Shantonu Abe

[Shantonu Abe @AbeShantonu]

@rwmead - Emojis?

[Shantonu Abe @AbeShantonu]

@TheStarLi From the French word for competition, concours

[tern @1goodtern]

Covid infections make every single part of your body vulnerable to new problems.

Whatever age you are.

But let's pick *one* part of your body, the skin.
You'd be surprised how much harm Covid is doing.

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

Hiker El Güero Inglés was lost in the Peruvian mountains, then a stray dog arrived to show him the way. "I decided to follow him and he saved me,” he told local newspaper.

[Outbreak Updates @outbreakupdates]

We’re watching a pandemic being born.

Over 30% of California’s dairy herds are confirmed infected.

That’s not a warning.

It’s a ticking bomb.

Every herd is a mutation factory, every mutation a step closer to humans.

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

Just a deep sadness that we are so late now - and a despair that almost no one in the media seems to care or care to understand what is unfolding.

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

Flooding in Bayonne in southwest France today...🌊

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

Whoahh! The Rhône River flood is progressing toward the Mediterranean. This is at the Vallabrègues dam in the Gard region, France 😮

[Leon Simons 🌍 @LeonSimons8]

'@NASAClimate shared the most important graph in the world again.

The rate of global heat uptake has doubled in the past 20 years.

More and more sunshine is being absorbed than longwave radiation is radiated to space.

As greenhouse gases increase and aerosols decreased.

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

Rive de Gier, France yesterday....

THIS IS NOT NORMAL
#FranceFloods

[David Bergman @TheDavidBergman]

When judges do not receive due process, how can anyone else expect to receive it? This is the question that emerges from the events that took place yesterday at the #Bangladesh High Court that ended in the Chief Justice putting 12 High Court judges on leave after they refused to resign, and students surrounded the High Court demanding they be forced out.

Some background is required. During the 15 years in power of the Awami League, the party stacked the High Court with loyalist Judges, many of whom were also of a low calibre. Now the Awami League is out of power, there is a very legitimate issue of how to deal with these judges.

On August 11th - two days after the interim government was sworn into power - the then Chief Justice and five other members of the Appellate Division resigned after thousands of students surrounded the court. (This happened after evidence came to light suggesting that the appellate division was, that very day, seeking to overturn the legitimacy of the interim government in a new court order.) Whilst, the optics of this were not good, at the same time this may well have been the only way to avoid a constitutional crisis that could have seriously destablised the country.

A new Chief Justice and appellate division were appointed - along with 23 new High Court Judges. (I will write about concerns relating to their appointment on another ocasion)

Since then, the question has been what to do with all the highly partisan pro-AL judges.

On Tuesday, a group of supreme court lawyers organised a protest demanding the resignation or removal of 30 lawyers. That evening, one of the student leaders, posted on Facebook their intention to try and force the judges out: "In demand of the resignation of the fascist judges of the Awami League, we will besiege the High Court ...", one wrote. And on Wednesday (yesterday) that is exactly what happened, students again marched on the court.

Now, it is understood that many of these judges have been asked to resign, but they have refused to do so - and neither the Chief Justice, nor the President, can simply sack a judge. At the end of Wednesday, in a kind of compromise the Chief Justice yesterday put 12 High Court judges on leave. "The 12 judges are not being assigned to any benches at this time, meaning they will not be able to participate in judicial proceedings," the supreme court registrar general stated.

Now, how does one legally remove a judge in Bangladesh?

There used to be a process of getting rid of judges - setting up a Supreme Judicial Council where allegations against judges could be made. The Awami League government sought, through a constitutional amendment, to remove this provision and give to Parliament the power of sacking a judge However, in 2017, the then Justice Sinha's Appellate Division struck the amendment down as unconstitutional (a decision that resulted in the government forcing Sinha from his position of Chief Justice.)

The Awami League government filed an application to review the Appellate Division decision, a matter that is in fact before the court on 20 October, in three days time. Now, in order for the Supreme Judicial Council to again to become available as a mechanism to remove judges, all that needs to happen is for the Attorney General to withdraw the review application, so that Sinha's decision striking down the constitutional amendment stands.

Effectively, it seems the demands for the judges to resign now, before 20 October, was an attempt to try and avoid having to use the Supreme Judicial Council.

However, it is important that the process of removal of judges is done in a legal and proper manner, and the Supreme Judicial Council is the right forum to allow this to happen. Let those who make allegations of pro-AL bias and corruption put together the evidence and present it to the SJC, and let the SJC determine whether it is sufficient for judges to be sacked. Too many people right now are losing their jobs simply on the basis of allegations, rather than substantive evidence of wrong-doing.

As for the students. The terrible irony is that they never fail to use the term "fascistic" when describing the Awami League (and they may well be right in doing so) but there is nothing more emblematically "fascistic" than a mob of people marching to a court and demanding that Judges resign. This is as far away from due process and rule of law as one can be, and the students have unfortunately demeaned themselves in getting involved in this.

What students should be demanding is for those lawyers who have allegations against these judges to put in the hard work of actually putting together the evidence to substantiate the allegations they make, so that it can be presented to the Supreme Judicial Council.
https://t.co/KIPPkr66Q7

[Shantonu Abe @AbeShantonu]

@archaeologyart That’s a μπαρμπουνι (barbouni), prized fish of the Mediterranean

[yammi @sighyam]

the founder of The Elephant Nature Park mourning the death of her beloved elephant, Ploythong:

“She must’ve suffered so much. During the chaos of the floods, she must’ve been wondering, ‘What is happening to me?’ She’s so used to being with her family, where she is guided and where people are there to constantly care for her, where people talk to her through everything.

When she wandered somewhere and couldn’t see, there would always be people calling her name, there would always be someone to let her know where to go. But this time—-there wasn’t anyone.

Had my child not been blind, she might’ve had a chance to survive. The debris from the flood must’ve hit her so hard.”

“when the doctor told me that nothing could be done for her eyes, I said that’s okay, we will make sure she has friends, so she had her herd of 6, those were hers. She was the only blind elephant, her juniors took care of her so well.

She had her adopted babies, she cared for them deeply, her heart was exquisite, Ploythong, her heart was beautiful. And she talked a lot, she was really chatty, she was a talkative person, so during the floods when I couldn’t heart her voice———“

”I have said to her that, in another life, when we are reborn, please come back as my daughter, I wish for her to reincarnate as my daughter, because as an elephant, I don’t think she’ll receive the love and respect that she deserves.“

[Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience]

Mathematical reasoning could lead to new insights into the universal characteristics of living systems.

For 3.8 billion years, evolution has followed a branching tree pattern, from simple bacteria to complex life forms. But what if the structure of these evolutionary trees reveals hidden patterns? Recent work has uncovered two key features across evolutionary time:

Scale-Invariant Topology: Evolutionary trees aren't perfectly balanced nor fully unbalanced—they follow a striking in-between structure; Bursts of Diversification: These trees experience rapid, unpredictable bursts of new species formation across all time scales.

In this SFI colloquium titled “Topological scaling laws and the mathematics of evolution,” Nigel Goldenfeld uses statistical models to show how the interaction between ecological niches and speciation might explain these patterns. Even though biology is intimidatingly complex, his findings suggest that universal rules may shape the evolution of life.

https://t.co/AO5gieyi71

#Evolution #Complexity #Mathematics #Biology #Innovation

[Monica Piccinini @yourvoiz_org]

The Amazon is one of the most important carbon sinks in the atmosphere, said Lucas Ferrante, a biologist and researcher.

“Today it has started to emit carbon,” he said. “We are at a turning point, a point of no return.” https://t.co/gZWwJd5y0K

[Max Roser @MaxCRoser]

Why numbers are sometimes better than words.

What people think you say when you say “little chance,” “probably not,” or “highly likely.”

[Ben See @ClimateBen]

BREAKING: record Arctic temperatures look "like something that shouldn't be physically possible" as global climate enters a "catastrophic phase" 🧵

[Amitav Ghosh @GhoshAmitav]

Some things that Indians need to know about Bangladesh.
https://t.co/brHL1i5umz

[UNICEF Bangladesh @UNICEFBD]

Catastrophic floods in southeastern Bangladesh, particularly in Noakhali, Feni, and Khagrachari, are wreaking havoc.

Over 3 million lives, including 1.2 million children, are affected, and the essential services they depend on are at risk.

[Michael Kugelman @MichaelKugelman]

Sheikh Hasina was ousted because her security forces killed scores of peaceful protestors, resulting in a mass movement against her that she proved unable to control.
Don’t let misinformation—which continues to circulate nearly two weeks later—obscure this essential fact.