Latest News Clips 2014.07.28

1. The Big Challenge for Indonesia’s New President: Proving Democracy Works

Time  July 24, 2014

    

Indonesian presidential candidate Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, now president elect, sits on a bench while waiting for the announcement of election results by the Elections Commission at Waduk Pluit in Jakarta July 22, 2014.Beawiharta Beawiharta—Reuters

Joko Widodo’s election victory was a big win for Muslim-majority Indonesia, the world's third largest democracy and fourth most populous nation. Now the incoming President has to deliver much-needed reform

When Indonesia’s election commission announced late Tuesday that Jakarta Governor Joko Widodo had won July’s presidential election, the transition of the world’s fourth-most populous nation to democracy was finally made complete.

Sixteen years ago, when autocrat Suharto fell from power amid street riots and a financial crisis, it seemed the sprawling archipelago nation could break apart as politics in Jakarta descended into chaos. However, the victory of Joko Widodo, affectionately called “Jokowi,” shows how mature and stable the country’s new democracy has become. Jokowi is the first leader in Indonesia who is not affiliated with the old ruling class, but a self-made man, who built a political career with his honesty, smart policies and good results.

Now he faces an entirely new challenge: Proving that new democracies in the emerging world can govern effectively. Indonesia has become a rising star in the global economy, propelled by its increasingly wealthy 250 million people and government policies that are friendlier to investment. However, Indonesia, like many other emerging economies, is slipping. The IMF expects Indonesia’s GDP to grow by 5.4% in 2014 — not bad, but the rate has been declining steadily from 2011, when it was 6.5%. The problem is the same that is dragging down developing nations everywhere, from India to Brazil: Politicians, mired in factional fighting and lacking the necessary will, have failed to implement the reforms critical to keep growth going.

2. After MH17 And Two Other Plane Crashes, Is It Still Safe To Fly?

International Business Times July 24 2014

A boy watches a plane on the runway on the morning of the final MH17 flight arriving at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on July 25, 2014. Malaysia Airlines retired flight number MH17 after its Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight was shot down over Ukraine. Reuters/Olivia Harris

Nervous flyers have powerful reasons to be fearful right now. Over the last eight days alone, 462 people have been killed in three different air crashes on three different continents. That grim toll -- from Malaysia Airlines, TransAsia and Air Algérie -- came just four months after the unsettling disappearance of MH370, a Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 239 human beings. Major swaths of airspace now seem vulnerable to missiles unleashed as part of one violent conflict or another -- a fact underscored by the downing of MH17 and the decision by major carriers to scrap flights into Israel.

From the United States to Asia, people increasingly feel skittish about boarding planes bound for international skies. Airport newsstands are papered with grisly photos of airplane debris and corpses in body bags. Type “never flying again” into Twitter and absorb this flurry of results. Overwhelming dread seems like a perfectly sane, rational response.

Yet for all the saturation coverage of the disasters playing out in recent times, aviation safety data reveals a perhaps counter-intuitive truth: Air travel is by many measures the safest it has been in the history of aviation.

On any given day, some 100,000 commercial flights take off and land, the vast majority without incident, according to the International Air Transport Association. More than 3 billion people took to the skies last year, with only 210 fatalities. That this year has seen that number more than double is an anomaly, say experts, one that goes against the grain of many decades of steady declines in air crashes.

Between 1970 and 2010, the number of commercial air departures tripled from 9.4 million to 28 million, reports the Aviation Safety Network. Over that same 40-year span, the number of aviation accidents dropped each decade, except for a small spike during the 1990s. The 1970s averaged 68.1 accidents per year; by the 2000s, the average had fallen to 39.6 per year. Fatalities in the 1970s averaged 1,676 per year; by the 2000s that figure had halved to 831.8 per year -- not quite double the 475 people who lost their lives in 2012.  

“If you look at the numbers of flights in one day, it’s astounding,” said Bill Waldock, professor of aviation safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona. “But the number of accidents has gone down tremendously. The probability of getting killed in a car wreck on the way to the airport is more than 20 times higher than it is being on an airplane.”  

What has increased sharply is the amount of media attention devoted to air crashes, say experts -- a factor that has shaped public perceptions.  

“Twenty-five years ago we didn’t have cell phones that could take pics and videos in real time,” Waldock said. “We also didn’t have 24-hour news cable."

The relentless coverage of MH370 on CNN helped fuel bizarre conspiracy theories featuring aliens and black holes, provoking criticism from various quarters, including Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

The wall-to-wall cable coverage is part of a wider trend over the last 30 years: A far greater amount of reporting on far fewer accidents and deaths. For example, a LexisNexis analysis of aviation media reports from 1985 to 2014 showed that media reporting of aviation disasters has gone up by around 2,000 percent, while accidents and deaths have seen a drop of about 75 percent of the same period of time,

3. The Sixth Great Extinction Is Underway—and We’re to Blame

Time July 25, 2014

    

Goodbye to all that: millions of Earth's species, like the white rhino, are no match for the one species that considers itself the smartestGetty Images

The Earth has been stripped of up to 90% of its species five times before in the past 450 million years. Now it's happening again—and this time there's no rogue asteroid to blame

Here’s hoping the human species likes its own company, because at the rate Earth is going, we might be the only ones we’ve got left.

Nobody can say with certainty how many species there are on Earth, but the number runs well into the millions. Many of them, of course, are on the order of bacteria and spores. The other ones, the ones we can see and count and interact with—to say nothing of the ones we like—are far fewer. And, according to a new and alarming series of papers in Science, their numbers are falling fast, thanks mostly to us.

One of the first great rules of terrestrial biology is that no species is forever. The Earth has gone through five major extinction events before—from the Ordovician-Silurian, about 350 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Paleogene, 65 million years back. The likely causes included volcanism, gamma ray bursts, and, in the case of the Cretaceous-Paleogene wipeout, an asteroid strike—the one that killed the dinosaurs. But the result of all of the extinctions was the same: death, a lot of it, for 70% to 90% of all species, depending on the event.

As increasingly accepted theories have argued—and as the Science papers show—we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction, the unsettlingly-named Anthropocene, or the age of the humans.

The numbers are sobering: Over all, there has been a human-driven decline in the populations of all species by 25% over the past 500 years, but not all groups have suffered equally. Up to a third of all species of vertebrates are now considered threatened, as are 45% of most species of invertebrates. Among the vertebrates, amphibians are getting clobbered, with 41% of species in trouble, compared to just 17% of birds—at least so far. The various orders of insects suffer differently too: 35% of Lepidopteran species are in decline (goodbye butterflies), which sounds bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to the similar struggles of nearly 100% of Orthoptera species (crickets, grasshoppers and katydids, look your last).

As the authors of all this loss, we are doing our nasty work in a lot of ways. Overexploitation—which is to say killing animals for food, clothing or the sheer perverse pleasure of it—plays a big role, especially among the so-called charismatic megafauna. So we get elephants slaughtered for their tusks, rhinos poached for their horns and tigers shot and skinned for their pelts, until oops—no more elephants, rhinos or tigers.

4. Ending the war on butter: Are fatty foods really OK to eat?

TODAY June 12, 2014

Fatty foods are good. Carbs are bad. Wait, what? 

In a provocative cover story, "Eat Butter," Time magazine says scientists were wrong to label saturated fats the enemy — that carbs, sugar and processed foods are mainly to blame for obesity, diabetes and other weight-related diseases, according to a growing body of research. 

The research doesn't specifically focus on butter, but suggests that Americans should reconsider the role saturated fats play in our diets. A recent study from University of Cambridge in England questioned the link between so-called "bad" fats, such as butter and pork, and heart disease. The Cambridge researcher also found no evidence that polyunsaturated fats, or "good" fatty acids such as salmon, walnuts and healthy oils, lower risk of heart disease. 

Fats don't hurt our hearts? What's the real deal? 

Some of the confusion comes from the decades-long war on trans fats, the artery-clogging ingredient found in baked goods and desserts. Science has shown that trans fats are harmful because they increase risk of heart disease because they both raise level of bad cholesterol (LDL) and lower levels of good cholesterol (HDL). Last year, the Food and Drug Administration said it would require food makers to phase out trans fats.

But saturated fats are different from trans fats.

"I do agree butter, along with other saturated fats like poultry skin, coconut oil, full fat dairy and certain cuts of red meat, are no longer the enemy," TODAY diet expert Joy Bauer said Thursday. “But, before people go slathering butter on things like bagels, mashed potatoes and pasta, they need to know that it's way more complicated than that." 

"We always knew that saturated fats elevate LDL-cholesterol (also known as the bad cholesterol)," said TODAY diet expert Joy Bauer Thursday. " 

However, scientists now know that there are two different kinds of bad cholesterol particles — one is small and dense (the kind linked to heart disease) and the other is large and fluffy (the kind that seems to be mostly benign). Saturated fat raises the level of larger particles that don’t appear to be harmful. 

On the other hand, refined carbohydrates (white bread, bagels, crackers, baked goods, cookies and soda), do increase the smaller, more dangerous LDL particles. 

"And unfortunately when fat was vilified back in the 1970s, we replaced those fats with…you guessed it…refined carbohydrates. That’s why we’re in trouble now," Bauer said. 

That's why it's important to reduce intake of refined carbs.