Jurisprudence Of The Ethiopian Airlines Crash

Air transport is a human endeavour where human lives are placed in the custody of the airline which is required to carry the passenger safely and securely to the destination.

by Dr Ruwantissa Abeyratne-March 14 at 11:56 PM 

Writing from Paradise Island, The Bahamas

On Sunday 10th March an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft operating flight 302 crashed just after takeoff from Addis Ababa on its way to Kenya. All 157 persons on board were killed as the plane crashed at high speed onto the ground. The captain of the flight had reported “flight control problems” to air traffic control shortly before the aircraft crashed. It is reported that the manufacturer Boeing issued a statement following the crash saying they would recommend the temporary global suspension of the entire 737 Max fleet. As this article was being written, fifty countries had grounded or banned the planes inside their airspace.

On 2 Sunday 8 October 2018 Lion Air Flight JT 610 took off from Jakarta at 23:30 GMT heading towards Depati Amir airport in Pangkal Pinang. 13 minutes into the flight, authorities lost contact. The aircraft crashed shortly off Jakarta. The flight was operated by a Boeing Max aircraft – the same type which was involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash. The aircraft was carrying 178 adult passengers, one child and two babies. In addition to the two pilots, there were also six cabin crew. It is reported that the pilots were desperately engaged in a “futile tug-of-war with the plane's automatic systems” in the minutes before it plunged into the ocean, killing all 189 people on board. According to Lion Air, the pilot and co-pilot had more than 11,000 flight hours between them.

Unlike the Lion Air flight which was operated between two points in Indonesia, the Ethiopian Airlines flight was an international one between two countries. Both Ethiopia and Kenya have ratified the Montreal Convention of 1999 which is the Convention for the unification of certain rules pertaining to international carriage by air. Ethiopia ratified the Convention on 24 April 2014 while Kenya ratified it on 7 January 2002. Therefore, the applicable treaty for the adjudication of claims for death of the passengers would come within the purview of the Montreal Convention.

Article 17 of the Montreal Convention stipulates that the airline is liable for damage sustained in case of death or bodily injury of a passenger upon condition only that the accident which caused the death or injury took place on board the aircraft or in the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking. For damages arising under Article 17 not exceeding 100 000 Special Drawing Rights for each passenger, the airline is not be able to exclude or limit its liability. This means that the airline (i.e. Ethiopian airlines) is liable in limine (at the outset) to pay 100,000 Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in the case of each passenger. However, the airline is not liable for damages arising under Article 17 to the extent that they exceed for each passenger 100 000 Special Drawing Rights if the airline proves that: such damage was not due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of the airline or its servants or agents; or such damage was solely due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of a third party. Although the cause of the crash has not been conclusively determined, Ethiopian Airlines may have a valid defence under this provision if the final findings were that there was an inherent defect in the aircraft itself. If, however, it is found that the flight crew were responsible (through negligence) for the crash, (note: it is the airline that has to prove absence of negligence) the plaintiff would be able to claim compensation over and above the 100,000 SDRs limit.

Article 28 of the Convention admits of advance payments in the case of aircraft accidents resulting in death or injury of passengers, where the airline is required to, if required by its national law, make advance payments without delay to a natural person or persons who are entitled to claim compensation in order to meet the immediate economic needs of such persons. Such advance payments do not constitute a recognition of liability and may be offset against any amounts subsequently paid as damages by the airline.

As to the issue of where an action for compensation can be brought against the airline Article 33 of the Convention provides that an action for damages must be brought, at the option of the plaintiff, in the territory of one of the States Parties, either before the court of the domicile of the airline or of its principal place of business, or where it has a place of business through which the contract has been made or before the court at the place of destination. In respect of damage resulting from the death or injury of a passenger, an action may be brought before one of the courts mentioned above, or in the territory of a State Party in which at the time of the accident the passenger had his or her principal and permanent residence and to or from which the airline operates services for the carriage of passengers by air, either on its own aircraft, or on another airline’s aircraft pursuant to a commercial agreement, and in which that airline conducts its business of carriage of passengers by air from premises leased or owned by the airline itself or by another airline with which it has a commercial agreement.

Article 35 is explicit in that the right to damages are extinguished if an action is not brought within a period of two years, reckoned from the date of arrival at the destination, or from the date on which the aircraft ought to have arrived, or from the date on which the carriage stopped.

All this is clinical legal jargon to those who lost their loved ones in the crash. Air transport is a human endeavour where human lives are placed in the custody of the airline which is required to carry the passenger safely and securely to the destination. Air transport is not primarily about States. Nor is it about airlines. It is about the young woman – newly married – who texts her husband that she will contact him on landing (which never happened). It is when the ultimate in technology meshes gently with humanity.

The author, who is a former Senior Legal Officer of ICAO, is currently Senior Associate, Air Law and Policy at Aviation Strategies International, a consultancy headquartered in Montreal, having branches around the world. He has written this article while on mission in Nassau, The Bahamas.

Florida advances bill to shield Israel from criticism

US lawmakers continue to promote laws punishing supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights. (Joe Catron)

Nora Barrows-Friedman - 14 March 2019

A resolution recently introduced in the Missouri state legislature would affirm that boycotts are protected political expression.

The measure, sponsored by Black progressive lawmaker Brandon Ellington, says that “criticism of a nation by individuals, including as a nonviolent citizens’ boycott, does not constitute bigotry against the citizens of that nation.”

It upholds the constitutional right to boycott “any entity when [people] have conscientious concerns with the entity’s policies or actions,” adding that the state should not “punish individuals” for supporting boycotts by denying them contracts.

According to the resolution, boycotts are “an expression of encouraging the government of the nation to modify its policies and practices to uphold the inalienable human rights of all people within its borders.”

Lara Friedman@LaraFriedmanDC

Rare good news: resolution intro’d in Missouri that "Celebrates diversity and affirms the right to boycott"https://www.house.mo.gov/Bill.aspx?bill=HCR49&year=2019&code=R …

26

11:33 AM - Mar 12, 2019

Though Ellington’s resolution does not name Israel, it is being introduced at a time when state and federal lawmakers are pushing laws that punish supporters of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights.

Under pressure from Israel lobby groups, many politicians claim that criticizing Israel’s human rights violations, or its state ideology Zionism, is tantamount to anti-Jewish bigotry.

Last year, during a debate on a state anti-BDS bill that ultimately failed to pass, Ellington explained that the measure “is the definition of white masculism and an example of white supremacy.”

“When we talk about Israel, we’re talking about a country that has practiced ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians,” he added.

Ellington also described Israel’s expulsion of thousands of asylum-seekers from African states as ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a bill that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism advanced with bipartisan support this week.

The Florida bill has sparked free speech concerns among civil rights experts.

The measure focuses on college campuses and conflates criticism of Israel or Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry.

It uses language similar to the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which has been pushed by Israel lobby groups.

“Applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, or focusing peace or human rights investigations only on Israel” is considered anti-Semitic, according to the measure.

“Delegitimizing Israel by denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist” is also defined as anti-Semitism.

This means that someone advocating for a single democratic state in which Israeli Jews, Palestinians and all others have full, equal rights could fall afoul of the law.

The bill claims that these and other examples of alleged anti-Semitism related to criticizing Israel do not “diminish or infringe upon any right” to free speech and “shall not be construed to conflict with state or federal laws.”

But FIRE, a free speech advocacy organization, calls this caveat “an inadequate attempt to salvage the constitutionality of the bill.”

FIRE states that the bill’s “overbroad and vague definitions of anti-Semitism show that even core political speech can, and likely will, be censored by the bill based on the viewpoints espoused.”

Tomorrow, the Florida House of Representatives will hear HB 741, an unconstitutional campus anti-Semitism bill.

We urge legislators to reject or replace it with legislation that complies with the First Amendment.https://t.co/LGqUQYEHza

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) 11 March 2019

“Silencing questions”

The legislation is related to another Florida measure, House Bill 371, that would punish organizationsinvestigating Israel for “peace or human rights violations.”

That bill, introduced in January, would allow Florida residents to sue or file complaints against teachers or administrators who criticize Israel, according to the Miami New Times.

In defining anti-Semitism to include peace or human rights investigations only focused on Israel, the measure “lays bare what these laws are about: silencing any questions about Israel’s human rights record,” Palestine Legal staff attorney Meera Shah told The Electronic Intifada.

Florida’s US Senator Marco Rubio sponsored the AIPAC-backed Combating BDS Act, which passed through the Senate in February.

The bill would uphold the rights of states and local governments to pass measures that punish or criminalize individual contractors, pension funds and corporations that support the BDS campaign for Palestinian rights.

Rubio’s legislation faces mounting opposition in the House, where many say it will probably not pass in its current form.

Palestine Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union have warned lawmakers that the bill blatantly infringes on free speech.

These kinds of legislative attempts to police speech and suppress boycotts for Palestinian rights are “alarming on multiple fronts,” Shah said.

Not only do they trample on free speech rights, Shah said, but “they conceal the ongoing violence against Palestinians by changing the subject and they fail to provide meaningful solutions to growing threats of racism at home and abroad.”

Newspaper publisher pushes challenge to anti-BDS law

A newspaper publisher in Arkansas is pursuing his constitutional challenge to that state’s law requiring contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel.

Alan Leveritt, the publisher of The Arkansas Times, has appealed at the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The 2017 law “requires Arkansas to create a blacklist of companies that boycott Israel, and require public entities to divest from blacklisted companies,” according to Palestine Legal.

Leveritt, represented by the ACLU, filed the initial lawsuit after the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College “informed the Times that it had to sign a certification that it would not engage in a boycott of Israel if it wanted to continue to receive advertising contracts” from the the university, the newspaper reported.

Leveritt declined, and the paper lost the university contract.

A federal judge threw out Leveritt’s initial case in January, ruling that political boycotts are not protected under the First Amendment.

But the ACLU says that the law clearly violates constitutional protections “by penalizing disfavored political boycotts.”

The civil rights group has appealed the case on Leveritt’s behalf.

“Allowing the government to force people to relinquish their First Amendment rights or pay a penalty for expressing certain political beliefs disfavored by the government would set a dangerous precedent,” Rita Sklar, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas, said.

“This ‘pay-to-say’ tax is blatantly unconstitutional and we’re committed to seeing the law struck down,” Sklar added.

The ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations have brought cases against state anti-BDS laws.

In Arizona and Kansas, federal judges have blocked those states’ measures, citing constitutional violations.

However, Republican lawmakers in Arizona are trying to pass another version of the state’s anti-boycott measure, which “appears to attempt to circumvent the court injunction against the current anti-BDS law,” according to the Phoenix New Times.

Brian Hauss, an ACLU attorney, called it a “transparent attempt to avoid another defeat in court by passing a face-saving measure that would narrow the law into practical oblivion.”

The proper response, Hauss added, “would be to repeal this unconstitutional law in its entirety.”

Other lawsuits have been filed against anti-BDS laws in Texas and Maryland.

To date, 26 states have passed anti-BDS measures, while federal legislation is pending.

May wins vote to seek Brexit delay

Gary Gibbon-14 Mar 2019Political Editor

In a narrow Commons victory this evening the government fought off an attempt by MPs to take control of Brexit in Parliament.

Instead, Theresa May has presented a stark choice to MPs: back her deal in another vote next week – or risk a long delay to Brexit – and even the possibility of having to hold European elections in May.

MPs are now expected to have a third meaningful vote on Brexit next week. That’s just before Theresa May heads off to Brussels for what is currently set to be the last European Summit with a British Prime Minister at the table.

Protest, torture, siege, displacement: The Syrian revolution through a rebel's eyes

Obada Dabbas lived through some of the worst atrocities of Syria's eight-year war. Now in Idlib, he looks back on his experiences

Rebel fighter Obada Dabbas in al-Dana, a town in Syria's Idlib province (MEE/Harun al-Aswad)

By Harun al-Aswad- 16 March 2019

In the dusty backyard of a small house with cracks down its walls sits Obada Dabbas, cooking eggs.

Despite suffering from old wounds, a broad smile is drawn across his face.

Protest, torture, siege, di... by on Scribd

How the Christchurch Shooter Played the World’s Media

Friday’s shooting in New Zealand was a terrorist attack conceived for the internet era.

A A security official stands guard near the Al Noor mosque after a shooting in Christchurch on March 15. (Tessa Burrows/AFP) 

BY ELIAS GROLL

 | MARCH 15, 2019, 6:06 PM

In the days and hours ahead of his deadly killing spree at a New Zealand mosque on Friday, the alleged shooter left a trail of digital evidence that demonstrated one clear purpose: His terrorist attack was conceived with the internet in mind. The murderer was making a snuff film for the social media era, one that would get instantaneous global distribution by being broadcast live to his Facebook page.

Even the location for the shootings, tucked-away New Zealand, was apparently selected to send a message that would resonate instantly across the darker digital world: No place on earth is safe any longer from the white supremacists and their creed, who have achieved a new life on the internet.

That body of work—a press kit for a terrorist attack that left 49 people dead—now serves as the fodder for an insatiable global media broadcasting the killer’s ideas around the world, bringing them further into the mainstream. And that too appears to have been just the plan of the killer, who seems to have participated in some of its most toxic online subcultures. (Police identified the suspect as a 28-year-old Australian named Brenton Tarrant.)

All this poses hard questions for how the media should respond to a massacre broadcast across the internet.

“The media is pretty good at dealing with groups like al Qaeda,” with a clear leadership and organizational structure, argues Robert Evans, a journalist and researcher who has written extensively about online extremist groups. Leaderless online communities like those the shooter appears to have participated in pose a far more difficult challenge.

At the center of the shooter’s media strategy was a sordid video: a 17-minute film broadcast live from a camera mounted to his military-style helmet. It showed the suspect in real time as he drove his Subaru to his target, walked up to the mosque, and began shooting.

His followers knew to tune in because he had advertised the shooting—and the fact that he would stream it live—on the message board site 8chan, an image-sharing site that prides itself on hosting content deemed too offensive for the internet’s other cesspools. Along with a link to his Facebook page, the shooter posted links to his 74-page manifesto spread across multiple sites so that other users of 8chan could grab a copy before the document was taken down. (8chan grew out of the similar site 4chan after some users of the latter thought it had become too hostile to highly offensive and hateful content.)

In the hours following the shooting, the global media has broadcast this material far and wide. The British tabloid the Sun posted excerpts of the shooter’s video on its homepage, and the Daily Mail provided its readers with a link to download the manifesto. The U.S. cable outlet MSNBC displayed the manifesto prominently on air and quoted from it.

For hours after the attack, the video was available on YouTube before the platform scrubbed it. It was also available on Facebook, where it was originally broadcast, for a time before the platform worked to remove it. While the video is now mostly unavailable on major sites, any enterprising internet user can still find it.

Friday’s shooting wasn’t the first time a brutal murder was livestreamed on Facebook—an Islamic State fighter used the technology to immediately confess to the murder of a French police captain and his partner in 2016.

But the shooter’s manifesto, video, and means of distributing the two were remarkable for the way in which they were steeped in the idioms and conventions of online culture. And they suggested the killer, who was said to admire the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, wanted mainly to achieve a similar kind of racist immortality.

At the outset of the video, the shooter encourages viewers to subscribe to the YouTube personality, PewDiePie, who has flirted with anti-Semitism and has made derogatory statements about women. With just short of 90 million subscribers, he is the world’s most popular YouTube personality.

The reference to PewDiePie led to the YouTuber, Felix Kjellberg, issuing a statementdenouncing the attack—and ensured that his legions of followers would be exposed to what happened in New Zealand.

While referencing previous white nationalist mass shooters, the manifesto is replete with references to online memes, the images and texts that make up the shared language of internet users. At its core, the manifesto is a screed advocating the killing of non-ethnic Europeans.

At times, the author deliberately provokes readers unfamiliar with internet culture by making outlandish statements outsiders may take seriously. In one remarkable passage in which the author addresses whether he was taught violence from video games, he writes that he learned about “ethno-nationalism” from the video game Spyro the Dragon 3 and that the video game Fortnite trained him “to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies,” a reference to the celebratory dances that are a component of that game.

The document is steeped in the types of message board in-jokes and make clear its author is a veteran member of such communities. The author used as his avatar a well known meme—“Australian Shitposters”—that refers to “the commonly held stereotype that Australian 4chan users are responsible for the vast majority of shitposts created on the site,” according to the website knowyourmeme.com. The word “shitposts” refers to low-quality submissions to an online message board.

In advertising the attack on 8chan, the shooter wrote, “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post.”

Just as the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally of American white nationalists brought fringe elements of the American far-right out from their dark corners of the internet and onto the streets of a Virginia college town, Friday’s shooting brought the most noxious form of 8chan racism into the sanctuary of a Christchurch mosque.

How to cover online phenomena such as these represent a profound challenge for traditional media organizations. In a 2018 report, researchers at Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization, examined how coverage of online communities and their racist ideology brought them into the mainstream.

“Just by showing up for work and doing their jobs as assigned, journalists covering the far-right fringe—which subsumed everything from professional conspiracy theorists to pro-Trump social media shitposters to actual Nazis—played directly into these groups’ public relations interests,” the researchers concluded. “In the process, this coverage added not just oxygen, but rocket fuel to an already-smoldering fire.”

When members of the far-right fringe leave the internet and engage in mass violence, it is all but impossible for media outlets not to cover the issue. The killing of 49 people is, in the parlance of the media, news. The challenge lies in telling that story without also exposing a huge number of the uninitiated to the violently racist online communities that inspired the attack.

Congress party promises to spend more on health if voted back

A supporter wearing an inflatable symbol of India's main opposition Congress party walks during a public meeting in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India, March 12, 2019. The words read: "Long live Rahul Gandhi". REUTERS/Amit Dave

MARCH 15, 2019

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India’s main opposition Congress party said on Friday it would more than double healthcare spending in five years if voted back to power, adding to a growing list of promises to try to woo voters away from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party.

Congress will lift the expenditure on healthcare to 3 percent of GDP by 2024, provide free diagnostics and medicines through a network of public hospitals, establish more medical colleges and give financial support to medical students, party leader and former finance minister P. Chidambaram said on Twitter.

Asia’s third biggest economy spent an estimated 1.4 percent of its GDP on healthcare in 2017/18, among the lowest proportions in the world.

“The biggest cause of falling back into poverty is healthcare,” Congress President Rahul Gandhi said at a political rally weeks before India starts voting in a general election on April 11.

“So healthcare is, in a sense, a foundation and we have to ensure that foundation is built firmly.”
He said Congress was working on developing legislation that would guarantee certain mininum healthcare to all Indians.

India currently ranks 130 out of 189 countries in the U.N. human development ranking, reflecting insufficient spending on health, education and income parameters, despite the economy growing at more than 7 percent a year for more than a decade.

Congress earlier proposed to increase spending on education to 6 percent of GDP by 2023/24 - up from an estimated 2.7 percent in 2018 - and provide a minimum income guarantee for the poor.
These proposals come just as pollsters say Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has an advantage after Indian armed forces clashed with those of arch rival Pakistan.

The BJP dismissed the Congress announcements as lacking credibility.

“If somebody spends 6 percent on education, we are not saying it is bad. But the issue is resource mobilisation, how it will happen,” party spokesman Gopal Krishna Agarwal said. “You have to come out with a complete roadmap.”

A government adviser who previously worked with Congress’ Chidambaram said that revenue collections grow at an average of about 14 percent a year, and that any increase in spending on education, health and rural welfare programmes could be funded partly through that.

Getting priorities on human rights right in Syria

“If you want the refugees to leave, if you want to stop a second wave of refugees, if you want to end the suffering of the internally displaced, if you want to tackle ISIS in Europe- and they are there- then you need to deal with the Syrian government

Moreover, the EU insists on maintaining counterproductive economic sanctions and (the still necessary) sanctions on high-ranking Syrians

16 March 2019

The long war is almost over in Syria. Tyranny has won. Violence has won. Most have suffered, many unspeakably. For too long all sides were stalemated by each others’ brutality. Now the government of Bashar Al-Assad has come out on top, aided by Russia and Iran   
What to do next? Tomorrow EU member states hold their third annual Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region. It’s time for some radical re-thinking. Well-wishing for good things like the persecution of war crimes is whistling in the wind, at least for now.   

We are facing a fait accompli and renewed realization that the outside world does not have much leverage, apart from Russia and Iran, and even their influence is circumscribed.   

For Syria today it is these social rights that must be tackled first. It is indeed in the EU’s own interest to do it this way. The migrants who fled en masse to Europe three and a half years ago have only shallow roots in their host countries. Only a minority has learnt the language well and many have jobs way below their qualifications

Yet, understandably, EU countries insist that in return for helping to re-build Syria the government must commit itself to a human rights agenda -- the freeing of political prisoners, the end of torture and capital punishment, free elections, judicial reform, enshrining in law the right to protest and the devolution of power to town and village councils, even if it means giving opposition groups some political power. From time to time they also insist on what is manifestly impossible, the stepping down of President Assad. Under the Geneva peace talks, set up by UN Resolution 2254 passed in December 2015, the regime and the opposition are supposed to agree to a joint committee to write a new constitution.   

All this is good. Encourage it, yes. Insist on it right now, no. The biggest and most important human rights at stake in post war Syria are the right to life, good health and education, the right to family life, the right to a home and the right to a job. A few years ago Amnesty International widened its list of necessary human rights from the issues of political prisoners, torture and capital punishment to these broader social rights traditionally supported as the priority by Communist and Third World governments. There should never have been a contradiction in the first place.   

For Syria today it is these social rights that must be tackled first. It is indeed in the EU’s own interest to do it this way. The migrants who fled en masse to Europe three and a half years ago have only shallow roots in their host countries. Only a minority has learnt the language well and many have jobs way below their qualifications. 

They are not the kind of migrants -- like the Africans, Bangladeshis or Algerians -- who have dreamed all their lives of migrating like Dick Whittington and who as soon as they get the chance are off to search for a better life. Syrians before the war rarely migrated except to neighbouring Lebanon. Today most, I suggest, would gladly uproot from Germany, Sweden or wherever and go back home. 

We should help rebuild Syria as fast as it can be done, redirecting the money allocated to settling refugees to re-starting home building, school and medical services in Syria

They want to be close to the grandparents they left behind. They want to get hold again of their traditional home and the plot of land in their old village that has been in the family for generations. If they live in the town or city they want too the apartment they have probably built themselves with their own sweat. They want their children to grow up as Syrians who live according to the norms of Islamic and Syrian culture.   

We should encourage them to go. We should help rebuild Syria as fast as it can be done, redirecting the money allocated to settling refugees to re-starting home building, school and medical services in Syria.   

This is what Russia has been arguing for and it is right. The last months in the run up to tomorrow’s EU conference the east European members plus Italy and Greece, the two major destination countries, have been arguing the same. 

A southern European diplomat is quoted in the current issue of Foreign Policy as saying, “If you want the refugees to leave, if you want to stop a second wave of refugees, if you want to end the suffering of the internally displaced, if you want to tackle ISIS in Europe- and they are there- then you need to deal with the Syrian government.”   But the Germans, French, Scandinavians, Dutch and British have been taking a political correct stance- before it receives substantial aid Syria has to commit itself to the full panoply of human rights and to show by its actions that it is following through. Moreover, the EU insists on maintaining counterproductive economic sanctions and (the still necessary) sanctions on high-ranking Syrians.   

It’s hard for us to accept that Assad has won this bestial conflict but to stop the innocent and the opposition from further punishment we have to aid the regime to do what it says it now wants to do, which is rebuild Syria. The rest is for another day. 

Note -- The writer is the author of two books on human rights: “Like Water on Stone -- The Story of Amnesty International” (Penguin) and “Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals” (Nijoff). 

Venezuela blackout devastates country's second city as world focuses on Caracas

The sick must provide their own medical supplies as havoc grips Maracaibo, but shelves in the looted shops are bare
An employee cleans a store inside a shopping mall after looting in Maracaibo, March 12, 2019. Photograph: Issac Urrutia/Reuters

Sheyla Urdaneta in Maracaibo-Fri 15 Mar 2019

The air in the crowded emergency ward was already thick with the rusty smell of dried blood when the door burst open and two men barged in, screaming for help.

Between them, they carried a third man: barefoot, bare-chested – and bleeding freely from a deep wound which had nearly severed his right arm.

Two doctors ran over to help; one examined the wounded man while the other told his friends to go and find bottled water and sutures; there were none left in the hospital.

The nationwide blackout which struck Venezuela on 7 March caused chaos across the country, paralyzing airports and hospitals, cutting phone and internet services, and shutting down water supplies.

But nowhere was the havoc as intense as in the country’s second city, Maracaibo, which was convulsed by a wave of looting and violence on a scale unseen for decades.

According to the city’s chamber of commerce some 500 businesses were sacked in the unrest, and countless people injured in clashes between looters, security guards, gang-members and the security forces.

Video posted on social media showed chaotic scenes in which crowds forced their way into shops to steal food, medicines and valuables.

“It was total madness,” said Ricardo Acosta, a vice president of a business association in the surrounding Zulia state.

At the city’s University Hospital, the scene in casualty was like something from a war film. Dozens of patients and their families were crowded into the sweltering ward, a few lying on beds, others slumped on the bloodstained floor.

The hospital is Maracaibo’s largest – and one of just two with their own emergency generators, although power was connected only in the emergency ward.

Locals look at a shop window smashed during the massive blackout that paralyzed Venezuela. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Most of the patients had been injured in the wave of plundering – but others were victims of Venezuela’s chronic medical shortages and crumbling healthcare system.

Next to a man with knife wounds on his arms, legs and head, lay José Luis Faría, who hovered in and out of consciousness, 24 hours after suffering a heart failure.

Neighbours had found him unconscious in the street outside the house where he lived alone after his family joined the 3 million Venezuelans who have fled the country’s political and economic crisis.

Nobody could reach Faría’s one remaining relative – a nephew – because he had been unable to charge his mobile phone battery in the blackout, so the neighbours loaded him into a car and sought medical help.

After two other hospitals turned them away, El Universitario admitted Faría, but as often happens in a country beset by chronic shortages, the sick man was told he would have to provide his own medicine.

“He’s still not improving, but we finally managed to reach his nephew who is looking for saline solution and a drip. The doctor says the danger is that he has a heart attack,” said Faría’s neighbour, Misael Larreal.

For a brief moment, Faría regained consciousness, and asked where he was. He looked around at the bloody patient on the next bed – and passed out again.

By mid-afternoon, the temperature in the stifling ward had reached 42 degrees. To avoid overloading the generator, the hospital’s air conditioning system had been turned off, so medical staff set up an improvised waiting area in the lobby, where a weak breeze came through the open doors.

The man with a wounded arm was screaming in pain; the skin on his arm had already turned grey. After a couple of hours, his friends had returned with some bottles of water, suture – and the news that they had been unable to obtain any anaesthetics.

Weakly, the man replied: “It doesn’t matter – I can’t feel anything any more.”

Every few minutes, doctors emerged shouting the name of a patient, but instead of updates, relatives were given a new list of medicines or supplies which they would somehow have to find.
Zulia is one of the poorest regions in Venezuela, and medicine – and even basic food staples – are often far too pricey for ordinary people.

One woman sat crying. “What are we going to do?” she said. “I don’t have a bolívar to buy anything and all the shops are closed. What can we do?”

The woman explained that her husband had joined the plunder at a local butcher’s shop after seeing neighbours run past carrying cuts of ham, eggs and a bunch of plantains. But before he could escape, she said, a group of armed men had arrived, firing handguns in the air and robbing the looters.

“He fell and cut his leg. The wound isn’t deep but the doctors say he needs stitches, and a tetanus shot,” she said.

Venezuela has one of the highest rates of caesarian sections in the world, but at the Castillo Plaza maternity hospital, mothers were told they would have to have a vaginal birth whatever their condition.

Outside the emergency ward, a woman called Alicia said her new-born grandson desperately needed to admission to an intensive care unit because he had a problem with his lungs. “He wasn’t ready,” she sobbed.

But there was no electricity in the only hospitals with ICUs and El Universitario had no facilities for children. In a phone call the next day, Alicia said the baby had died.

Back at the University Hospital, there was still no electricity, and the emergency room was still crowded. Some of the men wounded in the looting had been discharged – only to be replaced by others with similar injuries.

A man arrived with a deep machete wound in the back of his head, and another in the leg. He was turned away; there were no doctors left to see him.

Why staying optimistic matters in environmental conservation

Providing optimism in the face of environmental reality can help people stay aware and hopeful for a positive outcome. Source: Shutterstock

HUMANS love optimism.-March 14 at 9:33 PM 

It’s a no-brainer – optimism makes us feel good and wanting more. This attraction has deep neurological roots that affect both our brain functions and how we process new information.

For this reason, optimism is powerful. Optimistic individuals or groups frequently perform better in sports, are better negotiators in business, and recover faster from illness. Feeling optimistic may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But for scientists trying to communicate dark and difficult messages about conservation, extinction risks or climate change, pessimism can also be a useful tool (and a logical outcome). Shock headlines grab attention – and may more accurately reflect reality.

But too much leads to fatigue and disengagement.

Published today in BioScience, our research outlines steps to usefully combine optimism with pessimism when talking about environmental conservation. We took a deep dive into the literature from psychology, business, politics and communications disciplines, to understand how positive and negative thinking influence human performance.

SEE ALSO: How machine learning can tell us where to spend our conservation efforts

Know your target audience

To make your environmental message stick, first you need to know who your target audience is. What are their daily fears and future worries? Do they care about nature for nature’s sake, or only when it impacts themselves? How do they perceive scientists? Knowing their fundamental values helps tailor your message.

Let’s say we want to restore an endangered forest, whose existence has been largely forgotten.

The benefits of restoring a forgotten habitat are many: the mental health benefits of walking among wise, old trees, the busy routine of forest creatures that churn the soil, increasing forest productivity and cleaning the rivers that flow beyond, and the abundant fruit that falls from the canopy. Not to mention the beauty and wonder of nature, which inspires and enlightens.

Clearly, the benefits of conserving the forest can be framed in many ways for many audiences, whether their primary concerns are environmental, social, economic or personal. Knowing the values and fears of your target audience helps identify what information will resonate.

Forest accessibility is important for hikers. Source: Shutterstock

Build awareness of the threat

Shock grabs attention, so clearly explaining a dire environmental issue is a good strategy for generating initial awareness. An impeding or recent loss (for example, the River Franklin in Tasmania, or fish within the Murray Darling Basin) has a greater attention-grabbing property than positive news, particularly when framed to address the audience’s key concerns.

This is where pessimism is necessary – and in fact may simply be realism.

In our endangered forest, the valuable wood has been logged to near extinction. Without the tree’s shade the soil has turned toxic and hard under the baking sun, rendering the land unsafe for human use. The inaccessibility of the last remnant patches means few people can experience their wonders and they will soon be lost from common memory.

This is where the first step, understanding your audiences’ values, helps. For keen hikers the accessibility of forests may be most important. For those focused on the cost of living, you might highlight that without the forest filtering and cleaning drinking water they will need to pay for water treatment plants.

If the trees become extinct so will a sustainable logging industry, which reduces employment. (It also speaks to intergenerational equity, where earlier generations benefited at the expense of later generations.)

SEE ALSO: People are searching more about conservation on Google than ever before

Build optimism with success stories

While negative news grabs attention, in the absence of hope it can quickly lead to despair and disengagement.

By introducing optimism in the face of environmental crises, people can remain both aware and hopeful for a positive outcome.

Indeed, expectation of a positive outcome is a key motivator for people to commit to a cause. But where can optimism be found when all is seemingly lost?

Optimism can be built on back of environmental success stories. In our example, the endangered trees produce more seeds than needed to replace old trees. Using these seeds, a local community has reforested toxic land where an old forest once stood, producing early signs of a healthy restored ecosystem. Such a success story provides optimism for other communities to envisage success in their own backyard.

Provide a path forward

Neither hope nor fear alone will change people’s behaviour. To allow change, people must believe their actions can make a difference. Therefore, our next step is to infuse optimism with efficacy, by offering the audience a pathway to engage with the issue.

The initial success of the restored forest breathed optimism into other revival efforts. But without public pressure, local governments can see investment in restoration as unnecessary (especially when the town’s water treatment facilities need updating anyway).

However when councils are convinced and communities engaged we can sow the seeds of recovery and create the community stewardship needed for long-term care.

Positive community spirit is hard to overlook. Source: Mike Lemmon/flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Create community spirit

Our final step is to build a sense of community. Believing in the collective ability of a unified group gives us motivation and commitment. Belonging to a group can empower the individual, helping them confront an issue they would not tackle alone.

Encouraging the target audience to form community groups can see a trickle of public pressure increase to a flood. Local administrators may overlook the demands of one or two forest-loving individuals, but it’s hard to ignore a group of voters seeking action.

The power of positive thinking has long been recognised. But environmental optimism is no panacea. It needs to be balanced with the reality of environmental pessimism. Both have their motivating virtues and finding a balance between them attracts attention and inspires action over the long-term.

Our forest example was derived from our experience with restoring Australia’s lost oyster reefs. South Australia’s 20 hectare oyster reef restoration was enabled by the local enthusiasm of a rural community, which was empowered by the expertise of an NGO and solution-seekers within several government departments; all underpinned by the credibility of university research.

By Dominic McAfee, Postdoctoral researcher, marine ecology, University of Adelaide; Sean Connell, Professor, Ecology,University of Adelaide, and Zoe Doubleday, Research Fellow, University of South Australia. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.