YOU would hunt hard for a better illustration of the maxim that the European Union is capable of reforming itself only in times of crisis. The euro summit on June 29th was supposed to be the first proper chance in years for leaders to take tough decisions on boosting the resilience of their common currency. Instead, it turned out to be a stale dessert after the meaty migration debate that had occupied the previous night. The statement issued by the leaders after the summit contained just 220 words.
It was a disappointment for Emmanuel Macron, France's president, who has argued passionately for deep reforms to put the currency on to a more stable footing. Last week he and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, had issued a joint initiative on euro-zone reform that was more ambitious than some French observers had dared hope. Crucially for Mr Macron, the agreement did call for the establishment of a euro-zone investment budget. If the proposal fell well short of the full macroeconomic...Continue reading
Souce: Europe https://ift.tt/2KvF3fO
THERE is a pattern to European Union summits about subjects on which governments cannot agree. First, leaders stay up all night to signal their commitment. Second, they issue a statement sufficiently vague and contradictory to allow everyone to declare victory. Third, officials charged with implementing the agreement argue endlessly over how to interpret it. This sequence, described in a tweet by a former EU official, Shahin Vallée, perfectly describes the EU summit on illegal migration on June 28th-29th. The leaders battled into the pre-dawn hours on June 29th, but the tortuous phrasing of their conclusions—one sentence contained 12 commas—betrayed their inability to find meaningful compromises on the issues that continue to bedevil them.
As ever, the trickiest discussion was on how to share responsibility among governments for migrants who arrive in Europe. The leaders agreed, eventually, to establish...Continue reading
Souce: Europe https://ift.tt/2KwWIjY
THERE is a pattern to European Union summits about subjects on which governments cannot agree. First, leaders stay up all night to signal their commitment. Second, they issue a statement sufficiently vague and contradictory to allow everyone to declare victory. Third, officials charged with implementing the agreement argue endlessly over how to interpret it. This sequence, described in a tweet by a former EU official, Shahin Vallée, perfectly describes the EU summit on illegal migration on June 28th-29th. The leaders battled into the pre-dawn hours on June 29th, but the tortuous phrasing of their conclusions—one sentence contained 12 commas—betrayed their inability to find meaningful compromises on the issues that continue to bedevil them.
As ever, the trickiest discussion was on how to share responsibility among governments for migrants who arrive in Europe. The leaders agreed, eventually, to establish...Continue reading
Souce: Europe https://ift.tt/2KfVKfI
THERE is a pattern to European Union summits about subjects on which governments cannot agree. First, leaders stay up all night to signal their commitment. Second, they issue a statement sufficiently vague and contradictory to allow everyone to declare victory. Third, officials charged with implementing the agreement argue endlessly over how to interpret it. This sequence, described in a tweet by a former EU official, Shahin Vallée, perfectly describes the EU summit on illegal migration on June 28th-29th. The leaders battled into the pre-dawn hours on June 29th, but the tortuous phrasing of their conclusions—one sentence contained 12 commas—betrayed their inability to find meaningful compromises on the issues that continue to bedevil them.
As ever, the trickiest discussion was on how to share responsibility among governments for migrants who arrive in Europe. The leaders agreed, eventually, to establish...Continue reading
Souce: Europe https://ift.tt/2Kun6e7
ON JUNE 8th reports of a suspected case of polio came from Venezuela. Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm. The report that came from Papua New Guinea on June 22nd, though, is no fiction. It was issued by the World Health Organisation and concerns not one, but three children who have tested positive for a threatening polio virus.
Around the world, polio is in full retreat. A mere three countries are still known to harbour wild polio viruses. These are Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. In 2017 only 22 cases of polio caused by such wild viruses came to the attention of the authorities. Unfortunately, the reason for this success, which is the extensive vaccination against polio of children throughout the world, can occasionally backfire and itself cause polio outbreaks.
In many countries polio vaccine includes live, attenuated viruses which breed in the recipient’s intestines and then enter the bloodstream, thereby triggering a protective immune response. An...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2yS7dNf
BECAUSE it is locked away inside the skull, the brain is hard to study. Looking at it requires finicky machines which use magnetism or electricity or both to bypass the bone. There is just one tendril of brain tissue that can be seen from outside the body without any mucking about of this sort. That is the retina. Look into someone’s eyes and you are, in some small way, looking at their brain.
This being so, a group of researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, working with others around the world, decided to study the structure of the eye for signs of cognitive decline. Changes in the brain, they reasoned, might lead to changes in the nervous tissue connected to it. They focused on a part of the eye called the retinal nerve-fibre layer (RNFL). This is the lowest layer of the retina and serves to link the light-sensitive tissue above to the synapses which lead to the brain. The team’s results, published in JAMA Neurology this week,...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2tBHW58
AROUND the beginning of the 20th century the medical profession underwent an image makeover. Doctors swapped their traditional black coats for white ones, similar to those worn by scientists in laboratories. This was meant to bolster a physician’s scientific credibility at a time when many practising healers were quacks, charlatans and frauds. As the importance of antiseptics became more widely understood, white was also thought to have the advantage of showing any soiling.
Nowadays many doctors are likely to wear everyday clothes, or blue or green “scrubs”, which are said to reduce eye strain in brightly-lit operating theatres. White coats are reckoned to be capable of spreading diseases as easily as clothing of any other colour, especially when long sleeves brush against multiple surfaces. Many clinics and hospitals now have a “bare below the elbows” policy for staff, whether in uniform or their own clothes. This is also supposed to encourage more thorough handwashing.
What,...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2yUezzL
DISEASES of the psyche have always been slippery things. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression and a host of others have no visible markers in the brain. Their symptoms overlap sufficiently that diagnoses may differ between medical practitioners, or even vary over time when given by a single practitioner. In this they are unlike neurological diseases. These either leave organic traces in the brain that, though not always accessible before a patient’s death, are characteristic of the condition in question, or cause recognisable perturbations of things such as electroencephalograms.
The impulse to categorise, though, is enormous—as witness the ever greater number of conditions identified in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. That is because diagnosis and treatment go hand in hand. But if diagnostic categories are misconceived then treatment may be misapplied. In this context a paper...Continue reading
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WHEN it comes to habitat, human beings are creatures of habit. It has been known for a long time that, whether his habitat is a village, a city or, for real globe-trotters, the planet itself, an individual person generally visits the same places regularly. The details, though, have been surprisingly obscure. Now, thanks to an analysis of data collected from 40,000 smartphone users around the world, a new property of humanity’s locomotive habits has been revealed.
It turns out that someone’s “location capacity”, the number of places which he or she visits regularly, remains constant over periods of months and years. What constitutes a “place” depends on what distance between two places makes them separate. But analysing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2tNzTBq
A FORMER editor of this newspaper once said that “a gift is a sale at a price of zero”. In strict monetary terms this is true. But most people do expect to be paid for gifts, albeit in the non-monetary currency known as “gratitude”. This has many denominations: words of appreciation, hugs and kisses and, particularly, smiles. The wider point our ex-editor was making, though, is pertinent. A gift will cause a misallocation of resources if the recipient would have preferred something else that would have been no more expensive for the donor to acquire.
In this context, a study just published in Psychological Science, by Adelle Yang at the National University of Singapore and Oleg Urminsky at the University of Chicago, looks illuminating. Dr Yang and Dr Urminsky have studied the currency of gratitude and think it may be creating poor incentives. Their hypothesis is that the reason gift-givers sometimes appear to make bad...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology https://ift.tt/2N9cenD