Chris Hedges's Blog, page 338

Peter Jackson’s Cartoon War

When ’s World War I film, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which miraculously transforms grainy, choppy black-and-white archival footage from the war into a modern 3D color extravaganza, begins, he bombards us with the clichés used to ennoble war. Veterans, over background music, say things like “I wouldn’t have missed it,” “I would go through it all over again because I enjoyed the service life” and “It made me a man.” It must have taken some effort after the war to find the tiny minority of veterans willing to utter this rubbish. Military life is a form of servitude, prolonged exposure to combat leaves you broken, scarred for life by trauma and often so numb you have difficulty connecting with others, and the last thing war does is make you a man.

Far more common was the experience of the actor Wilfrid Lawson, who was wounded in the war and as a result had a metal plate in his skull. He drank heavily to dull the incessant pain. In his memoirs “Inside Memory,” Timothy Findley, who acted with him, recalled that Lawson “always went to bed sodden and all night long he would be dragged from one nightmare to another—often yelling—more often screaming—very often struggling physically to free himself of impeding bedclothes and threatening shapes in the shadows.” He would pound the walls, shouting “Help! Help! Help!” The noise, my dear—and the people.

David Lloyd George, wartime prime minister of Britain, in his memoirs used language like this to describe the conflict:

… [I]nexhaustible vanity that will never admit a mistake … individuals who would rather the million perish than that they as leaders should own—even to themselves—that they were blunderers … the notoriety attained by a narrow and stubborn egotism, unsurpassed among the records of disaster wrought by human complacency … a bad scheme badly handled … impossible orders issued by Generals who had no idea what the execution of their commands really meant … this insane enterprise … this muddy and muddle-headed venture. …

The British Imperial War Museum, which was behind the Jackson film, had no interest in portraying the dark reality of war. War may be savage, brutal and hard, but it is also, according to the myth, ennobling, heroic and selfless. You can believe this drivel only if you have never been in combat, which is what allows Jackson to modernize a cartoon version of war.

The poet Siegfried Sassoon in “The Hero” captured the callousness of war:

“Jack fell as he’d have wished,” the Mother said,

And folded up the letter that she’d read.

“The Colonel writes so nicely.” Something broke

In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.

She half looked up. “We mothers are so proud

Of our dead soldiers.” Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.

He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies

That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.

For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes

Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,

Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how “Jack,” cold-footed, useless swine,

Had panicked down the trench that night the mine

Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried

To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,

Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care

Except that lonely woman with white hair.

Our own generals and politicians, who nearly two decades ago launched the greatest strategic blunder in American history and have wasted nearly $6 trillion on conflicts in the Middle East that we cannot win, are no less egotistical and incompetent. The images of our wars are as carefully controlled and censored as the images from World War I. While the futility and human carnage of our current conflicts are rarely acknowledged in public, one might hope that we could confront the suicidal idiocy of World War I a century later.

Leon Wolff, in his book “In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign,” writes of World War I:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing; and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452. Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach ten million. The moral and mental defects of the leaders of the human race had been demonstrated with some exactitude. One of them (Woodrow Wilson) later admitted that the war had been fought for business interests; another (David Lloyd George) had told a newspaperman: ‘If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t—and can’t know. The correspondents don’t write and the censorship wouldn’t pass the truth.’

There is no mention in the film of the colossal stupidity of the British general staff that sent hundreds of thousands of working-class Englishmen—they are seen grinning into the camera with their decayed teeth—in wave after wave, week after week, month after month, into the mouths of German machine guns to be killed or wounded. There is no serious exploration of the iron censorship that hid the realities of the war from the public and saw the press become a shill for warmongers. There is no investigation into how the war was used by the state, as it is today, as an excuse to eradicate civil liberties. There is no look at the immense wealth made by the arms manufacturers and contractors or how the war plunged Britain deep into debt with war-related costs totaling 70 percent of the gross national product. Yes, we see some pictures of gruesome wounds, digitalized into color, yes, we hear how rats ate corpses, but the war in the film is carefully choreographed, stripped of the deafening sounds, repugnant smells and most importantly the crippling fear and terror that make a battlefield a stygian nightmare. We glimpse dead bodies, but there are no long camera shots of the slow agony of those dying of horrific wounds. Sanitized images like these are war pornography. That they are no longer jerky and grainy and have been colorized in 3D merely gives old war porn a modern sheen.

“When the war was not very active, it was really rather fun to be in the front line,” a veteran says in the film. “It was a sort of outdoor camp holiday with a slight spice of danger to make it interesting.”

Insipid comments like that defined the perception of the war at home. The clash between a civilian population that saw the war as “a sort of outdoor camp holiday” and those who experienced it led to profound estrangement. The poet Charles Sorley wrote: “I should like so much to kill whoever was primarily responsible for the war.” And journalist and author Philip Gibbs noted that soldiers had a deep hatred of civilians who believed the lies. “They hated the smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men. … They desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed to God to get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England—to make the people know what war meant.”

Military studies have determined that after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of those who survive will have become psychiatric casualties. The common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” Lt. Col. David Grossman wrote: “It is not too far from the mark to observe that there is something about continuous, inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and the other 2 percent were crazy when they got there.”

The military cliques in American society are as omnipotent as they were in World War I. The symbols of war and militarism, then and now, have a quasi-religious aura, especially in our failed democracy. Our incompetent generals—such as David Petraeus, whose surges only prolonged the Iraq War and raised the casualty figures and whose idea to arm “moderate” rebels in Syria was a debacle—are as lionized as the pig-headed and vainglorious Gen. Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, who resisted innovations such as the tank, the airplane and the machine gun, which he called “a much overrated weapon.” He believed the cavalry would play the decisive role in winning the war. Haig, in the Battle of the Somme, oversaw 60,000 casualties on the first day of the offensive, July 1, 1916. None of his military objectives were achieved. Twenty thousand lay dead between the lines. The wounded cried out for days. This did not dampen Haig’s ardor to sacrifice his soldiers. Determined to make his plan of bursting through the German lines and unleashing his three divisions of cavalry on the fleeing enemy, he kept the waves of assaults going for four months until winter forced him to cease. By the time Haig was done, the army had suffered more than 400,000 casualties and accomplished nothing. Lt. Col. E.T.F. Sandys, who saw 500 of his soldiers killed or wounded on the first day at the Somme, wrote two months later, “I have never had a moment’s peace since July 1st.” He then shot himself to death in a London hotel room. Joe Sacco’s illustrated book “The Great War,” a 24-foot-long wordless panorama that depicts the first day of the Battle of Somme, reveals more truth about the horror of war than Jackson’s elaborate restoration of old film.

The military historian B.H. Liddell Hart, who served in the war, wrote in his diary:

He [Haig] was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruple—who, to his overweening ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the Government which he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal.

The American attorney Harold Shapiro, following World War I, examined the medical records of the Army on behalf of a disabled veteran. He was appalled at the reality these records elucidated and the misperception of the war within the public. The medical descriptions, he wrote, rendered “all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda.” He published a book in 1937 titled “What Every Young Man Should Know About War.” It was pulled from circulation when the United States entered World War II and never reissued. It was the model for my book “What Every Person Should Know About War.”

Shapiro wrote in his chapter “Mental Reactions”:

Q: What may happen to me after I bayonet my enemy in the face?

You may develop an hysterical tic—quick, sudden, convulsive spasms of twitching of your own facial muscles.

Q: What may happen to me after I bayonet my enemy in the abdomen?

You may be seized with abdominal contractions.

Q: What may happen to me following particularly horrible sights?

You may be seized with hysterical blindness.

Q: What may happen to me if I find the cries of the wounded unbearable?

You may develop hysterical deafness.

Q: What may happen to me should I be detailed to burial parties?

You may develop anosmia (loss of your sense of smell).

The German pacifist Ernst Friedrich collected 200 photographs of gruesome wounds, piles of corpses in mass graves, the hanging and executions of deserters—their families were told they had “died of wounds”—and battlefield atrocities censored from the public in his 1924 book, “WAR Against WAR!” He juxtaposed the images against the propaganda that romanticized the conflict. His 24 close-ups of soldiers with grotesquely disfiguring facial wounds remain difficult to view. Friedrich was arrested when the Nazis came to power in 1933, his book was banned and his Anti-War Museum closed. A picture of a nearly naked soldier dead in a trench in his book reads: “Mothers! This was the fate of your sons in the war; first murdered, then robbed to the skin and then left as grub for animals.”

Honestly examining past wars gives us the ability to understand current wars. But this is a herculean struggle. The public is fed, and yearns for, the myth. It is empowering and ennobling. It celebrates supposed national virtues and military prowess. It allows an alienated population to feel part of a national collective engaged in a noble crusade. The celebration of the destructive force of our weaponry makes us feel personally empowered. All wars, past and present, are effectively shrouded in this myth. Those who decried the waste and carnage, such as Keir Hardie, the head of the Independent Labour Party, were jeered in the streets. Adam Hochschild’s book “To End All Wars” details the struggle by pacifists and a handful of journalists and dissidents during the war to make the truth known and who were mocked, silenced and often jailed.

“Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling,” wrote J. Glenn Gary, a combat veteran of World War II, in “The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle.” “This is especially true of men in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.”

Jackson closes the film with an army ditty about prostitution. “You might forget the gas and shell,” the song goes, “but you’ll nev’r forget the Mademoiselle! Hinky-dinky, parlez-vous?”

Tens of thousands of girls and women, whose brothers, fathers, sons and husbands were dead or crippled, and whose homes often had been destroyed, became impoverished and often homeless. They were easy prey for the brothels, including the military-run brothels, and the pimps that serviced the soldiers. There is nothing amusing or cute about lying on a straw mat and being raped by as many as 60 men a day, unless you are the rapist.

“Give sorrow words,” William Shakespeare reminded us, “The grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”

It is fortunate all the participants in the war are dead. They would find the film another example of the monstrous lie that denied their reality, ignored or minimized their suffering and never held the militarists, careerists, profiteers and imbeciles who prosecuted the war accountable. War is the raison d’être of technological society. It unleashes demons. And those who profit from these demons, then and now, work hard to keep them hidden.

 

Denver Teachers to Strike as Educators Continue to Lead Labor Movement

Teachers in Denver are preparing to strike Monday over wages and working conditions after failing to reach agreement after 14 months of negotiations with the school district.

The planned strike could help cement teachers’ leading role in the labor movement, following a recent victory for Los Angeles educators, who reached a deal on a variety of issues after a weeklong strike in January. Teachers in the California cities of Oakland and Sacramento may be preparing to walk off the job next.

Last year, the number of workers who went on strike was the highest in 32 years. The vast majority—more than 90 percent—were members of education, health care and social assistance groups. The 20 biggest work stoppages in 2018 involved 485,000 workers, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Denver teachers union lead negotiator Rob Gould expressed frustration Saturday over the solutions offered by Denver Public Schools Superintendent Susana Cordova: “I think we’re at this point where you keep asking teachers to compromise over and over. What else do you want from us, Susana? We give you our lives. What are you willing to give us?”

When Cordova responded that she wanted to continue negotiations, Gould announced that the union would return to the bargaining table Tuesday, after the strike. Points of contention include the complicated system the school district uses to calculate bonuses and the its disproportionate number of highly paid administrative positions compared with teaching positions.

“We will strike Monday for our students and for our profession,” said teachers union President Henry Roman, “and perhaps then [the school district] will get the message and return to the bargaining table with a serious proposal aimed at solving the teacher turnover crisis in Denver.”

.@DenverTeachers yell “123 Solidarity!” Time to head to prepare for tomorrow to fight for the #SchoolsOurStudentsDeserve and fair pay. #StrikeReady #Solidarity #RedForEd #DCTAstrong #copols #Education pic.twitter.com/wzeOqId863

— Colorado Education Association (@ColoradoEA) February 10, 2019

“I didn’t expect to make a lot of money,” said Denver teacher Amber Wilson, “but I didn’t expect in my late 30s and early 40s to be waiting with bated breath for my paycheck to come at the end of the month.”

The largest strike of 2018 was in Arizona and involved 81,000 teachers who collectively accounted for 486,000 lost days of work, according to the BLS. The walkout ended after the governor agreed to give teachers a 19 percent pay raise. The next biggest strike, which resulted in 405,000 working days lost, was in Oklahoma, where teachers went on strike over class size and pay.

Some of the biggest work stoppages last year were called for by union members, not their leadership, according to Patrick Martin at the World Socialist Web Site.

“Of the six conflicts in 2018 with the largest impact in terms of work days lost, only one, against the Marriott hotel chain, was called by the unions. Four were statewide teachers’ strikes initiated by the rank-and-file on their own, using social media,” Martin wrote.

Los Angeles teachers union President Alex Caputo-Pearl said he attributes its victory last month to “old-fashioned organizing.”

We’ve spent the last few years building systems and structures among our members, parents, and community organizations. By the time we went on strike, we had all nine hundred schools ready to go with contract action teams at just about every single school. We had regional structures that parents and community were involved in. Then once we went on strike, the issues touched a nerve publicly, and tens of thousands of more parents and community got involved.

In Oakland, the union has authorized a strike over teacher pay, class size and school privatization. In Sacramento, a judge ordered the school district to return to arbitration Wednesday to negotiate a salary adjustment for early- and mid-career teachers. The district narrowly avoided a strike in November 2017.

“It’s a shame that the district frivolously spent precious resources on attorneys rather than using those resources in our classrooms,” noted David Fisher, president of the Sacramento teachers union.

OUSD students have organized a sick out in solidarity with the upcoming @OaklandEA strike!

Charter schools have go to go! #unite4oaklandkids #RedForEd pic.twitter.com/ukC03Lti6V

— Majority (@EastBayMajority) February 8, 2019

Protest Erupts Over Guggenheim Museum’s Ties to Big Pharma

Demonstrators inside New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum staged a “die in” and dropped thousands of paper slips designed to look like OxyContin prescriptions Saturday night to protest the facility’s ties to the billionaire Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma and has been accused of deliberately fueling the opioid epidemic for profit.

“Education facilities at the Guggenheim, including a theater and an exhibition gallery, are housed inside the 8,200-square-foot Sackler Center for Arts Education, identified by the museum as ‘a gift of the Mortimer D. Sackler Family,'” the New York Times reported.

“The cloud of white slips, created by a group founded by the photographer Nan Goldin, was a response to a recently disclosed statement by Richard Sackler, the son of a Purdue founder, who said years ago that OxyContin’s launch would be ‘followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,'” the Times continued.

Videos of the striking demonstration quickly spread on social media:

My first trip to the Guggenheim. Sackler family made Billions pushing Oxycotin and lying about the dangers. Fuck them and their money they shouldnt be honored in museums, they should be prosecuted! #SacklersLiePeopleDie pic.twitter.com/s0CwZ5YBYF

— Charles Khan (@Charles_Darkley) February 10, 2019

Protestors staged a die-in & dropped flyers @ the #Guggenheim tonight demanding that the museum remove the name of the Sackler family, owners of ⁦@purduepharma⁩ that produces OxyContin. The pill kills ~200 people every day #OpioidEpidemic. Read more: https://t.co/UjEqeTLfYr pic.twitter.com/pRmoS3qRKY

— Andrew Kimmel (@andrewkimmel) February 10, 2019

I didn’t know what was happening today @Guggenheim as people starting yelling. An incredibly moving protest against Big Pharma @sacklerpain #sacklerpain pic.twitter.com/MB0vh5GHRF

— Krista Parry (@kristaparry) February 10, 2019

Demonstrations against the Sackler family continued outside Guggenheim Saturday night, with protesters marching with banners that read, “Shame on Sackler”:

Take to the streets. Shame on Sackler. Lock them up. @sacklerpain @Guggenheim @FEDUpRally @FacingAddiction pic.twitter.com/4gb93t4hPM

— Ryan Hampton (@RyanForRecovery) February 10, 2019

Blackface, Other Insensitivities Ran Rampant in ’80s Culture

At the time Virginia’s future political leaders put on blackface in college for fun, Dan Aykroyd wore it too — in the hit 1983 comedy “Trading Places.”

Sports announcers of that time often described Boston Celtics player Larry Bird, who is white, as “smart” while describing his black NBA opponents as athletically gifted.

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Such racial insensitivities ran rampant in popular culture during the 1980s, the era in which Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and the state’s attorney general, Mark Herring, have admitted to wearing blackface as they mimicked pop singer Michael Jackson and rapper Kurtis Blow, respectively.

Meanwhile, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Michael Jackson made music history with his “Thriller” album, U.S. college students protested against South Africa’s racist system of apartheid and the stereotype-smashing sitcom “The Cosby Show” debuted on network television.

It would be another 10 years before the rise of multiculturalism began to change America’s racial sensibilities, in part because intellectuals and journalists of color were better positioned to successfully challenge racist images, and Hollywood began to listen.

“We are in a stronger position to educate the American public about symbols and cultural practices that are harmful today than we were in the 1980s,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

During the ’80s, college faculties and student bodies were less diverse, Gates said. Some scholars who entered college during the 1960s had yet to take on roles in which mainstream culture would heed their cultural critiques, he said.

At the time Northam and Herring put on black makeup, Hollywood and popular culture still sent messages that racial stereotypes and racist imagery were comical and harmless, despite pleas from civil rights groups and black newspapers.

Herring was a 19-year-old University of Virginia student when he wore brown makeup and a wig to look like rapper Kurtis Blow at a 1980 party. Three years before that, white actor Gene Wilder darkened his face with shoe polish in the movie “Silver Streak” co-starring Richard Pryor. He used a stereotypical walk to impersonate a black person living in an urban neighborhood.

On television, viewers could see a Tom and Jerry cartoon featuring the character Mammy Two Shoes, an obese black maid who spoke in a stereotypical voice. The 1940s cartoon series was shown across several markets throughout the 1980s. Television stations ignored complaints from civil rights groups.

Elsewhere, Miami erupted into riots following the acquittal of white police officers who killed black salesman and retired Marine Arthur McDuffie in what many called a case of police brutality. President Jimmy Carter visited and pressed for an end to the violence, but a protester threw a bottle at his limousine as he left.

When Northam wore blackface to imitate Michael Jackson and copy his moonwalking skills at a 1984 San Antonio dance contest, television stations still aired Looney Tunes episodes with racially insensitive images using Bugs Bunny and other characters despite some controversial episodes being taken off the air in 1968.

African-Americans, however, had reason to be hopeful amid electoral gains. A year before, in 1983, Chicago became the latest city to elect a black mayor, Harold Washington, after activists registered 100,000 new black voters. That election, Jesse Jackson later said, paved the way for him to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 1984.

“It was out of that context that my own candidacy emerged,” Jackson said in the 1990 “Eyes on the Prize” documentary. Jackson lost the nomination to former Vice President Walter Mondale.

Two years after Northam’s moonwalk performance, the comedy “Soul Man” hit theaters. In the movie, Mark Watson, played by white actor C. Thomas Howell, takes tanning pills in a larger dose to appear African-American so he can obtain a scholarship meant for black students at Harvard Law School. The movie drew a strong reaction from the NAACP and protesters to movie theaters.

Still, “Soul Man” took in around $28 million domestically, equivalent to around $63.5 million today.

Despite those images, new and popular black cultural figures also emerged, including Eddie Murphy, Oprah Winfrey and a young Michael Jordan. Black Entertainment Television, or BET, was founded in 1980 by businessman Robert L. Johnson, giving the country access to black entertainment using 1970s sitcoms and music.

But as Nelson George argued in his book “Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans,” BET failed to counter negative images by relying on free music videos and investing little money in original programming. “Through this conservative strategy, BET prospered while offering little new to a community starved for images of itself,” George wrote.

In addition, the new black cultural figures rarely engaged in politics or spoke out against racial injustice.

Sometimes, stereotypes and comments did result in consequences. For example, CBS fired sports commentator Jimmy Snyder, known as Jimmy the Greek, in 1988 after he suggested in a television interview that black athletes were better because of slavery. The Los Angeles Dodgers fired general manager Al Campanis in 1987 for saying on ABC’s “Nightline” that blacks “may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager or perhaps a general manager” and they were poor swimmers.

In 1987, black demonstrators marched in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, to protest the racism that kept blacks out for 75 years. They were promptly attacked by white nationalists hurling rocks and waving Confederate flags. The shocking images sparked national outrage and led Oprah Winfrey to air an episode of her then-5-month-old syndicated talk show from the county.

“What are you afraid that black people are going to do?” Winfrey asked the audience.

“I’m afraid of them coming to Forsyth County,” one white man told her.

Today, Gates said, people can no longer claim ignorance. While it should have been understood that blackface was offensive during the 1980s, one might have had to go to the library to learn exactly why, he said.

“We also have more records digitized,” Gates said. “The access to archives is larger, and we have more diversity in the media so we can say these images are painful … and why we shouldn’t use them.”

___

Associated Press Writer Russell Contreras is a member of the AP’s race and ethnicity team.

Reusing Greenhouse Gases to Power the World

Researchers have found ways to realise a modern version of the medieval alchemists’ dream – not turning base metals into gold, but conjuring energy from greenhouse gases, exploiting abundant pollutants to help to power the world.

Korean scientists have developed a sophisticated fuel cell that consumes carbon dioxide and produces electricity and hydrogen – potentially another fuel – at the same time.

Researchers based in the US and Spain have devised a nanoscale fabric that converts electromagnetic waves into electrical current.

The dream is that a smartphone coated with the fabric could, without benefit of a battery, charge itself from the ambient wi-fi radiation that it exploits for texts, calls and data.

German scientists have taken a leaf from nature’s book and applied it – so far in theory – to bulk cargo shipping. Salvinia molesta, a floating fern native to Brazil, isolates itself from water with a thin sheath of air. If the large carriers could adopt the Salvinia trick and incorporate a similar layer of air in the anti-fouling coating on the hull, this would reduce drag sufficiently to save 20% of fuel costs.

To the Urals

And in yet another demonstration of the ingenuity and innovative ambition on show in the world’s laboratories, another German team has looked at the large-scale climate economics of artificial photosynthesis – a system of semiconductors and oxides – that could draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and deliver stable chemical compounds.

To take 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year would demand a forest that covered all Europe as far as the Urals. But to do the same job, a commercial forest of “artificial leaves” would require a land area about the size of the German federal state of Brandenburg.

All these ideas are ready for further development. None is so far anywhere near the commercial market.

But all are evidence that chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists have taken up the great climate challenge: how to power modern society without fuelling even faster global warming and climate change that could, ultimately, bring global economic growth to a devastating halt.

And, as many researchers see it, that means not just by-passing the fossil fuels that drive climate change, but actively exploiting the ever-higher ratios of carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere, or soon to emerge from power station chimneys

The best thing now would be to drastically reduce emissions immediately – that would be safer and much cheaper.

Scientists at UNIST, Korea’s National Institute of Science and Technology, report in the journal iScience that in collaboration with engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US they have already developed a hybrid sodium-carbon dioxide system of electrolytes that converts dissolved carbon dioxide to sodium bicarbonate and hydrogen, with a flow of electric current.

Efficiency is high – with 50% of the carbon dioxide exploited – and could be higher. And their test apparatus so far has run in stable fashion for 1000 hours. The system uses a new approach to materials to exploit something in the air everywhere.

And that too is exactly what researchers in the US have done: they report in the journal Nature that they have fashioned a flexible sheet of ultra-thin material that serves as what they call a “rectenna”: a radio-frequency antenna that harvests radiation, including wi-fi signals, as alternating current waveforms, and feeds them to a nanoscale semiconductor that converts it to direct current.

So far, the rectenna devices have produced 40 microwatts of power: enough to fire up a light-emitting diode, or power a silicon chip.

“We have come up with a new way to power the electronics systems of the future – by harvesting wi-fi energy in a way that’s easily integrated in large areas – to bring intelligence to every object around us,” said Tomás Palacios, an electrical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the authors.

Magic carpet

The waterweed Salvinia molesta exploits bubbles to keep itself afloat but out of the water: it literally rides in the water on a little magic carpet of air. The hydrophobic plant is regarded as an invasive pest, but the way it harnesses air to keep itself afloat and on top of things provides a lesson not just for evolutionary biologists but for engineers.

Researchers from the University of Bonn have been looking at the problem of the global shipping fleet: cargo freighters burn 250 million tonnes of fuel a year and emit a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, much of it because of the sheer drag of moving a hull through the waves. So anything that reduces drag saves fuel (which accounts for half of all transport costs).

The German scientists report in the Philosophical Transactions A of the Royal Society that their experiments with hull coatings based on the lessons of Salvinia could in the medium term cut fuel costs by up to 20% and on a global scale reduce emissions by 130 million tonnes a year. If the same coating discouraged barnacles as well, the saving could reach 300 million tonnes – 1% of global CO2 output.

To keep global warming to the promised level of no more than 1.5°C, an ambition signed up to by 195 nations in Paris in 2015, global fossil fuel emissions will have to reach zero by 2050.

Right now, nations are adding 42 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. So there is pressure to find ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it.

Huge economy

German scientists report in the journal Earth System Dynamics that they did the sums and calculated that to take 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere using the machinery supplied by 3 billion years of evolution would require new forest plantations that stretched over 10 million kilometres. This is about the size of continental Europe.

But supposing artificial leaf systems developed in laboratories could be further developed on a massive scale? These leaves would draw down carbon dioxide and deliver it for permanent storage or for chemical conversion to plastic or building material.

If so, then efficient synthetic photosynthesis installations could do the same job from an area of only 30,000 square kilometres.

“These kinds of modules could be placed in non-agricultural regions – in deserts, for example. In contrast to plants, they require hardly any water to operate,” said Matthias May of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, one of the authors. It would of course come at a formidable cost – about €650 bn or US$740 bn a year.

“The best thing now,” Dr May said, “would be to drastically reduce emissions immediately – that would be safer and much cheaper.”

The Looming Health Crisis We Aren’t Preparing For

As a fourth-year medical student, I’ve learned plenty about caring for patients with common illnesses and injuries. But as a native of fire-ravaged Northern California, and a student in Pennsylvania — where I hear regularly about communities torn apart by the natural gas industry — I can’t help but worry about my ability to care for my patients in an age of climate change.

Climate change isn’t just an environmental crisis, after all. It’s a looming health crisis. More hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires means more disease, dehydration, famine, injury, and death.

Our health system is already overburdened, and extreme climate change could put it over the edge. And it will unfortunately be our most vulnerable communities — low income communities, communities of color, and places where health care is already hard to come by — who will suffer the worst consequences.

While my medical school’s curriculum encourages deep thinking about how to expand health care for underserved communities, it’s included little if any acknowledgement of the coming climate catastrophe.

Some medical colleges are beginning to wake up to the need to prepare the future generation of physicians to handle these challenges, and more colleges are joining this critical effort each day. For example, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai recently launched a Climate Change Curriculum Infusion Project, which seeks to prepare future physicians by weaving the impacts of climate change on health into existing medical curriculum.

We know that climate change is real, manmade, and accelerating far beyond what researchers originally predicted. It’s not up for debate. There are countless studies to back that up — including the Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2018 Global Climate Report, and the Fourth National Climate Assessment, to name a few.

We didn’t create this pending catastrophe — an overzealous, greedy fossil fuel industry did. But my generation will have to bear the consequences of their recklessness, and a whole generation of doctors, nurses, and other health professionals will have to care for those who suffer.

As the data rolls in, we understand that climate change has already begun to make permanent changes to our world — and that only rapid, sweeping changes to our energy system and environmental policies will even begin to mitigate the damage.

The truth is we’re moving too slow. Under the current U.S. administration, we’re in fact moving in the wrong direction if we hope to minimize this looming health crisis. We need to commit to zero emissions and an overhaul of our energy system to renewables — yesterday.

Whatever happens on the policy front, health professionals need to be ready for the disruptions we know are coming.

Medical colleges are in a unique position, and have a distinct obligation, to prepare future generations of physicians for the challenge of a lifetime. Medical students need our educators to help us — not only to prepare our medical practice, but to take leadership in pushing for the sweeping policy changes required to avert the worst consequences of this impending disaster.

We need everyone to wake up and see that if we don’t act boldly now, we’ll have a crisis too big for our system to handle — and too much for any budding physician’s hands to hold.

Threat to Bezos Not Extortion, National Enquirer Lawyer Says

WASHINGTON—The National Enquirer committed neither extortion nor blackmail by threatening to publish intimate photos of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, an attorney for the head of the tabloid’s parent company said Sunday.

Elkan Abromowitz, an attorney for American Media Inc. chief executive David Pecker, said on Sunday a “reliable source” well-known to Bezos and his mistress provided the story about the billionaire’s extramarital affair.

Bezos has said AMI threatened to publish the explicit photos of him unless he stopped investigating how the Enquirer obtained his private exchanges with his mistress, former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, and publicly declare that the Enquirer’s coverage of him was not politically motivated. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.

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Bezos’ investigators have suggested the Enquirer’s coverage of his affair was driven by dirty politics, and the high-profile clash has pitted the world’s richest man against the leader of America’s best-known tabloid, who is a strong backer of President Donald Trump.

Federal prosecutors are looking into whether the Enquirer violated a cooperation and nonprosecution agreement that recently spared the gossip sheet from charges for paying hush money to a Playboy model who claimed she had an affair with Trump, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday. The people weren’t authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

But asked during an interview with ABC’s “This Week” whether he was concerned the Bezos matter could jeopardize the noncooperation agreement, Abramowitz said: “Absolutely not.”

Abramowitz defended the tabloid’s handling of the situation as part of a standard legal negotiation.

“I think both Bezos and AMI had interests in resolving their interests,” Abramowitz said. “It’s absolutely not a crime to ask somebody to simply tell the truth. Tell the truth that this was not politically motivated, and we will print no more stories.”

Bezos’ affair became public when the Enquirer published story on Jan. 9 about his relationship with Lauren Sanchez, who is also married. Bezos then hired a team of private investigators to find out how the tabloid got the texts and photos the two exchanged.

Bezos’ personal investigators, led by his security consultant Gavin de Becker, have focused on Sanchez’s brother, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. Michael Sanchez is his sister’s manager, a Trump supporter and an acquaintance of Trump allies Roger Stone and Carter Page.

Abramowitz would not comment when asked whether Michael Sanchez was the Enquirer’s source but said that “Bezos and Ms. Sanchez knew who the source was.”

Michael Sanchez has declined to speak with AP on the record. In a Jan. 31 tweet, he said without evidence that de Becker “spreads fake, unhinged conservative conspiracy theories.”

After Bezos on Thursday posted the exchanges with AMI in an extraordinary blog post on Medium.com, several celebrities and journalists posted on social media that they too had been threatened by AMI. Ronan Farrow said he and “and at least one other prominent journalist” involved in reporting on the tabloid had “fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI” and actor Terry Crews alleged the company tried to “silence him” by “fabricating stories of me with prostitutes.”

Abramowitz said he didn’t know of any AMI employees blackmailing celebrities or journalists or “committing any crime at all.”

In recent months, the Trump-friendly tabloid acknowledged secretly assisting Trump’s White House campaign by paying $150,000 to Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Trump. The company then buried the story until after the 2016 election.

Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last year to charges that included helping to broker that transaction.

As part of a nonprosecution agreement in that case, AMI promised not to break the law. The deal requires top executives, including Pecker and the Enquirer’s editor, Dylan Howard, to cooperate with federal prosecutors. A violation of the agreement could lead to criminal charges over the McDougal payments.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller in Washington and Michael R. Sisak and Jim Mustian in New York contributed to this report.

A Good Way to Start Making America Decent Again

“Make America Cruel Again.” That’s how journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Shipler has reformulated Donald Trump’s trademark slogan. Shipler’s version is particularly apt when you think about the president’s record over the last two years on refugee resettlement and other humanitarian-related immigration issues.

President Trump’s border-wall obsession and the political uproar over it have dominated the news, while the alleged dangers of illegal immigrants — whose numbers he wildly exaggerates — have dominated his rhetoric. But the way he’s altered immigration policy affects many more people than just the migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border who are at the center of the wall debate. Many of those currently or potentially harmed by his actions are not outside the law, but are in the United States legally, some with permanent residence status and others on a temporary or provisional basis. Many more, including tens of thousands of refugees who would be eligible for resettlement, are seeking entry or lawful residence through normal immigration procedures, not trying to sneak into the country.

Among those lawfully here who have been affected by Trump’s policies are nearly three-quarters of a million “Dreamers.” Brought here illegally by their parents, they have qualified to remain under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Those young people have spent well over a year not knowing if they will lose that protection under the current administration, despite strong public support and bipartisan political approval of the program’s premise that it would be inhumane and unfair to penalize young people because of their parents’ actions.

Another 250,000 people face possible deportation if the administration wins its legal battle to terminate their temporary protected status (TPS), which allows those who have been displaced by natural or manmade disasters in their countries to remain in the United States. If it weren’t for court rulings blocking both the enforcement of a presidential order to end DACA and a series of directives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ending TPS for recipients from specific countries, a large majority of the one million people in those two categories would lose their legal status between now and September.

During the government shutdown, President Trump conditionally offered to extend temporary protection under DACA or TPS for another three years in return for support from congressional Democrats for his border wall. Whether any such reprieve will be part of an eventual legislative compromise on the wall remains to be seen, but even if it is, that will only further delay, not remove, the threat hanging over the lives of a million people. And the president’s switch raises a pointed question about his previous stance: if he now believes that letting dreamers and TPS recipients stay for another three years won’t endanger public safety or damage other national interests, why did he want to expel them in the first place?

A proposed change in a different set of immigration rules could take a heavy toll on still another group: lawful immigrants who are seeking the right to legal employment. As drafted by DHS, the new regulations would set much stiffer standards for the requirement that a green-card applicant be self-sufficient and not “likely to become a public charge” (that is, “primarily dependent on the government for subsistence”).

For many years that requirement was applied only to programs that extend cash assistance for income maintenance, such as welfare or Social Security disability payments. Under the proposed drastic expansion of those guidelines, immigrants could also be penalized for using food stamps, Medicaid, or various housing assistance programs.

The burden of those rules, as an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute points out, would fall most harshly on the most disadvantaged applicants. One probable outcome is that women would have a harder time “because they are less likely to be employed than men, generally live in larger households, and have lower incomes.”

Although those rule changes are not yet in effect, they have already led an unknown but significant number of low-income immigrants to forgo food stamps, Medicaid, or other benefits — assistance they are legally entitled to and badly need, but fear might jeopardize their chances for lawful permanent residence.

A Case Study in Cruelty

President Trump’s refugee policy offers perhaps the single best case study of how far he and his team have steered away from compassion. Using the law that lets the president set a ceiling for the admission of refugees, Trump has sharply reduced that annual cap, bringing it to by far the lowest level in 40 years.

That downward trend began only a week into Trump’s presidency when he issued an executive order reducing the ceiling for fiscal 2017 to 50,000 in place of the 110,000 cap originally set by the Obama administration. He then reduced the quota to 45,000 for 2018 and cut it again to 30,000 for 2019. The latest cap is lower by half than any previous one since the current refugee law took effect in 1980 — and actual arrivals have dropped even more sharply because of onerous and time-consuming new screening procedures for refugees.

In 2018, only 22,491 refugees were admitted to the country, fewer than half the number authorized. That is slightly more than one quarter of the refugees admitted during President Obama’s last year in office. It is also considerably lower than in any year since Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, even counting the two years after the 9/11 attacks when refugee admissions dropped sharply because of more intensive screening procedures.

Trump’s cuts came even as the need for humanitarian relief was growing globally. During his first year in office, according to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, the number of individuals “forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, or generalized violence” rose from an already staggering 65.6 million to a record 68.5 million. In both years, slightly more than half of those totals were children below the age of 18. Displaced people officially designated as “refugees” — defined as those driven from their own country — climbed from 22.5 million at the end of 2016 to 25.4 million a year later.

UNHCR has not released its 2018 figures yet, but other measurements indicate that the refugee crisis is still getting worse. In a June 2018 release, the agency projected that the number of people “in need of resettlement globally” in 2019 might be 17% higher than the previous year, clear evidence that the upward trend is continuing. Another figure in its annual reports offers a startling measure of the scale of human suffering around the world and how sharply it’s increasing: 28,300 people were forced to flee their homes every day in 2016, a number that jumped to 44,400 the next year.

Those numbers may seem abstract, but they represent a lot of human misery.

Ruben Chandrasekar, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s two resettlement offices in Maryland, notes that the Trump administration’s cutbacks on refugee admissions only heighten the suffering of people who have already lost their homes and livelihoods. Tens of thousands of refugees could have started new lives in the United States, if past ceiling levels had been maintained. Now, they face an indefinite future of “protracted displacement,” as Chandrasekar put it in a recent conversation, either in refugee camps with no certainty of adequate food, clothing, or medicine, or as non-citizens in the countries to which they’ve fled and where they live in “precarious urban circumstances,” often unable to work or enroll their children in school.

In other words, Chandrasekar added, the U.S. government “is allowing people who would otherwise qualify for resettlement to live under conditions that could kill them.”

Hurting People Who Need Help — And the Helpers

Curtailing the flow of refugees from overseas has also led, by a kind of malevolent logic, to a significant decline in assistance to refugees already in the United States. That’s because the nonprofit agencies that administer the resettlement program receive a set amount of money from the State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement for each individual they are assigned to manage. As a result, when arrivals fall, government funding for those organizations — the two largest being the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the International Rescue Committee — automatically drops as well.

The funds those agencies get from private donors haven’t offset the shortfall in State Department payments. As a result, resources that help resettled refugees find jobs and housing, navigate the health, social service, and educational systems, and the like are shrinking or, in some places, disappearing.

In the most recent cutback, according to the International Rescue Committee’s Chandrasekar, the nine national resettlement agencies were instructed late last year to shutter 39 branch offices in communities across the country, only adding to the closings and staff layoffs of the previous two years. That doesn’t just harm refugees who are getting less service. It also harms the people who provide those services and must now do their emotionally draining work with ever fewer resources and ever more worries about growing caseloads and the possibility of being laid off themselves. In other words, Trump’s policies hurt both people who need help and those who help them, making America cruel indeed.

Fake Facts About Refugees

The Trump administration has offered two basic arguments for its refugee policies. Both are false.

The first is that refugees are potential terrorists. The title over Trump’s first directive on refugee resettlement explicitly proclaimed that rationale: “Executive Order Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”

Since then he and his associates have regularly sought to link refugees to terrorism, a claim not validated by either facts or logic. Refugees are more thoroughly screened than any other class of immigrants and plenty of research has shown that the vetting process, which usually lasts two to three years or longer, far from being too loose (as Trump administration officials have often suggested) has been strikingly effective in keeping out dangerous people.

Over more than four decades, not a single American has been killed on U.S. soil by someone who entered the country as a refugee. Of the million-plus refugees who arrived in the last 20 years, no more than a few dozen have been implicated in any kind of terrorism case, lethal or not. Almost none of those cases involved a violent act in this country.

There is no proven case of a terrorist sneaking into the country through the refugee resettlement process. Of the very few refugees who have been connected with terrorist crimes, many came to the United States as children or lived here for years before becoming involved in violent extremism, which means they wouldn’t have been kept out by any vetting procedure, however tight.

The argument that refugees are a drain on public funds and the national economy is also contradicted by the facts. A detailed 2017 report prepared (at the request of the White House) by the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that, from 2005 through 2014, refugees paid $63 billion more in taxes than they received in taxpayer-funded government assistance — a finding consistent, the authors noted, with comparable analyses of the costs and benefits associated with refugees and other immigrants. Department higher-ups refused to send that report to the White House. Instead, they submitted a much shorter paper that listed only the cost of refugee benefits with no mention of their tax payments and so made the case that Trump and his advisers wanted.

If the stated grounds for the administration’s actions are largely false, do such policy changes serve any valid national goal or legitimate principle?

The administration often makes the case that it is only upholding the rule of law. That is its primary justification, for example, for the effort to kick out several hundred thousand people who have been in the United States for years under the Temporary Protected Status rule. If the law says “temporary,” the government contends, that’s what it means: a status that lets people stay for some period of time but does not give them any right to remain when that interval ends.

Legally and logically, that is an unassailable proposition. Those who have gone to court to block the government’s plan are not contesting the law or the dictionary. The argument is about the facts on the ground and whether the situations in the countries involved are actually safe enough for their temporarily sheltered nationals to go home. As with any lawsuit, the courts that will rule on these cases are bound by the letter of the law. In the larger policy debate, however, there should be room to consider broader questions and ask whether the enforcement of a law is in conflict with other human values.

Even if conditions in El Salvador are now less dangerous, does that justify disrupting the lives that nearly 200,000 Salvadoran TPS recipients have developed over years, even decades, in the United States? Life in Haiti may well be safer than it was nine years ago after a catastrophic earthquake left more than a million people homeless, but does that make it right to use U.S. law to force many Haitians who found shelter in this country to choose between keeping their families together or leaving U.S.-born children here to grow up in greater security than they would have in Haiti?

Zuzana Cepla, a policy and advocacy associate at the Washington-based National Immigration Forum, tells me that she can see the logic of changing the status of TPS recipients once protection is no longer necessary. But, she adds, that does not have to mean leaving several hundred thousand people this year (or even three years from now) with only bad options: deportation back to their home countries, leaving for another country, or going into the shadows and remaining in the United States without documentation. If the sole reason to expel them is that the circumstances they fled 10 or 20 years ago have changed, she concludes, “The problem is in the program, not in the people.”

Cepla was speaking about one program, but her reasoning applies across the full spectrum of immigration issues in the Trump era. If the problem is the system, not the people, it won’t be solved by uprooting a million or more immigrants who have legally resided in the United States for years or closing the door on tens of thousands of refugees who would qualify for resettlement. The solution should be to fix the system, not punish the people.

Americans don’t need to keep shouting at each other about Trump’s border wall. They need to talk about how to reform the immigration system without needlessly damaging a great many human lives. That would be the logical and useful discussion to have. It would also be a good way to start making America decent again.

South Korea, U.S. Sign Cost-Sharing Deal for American Troops

SEOUL, South Korea—South Korea and the United States struck a new deal Sunday that increases Seoul’s contribution for the cost of the American military presence on its soil, overcoming previous failed negotiations that caused worries about their decades-long alliance.

South Korea last year provided about $830 million, covering roughly 40 percent of the cost of the deployment of 28,500 U.S. soldiers whose presence is meant to deter aggression from North Korea. President Donald Trump has pushed for South Korea to pay more.

On Sunday, chief negotiators from the two countries signed a new cost-sharing plan, which requires South Korea to pay about 1.04 trillion won ($924 million) in 2019, Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The statement said the two countries reaffirmed the need for a “stable” U.S. military deployment amid the “rapidly changing situation on the Korean Peninsula.” The ministry said the U.S. assured South Korea that it is committed to the alliance and has no plans to adjust the number of its troops in South Korea.

South Korea began paying for the U.S. military deployment in the early 1990s, after rebuilding its economy from the devastation of the 1950-1953 Korean War. The big U.S. military presence in South Korea is a symbol of the countries’ alliance, forged in blood during the war, but also a source of long-running anti-American sentiments.

About 20 anti-U.S. activists rallied near the Foreign Ministry building in Seoul on Sunday, chanting slogans like “No more money for U.S. troops.” No violence was reported.

“The United States government realizes that Korea does a lot for our alliance and peace and stability in the region,” chief U.S. negotiator Timothy Betts said Sunday in Seoul. “We are very pleased our consultations resulted in agreement that will strengthen transparency and deepen our cooperation and the alliance.”

The deal, which involves the spending of South Korean taxpayer money, requires parliamentary approval in South Korea, but not in the United States, according to Seoul’s Foreign Ministry.

The allies had failed to reach a new cost-sharing plan during some 10 rounds of talks. A five-year 2014 deal that covered South Korea’s payment last year expired at the end of 2018.

Some conservatives in South Korea voiced concerns over a weakening alliance with the United States at the same time as negotiations with North Korea to deprive it of its nuclear weapons hit a stalemate. They said Trump might use the failed military cost-sharing negotiations as an excuse to pull back some U.S. troops in South Korea as a bargaining chip in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Feb. 3 that he has no plans to withdraw troops from South Korea. During his election campaign, Trump suggested he could pull back troops from South Korea and Japan unless they took on greater a share of the financial burdens of supporting U.S. soldiers deployed there.

South Korean media earlier reported that Trump demanded South Korea double its spending for the U.S. military deployment, before his government eventually asked for 1.13 trillion won ($1 billion). Seoul’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. had called for a sharp increase in South Korean spending but didn’t elaborate.

Trump announced last week that he will sit down with Kim for a second summit in Vietnam in late February. Their first summit in Singapore last June resulted in Kim’s vague commitment to the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” a term that his propaganda machine previously used when it argued it would only denuclearize after the U.S. withdraws its troops from South Korea.

Trump’s top envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, visited Pyongyang last week to work out details of the upcoming summit. After being briefed by Biegun about his Pyongyang trip, South Korea’s presidential office said Sunday that U.S. and North Korean officials plan to meet again the week of Feb. 17 in an unidentified Asian country.

The U.S. military arrived in South Korea to disarm Japan, which colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910-45, following its World War II defeat. Most U.S. troops were withdrawn in 1949 but they returned the next year to fight alongside South Korea in the Korean War.

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Associated Press journalists Chang Yong Jun and Lee Jin-man contributed to this report.

French Yellow Vest Anti-Government Protests Turn Violent in Paris

PARIS—A French yellow vest protester’s hand was ripped apart Saturday during violent clashes in Paris as demonstrators tried to storm the French National Assembly in a 13th consecutive week of unrest.

Police said the injured protester lost four fingers as police swooped in to stop protesters from breaching the parliament’s exterior. Police could not confirm French media reports that the hand of the demonstrator, who is now being treated in the hospital, was blown up by a grenade used to disperse unruly crowds.

As scuffles broke out in front of the National Assembly and French police responded with tear gas, paramedics huddled around the injured protester at the National Assembly gates.

Police used batons and fired tear gas in Paris to disperse demonstrators, some of whom threw debris at riot police. Cars, motorbikes and trash bins were set ablaze as the protest moved toward the city’s Invalides monument and onto the Eiffel Tower.

French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner went to Twitter to express his “disgust” as protesters set alight an anti-terror military car. Its yellow smoking plumes, against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, made for a powerful image of rejecting authority.

Such vehicles have been a common sight in Paris since deadly extremist attacks in 2015.

“Every day the military … protects our compatriots from the risk of terrorism. These attacks are intolerable,” Castaner said.

Police said 31 demonstrators had been arrested in the unrest. But France’s Interior Ministry said this week’s protest was significantly smaller than last week’s.

The yellow vest activists, who have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets over the past three months, are now trying to achieve electoral success but the movement is politically divided and has no appointed leader.

French President Emmanuel Macron — the target of many demonstrators’ anger — seems to be clawing back support from the public as he tries to address the movement’s anger with a national political debate on economic injustice. Recent polls show Macron’s approval ratings are rising.

Earlier Saturday, activists in Latvia staged a picket in front of the French embassy in Riga, the capital of the small Baltic EU country, to support the yellow vest movement and urge Latvians to demand higher living standards.

The activists waved Latvia’s red-and-white flag, shouting slogans like “the French have woken up, while Latvians remain asleep.”

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Jari Tanner in Helsinki contributed to this report.