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Have a great week! —Kelsey Piper, senior writer |
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Revisiting Syria after the quakes |
Courtesy of the International Medical Corps. |
Amid a deadly civil war, a cholera outbreak, and the impending reinstatement of aid-preventing sanctions, the people of Syria are still struggling to recover from a devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake two months after it shook the country. In Syria, where over 7,000 people died from the February 6 quake, existing crises were exacerbated, which I wrote about in the days after. Sanctions against the country — which were lifted by the US temporarily for 180 days — and damage to the only official humanitarian aid route in northern Syria, slowed international aid. Such bottlenecks are common after major natural disasters. But often international attention and donations begin to drop off as time passes, despite this being when it is most needed. "The messages you get from the people, it breaks your heart," says Wafaa Sadek, the International Medical Corps country director for Syria. "One person, all his family is gone — his wife and his five children — and he stayed alive, and he said, 'They are alive and I am dead.'" I spoke with Sadek about the earthquake, the damage it caused, and what long-term recovery efforts are needed in Syria. —Rachel DuRose, Future Perfect fellow What was the immediate response in Syria to the earthquake, especially given the context of the other crises that were already happening? The situation was extremely bad even before the earthquake, there were already about 15.1 million people who were in need. The army went in and tried to get people from under the rubble with their hands because they didn't have any equipment. The International Medical Corps, we actually went straight away — we had three trucks full of medicine, medical consumables [bandages, masks, etc], and cholera kits, and we delivered to the governorate of Aleppo, the governorate of Hama, and the governorate of Latakia. Those three were the most affected areas. Unfortunately, the situation is still extremely bad. People now are moving from that area. We are receiving a lot of [internally displaced peoples] coming from the north to Damascus and rural Damascus to receive services and help. |
"The need is absolutely tremendous." |
And so now, over a month since the earthquake happened, what is the longer-term outlook? What will the IMC be focusing on? We are going regularly to Aleppo and to Latakia and Hama, those areas are most affected, and a lot of people don't sleep in their homes now because they are worried that they will fall or they will have aftershocks. What IMC is doing at the moment [is] deploying emergency medical mobile teams. At the very beginning, when our team went and visited shelters, they brought items like jackets, mattresses, and blankets. At the end of the day, this is what was most needed. The shelters are not very big, I would say probably three rooms where you can find around 20 families, each family is around a minimum of five people, with only one or two toilets. The next project we're going to do is trying to support the people in these shelters with a wash and to have bathrooms, and we will hopefully have solar systems. A lot of health centers and hospitals have been destroyed. We went to Latakia where we are going to support the main hospital with equipment for an operating theater. I will be visiting Aleppo and Hama next week to go as well to the hospital to see what is most needed, although we already donated some medication, consumables, and cholera kits. The need is absolutely tremendous. There is crisis after crisis after crisis, and it's been going on for the last 12 years. Thank you for sharing. Is there anything you would like to add? We need some support from everyone, whatever we can get — any support, any donation, it will make a lot of difference to the people of Syria.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned, the sanctions are making it very hard for us, although now it's lifted, it is lifted for 180 days only. I would advocate with the government of the US to try to keep those sanctions lifted for the time being, not only for a certain amount of time, and to try to understand that these people are in need. We need to give them some hope.
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Seattle may have figured out how to get more poor people into better housing |
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images |
What if the government had decent customer service? That's what Seattle is discovering through a program designed to provide people with "navigators" to help comb through the bureaucracy of finding housing. The help made an enormous difference — for the most recent paper, the researchers experimented with giving some applicants only information and others a fuller package. The group without help was much less likely to move to a high-opportunity neighborhood, writes senior correspondent Dylan Matthews.
More on this topic from Vox: |
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The viral story of a girl and her goat explains how the meat industry indoctrinates children |
Advancing Law for Animals |
The story of a California girl and her goat named Cedar, which captured national and international headlines this past week, almost reads like it could have been penned by a Hollywood screenwriter. But the whole affair reflects a bigger point about how youth programs train generations of children to act against their better moral judgments, argues Gabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz. More on this topic from Vox: |
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Photo Illustration by Valera Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images |
Sam Bowman is a bleeding-edge AI researcher, so you should read his new paper outlining what we know about how large-language models work, or at least scan his tweet thread. The most striking point to me: "There are no reliable techniques for steering the behavior of LLMs." —Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent The "Got Milk?" slogan that dominated airwaves and print magazines for decades has been replaced by a more assertive one: "Gonna need milk." It's directed squarely at Gen Z, which drinks 20 percent less cow's milk than the rest of America, and the dairy industry is pulling out all the stops to get them to put down the oat milk by recruiting high-profile YouTubers, esports stars, and up-and-coming athletes. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer Despite the controversy generated by JK Rowling's public comments on trans issues, her work remains insanely popular — including Hogwarts Legacy, the video game based on her Harry Potter series, which sold more than 12 million copies in its first two weeks. But you wouldn't know that from reviews by the gaming press, which largely criticized the game based on Rowling's politics instead its merits. As Helen Lewis writes in a thought-provoking Atlantic article, this growing gap between more politicized critics and audiences is a worrying one, and not just for video game reviews. "If you're an activist trying to improve society," Lewis writes, "it is catastrophic not to realize when most people don't agree with you." —Bryan Walsh, editor A few months ago, I grumbled in this newsletter about a bad Bloomberg story that investigated a nonexistent cancer threat from cellular meat. A comprehensive new report on the safety of cell-based foods from two UN agencies says (on pg. 110) essentially the same thing that exasperated critics of Bloomberg's story did in February: no cancer risk exists because "current scientific knowledge does not support the plausibility of human cancer contagion via introduction of cells even from other humans," let alone from animal cells. It also points out that regular meat from slaughtered animals already can contain cancerous cells and this poses no cancer threat either. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor
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