Carmon, in 2017, that the women who accused President Donald Trump — a family friend — of sexual misconduct were looking for “fame” and “attention,” her perspective has changed.

“I’m happy that there’s been the #MeToo movement where people have completely changed their views on that,” Ms. Hilton said. “But at the start, it was just really unfair for a woman to be treated that way because somebody exposed them.”

She learned to mask her emotions. “In every relationship I’ve always been like, ‘Oh, this is amazing. I’ve never been so happy,’” she said. “It was just something I would just say to the world, even when the worst things in the world were happening to me in my relationships. I didn’t want anyone to know because I didn’t want my brand to be affected.”

Originally scheduled to premiere at Tribeca Film Festival in April, “This Is Paris” is one of a handful of celebrity documentaries and docu-series to be released by streaming giants in recent years. Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber and the Jonas Brothers have all joined Ms. Hilton in giving an “inside look” at their lives.

Of course, depending how involved celebrities are with their documentaries, a compelling narrative can be a way to build up or defend their public image.

Susanne Daniels, YouTube’s global head of original content, said she doesn’t see these documentaries as a “defense.” “They know that their image is complex, and at some point, they’re ready to share all the complexities of why they’ve made the choices they have,” she said, of the celebrities. “I think to a certain extent it can be considered brave.”

For Ms. Daniels, every documentary YouTube takes on is “a leap of faith” that there’s going to be a “surprise or twist.” “I thought to myself, ‘OK, either this is a really good hook that these producers created because they’re really good producers, in which case maybe they could make it work, or just for real, it’s going to be incredibly compelling,” Ms. Daniels said. She was won over. “I hope the audience is, too, because I think Paris is deserving of that revelation,” she said.

Now, Ms. Hilton hopes to use her brand for good. She wants to expose institutions that administer cruel psychiatric treatment to minors, working with former students who said they had similar experiences to do so. “I’m really going to dedicate a lot of my life to helping make this happen and shutting these places down,” she said.

She’s no longer interested in playing a character, she said. “I’m happy for people to know that I am not a dumb blonde,” she said. “I’m just very good at pretending to be one.”

Bloomberg / Max Zimmerman / Sep 11, 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-10/what-the-world-can-learn-from-life-under-tokyo-s-rail-tracks?srnd=premium-asia

The spaces beneath elevated railways generally get a bad rap. At least that’s the case in the U.S. and mainland Europe, where they are often considered dark, dangerous and noisy.

In Tokyo, however, the undertracks’ reputation is rather different.

These spaces are more than just storage and parking. They are agglomerations of cozy restaurants and shops that are intimately tied to the identity of certain commercial districts. Perhaps the best-known example is near the business district of Yurakucho, where the latest overhaul of the area’s brick archways opened on Sept. 10. The arches traditionally house a jumble of old-school pubs and tiny eateries illuminated by red paper lanterns; the revamped section will modernize the interior with a walkway lit by floor lamps that guide visitors through zones of dining, retail and nightlife.

Developments outside the city center have expanded the possibilities, too: Workshops, nurseries, college dormitories and medical clinics can all be found under the tracks.

Japan’s first elevated rail was completed near Yurakucho in 1910. It was designed to house commercial facilities from the start; the first restaurant owner set up shop below the rail a decade later. As Japan’s economic growth accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s, the rail network boomed. Operators began to raise more trains to help ease congestion, integrating commercial facilities below some of their tracks. Since 1959, 112.2 kilometers (69.7 miles) of ground-level track have been elevated, according to government data.

“Before the war, and after in the 1960s, there was a lot of population and demographic pressure in Tokyo. So any inch of space was really valuable and people were really colonizing everywhere,” said Jorge Almazán, an associate professor at Keio University’s Center for Space and Environment Design Engineering and author of “Emergent Tokyo,” which explores the city’s use of undertrack space.

Japan’s early adoption of undertrack for commercial activities is relatively unusual. In cities like New York and Chicago, railways often had to be built over existing roads leaving local residents complaining of noise, lack of sunlight, pollution and filth. Elevated highways in many U.S. cities face similar criticism, and European cities like Paris encountered the same problems in building elevated rails, with the added issue of preserving the historic architecture around them. While centrally planned, public projects like the Promenade Plantée and New York’s High Line aim to revive these areas, the undertracks were — and still are — largely considered to be dead spaces that divide neighborhoods.

In Tokyo, elevated structures were often built over wider passages or in undeveloped areas outside the city center, leaving the space underneath available for use. Rather than creating a monolithic rail-and-road partition through the city, occupied undertrack spaces remained somewhat permeable and carried less of a stigma.

Japan’s early adoption of undertrack for commercial activities is relatively unusual. In cities like New York and Chicago, railways often had to be built over existing roads leaving local residents complaining of noise, lack of sunlight, pollution and filth. Elevated highways in many U.S. cities face similar criticism, and European cities like Paris encountered the same problems in building elevated rails, with the added issue of preserving the historic architecture around them. While centrally planned, public projects like the Promenade Plantée and New York’s High Line aim to revive these areas, the undertracks were — and still are — largely considered to be dead spaces that divide neighborhoods.

In Tokyo, elevated structures were often built over wider passages or in undeveloped areas outside the city center, leaving the space underneath available for use. Rather than creating a monolithic rail-and-road partition through the city, occupied undertrack spaces remained somewhat permeable and carried less of a stigma.

Newly raised lines in Tokyo’s suburbs, however, present similar issues to those in American cities. As of April 2020, 19.5 kilometers of overhead track was under construction with 12.8 kilometers more in the pipeline, according to government data. Many of these projects are located in residential neighborhoods, where rail operators have been less eager to develop the real estate.

“On the outskirts, the undertrack’s image is the same as in America: fragmenting features that are unsafe,” according to Kazuhisa Matsuda, an architect whose latest work includes an undertrack project near Tokyo’s southern border.

In these areas, Tokyo’s conventional model of retailers and restaurants would be unprofitable. Instead, novel uses that draw on local characteristics and resources have sprung up.

When a rail line near Kamata — a neighborhood not far from the city’s Haneda airport — was elevated in 2012, the area beneath the track was initially slated to become parking. Matsuda describes the adjacent road as having little foot traffic, especially after nightfall. “It was not the type of place a woman would want to walk alone. Kamata is not really that safe a place from the start,” he said.

So a group of local designers, architects, artists and businessmen including Matsuda proposed leveraging the area’s base of small factories and craftsmen. The result was Koca, a coworking space aimed at connecting creatives with each other and local workshops that can serve their needs.

“Kamata is on the edge of Tokyo so it was a different approach here. The focus was how to develop something that will take root in the local area,” Matsuda said. The undertrack now hosts another factory next to Koca, with plans for more facilities extending to the next station north.

It’s just one example of the practice. Under a stretch of the Chuo Line, which reaches deep into western Tokyo, East Japan Railway Co. has developed not just its own shopping complex but also student dormitories serving nearby universities as well as a nursery, an event space, shared offices, restaurants and public seating. In Nerima Ward, a highly residential area of western Tokyo, Seibu Railway Co. opened a “medical mall” with three specialized clinics and a pharmacy, reducing residents’ need to travel to hospitals for minor issues.

While Yurakucho’s most recent revamp has been led by owner JR East, key factors for many of Tokyo’s successful undertrack spaces are emptiness and economy. “One of the lessons is that when you have these kind of difficult spaces — these gaps or cracks in the city where somehow public space doesn’t work — let many entrepreneurs in, giving them very low rental prices and giving them freedom,” Almazán said.

“Historically we see that is the case, and they can turn that space into a magnet, even a connector, not a barrier.”

Al Jazeera / Sep 13, 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/clashes-arrests-yellow-vest-protests-return-france-200912161751866.html

The French police fired tear gas and arrested more than 250 people in Paris as “yellow vest” protesters returned to the capital’s streets in force for the first time since the coronavirus lockdown.

The “yellow vest” movement, named after motorists’ high-visibility jackets, began in late 2018 in protest against fuel taxes and economic reform, posing a big challenge to President Emmanuel Macron as demonstrations spread across France.

On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the starting points of two authorised marches.

While one cortege set off without incident, the other march was held up as police clashed with groups who left the designated route and set fire to rubbish bins and a car.

Some of the protesters wore black clothes and carried the flag of an anti-fascist movement, suggesting the presence of radical demonstrators dubbed “black blocs” often blamed for violence at street marches in France.

The police arrested 256 people by 6pm (16:00 GMT), many of them for carrying items such as tools that could be used as weapons, including screwdrivers, ice axes and knives.

The country’s daily cases of COVID-19 reached a record high of nearly 10,000 on Thursday.

A day later, French Prime Minister Jean Castex announced plans to speed up testing and toughen measures in certain cities as the government seeks to avoid a repeat of the nationwide lockdown earlier this year.

Police called on demonstrators to respect coronavirus measures in Paris, which is among France’s high-risk “red zones” and where it is compulsory to wear a face mask on the street.

On Friday, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced slightly tougher rules on how police use controversial rubber-coated bullets and other crowd-control weapons before the marches.

Officers must now ask supervisors for permission to fire the projectiles, which have been responsible for injuries. Jerome Rodrigues emerged as a prominent leader after losing an eye to a police rubber bullet during a protest.

‘Last stand’

Commenting on the relatively low turnout on Saturday, Michael, a 43-year-old protester in the crowd at Place de Wagram, told AFP news agency, “The movement is dead, I’ll say that clearly, but we’re here because we have nothing to lose. This is a kind of last stand.”

Another protester, a 50-year-old civil servant who asked to remain anonymous, said “social and economic robbery” and “our fundamental freedoms increasingly [coming] under attack” drove him out onto the streets.

Pensioners Pascale and Patrick, who had travelled to Paris from Crolles in southeast France, said they were sure “the movement isn’t running out of steam”.

Veterans of demonstrations at traffic roundabouts in provincial towns, the pair said they “don’t want this world for our children and grandchildren, where we’re subjugated by this oligarchy”.

“We’re anti-capitalist, anti-system, former hippies and yellow vests,” they said.

Elsewhere in France, several hundred “yellow vest” protesters gathered in the southwestern city Toulouse in defiance of a ban authorities said had been imposed over coronavirus infection risks.

Police tried to disperse the group with tear gas, a scene matched in Lyon, while people also gathered in Bordeaux and other towns.

“I didn’t back the yellow vests at first but things have only got worse for people in poverty. Nothing’s changed after two years of struggle,” a 53-year-old man calling himself Dodo said at the Toulouse protest.

VICE / Laura Wagner / Sep 11, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kp3v9/what-do-you-call-a-reporter-who-doesnt-report-the-news-bob-woodward

Legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward reveals in his new book that Donald Trump told him in February of this year that he knew exactly how deadly the novel coronavirus was, and that he was deliberately downplaying the threat to the public. In a bizarre year in media, it’s perhaps the most bizarre development of all: The most famous investigative reporter in the United States getting the most explosive scoop imaginable, and declining to publish it at a time when doing so could have saved lives.

Why did he do this? A day after the information came out, no one knows. Woodward has no convincing explanation for why he didn’t tell the public about this, and the strongest defense his own nominal employer will mount is a narrow, mechanical one.

Here’s the Washington Post yesterday, reporting on the reporting that a Washington Post reporter did not report when it could have most mattered:

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu…This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

The next month:

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

(The taped conversation was published by CNN.)

Woodward—despite having, he said, no agreement with the White House requiring him to hoard information from the interviews for the book—did not report that the president was, by his own admission, deliberately downplaying the seriousness of the crisis. Nor did he pass along the information to one of his colleagues so they could try and track down the information and report it themselves.

His main defense for sitting on the information was that he didn’t know if what the president was saying about the deadliness of the coronavirus was true. His second line of defense was to downplay the value of his own explosive scoop. (“If I had done the story at that time about what he knew in February,” he told the Associated Press, “that’s not telling us anything we didn’t know.”)

Neither line of argument is remotely believable. Woodward had weeks and then months to determine that what Trump said was true and significant and still didn’t report it, even as it became clear that the president’s commitment to carrying out the plan he described in February was costing lives. (Bear in mind the timeline here: As late as March 15, more than a month after Trump described his strategy to Woodward, New York mayor Bill de Blasio was encouraging people to go to bars. Four days later, as cities and states were deciding whether and how to lock down, Trump told Woodward, “I still like playing it down.”) At an even more basic level, it is difficult to conceive of anything more newsworthy than the president secretly telling an elite member of the Washington press corps that he was lying to the public while telling the public to relax and check out hydroxychloroquine and investigate bleach. It’s unclear what there needed to be “nailed down.” Over at Esquire, Charlie Pierce put it as plainly as it can be put:

The interviews with the president* were conducted on the record. As early as January, Woodward could have broken a huge story quoting the president* himself about how the president* was lying to the public and risking the public health. Maybe it would have forced a change of policy that would have saved lives. (Probably not, given what we know about this president’s modus operandi.) Woodward knew the truth behind the administration’s deadly bungling—and worse—and he saved it for his book, which will be released to wild acclaim and huge profits after nearly 200,000 Americans have died because neither Donald Trump nor Bob Woodward wanted to risk anything substantial to keep the country informed.

Woodward’s feeble defense is that what he knew didn’t matter. Defenses of Woodward have been oriented narrowly around his relationship to the Post and his publishers, and around the idea that he, as someone writing a book, was primarily beholden to his book project and not his fellow humans dying in droves.

For example, Post media reporter Erik Wemple launched a wised-up argument that amounted to scolding people for being angry about preventable deaths and implying that they simply don’t understand the way of the world. Publishing the scoop would have prevented Woodward from getting future scoops, he argued; Trump flacks would have denied it was newsworthy at all; and, finally, he pointed out, Woodward isn’t really a Post reporter anyway, but merely someone who publishes scoops in the Post in exchange for a $25 monthly salary. Per Wemple, this is the system working as designed. (Its design perhaps explains why, with early access to Woodward’s book, the Post didn’t report his scoop, reported by Business Insider today, that Trump bragged about “saving” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, believed by Western intelligence agencies to have been involved in the murder of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.)

What any of this has to do with the moral question at the heart of the matter—Should someone who had potentially life-saving evidence that Trump was lying about the coronavirus have shared it with the public, or no?—Wemple didn’t bother addressing. He did pass on Woodward’s insistence that the president’s lies were not a “legitimate public health issue.” If Wemple did ask what Woodward would consider a public health issue, he didn’t include it in his Twitter thread.

Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan aptly summarized the brouhaha while carefully avoiding anything that could be read as criticism of Woodward or the Post. “[Woodward’s] no longer in the daily journalism business,” she wrote, as if reporting critical information in service of the public being somehow below such a towering giant of the craft excused him not doing it. Other journalists, on the right and the left, provided equally callous and craven excuses for Woodward, arguing that even if he had reported the information, it wouldn’t have mattered because people wouldn’t have cared. Why people with such a low estimation of the public and disdain for the idea that giving the public information can effect change are even in journalism is unclear; the only conceivable answers are bleak ones.

The Post, which enjoys the benefits of its branding association with Woodward’s scoops (conversely, the association allows Woodward, whose author page displays five Washington Post bylines this century, to pretend he’s still an active newspaperman, at least until that becomes inconvenient) essentially denied having anything to do with Woodward. A Post flack told me that she’d “need to refer you to Bob or his publisher on this as his book work is done independently of The Post.” When I followed up asking to speak to editor in chief Marty Baron or get an on-the-record statement about Woodward failing to report information of incredible significance in a timely way, the flack emailed me this Twitter statement from another flack, again asserting that Woodward’s book projects have nothing to do with the Post. This neatly sidestepped the question of whether a nominal Post reporter should report critical news.

Post staffers were generally unwilling to touch this topic with a 20-foot pole. One, who was granted anonymity so they could speak freely, said “[It] seems like a trend that feels especially unethical and selfish right now, to save material to sell book copies with everything that’s going on, and it’s disappointing that it’s no different at our place.”

If Woodward reporting his scoop when he got it would have saved even one life, it would have been worth it; this is the criticism of him that matters and the one that has not been answered. The Washington Post’s tagline is “democracy dies in darkness.” People do, too.

My Modern Met /  Sara Barnes
https://mymodernmet.com/sim-kyu-dong-goshiwon-photos/

Seoul is one of the world’s most expensive cities to live in. These high prices make it a challenge for many people to find affordable housing. As a result, an alternative to the conventional apartment has emerged. Called goshiwons, these are not apartments but tiny rooms that are large enough for a twin-sized bed and some prized belongings. Photographer Sim Kyu-Dong showcased these units—and the people that inhabit them—in a fascinating series of images.

Goshiwons can be a cheap place for a student to study or a housing option for someone who can’t afford an apartment and might otherwise be homeless. There’s no deposit required to live in one; it’s unlike a studio in Seoul, where one would need to come up with money before moving in. Plus, it has some privacy. A room typically has a bed, desk, and closet that affords someone the opportunity to keep their things safe and space to eat and work. But the facilities, such as the bathroom, are shared with other residents.

Like their larger counterparts, a goshiwon varies based on who is living in it. Some folks are neat and tidy while others have carved just enough space for them to sit and nothing else. The room might have a window (for an added fee) and wallpaper to give the room a homier feel. Scroll down to see how people have chosen to live in their goshiwon.

South China Morning Post / Winston Mok / Sep 9, 2020
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3100608/why-nokia-or-ericsson-might-be-wests-best-bet-against-huawei

The US has continued to pressure countries around the world not to use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s talking head is the US’ key competitive weapon against Huawei, something is not quite right.

Sifted / Marie Mawad, Mimi Billing, Maija Palmer /
Sep 7, 2020
https://sifted.eu/articles/musk-tesla-rivals-europe-1/

At $390bn, Tesla is worth a lot to investors. In fact, it’s worth more than all of Germany’s carmakers combined.

Europe started out as the birthplace of the automobile, but it has become the laggard — and not just as far as stock market valuations go.

In the 12 years since Elon Musk released his first full-electric sports car, he’s expanded into battery production at Tesla’s Gigafactory, deployed dedicated charging infrastructure worldwide and developed products that let consumers generate and store energy. His Roadster has become the reference for super-fast travel on a battery and his electric sedans have climbed the rankings to compete with Nissan for the world’s most sold electric car.

In that time frame, prestigious brands in Europe, the likes of Volkswagen and Daimler in Germany but also Renault and Peugeot in France, have mostly struggled with a diesel emissions scandal and displayed a sluggish attitude to shifting to battery-powered cars.

Pessimists say the fate of European carmakers shows the region’s inability to transform even the most brilliant ideas and finest engineering talent into disruptive innovation at scale.

“It’s not lack of vision that is plaguing Europe — carmakers like Renault have long had the vision of a future with electric, connected and autonomous vehicles,” says Francois Veron, the cofounder of investment fund Newfund. “But they failed at industrialising that vision, at adapting their production and supply chains to the new business models of electric cars.”

“Real disruption is more likely to come from an independent player than from the incumbents,” says Veron. “A heavily financed independent player.”

But while Europe does not have a single Tesla equivalent, it does have several companies doing parts of what Tesla does and in many cases doing it better.

Without the media might of the Musk empire, they are less well known, but there are companies such as Rimac making faster electric roadsters, companies like Skeleton Technologies making more powerful ultracapacitors and Einride making electric self-driving trucks.

Here’s part one of our series looking at Elon Musk’s empire and the European technology companies emerging as its rivals. Part one is focusing on cars and batteries, part two on space and part three on hyperloop.

Part one: vroom

Cars are one of the most visible parts of Tesla, and make up the majority of its revenues. In the second quarter of 2020, car sales accounted for 86% of its reported $6bn sales. A newly launched Model Y has got car pundits salivating.

But perhaps the most emblematic of Tesla’s successes lies in its ability to deploy a wide-spanning network of dedicated, ultra-fast chargers called superchargers. They’ve played a key role in helping Tesla’s cars stand out from the rest, by addressing consumers’ fear of running out of juice in an electric vehicle.

In fact, infrastructure that allows for a relatively short charging pit stop along the way is perhaps the only segment where Tesla truly has no equivalents in Europe.

The company boasts nearly 2,000 stations in Europe and the Middle East. Alternatives, even added together and helped by state subsidies, form a smaller network of disparate chargers that are all less powerful — hence slower to refill a battery — and are often faced with compatibility issues.

Every other part of the electric car ecosystem has Europeans in the ring, battling it out with Tesla. Here are the names worth knowing:

Tesla’s hypercar challengers in Europe

Rimac (Croatia)

Tesla’s Roadster makes claims on being the quickest car in the world. According to the company, it’s able to go from 0-60 mph in just 1.9 seconds, and has a top speed of more than 250 mph.

Croatia’s Rimac may be able to just pip Tesla’s record, with claims that its C_Two electric hypercar can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.85 seconds, a whisker faster than the Roadster. And the C_Two claims a top speed of 258 mph.

Mind you, Rimac’s C_Two isn’t in production yet. Any prospective customers will have to wait for 2021 to take delivery, and there are likely to be only a very limited number of vehicles made. Your likelihood of owning a C_Two is probably a lot lower than owning a Roadster.

Rimac, which began with Mate Rimac trying to pimp up his own very beat-up 1984 BMW when he was just 19, is clearly a very different (and much smaller) business than Tesla. But its mission to build electric motor cars that are, well, super fast, is having a surprisingly big reach across the car industry.

Porsche owns around 15% of the company, and Hyundai Motor Group recently invested €80m as part of a new partnership which will see the two companies collaborate on a range of performance electric cars. A number of other carmakers, including Aston Martin and Pininfarina already use Rimac’s battery packs for their own electric supercars.

With serious investors coming in now, Rimac is professionalising and gearing up to go much bigger. Plus, it just recently hired ex-Tesla engineer Chris Porritt as CTO.

Piëch (Switzerland)

Piëch is based in Switzerland but it has deep roots in Germany and links back to Volkswagen.

The company was founded by Toni Piëch, the son of former Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch, whose own ancestors include Volkswagen founder Ferdinand Porsche.

It’s out to build on Germany’s history of top-notch engineering, combined with an electric motor and reviving iconic elements of classic sports car designs, to become the “leading luxury electric mobility brand”.

“In spirit, we go back to Ferdinand Porsche’s 1931 vision,” the company says on its website. “We aim to build a company that recaptures the artistry, craftsmanship and heritage of the past, but we emerge into 21st century with a new powertrain, a new business model, and an appetite for technology and disruption.”

The company’s Mark Zero all-electric model, scheduled to go on sale in 2022, can get to 100km/h in 3.2s, charges 80% of its battery in 4 minutes 40 seconds, and boasts a range of 500km on a single charge.

One specific: Piëch has no plans to invest in its own manufacturing and relies instead on a network of partners for production — carmakers with factories, assembly and supply chains already set up.

Nikola (US-based, with ties to Germany and Italy)

The other, much-hyped challenger to Tesla is Nikola.

Admittedly that’s partly because of the name of the company, which refers to Nikola Tesla, the engineer and inventor who made important contributions during the 1900s to what we know about electrical supply systems. His surname inspired Musk’s company, and Nikola of course picked up on his first name.

Nikola is going head-to-head with Tesla in electric trucks. The company is US-based, but it does have a big European connection.

Germany’s Robert Bosch and Italy’s Iveco, the truck-maker backed by the Agnelli family, each own 6% of Nikola and were instrumental in building the important parts of the company’s trucks.

More than 200 Bosch employees were involved in building important parts of Nikola’s trucks, including the electric motor for the axle, the vehicle-control unit, the battery and the hydrogen fuel cell. The trucks themselves are being built in an Iveco factory in Germany.

Tesla’s trucks challengers in Europe

The Tesla programme for trailer trucks, dubbed Tesla Semi, has been pushed back a bunch of times and the first units are now expected to be delivered sometime in 2021.

Einride (Sweden)

Stockholm-based Einride’s trucks are not for consumers, but for the logistics industry. The company started off focused on developing self-driving trucks that would transport goods entirely autonomously or controlled remotely. Recently it has acknowledged that the transition to full autonomy may take some time, so it is also building trucks that have space for human drivers.

The trucks will still be all-electric, however, and deals with big companies may do more to speed along the battery-powered revolution than any consumer-focused business. Einride recently signed a deal to supply trucks to German supermarket group Lidl, supporting Lidl’s ambition to make its supply chain emission-free.

Others include:

Volta Trucks (Sweden)

The company recently launched a purpose-built 16-tonne electric truck that can drive up to 200 km on a single charge. The company is expecting to sell 500 of the Volta Zero trucks in 2022, rising to 5000 by 2025. It is expecting to find strong demand in cities like London and Paris where diesel vehicles have been banned from the city centres.

Tesla’s Gigafactory challengers in Europe

Musk called the Gigafactory “the machine that builds the machine” — where everything needed by Tesla would be made, most notably a huge number of lithium-ion batteries for its vehicles. Tesla has three such factories in operation so far, in Nevada, New York and Shanghai, with a factory near Berlin expected to be completed next year.

The idea of the Gigafactory was not only to decrease Tesla’s reliance on overseas suppliers of batteries but bring the cost of production down to under $100 per KWh of energy storage, a level at which it becomes cheaper to build an electric powertrain than an internal combustion engine.

The Nevada Gigafactory had a goal of producing 35 GWh per year by 2020. Opened in 2016, the Tesla facility has a clear head start, but in the past year or two a number of challengers have emerged in Europe:

Northvolt (Sweden)

One of Europe’s biggest battery startups was founded by ex-Tesla employees. Peter Carlsson, who was global head of sourcing and supply chain at the company, worked closely with Musk to launch the Model S. Another Tesla alumnus, Paolo Cerruti, helped Carlsson launch Northvolt, which is building a giant battery factory in northern Sweden, aiming to produce 32GWh of capacity annually — just short of Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory levels —  once it is fully up and running. The company raised $1bn last year from investors led by Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs.

Carlsson says that while China and the US have been in the lead so far when it comes to producing the batteries needed for electric cars, Europe now has an opportunity to catch up.

“At present, we don’t have enough factories but looking at the projects being planned and constructed as we speak the future looks promising in Europe,” he says. “In Europe, there is a new momentum. We have seen actions in the regulatory space and Europe has started to flex its muscles by backing and financing car manufacturers and others along the supply chain – and the dynamics are strong. To be frank, the US has lost a bit of headway between the shift from Obama and Trump.”

“Europe now has to decide whether it will focus on satellite factories that rely on supplies from Asia or will it build its own ecosystem. There are advantages to the region to have its own ecosystem with all the actors across the supply chain including subcontractors, factories, support to universities and so on.”

“Strategically, it is possible to build it but we don’t have it ready for raw materials as yet. We have the conditions to create nickel and cobalt but it will take time. We are not alone, even in China they are dependent on building supply chains of raw materials, just look at what they are doing in parts of Africa and South America.”

In the meantime, Northvolt is developing patent-protected ways of recycling batteries more efficiently, so that part of Europe’s raw material needs could be supplied this way.

Verkor (France)

The startup exited stealth mode and unveiled ambitious plans to deliver up to 50GWh of battery production capacity. Production in Verkor’s first gigafactory is scheduled to begin in 2023 with 16GWh capacity and ramp up from there.

Backed by French industrial Schneider Electric, real estate group IDEC and the EU’s European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT), Verkor is currently looking for land to set up a gigafactory in France. The initial investment in the project is about €1.6bn.

It’s not the only French project of the sorts. Energy giant Total and carmaker PSA have set up a joint venture called Automotive Cells Company, which is also aiming to start deliveries in 2023. The first phase of the project involves a €200m investment and a pilot plant built around an existing facility in Nersac, France, owned by Saft, Total’s battery production arm. Total took over startup Saft in 2016 for €950m.

Fast charging 

Europe is also developing breakthrough technologies that could significantly increase the charging speeds for electric vehicles. Charging an electric car at a public charging point can still take several hours — even a Tesla Supercharger station will take at least half an hour — so getting charging times down to a point where they can compete with a few minute petrol refuelling stop is crucial.

Ulracapacitors, which discharge energy much faster than batteries, have been seen as a potential part of the solution. Tesla bought ultracapacitor company Maxwell Technologies for $218m in 2019, in hopes of improving the batteries used in its cars. Battery experts speculated that Musk might be looking to apply some of the technologies used in Maxwell’s ultracapacitors to improve the cost, performance and lifespan of its lithium-ion batteries.

Skeleton Technologies (Estonia)

A European challenger, Estonian Skeleton Technologies, may be close to this already. The company is developing the SuperBattery, a ground-breaking graphene battery with a 15-second charging time and the capability of being recharged hundreds of thousands of times.

The company has just partnered with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to complete the development of the battery. If this is successful, it would eliminate the three main anxieties of electric car owner: slow charging time, battery degradation over time, and limited range.

Skeleton Technologies chief executive Taavi Madiberk says the technology will “blow existing EV charging solutions out of the water”. He also notes that, unlike Tesla, which seeks to do everything itself, in Europe the key to energy storage breakthroughs will be a collaboration between companies.