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Why lawmakers are fighting over the debt ceiling — again

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<p>Every couple of years, Congress finds itself standing at the same precipice: If lawmakers don’t agree to suspend or raise the debt ceiling, the federal government risks defaulting on its loans, likely causing a massive economic crisis.</p>
<p>Lawmakers are now back at the brink, scrambling to pass a suspension to the debt limit — a legal cap to how much the country can borrow — even as they wrestle over an expansive infrastructure package and social spending bill. According to estimates from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, lawmakers have until October 18 to avoid a potential default.</p>
<p>For weeks, Republicans plainly refused to support legislation addressing the debt ceiling because they want to paint Democrats as big spenders who’ve racked up the debt — and as hypocrites who are willing to pass a larger social spending bill on party lines, but unwilling to raise the ceiling the same way.</p>
<p>“Republicans’ position is simple. We have no list of demands,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017c-4b9b-dddc-a77e-4f9b932b0000">wrote to President Joe Biden on Monday</a>. “For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.”</p>
<p>But on Wednesday, McConnell said that Republicans would not block a short-term increase of the debt limit until December, as long as Democrats met certain conditions.</p>
<p>Republicans’ position on the debt ceiling is the latest attempt to use it for political leverage. Debt has been accrued under both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and both political parties have used looming debt crises to argue that the other side is being fiscally irresponsible. In more recent years, the GOP, in particular, has used such disagreements to extract policy concessions. In the current fight, Republicans’ willingness until now to oppose a suspension without any requests was more novel, and a clear indication that the GOP primarily hoped to gain ammunition it could use against Democrats in the future.</p>
<p>“This is a very dangerous game of chicken we’re playing,” says Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.</p>
<p>It seems as though Republican leaders have now swerved for the time being, wanting to avoid economic collapse. If lawmakers move forward with a short-term increase, however, it’s likely they’ll find themselves in the same stalemate in a few months.</p>
<p>Raising or suspending the debt limit, much like approving government appropriations, is a routine issue that Congress is tasked with. <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22684328/us-debt-ceiling-government-shutdown-biden-democrats">As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has explained</a>, the United States is unique in having a debt limit that lawmakers need to suspend or raise every few years; since the 1960s, Congress has raised or suspended the debt limit roughly 80 times, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/debt-limit-explained-8c9cbcd3d0c4a8fe989a0110f5159f7c">according to the Associated Press.</a></p>
<p>The last time lawmakers suspended the debt limit was in 2019, when both the House and Senate did so on a bipartisan basis.</p>
<p>This time, however, Republicans had refused to allow even a short-term measure to move forward until this week. They argued that it wasn’t because they didn’t want one, but because they feel that Democrats, who control both houses of Congress and the White House, should be responsible for approving it on their own.</p>
<p>“The debt ceiling will be raised, as it always should be. But it will be raised by the Democrats,” McConnell has said. (In the past, if a party held both the White House and Senate, data shows that its members have made up the bulk of the votes for such efforts, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/05/congress-is-struggling-raise-nations-debt-cap-heres-what-you-need-know/">political scientist Sarah Binder explained in the Washington Post</a>. It was less common, though, for the minority party to filibuster such attempts.)</p>
<p>Republicans’ refusal to act for weeks was largely political: Republicans broadly want to make sure that Democrats get the blame for accepting new debt while also trying to pass a large social spending package along party lines. The debt that would be addressed includes spending that took place during the Trump administration, like the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and more than $1.5 trillion in tax cuts.</p>
<p>Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the head of Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, recently acknowledged the party’s political motives. “Oh, you better believe it,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/why-gop-threatening-block-debt-limit-extension-they-say-needed-n1280064">Scott told NBC News</a> when asked about whether he’d be using Democratic votes in favor of raising the debt limit to attack them in campaign ads during the 2022 midterms.</p>
<p>So far, Republicans have already filibustered, or blocked, an attempt by Democrats to approve a suspension to the debt ceiling in a short-term spending bill that would have also funded the government through mid-December. This week, they’re poised to do so again when lawmakers consider a standalone suspension into next year. When filibustered, legislation requires 60 votes to pass, meaning the 50-person Democratic caucus would need to find 10 Republican lawmakers to join them.</p>
<p>As a concession, McConnell has promised that Republicans won’t filibuster a short-term debt limit increase into December and he suggested that the party wouldn’t slow attempts to approve an increase via budget reconciliation. Thus far, Democrats have been reluctant to use budget reconciliation because of how long and convoluted the process could be. Taking this approach could require proposing a specific increase to the debt ceiling, which Democrats wanted to avoid as well.</p>
<p>Political threats about the debt ceiling have been around for a long time.</p>
<p><a href="https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/debt-ceiling-crisis/index.html">In the 1950s,</a> Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower navigated standoffs with Democratic members of Congress about increasing the debt ceiling. At the time, Senate Democrats argued that the federal government should focus on reducing its expenditures rather than raising the debt cap. By withholding their support for a higher ceiling, lawmakers forced the administration to consider serious spending cuts.</p>
<p>Since then, the debt ceiling has been weaponized by members of both parties: Because a suspension or increase is a must-pass measure, lawmakers have tried to push for their demands to be addressed in exchange for votes. And many have opted to vote against debt increases as a way to portray the opposing party as involved in irresponsible spending. Republicans, for instance, like to point out that Biden was among the senators who opposed raising the debt limit in 2006 when Republicans had congressional control. (Democrats did not filibuster the final vote on the debt limit that year, however.)</p>
<p>“My vote against the debt limit increase cannot change the fact that we have incurred this debt already, and will no doubt incur more,” Biden said that year. “It is a statement that I refuse to be associated with the policies that brought us to this point.”</p>
<p>A recent fight in 2011 was a turning point; some lawmakers actually seemed open to a possible default.</p>
<p>That year, Republicans balked on suspending the debt limit and refused to do so until President Barack Obama agreed to key spending cuts, concessions they ultimately secured. The US got so close to default that year that it led Standard and Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating.</p>
<p>Political experts note that this disagreement marked one of the first times it seemed like lawmakers were actually willing to go over the edge, despite the economic chaos that could ensue.</p>
<p>“I’d definitely say 2011 was a step forward in how aggressively the debt ceiling was weaponized to secure partisan policy goals,” said Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “I’d say 1995 was also important; [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich threatened this but didn’t take it as far as the GOP did in 2011.”</p>
<p>In the years since, lawmakers, specifically Republicans, have become more aggressive in holding debt ceiling increases hostage in order to either elicit a policy demand or make a point. In 2013, Republicans did not support ending debate on the debt ceiling, a practice that had been uncommon beforehand. The willingness to filibuster the debt ceiling, experts say, is a sign of how partisan many legislative fights — including this one — have become.</p>
<p>“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in the use of a filibuster ... you need 60 votes for everything,” says Shai Akabas, the director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It’s not unique to the debt limit.”</p>
<p>Because majorities in Congress have narrowed in recent years for both parties, experts note that there’s greater incentive to stymying the other party’s efforts, since it could offer an advantage in the upcoming elections — and allow the minority to retake control.</p>
<p>“It’s much more common to exert all procedural options to something like appropriations or the debt ceiling. There’s much more brinksmanship. It’s expected that every September 30, we’ll be approaching a shutdown. It’s expected that every October, we could approach a default,” says Josh Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute. “It’s using all of the legislative tools to put the majority party in a bad position, for electoral gain.”</p>
<p>The US government doesn’t have to work this way.</p>
<p>Congress could pass legislation doing away with the debt ceiling, and the president has options to ignore it as well, though they’d likely prompt legal challenges. <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22684328/us-debt-ceiling-government-shutdown-biden-democrats">As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has reported</a>, options range from the president invoking the 14th Amendment and ignoring the debt limit to Congress approving an increase to the debt cap that’s so high it basically nullifies the ceiling.</p>
<p>Abolishing the debt limit altogether would prevent either party from using this process as political leverage and eliminate the risk of the US defaulting on its obligations. Doing so would greatly reduce the uncertainty that comes around every time there’s a deadline like this and prevent significant market volatility that results.</p>
<p>“There are zero downsides to getting rid of the debt ceiling. It is utterly meaningless as a policy guide or institution; it is good only for grid-locking government. And, in the modern age, gridlock is an enormous problem, given the huge pressing needs policymakers should be addressing,” says Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute.</p>
<p>Others note that it could take away an opportunity for Congress to debate fiscal policy. But many feel like that’s a moot point, given debt ceiling standoffs are rarely about any specific spending anymore, but rather about weakening the electoral advantage of the party in power.</p>
<p>“The debt limit was one of those stoppage points that has encouraged and allowed for conversations over how to address health care costs, tax policy, how to address fiscal reforms,” says Marc Goldwein, policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We haven’t seen that in any of the recent increases. An argument against repealing it is you lose that stoppage point.”</p>
<p>Rather than do away with the debt limit altogether, some experts have proposed options like giving the president the ability to propose a suspension that Congress would need to override if it disagreed, making it tougher for legislators to jam up that process. A proposal that Akabas of the Bipartisan Policy Center supports would pair this proposal with a mandatory debate on fiscal policy to force Congress to confront spending issues.</p>
<p>Whether there’s enough political will to make any of these changes is heavily in doubt; both parties have used this must-pass legislation to make political statements when it suits them.</p>
<p>“I’m not sure there’s all that much desire to take it off the table in terms of members of the minority losing this political thing they have to fight with,” University of Texas Austin government professor Alison Craig told Vox.</p>
<p>Instead, it seems as though lawmakers are comfortable getting right up to the brink — and running the risk of a default again and again.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/10/6/22691910/debt-ceiling-congress">https://www.vox.com/2021/10/6/22691910/debt-ceiling-congress</a>

vox Why lawmakers are fighting over the debt ceiling — again

Every couple of years, Congress finds itself standing at the same precipice: If lawmakers don’t agree to suspend or raise the debt ceiling,...

The WHO approval of the first malaria vaccine is a big deal

<p>Every year, malaria kills more than <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/malaria_worldwide/impact.html">400,000 people</a>, most of them children. There has been <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/malaria">significant progress against the disease in the past few decades</a> — death rates have fallen nearly in half since 2000 — but there’s still a long way to go.</p>
<p>For decades, researchers have been working on developing a vaccine. It hasn’t been easy. Malaria, a parasite infection, is hard to vaccinate against, and many attempted vaccines haven’t produced durable immunity.</p>
<p>But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/06-10-2021-who-recommends-groundbreaking-malaria-vaccine-for-children-at-risk">stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children</a> for the first time, after encouraging results from a pilot study that has reached hundreds of thousands of children across parts of sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. The vaccine, called Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is far from perfect — it produces about a <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/06-10-2021-who-recommends-groundbreaking-malaria-vaccine-for-children-at-risk">30 percent reduction in severe malaria</a> in fully vaccinated children, which is lifesaving but smaller than would be hoped for.</p>
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<p>But the WHO recommendation is a step forward in the fight against one of humanity’s deadliest remaining infectious disease enemies. It will likely lead to countries adding the vaccine to their childhood immunization programs starting immediately. And it’s only the first step of many to come. Researchers are already working to improve on Mosquirix, and with a combination of different approaches, it might be possible for the world to significantly cut down on malaria’s staggering human toll for good.</p>
<p>“This is a historic moment. The long-awaited malaria vaccine for children is a breakthrough for science, child health, and malaria control,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria">said</a>.</p>
<p>Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that causes fever and chills, and in severe cases anemia, seizures, and respiratory problems. With treatment, it’s very rarely fatal. Nonetheless, it is estimated that the approximately <a href="https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/malaria">220 million cases of malaria each year cause about 400,000 deaths</a>. Even preventing 40 percent of cases saves many lives, and since part of the malaria parasite’s life cycle is inside a human host, disrupting some cases will benefit even the people who are not conferred immunity.</p>
<p>Researchers have been working for more than 30 years on <a href="https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/rtss">the line of research that led to this malaria vaccine</a>. While widespread use of insecticide-treated bednets, preventive treatment, and indoor spraying have driven <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4901420/">malaria deaths down significantly since 2000</a>, the gains from those approaches have been <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/malaria">flattening in recent years</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="e-image__meta">Our World In Data</span></figcaption>
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<p>Continued progress against malaria is going to require new tools in the toolbox — and Mosquirix, also known as RTS,S, looks like a promising one.</p>
<p>In clinical trials, the vaccine prevented about 40 percent of cases of malaria, and 30 percent of the most severe cases. That’s much, much lower than the success rate of vaccines for most other early childhood diseases. The measles vaccine, by comparison, is <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html">97 percent effective</a>, and the chickenpox vaccine <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/hcp-effective-duration.htm">prevents 85 percent of cases</a> and nearly 100 percent of severe cases.</p>
<p>But with malaria killing hundreds of thousands of people every year, even a partially effective vaccine can be a lifesaver for many, many people. <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003377">Recent research</a> modeling the effects of a widespread Mosquirix rollout estimates that “5.3 million cases and 24,000 deaths could be averted” if we’re able to get the vaccine to the 30 million people at the greatest risk annually.</p>
<p>Evidence from the pilot rollout in Malawi also suggests that the vaccine <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2026330">works well in combination with existing malaria-fighting options</a> like the distribution of malaria-preventing drugs to children in high-risk areas. That’s important, because the vaccine isn’t sufficient on its own.</p>
<p>“Many global health organizations have worked long and hard to make an efficacious malaria vaccine a reality. There’s still an imperative to sustain existing interventions alongside, so we’ll be looking for donors to up their total contributions to fight against malaria to incorporate this new tool into their armaments,” Amanda Glassman, the executive vice president at the Center for Global Development, said in a statement.</p>
<p>The vaccine is administered as a series of four shots — three a month apart, and then a fourth a year later — and the effectiveness of further booster shots is being tested. With more than 2 million shots administered in the pilot programs to date, very few serious side effects have been reported, so the vaccine’s safety profile looks good. The vaccine is also relatively cost-effective, costing about <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244995">$5 a dose</a>.</p>
<p>The WHO approval does not, by itself, ensure widespread vaccine access. Instead, now that the organization has made its recommendation, the next steps are “funding decisions from the global health community for broader rollout, and country decision-making on whether to adopt the vaccine as part of national malaria control strategies,” the WHO <a href="https://www.who.int/news/item/06-10-2021-who-recommends-groundbreaking-malaria-vaccine-for-children-at-risk">says</a>.</p>
<p>But many countries follow WHO recommendations in setting their national health policy, and the recommendation is expected to spur countries to add this vaccine to their anti-malaria toolbox. And the WHO announcement will hopefully also spur funders to step up and help pay for ensuring the vaccine reaches everyone who needs it.</p>
<p>The Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria in humans needs both blood-sucking insects and humans for its life cycle. It grows inside a mosquito and is transferred to a human host when the mosquito bites them. Then the parasite migrates to the liver, replicates itself, and infects the blood — where it can be taken up by the bite of another mosquito.</p>
<p>When the parasite is in the blood, it causes fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Healthy adults usually recover, but those with a weaker immune system — especially young children and pregnant people — can die. In addition, it’s also one of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21518174/malaria-pregnancy-loss-miscarriage-stillbirth">leading causes of miscarriages and stillbirths in the world</a>.</p>
<p>(Older people who live in regions where malaria is endemic are, surprisingly, not especially vulnerable. The theory is that after sufficient exposure to malaria over a lifetime, the immune system develops a general anti-parasite response that might be more durable than malaria-specific immunity.)</p>
<p>In rich countries, malaria was largely eradicated in the mid-20th century through mass spraying of insecticides, including ones like DDT that have since been banned due to their ecological consequences. But many poor countries still have endemic malaria, and the range of malarial mosquitos is <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/7/18254825/zika-dengue-yellow-fever-mosquitos-climate-change">expanding due to climate change</a>.</p>
<p>Vaccinating against malaria is tricky. Parasites are much more complex than viruses, with many possible sites that the immune system might be trained to recognize.</p>
<p>“Malaria vaccine [development] has been a graveyard for really great ideas,” Derek Lowe, a researcher who writes about drug discovery, told me <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22399386/malaria-vaccine-r21mm-public-health-global-child-mortality">earlier this year</a>. “We’ve learned about a lot of stuff that doesn’t work.”</p>
<p>Targeting the parasite once it’s in the blood, for example, has been tried repeatedly but has <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4915341/">never succeeded</a>.</p>
<p>Exposing the body to dead or neutralized Plasmodium? A dead end. Researchers have been working on this for decades, and progress has been rare.</p>
<p>The earliest success stories of vaccination involved vaccines against diseases that produce lifelong immunity, like smallpox and polio. Those are viruses, so they’re much simpler to target. And since you can’t be reinfected with those diseases, the vaccine only needs to provoke the same immune response as the disease did originally, and the patient is safe for life.</p>
<p>But in the case of malaria, naturally acquired immunity against it typically is only partial and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2620631/">fades out in a few years</a>. Researchers have been working for decades to figure out <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22307700/malaria-rna-vaccines-covid-19">how a vaccine can induce durable immunity</a>, and most of that work has ended in frustrating failures.</p>
<p>That’s now changing. Mosquirix is the first vaccine to get promising results, but other vaccines have actually shown even higher efficacy in early trials. A recent phase 2 clinical trial of a malaria vaccine called R21/MM found <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3830681">77 percent efficacy</a> — a big step up, if it holds up in larger-scale trials.</p>
<p>And with many <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22307700/malaria-rna-vaccines-covid-19">other vaccine candidates</a> making their way through trials, these two early vaccines are likely to be joined by others.</p>
<p>The progress of malaria vaccine candidates is a story that’s rarely in the headlines but is big news for the world. Lessening the burden of this deadly disease for millions of people will save and improve a lot of lives. Vaccination is one of our most powerful tools against infectious disease, and our recent successes at bringing it to bear on one of our deadliest enemies is a triumph worth celebrating.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2021/10/6/22712898/who-malaria-vaccine-approval">https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2021/10/6/22712898/who-malaria-vaccine-approval</a>

vox The WHO approval of the first malaria vaccine is a big deal

Every year, malaria kills more than 400,000 people , most of them children. There has been significant progress against the disease in the p...

Our amazing sense of touch, explained by a Nobel laureate

<p>Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that nerve endings help carry the message from different parts of our bodies to our brains. But they didn’t know what kind of receptor on the nerve ending causes the message to fire — for example, when a person touches an ice cube or places a hand on a hot stove. You could say that researchers understood the wires, but not the light switch.</p>
<p>Then came <a href="https://www.scripps.edu/faculty/patapoutian/">Ardem Patapoutian</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(17)30083-0.pdf">In 2010,</a> Patapoutian and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute discovered the proteins that serve as two kinds of switches — proteins called Piezo1 and Piezo2 (piezo is Greek for the verb “to press”). This week, Patapoutian <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2021/advanced-information/">shared a Nobel prize</a> with David Julius, who similarly discovered how sensations of heat and cold enter our awareness.</p>
<p>In mammals like humans, piezo receptors transmit mechanical sensations to the nervous system. When cells that contain these piezo receptors are stretched, the receptors open up, letting in ions (charged particles) and setting off an electrical pulse.</p>
<p>But each type of receptor has a slightly different use. Piezo1 is part of our body’s built-in blood pressure monitoring system, as well as other internal systems that rely on pressure-sensing. Piezo2, on the other hand, is “the principle mechanosensor for touch and proprioception,” Patapoutian told me in 2019.</p>
<p>That is, without Piezo2, we couldn’t feel another person’s hand graze our own.</p>
<p>Proprioception, which also relies on Piezo2, is less well-known than the sense of touch, but it’s sometimes referred to as the body’s “sixth” sense. It’s our sense of where our bodies are in three-dimensional space.</p>
<figure class="e-image"><span class="e-image__inner"><span class="e-image__image" data-original="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1633554899_2154_33825" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22905335,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ByPpOqHqm5uIWC5AerDacHZ45IQ=/0x0:763x406/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PQN_ERij-X087I-DqNGrHQ9uxCo=/0x0:763x406/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lSo_K3FdhF1g0LkPmejV8wNNfas=/0x0:763x406/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Xp9-rUMbYSjlyB3SIMw8GMGgwuc=/0x0:763x406/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6MYRKMzZET9BLtXtcsNlcESAa5o=/0x0:763x406/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5dgL6aJLJ9I8JlntBZrNDO9tbOk=/0x0:763x406/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6zzHGeoP6-3aFZK1T59X6NtG87A=/0x0:763x406/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ZqX9Eq7TjDvrQpipe_r5iqUpQz4=/0x0:763x406/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WlHyhB8qGu36UmZ0eSR1d6uG3G0=/0x0:763x406/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="763" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/j03E79RpVM6P-bcidJ8G6aKV6Uc=/0x0:763x406/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1bm1H7d5QMna5P5TN8huZFq1kz8=/0x0:763x406/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OUMIAr0Bf8Z0TAWhu4ZvzlTIiw4=/0x0:763x406/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w-S0X-71_Of7xV5jGOkOx3iP3gU=/0x0:763x406/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0pKCwd4CKalglCxGGMCpYO4-y0o=/0x0:763x406/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eoElv5AX9hme68GzdlxpnXqebmA=/0x0:763x406/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Kp8nxtoo6kN72jIp4hNB_JnPSOQ=/0x0:763x406/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/aJFzA8_g67DhKGxm-BFKYtsWnVg=/0x0:763x406/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tgoQmfNUM2Zt3nmv98HNVxn3Jew=/0x0:763x406/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2UwohOVsqpwaJjs-Warnu4u8aXU=/0x0:763x406/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:763x406):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22905335/Screen_Shot_2021_10_06_at_12.38.47_PM.png 1920w" /></picture></span></span> <span class="e-image__meta"><cite><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2021/advanced-information/" target="_blank">NobelPrize.org</a></cite></span></figure>
<p>It’s easier to explain proprioception with a demonstration. If you put a cup out in front of you and then close your eyes, you can still find the cup with your hand. Proprioception is what guides your intuition of how far to move your hand and in which direction.</p>
<p>“It’s truly fascinating that we are not aware of it,” Patapoutian said of proprioception during a 2019 interview with Vox. “When I give lectures, even to college students or graduate students, I sometimes ask: “How many people know of proprioception?” Even specialized biologists often don’t know anything about it.”</p>
<p>I spoke to Patapoutian for a story about people who are missing <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/11/22/20920762/proprioception-sixth-sense">Piezo2 receptors</a> in their bodies because of a genetic inheritance. When they close their eyes, “it’s like I am lost,” one of them told me. With their eyes closed, they cannot reach for the cup in front of them. They have no idea where it is. They have no idea where their arms are in space.</p>
<p>Patapoutian helped me understand that the human sense of touch contains multitudes — and to this day, scientists don’t fully understand it. But as scientists learn more about touch receptors, they’re also figuring out how to tend to a body that’s in pain.</p>
<p><em>This conversation, which took place in 2019, has been edited for length and clarity.</em></p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>What is the sense of touch?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>We think about the five senses: vision, olfaction, taste, hearing, and touch. If you really start digging deep into touch, it’s so different than the rest of the senses.</p>
<p>When you talk about touch, there’s so many modalities to it: There’s different physical forces we sense, like temperature and mechanical force. There’s itch. There’s this [spectrum] of pleasant touch to noxious to painful.</p>
<p>It’s a very complex system. The demarcation of when pleasant touch ends and painful touch starts is actually very flexible. If you have a sunburn, for example, the same amount of touch that could have been pleasant becomes painful.</p>
<p>All of what I was just talking about is sensation on skin.</p>
<p>Again, if you put on top of it proprioception and internal organ sensation, it’s a very complicated sense that we don’t really understand. There’s no totally, well-agreed terminology even to describe clearly what we mean by touch and somatosensation.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>How is proprioception related to touch?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>Proprioception is dependent on your sensory system detecting muscle stretch. When that muscle gets stretched, these nerve endings that are wrapped around it can sense it. Piezo2 is actually sitting right at the ends of these nerves, where [they] wrap around the muscle.</p>
<p>When you close your eyes and touch your nose, how are you doing this? What’s the information that you’re basing this on? It’s all about learning, as you grow up, to sense how much each of these muscles are being stretched when you’re making these complex motions of your hand. From that, you know exactly where things are.</p>
<p>People sometimes call it muscle memory. It’s actually mostly these proprioceptive neurons that are giving you this understanding of where your limbs are compared to your body — simply from detecting how much your tendons and muscles are being stretched.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>Touch and proprioception use the same receptor: Piezo2. But all those other sensations you described — temperature, itch, pain — do those all enter us through different receptors? Is it the case that all these different types of touch feelings have a different specific molecule responsible for them?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>Absolutely, the molecules are different. There are temperature sensors at very different ranges of temperature. Cold, heat, warm are all different.</p>
<p>From 2000 to 2010, my lab studied temperature sensation. We, for example, identified the first cold-activated ion channel. It ended up also being the receptor for menthol. Anytime you use one of these chewing gums or toothpastes that gives that cooling sensation in your mouth, it hijacks the cold-activated channel.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>Is the goal to try to find the sensor responsible for each sensation?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>Yeah. What seems to have worked is starting with a very reductionist approach, in the sense of finding the sensor.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>Are some of these sensors still elusive?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>Absolutely. Without Piezo2, you don’t have touch, you don’t have proprioception. However, acute touch — the hammer hitting your finger “ouch” kind of feeling — the identity of these ion channels that account for acute pain is still unknown.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>I don’t know if this gets more into philosophy than science, but are we just the sum of all these inputs?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>I think the clear thing one has to realize is that sensory biology is not telling us about reality. It is <em>representing</em> reality.</p>
<p>[Reality is] very related to these senses. But that’s the thing I would emphasize — it’s kind of an approximation. We’re interpreting the world according to what sensory systems we have.</p>
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<p>What about our world has always made you curious? Fill out this <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfh0IRau0VqSIimlIDjBdXz9D1547Yir7Ft10FWp0AWJuk8pQ/viewform" data-analytics-viewport="related-story" data-analytics-link="related-story">short Google form</a>, and we might look into your questions for a future episode of <a href="http://vox.com/unexplainable" data-analytics-viewport="related-story" data-analytics-link="related-story"><em>Unexplainable</em></a><em>,</em> our new podcast about the most fascinating unanswered questions in science.</p>
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<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>I’m thinking about proprioception. I watched someone without Piezo2 receptors try to touch a ball on a table in front of her with her eyes closed. And she couldn’t do it. I asked her, “What does it feel like when your eyes are closed?” And she said, “It’s like I’m lost.”</p>
<p>Then I tried to think what I feel when I close my eyes and can sense the locations of objects around me. And I don’t have a word for it.</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>It’s consciousness. That’s what I keep going back to.</p>
<h4>Brian Resnick</h4>
<p>Is that just pure consciousness? It’s just awareness?</p>
<h4>Ardem Patapoutian</h4>
<p>I think I would get into trouble if I called proprioception consciousness. But I actually think, at the most basic level, a physical aspect of consciousness requires proprioception.</p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22710533/nobel-prize-2021-ardem-patapoutian-touch">https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22710533/nobel-prize-2021-ardem-patapoutian-touch</a>

vox Our amazing sense of touch, explained by a Nobel laureate

Before 2010, scientists knew very little about how the sensation of touch begins its journey into a person’s consciousness. They knew that n...

The mystery of the “same sky” postcards

<p>James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old-age homes, ugly restaurants, onlookers, and 1960s advertising are neatly organized in boxes in his Canadian home.</p>
<p>But James started to notice that some of his postcards — dozens, in fact — appeared to have the exact same sky. Looking even closer, he noticed that the same-sky postcards were all made by one publisher: Dexter Press out of West Nyack, New York.</p>
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<li data-ui="thumb" data-asset="22903789" data-slug="onlookers-with-red-coats-in-brouwers-collection" data-index="0"><a href="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22903789/ambleside_lake_district_england_11611132053_o.jpg" role="button"><img alt="Onlookers with red coats in Brouwer’s collection." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zNdr4WVjU-JsKHPgbMV56iqu3Bw=/250x250/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22903789/ambleside_lake_district_england_11611132053_o.jpg" /></a> <span class="c-image-gallery__thumb-title">Onlookers with red coats in Brouwer’s collection.</span> <span class="c-image-gallery__thumb-desc">James Brouwer/Flickr</span></li>
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<p>Dexter Press was once one of the largest publishers of “chrome-era postcards” — postcards made from color photographs became popular in the 1940s. By the time James started collecting in the 1980s, “chrome cards” were mostly overlooked by collectors, and could be bought cheaply in flea markets. It wasn’t until he looked through a lot of these cards that he noticed the same sky repeating itself.</p>
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<p>You can explore <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/94207108@N02/albums/with/72157633138912882">Brouwer’s full postcard collection</a> online.</p>
<p>Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn’t show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ8cMiYb3G5ce8J4P5j5qOEtYR94Z3DQs">here</a>.</p>
<p>You can find this video and all of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLXo7UDZvByw2ixzpQCufnA">Vox’s videos on YouTube</a>.</p>
<br />
<br />
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/videos/22711680/same-sky-vintage-postcard-dexter-press">https://www.vox.com/videos/22711680/same-sky-vintage-postcard-dexter-press</a>

vox The mystery of the “same sky” postcards

James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old-age homes, ugly restau...

Facebook is having a Big Oil moment

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<p>Sen. Richard Blumenthal mentioned a familiar metaphor <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22711551/facebook-whistleblower-congress-hearing-regulation-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen-senator-blumenthal">in the Facebook whistleblower hearing on Tuesday</a>. “Facebook and Big Tech are facing their Big Tobacco moment,” he said, arguing that the social network’s products “can be addictive and toxic to children.” Frances Haugen, the aforementioned whistleblower, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">has similarly called</a> Facebook’s decisions “disastrous” and has said that the company “chooses profit over safety.”</p>
<p>Do these phrases remind you of Big Tobacco? Sure. They also make me think of Big Oil.</p>
<p>At its best, Facebook’s products are a resource that has led to some good. (Connecting people online can be <a href="https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/obama-power-social-media-technology?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">a powerful thing</a>!) The company also produces an untold quantity of byproducts that lead to a lot of undesired effects. (Helping <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/facebook-democracy.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">destroy democracy</a> wasn’t exactly part of <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-lost-notebook/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for world domination</a>.) With nearly 3 billion users around the globe, Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon.</p>
<p>The Big Tobacco metaphor does a good job of framing Facebook’s products as unhealthy. The only problem with comparing the two is that you can pretty easily avoid cigarettes these days. But it’s actually quite difficult to spend a day on the internet <a href="https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-facebook-out-of-my-life-surprisingly-i-missed-i-1830565456?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">without interacting with Facebook</a>.</p>
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<p>Enter the oil metaphor. Just like Facebook, there are upsides to fossil fuels. Oil and gas have historically provided us with a relatively cheap, seemingly plentiful energy supply. This has led to cool inventions like the internal combustion engine and the cars it powers. But just like Facebook, fossil fuels come with a lot of downsides — like how our reliance on them <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/the-particular-psychology-of-destroying-a-planet?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">is destroying the planet</a> — but it’s also almost impossible to imagine the world functioning without them.</p>
<p>Most of us can’t just quit Facebook. The entire world can’t easily pick up and move to a new platform. At this point, we depend on Facebook’s products so much that turning them off suddenly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-down-ig-down-whatsapp-down.html?name=styln-facebook&region=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=LegacyCollection&variant=show&is_new=false&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">can bring entire economies to a halt</a>. We saw this play out on Monday, when a server configuration error took out Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp for hours. This may have seemed like a mere inconvenience for a lot of people in the United States, where there are plenty of other ways to communicate and do business online. But in the global South, some of Facebook’s products, particularly WhatsApp, have become essential services.</p>
<p>“Developing nations such as India, Mexico, and Brazil have come to rely on these free messaging services,” Callum Sillars, a social media expert at Ampere Analysis, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-outage-highlights-global-over-reliance-on-its-services?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">told the Guardian</a> this week. “They are often the backbone of communication in these countries. Small businesses and informal economies in particular rely on Facebook’s services.”</p>
<p>Sounds a bit like our reliance on oil, right? For example, if we woke up next Monday and all of the oil and gas on the planet had disappeared, it would be chaotic. But it wouldn’t be quite as bad in the US, where renewable energy use <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/15/renewable-energy-is-growing-fast-in-the-u-s-but-fossil-fuels-still-dominate/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">has been rising quickly</a>, as it would be <a href="https://blogs.worldbank.org/climatechange/diversification-and-cooperation-decarbonizing-world-climate-strategies-fossil-fuel?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">in parts of Africa and the Middle East</a>. The developing countries in these areas <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/heres-why-developing-countries-will-consume-65-of-the-worlds-energy-by-2040/282006/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">depend heavily</a> on fossil fuels for their daily energy needs, and they <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/essay/why-are-fossil-fuels-so-hard-to-quit/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">don’t have a viable alternative</a> right now.</p>
<p>You could extend the analogy, too. Facebook is like the oil industry because <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-geopolitics-of-energy-11599836521?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">both</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">play</a> an outsized role in geopolitics. Facebook, like oil, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earnings-profit.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">makes massive profits</a> while causing immeasurable harm to society. Facebook, like oil companies of yesteryear, has a habit of gobbling up smaller competitors to increase its control over the market. Comparing Facebook to Standard Oil is actually a pretty fun thought experiment, especially when you look at the inverse relationship between public sentiment and government intervention in Standard Oil. Simply put, it was only after people’s opinion of the Standard Oil monopoly plummeted in the early 1900s — <a href="https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2014/today-in-media-history-ida-tarbells-1902-1904-investigative-series-on-corruption-at-the-standard-oil-company/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">thanks in part to muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell</a> — that antitrust regulators swept in to break up John D. Rockefeller’s empire.</p>
<p>What will happen to Mark Zuckerberg’s empire as it confronts its <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/10/3/22707940/frances-haugen-facebook-whistleblower-60-minutes-teen-girls-instagram?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">latest crisis over the harm it causes society</a> remains unclear, but this time feels more serious than its past scandals. In her <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22711551/facebook-whistleblower-congress-hearing-regulation-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen-senator-blumenthal?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">testimony</a> before the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday, Haugen gave lawmakers a blueprint for how to fix Facebook, and Sen. Blumenthal <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen/senators-applaud-their-witness-in-facebook-hearing?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">called on Zuckerberg</a> to appear before the committee and answer some questions — specifically about recent revelations, like how Facebook knew that Instagram was harming teen girls but did nothing about it. If his appearance happens this month, Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/climate/exxon-oil-disinformation-house-probe.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Recode%2010.06.2021&utm_term=Recode">might even run into some oil industry executives</a> testifying before the House Oversight Committee about climate disinformation.</p>
<p><em>This story first published in the Recode newsletter.</em> <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/newsletters"><em>Sign up here</em></a> <em>so you don’t miss the next one!</em></p>
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source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22712348/facebook-whistleblower-outage-oil">https://www.vox.com/recode/22712348/facebook-whistleblower-outage-oil</a>

vox Facebook is having a Big Oil moment

Sen. Richard Blumenthal mentioned a familiar metaphor in the Facebook whistleblower hearing on Tuesday . “Facebook and Big Tech are facing ...

Police Attack Slovenians Protesting Against COVID Restrictions, Vax Passports

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<p><strong>Police in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana clashed with crowds demonstrating against Covid restrictions, deploying horse-mounted officers, tear gas and water cannon to disperse people on the eve of today’s European Union summit there.</strong></p>
<p>Hundreds of demonstrators on Tuesday took to the streets of Ljubljana to oppose the government’s pandemic measures, with a video on Twitter showing seas of people marching along roads.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">Slovenia 🇸🇮 When you consider the population of the country.. this protest against medical tyranny is absolutely epic.. of course MSM is silent <a href="https://t.co/EvlBEuX6lU">pic.twitter.com/EvlBEuX6lU</a></p>
— Pelham (@Resist_05) <a href="https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1445512902065090560?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 5, 2021</a></blockquote>
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<p>Other footage showed mounted riot-control police on horseback and demonstrators being hit with water cannon fired from a truck.</p>
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<p>A video apparently captured thick white plumes of tear gas moving across a road in the center of the capital as vehicles drove through the mist.</p>
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<p>The leader of the protest movement has reportedly been detained by law enforcement.</p>
<p>The demo came the day before European leaders met in Ljubljana, which is currently chairing the EU Council presidency, on Wednesday to hold talks with Western Balkan countries that aspire to become members of the bloc.</p>
<p>While the protests coincided with the arrival of EU officials, the rally was part of a string of similar demonstrations in recent weeks to decry the Slovenian government and its handling of the pandemic.</p>
<p>At the end of last month, huge crowds marched to protest against the mandatory requirement, introduced in mid-September, of Covid passes for almost all shops, services and workplaces.</p>
<p>Police estimated attendance for the late-September rally at 10,000, while the organizers put the figure at 10 times that number.</p>
<p>Slovenia, home to around 2 million people, has vaccinated around 48% of its population, falling behind many countries in the 27-strong member state EU bloc.</p>
<p><em>Mike Adams joins Alex Jones to <a href="https://freeworldnews.tv/watch?id=615a65b9ce96d12aecd7d92b" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">expose the collapse of society taking place as supply chains are disrupted</a> and how that fits squarely into the globalist agenda to swoop in and take control.</em></p>
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source <a href="https://www.infowars.com/posts/police-attack-slovenians-protesting-against-covid-restrictions-vax-passports">https://www.infowars.com/posts/police-attack-slovenians-protesting-against-covid-restrictions-vax-passports</a>

news Police Attack Slovenians Protesting Against COVID Restrictions, Vax Passports

Police in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana clashed with crowds demonstrating against Covid restrictions, deploying horse-mounted officers, tear...