Citizen Cartwright

Trump and the growing debate over global fascism

Questions are surfacing around the globe about a revival of fascism — generally defined as a governmental system that asserts complete power and emphasizes aggressive nationalism and often racism, says The New York Times.

In places like Russia and Turkey, leaders like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within three-tenths of a percentage point of becoming the first far-right head of state to be elected in Europe since World War II.

In Hungary, an authoritarian government has clamped down on the news media and put up razor wire fences to keep migrants out. There are worries that Poland may do the same. Traditional parties in France, Germany, Greece and elsewhere have been challenged by nationalist movements amid an economic crisis and waves of migrants. In Israel, fascism analogies by a former prime minister and a top general have again inflamed the longtime debate about the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“The crash of 2008 showed how globalization creates losers as well as winners,” says Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “In many countries, middle-class wages are stagnant and politics has become a battle over a shrinking pie. Populists have replaced contests between left and right with a struggle between cosmopolitan elites and angry nativists.”

“On a world level, the situation that affects many countries is economic stagnation and the arrival of immigrants,” says Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars of fascism. “That’s a one-two punch that democratic governments are having enormous trouble in meeting.”

Roger Eatwell, a professor at the University of Bath, in England, calls what’s happening “illiberal democracy,” a form of government that keeps the trappings of democracy without the reality.

“Elections are seen as important to legitimizing regimes,” he says, but instead of imposing one-party rule, as in the past, today’s authoritarians “use a variety of devices to control and/or manipulate the media, intimidate opponents” and so on.

Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst in Moscow, says neo-fascism in liberal societies in the West stems from crisis or dysfunction while in illiberal countries like Russia and Turkey it reflects an attempt to fill the void left by the failure of Western notions to catch on.

The problem, she says, is that “the Western political leadership at the moment is too weak to fight the tide.”

Rio Olympics: Call for postponement over Zika; refugee runners

It’s 66 days until the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics, and 150 experts called on Friday for the games to be postponed or moved because of the Zika virus.

Brazil’s Zika strain has more serious medical consequences than researchers had thought, Rio de Janeiro is one of the hardest-hit areas of the epidemic, and Rio’s mosquito-killing efforts aren’t meeting expectations, the experts say in their open letter to the World Health Organization.

The WHO said on Saturday that there’s “no public health justification” for postponing the games or changing their location.

The health experts’ letter had also highlighted the decades-long collaboration between the WHO and the International Olympic Committee. The experts said it was an “overly close” relationship that left the U.N. health agency unable to be impartial in Olympic issues.

Meanwhile, the IOC is fielding, for the first time in history, a small team of refugees — between five and 10 athletes who will represent not a country, but all those without one, says The Christian Science Monitor.

Report: Extreme weather increasing toxin levels in food

As they struggle to deal with more extreme weather, a range of food crops are generating more of chemical compounds that can cause health problems for people and livestock who eat them, according to a report by the U.N. Environment Program.

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Note to readers

Because of the Memorial Day holiday, Citizen Cartwright will publish next on Tuesday, May 31.

Now in U.S.: Bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotic

The bacteria are resistant to the drug colistin, an old antibiotic that in the United States is held in reserve to treat especially dangerous infections that are resistant to a class of drugs called carbapenems.

If carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called CRE, also pick up resistance to colistin, they’ll be unstoppable.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” says Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That wouldn’t just be urinary tract infections or pneumonia — that could be for the 600,000 patients a year who need cancer treatment.”

 “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients,” he says.

Antibiotic resistance has been blamed for at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths a year in the United States.

Experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon. But antibiotics are less profitable than other drugs, and few drugmakers have attempted to develop them.

Overprescribing of antibiotics by doctors and in hospitals and their extensive use in food livestock have contributed to the crisis. More than half of hospitalized patients will get an antibiotic at some point during their stay. But studies have shown that 30 percent to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed in hospitals are unnecessary or incorrect, contributing to the antibiotic resistance.

How can you protect yourself and your family? Washing your hands thoroughly is fundamental. Here are other tips, from PBS.

And write to your lawmakers and tell them to do something about this.

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Libertarian presidential candidate’s spending on consultants draws ire

Eight ‘is not a good number’ for the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg says

Secret Service punishes 41 employees over leak of lawmaker’s data

It’s not just D.C.: Boston and New York subways also need billion-dollar upgrades

Sea sponge the size of a minivan could be one of the world’s oldest living animals

FDA approves first implant to treat opioid addiction

Healthy lifestyle may offset genetic breast cancer risk

Cellphone-cancer link found by government researchers

Clinton’s defensiveness propels ‘untrustworthy’ criticism

The new report by the State Department’s inspector general that was delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday says Clinton didn’t seek or receive approval to use a private email server while she was secretary of state.

And after months when she said she used private email for convenience, and that she was willing to cooperate fully with investigations into her handling of official business at the State Department, the IG report undermines both claims, says The New York Times.

Here is the Times’ comparison of the Clinton campaign’s statement on Wednesday dismissing the IG report with the findings of that report.

Emails disclosed in the report make it clear that Clinton worried that personal emails could be publicly released under the Freedom of Information Act. “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” she told an aide.

So Clinton was on the defense both in using the private email system in the first place and in defending that use — feeding the untrustworthy, unlikable meme.

“Clinton’s inexcusable, willful disregard for the rules” is the headline of The Washington Post’s editorial on the issue.

So what happened at the first World Humanitarian Summit?

Not much, apparently.

The summit reinforced the urgent need for people hit by conflict and disasters to receive better help, but the meeting may not trigger the changes necessary to fix their plight, Reuters says, citing aid officials and experts.

As the two-day conference ended on Tuesday, outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who convened the summit, appealed to Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States:

"The absence of these leaders from this meeting does not provide an excuse for inaction," he said. "They have a unique responsibility to pursue peace and stability, and to support the most vulnerable."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only G7 leader to attend.

An “innovation marketplace” at the summit showed off hundreds of products and new ideas for a humanitarian response, says The Christian Science Monitor.

For example, Little Sun, a solar-powered, daisy-shaped light charges by day and provides hours of light by night for families across Africa — children doing homework, mothers with in-home microenterprises and communities otherwise in the dark or forced to use unsafe oil lamps.

And DayOne, a backpack-sized water purifying and transport system, changes unsafe water into safe — and safely transported — water from day one of an emergency.

Alzheimer’s as a possible result of the brain fighting infection

Harvard researchers are hypothesizing that a virus, fungus or bacterium gets into the brain, passing through a membrane — the blood-brain barrier — that becomes leaky as people age. The brain’s defense system moves to stop the invader by making a sticky cage out of proteins, called beta amyloid. The microbe becomes trapped in the cage and dies.

And what’s left behind is the cage — a plaque that’s the hallmark of Alzheimer’s.