In mid-April, three gig workers fell victim to violent crime in Florida: a woman was kidnapped and sexually assaulted after making a Doordash delivery, a couple’s car was shot at after turning onto the wrong driveway attempting to drop off an Instacart order, and a man was murdered after making an Uber Eats delivery.
While the news is unsettling, for some gig workers, feeling unsafe is an increasing concern.
“The safety of drivers and couriers is a top priority, and we’ll continue investing in critical safety features like the ability to chat with a live safety agent, record trip audio in the app in nearly 150 U.S. cities, and share their trip with loved ones,” a spokesperson for Uber told Entrepreneur.
Roberto Moreno, who formerly worked for GrubHub and Postmatesin San Diego County, told the AP Monday that he stopped working for ride-sharing and delivery services altogether due to concerns for his safety.
“We have to look out for ourselves because the companies don’t do it,” he told the outlet.
Moreno also noted the disparity between verification needed from drivers and riders. Drivers are required to submit a selfie, get background checks, and give other personal information, but when it comes to riders, “we don’t know anything about the passengers or the people who we’re delivering to,” he said.
Gig Workers Rising, an activist group fighting for the safety and protection of gig workers, found that 80 app-based workers had been killed while on the job between 2017 and 2022 — with 31 murdered in 2022 alone, signifying an increase in violence. The report was based on press releases, police records, and court documents.
“App workers worldwide are grappling with a business model and workplace practices that leave them facing an unparalleled and racialized health and safety crisis,” the organization wrote in the report.
In 2021, NBC News spoke to 15 gig workers — all of which said they often “feared for their safety,” and that it seems as though violence spiked during and following the pandemic.
That same year, Uber rolled out new safety measures to protect drivers such as thorough verification for riders who use untrackable payment options like gift cards. Last fall, the company implemented more safety features such as freezing rider accounts that appear fake or offensive, the option to video record the ride using the front-facing camera, as well as recording audio during a trip.
“We’ve designed these new features to provide more peace of mind when driving and delivering,” the company wrote in the release.
Still, among all the gig-driven apps, Uber had the most instances of workers killed in 2022 at 39% of total crimes, according to the report from Gig Workers Rising.
In regard to the report by Gig Workers Rising, Uber noted that the death of Milton Pillacela Ayora (which was attributed to Uber in the report) was not connected to the Uber platform, and that another recorded death, Michael Wallace, was in 2018 but still included in the most recent report.
If there were a silver lining in her son being convicted of high treason, it was that Yelena Gordon would have a rare chance to see him.
But when she tried to enter the courtroom, she was told it was already full. But those packed in weren’t press or his supporters, since the hearing was closed.
“I recognized just one face there, the rest were all strangers,” she later recounted, exasperated, outside the Moscow City Court. “I felt like I had woken up in a Kafka novel.”
Eventually, after copious cajoling, Gordon was able to stand beside Vladimir Kara-Murza, a glass wall between her and her son, as the sentence was delivered.
Kara-Murza was handed 25 years in prison, a sky-high figure previously reserved for major homicide cases, and the highest sentence for an opposition politician to date.
The bulk — 18 years — was given on account of treason, for speeches he gave last year in the United States, Finland and Portugal.
For a man who had lobbied the West for anti-Russia sanctions such as on the Magnitsky Act against human rights abusers — long before Russia invaded Ukraine — those speeches were wholly unremarkable.
But the prosecution cast Kara-Murza’s words as an existential threat to Russia’s safety.
“This is the enemy and he should be punished,” prosecutor Boris Loktionov stated during the trial, according to Kara-Murza’s lawyer.
The judge, whose own name features on the Magnitsky list as a human rights abuser, agreed. And so did Russia’s Foreign Ministry, saying: “Traitors and betrayers, hailed by the West, will get what they deserve.”
Redefining the enemy
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of Russians have received fines or jail sentences of several years under new military censorship laws.
But never before has the nuclear charge of treason been used to convict someone for public statements containing publicly available information.
A screen set up in a hall at Moscow City Court shows the verdict in the case against Vladimir Kara-Murza | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
The verdict came a day after an appeal hearing at the same court for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who, in a move unseen since the end of the Cold War, is being charged with spying “for the American side.”
Taken together, the two cases set a historic precedent for modern Russia, broadening and formalizing its hunt for internal enemies.
“The state, the [Kremlin], has decided to sharply expand the ‘list of targets’ for charges of treason and espionage,” Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, told POLITICO.
Up until now, the worst the foreign press corps feared was having their accreditation revoked by Russia’s Foreign Ministry. This is now changing.
For Kremlin critics, the gloves have of course been off for far longer — before his jailing, Kara-Murza survived two poisonings. He had been a close ally of Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.
But such reprisals were reserved for only a handful of prominent dissidents, and enacted by anonymous hitmen and undercover agents.
After Putin last week signed into law extending the punishment for treason from 20 years to life, anyone could be eliminated from public life with the stamp of legitimacy from a judge in robes.
“Broach the topic of political repression over a coffee with a foreigner, and that could already be considered treason,” Oleg Orlov, chair of the disbanded rights group Memorial, said outside the courthouse.
Like many, he saw a parallel with Soviet times, when tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” were accused of spying for foreign governments and sent to far-flung labor camps or simply executed, and foreigners were by definition suspect.
Treason as catch-all
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive.
In court, hearings are held behind closed doors — sheltered from the public and press — and defense lawyers are all but gagged.
But they used to be relatively rare: Between 2009 and 2013, a total of 25 people were tried for espionage or treason, according to Russian court statistics. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, that number fluctuated from a handful to a maximum of 17.
Former defense journalist Ivan Safronov in court, April 2022 | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Involving academics, Crimean Tatars and military accused of passing on sensitive information to foreign parties, they generally drew little attention.
The jailing of Ivan Safronov — a former defense journalist accused of sharing state secrets with a Czech acquaintance — formed an important exception in 2020. It triggered a massive outcry among his peers and cast a spotlight on the treason law. Apparently, even sharing information gleaned from public sources could result in a conviction.
Combined with an amendment introduced after anti-Kremlin protests in 2012 that labeled any help to a “foreign organization which aimed to undermine Russian security” as treason, it turned the law into a powder keg.
In February 2022, that was set alight.
Angered by the war but too afraid to protest publicly, some Russians sought to support Ukraine in less visible ways such as through donations to aid organizations.
The response was swift: Only three days after Putin announced his special military operation, Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office warned it would check “every case of financial or other help” for signs of treason.
Thousands of Russians were plunged into a legal abyss. “I transferred 100 rubles to a Ukrainian NGO. Is this the end?” read a Q&A card shared on social media by the legal aid group Pervy Otdel.
“The current situation is such that this [treason] article will likely be applied more broadly,” warned Senator Andrei Klimov, head of the defense committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament.
Inventing traitors
Last summer, the law was revised once more to define defectors as traitors as well.
Ivan Pavlov, who oversees Pervy Otdel from exile after being forced to flee Russia for defending Safronov, estimates some 70 treason cases have already been launched since the start of the war — twice the maximum in pre-war years. And the tempo seems to be picking up.
Regional media headlines reporting arrests for treason are becoming almost commonplace. Sometimes they include high-octane video footage of FSB teams storming people’s homes and securing supposed confessions on camera.
Yet from what can be gleaned about the cases from media leaks, their evidence is shaky.
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
In December last year, 21-year-old Savely Frolov became the first to be charged with conspiring to defect. Among the reported incriminating evidence is that he attempted to cross into neighboring Georgia with a pair of camouflage trousers in the trunk of his car.
In early April this year, a married couple was arrested in the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil for supposedly collaborating with Ukrainian intelligence. The two worked at a nearby defense plant, but acquaintances cited by independent Russian media Holod deny they had access to secret information.
“It is a reaction to the war: There’s a demand from up top for traitors. And if they can’t find real ones, they’ll make them up, invent them,” said Pavlov.
Although official statistics are only published with a two-year lag time, he has little doubt a flood of guilty verdicts is coming.
“The first and last time a treason suspect was acquitted in Russia was in 1999.”
No sign of slowing
If precedent is anything to go by, Gershkovich will likely eventually be subject to a prisoner swap.
That is what happened with Brittney Griner, a U.S. basketball star jailed for drug smuggling when she entered Russia carrying hashish vape cartridges.
And it is also what happened with the last foreign journalist detained, in 1986 when the American Nicholas Daniloff was supposedly caught “red-handed” spying, like Gershkovich.
Back then, several others were released with him — among them Yury Orlov, a human rights activist sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet activity.”
Some now harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles and suffers from severe health problems.
For ordinary Russians, any glimmers of hope that the traitor push will slow down are even less tangible.
Those POLITICO spoke to say a Soviet-era mass campaign against traitors is unlikely, if only because the Kremlin has a fine line to walk: arrest too many traitors and it risks shattering the image that Russians unanimously support the war.
Some harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles | Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
And in the era of modern technology, there are easier ways to convey a message to a large audience. “If Stalin had had a television channel, there would’ve likely not been a need for mass repression,” reflected Pavlov.
Yet the repressive state apparatus does seem to have a momentum of its own, as those involved in investigating and prosecuting treason and espionage cases are rewarded with bonuses and promotions.
In a first, the treason case against Kara-Murza was led by the Investigative Committee, opening the door for the FSB to massively increase its work capacity by offloading work on others, says Soldatov.
“If the FSB can’t handle it, the Investigative Committee will jump in.”
In the public sphere, patriotic officials at all levels are clamoring for an even harder line, going so far as to volunteer the names of apparently unpatriotic political rivals and celebrities to be investigated.
There have been calls for “traitors” to be stripped of their citizenship and to reintroduce the death penalty.
And in a telling sign, Kara-Murza’s veteran lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has fled Russia, fearing he might be targeted next.
Аs Orlov, the dissident who was part of the 1986 swap and who went on to become an early critic of Putin, wrote in the early days of Putin’s reign in 2004: “Russia is flying back in time.”
Nearly two decades on, the question in Moscow nowadays is a simple one: how far back?
LONDON — Britain’s tough new plan to police the internet has left politicians in a stand-off with WhatsApp and other popular encrypted messaging services. Deescalating that row will be easier said than done.
The Online Safety Bill, the United Kingdom’s landmark effort to regulate social media giants, gives regulator Ofcom the power to require tech companies to identify child sex abuse material in private messages.
But the proposals have prompted Will Cathcart, boss of the Meta-owned messaging app, whose encrypted service is widely-used in Westminster’s own corridors of power, to claim it would rather be blocked in the U.K. than compromise on privacy.
“The core of what we do is a private messaging service for billions of people around the world,” Cathcart told POLITICO in March when he jetted in to London to lobby ministers over the upcoming bill. “When the U.K., a liberal democracy, says, ‘Oh, it is okay to scan everyone’s private communication for illegal content,’ that emboldens countries around the world that have very different definitions of illegal content to propose the same thing,” he added.
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages — echoing claims from the tech industry that date back more than a decade that they can’t create backdoors in encrypted digital services, even to protect kids online, because to do so opens the products up to vulnerabilities from bad actors, including foreign governments.
“We can’t just let thousands of pedophiles get away with it. That wouldn’t be responsible or proportionate for a government to do,” Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO in February.
Ministers are keen to lower the temperature. But doing so will prove challenging, two former ministers told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, given the likelihood of pushback from MPs, the complexity of the technology and the emotiveness of the issue.
Easier said than done
Finding a compromise is unlikely to be easy — and the row mirrors similar debates that are underway in the European Union and Australia over just how accountable tech platforms should be for potentially harmful content on encrypted services.
The debate over whether the requirements of the bill can be met while protecting privacy centers around “client-side scanning.”
While leaders at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre and security agency GCHQ said last July they believe such technology can simultaneously protect children and privacy, other experts dispute their findings.
A raft of cryptographers criticized the technique in a report called Bugs in Our Pockets in 2021 prompting tech giant Apple to abandon plans to introduce client-side scanning on its services. In Australia, the country’s eSafety Commissioner recently published a report highlighting how the likes of Microsoft and Apple had few, if any, mechanisms to track child sexual abuse material, including via their encrypted services.
“This is not only companies really taking a blind eye to live crime scenes happening on their platforms, but they’re also failing to properly harden their systems and storage against abuse,” Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told POLITICO. “It’s akin to leaving a home open to an intruder. Once that bad actor is inside the house, good luck getting them out.”
WhatsApp’s smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages | Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images
Hacking risk
Cybersecurity experts agree the U.K. bill’s demands are incompatible with a desire to protect encryption. They claim that privacy is not a fungible issue — services either have it or they don’t. And they warn that politicians should be wary of undermining such protections in ways that would make people’s online experiences potentially open to abuse or hacking.
“In essence, end-to-end encryption involves not having a door, or if you want to use a postal analogy, not having a sorting office for the state to search. Client-side-scanning, despite the claims of its proponents, does seem to involve some kind of level of access, some kind of ability to sort and scan, and therefore there’s no way of confining that to good use by lawful credible authorities and liberal democracies,” Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the government’s National Cyber Security Centre said.
Ministers insist that they support strong encryption and privacy, but say it cannot come at the cost of public safety.
Tech companies should be researching technology to identify child sex abuse before messages are encrypted, Donelan said. But the government also appears to be searching for a way to cool the row, and Donelan insisted the measure would be a “last resort.”
“That element of the bill is like a safety mechanism that can be enacted, should it ever be needed to. It might never be needed because there might be other solutions in place,” she said.
One official in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), not authorized to speak on the record but familiar with government discussions, said DSIT wanted to find a way through and is having talks “with anyone that wants to discuss this with us.”
Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO that any efforts to break encryption in the name of safety would have to meet stringent rules, and such requests would be made in only the most extreme situations.
“There’s a high bar for Ofcom to be able to require the use of a technology in order to secure safety,” she said.
Lords debate
Peers in the unelected House of Lords, the U.K. parliament’s revising chamber, waded into the issue Thursday.
Richard Allan, a Lib Dem peer who was Facebook’s chief lobbyist in Europe until 2019, led the charge, saying tech companies will feel they’re “unable to offer their products in the UK under the bill.” He said undermining encryption opened the doors to hostile states and accused the government of playing a “high stakes game of chicken” with tech companies.
But Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer who has been leading much of the work in the Lords around child safety, said although she had some sympathy for Allan’s arguments, Big Tech companies had to do more to protect users’ privacy themselves.
Wilf Stevenson, who is managing Labour’s response to the bill in the Lords, said he was not convinced the government’s plans were “right for the present day, let alone the future.” He added that under the bill “Ofcom is expected to be both gamekeeper and poacher,” with power to regulate tech companies and inspect private messages.
But Stephen Parkinson, who is guiding the bill through the Lords on behalf of the government, defended the legislation. “The bill contains strong safeguards for privacy,” he said, echoing Donelan’s statement that powers to inspect messages were a “last resort” designed to be used only in cases of suspected terrorism and child sexual exploitation.
Convincing ministers
Messaging services including Signal and WhatsApp are hoping for a ministerial climbdown — but few see one coming.
There is little prospect of large swathes of MPs, who will have the final say on the bill, riding to their rescue, according to two former ministers who have worked on the legislation.
“People are scared if they go in and fight over this, even for very genuine reasons, it could be very easily portrayed that they’re trying to block protecting kids,” one former Cabinet minister, a party loyalist, who worked on an earlier draft of the bill, said.
The second former minister said MPs “haven’t engaged with it terribly much on a very practical level” because it is “really hard.”
“Tech companies have made significant efforts to frame this issue in the false binary that any legislation that impacts private messaging will damage end-to-end encryption and will mean that encryption will not work or is broken. That argument is completely false,” opposition Labour frontbencher Alex Davies-Jones, said in a debate last June.
The widespread leaking of MPs’ WhatsApp messages has also undermined perceptions of the platform’s privacy credentials, the former Cabinet minister quoted above suggests.
“If you are sharing stuff on WhatsApp with people that’s inappropriate, there’s a good chance it’s going to end up in the public domain anyway. The encryption doesn’t stop that because somebody screenshots it and copies it and sends it on,” they lamented.
WhatsApp does have one ally in the former Brexit secretary and long-time civil liberties campaigner David Davis, though.
“Right across the board there are a whole series of weaknesses the government hasn’t taken on board,” he told POLITICO of the bill.
And on WhatsApp and Signal’s threats to leave the U.K., Davis thinks a point could be made.
“Well, I sort of hope they do. The truth is their model depends on complete privacy,” he said.
Update: This article has been updated to include comments from the latest House of Lords debate on the Online Safety Bill.
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ATHENS — Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis was supposed to be preparing to call an early election — instead he’s dealing with protestors throwing Molotov cocktails at police as a wave of public rage convulses Greece following a train crash that killed 57 people.
Last week’s train collision was caused when a freight train and a passenger train were allowed on the same rail line. The station-master accused of causing the crash was charged with negligent homicide and jailed Sunday pending a trial.
The crash has raised deeper questions about the functioning of the Greek state, following reports that Athens hadn’t updated its rail network to meet EU requirements and that the state rail company was accused of mismanagement.
Mitsotakis initially blamed the incident on “tragic human error” but was forced to backtrack after he was accused to trying to cover up the government’s role. The first political victim was Transport Minister Kostas Karamanlis, who resigned soon after the accident. Mitsotakis put out a new message over the weekend saying: “We cannot, will not and must not hide behind human error.”
“As prime minister, I owe everyone, but above all the relatives of the victims, a big SORRY. Both personal, and in the name of all those who have ruled the country for years,” Mitsotakis wrote on Facebook.
His conservative New Democracy party is now weighing the political implications of the crash.
Before Tuesday’s deadly event, it was widely expected that the government would hold a final Cabinet meeting where it would announce a rise in the minimum wage. Mitsotakis would then dissolve parliament, with the likeliest election date being April 9.
But that’s now very uncertain. If the April 9 date slips away, alternatives range from a first round vote later in April, May or even July.
“Anyone who hinted to the prime minister these days that we need to see what we do about the elections was kicked out of the meeting,” government spokesperson Giannis Oikonomou told Skai local TV. “It is not yet time to get into that kind of discussion.”
Instead of election plans, the government is dealing with a massive outpouring of public rage at the accident that has seen large protest rallies and clashes between demonstrators and police.
“When a national tragedy like this is underway, it is difficult to assess the political consequences,” said Alexis Routzounis, a researcher at pollster Kapa Research. “Society will demand clear explanations, and a careful and discreet response from the political leadership is paramount. For now, the political system is responding with understanding.”
Opposition parties have so far kept a low profile, but that is starting to change.
“Mitsotakis is well aware that the debate on the causes of the tragedy will not be avoided by the resignation of his [transport] minister, but becomes even more urgent,” the main opposition Syriza party said.
Before the crash, New Democracy was comfortably ahead of its rivals, according to POLITICO’s poll of polls.
That lead came despite a growing series of problems, including high inflation, skyrocketing food prices, financial wrongdoing by conservative MPs, a wiretapping scandal and reports of a secret offer by Saudi Arabia to pay for football stadiums for Greece and Egypt if they agreed to team up and host the 2030 World Cup.
“The government has managed to weather previous crises, including devastating wildfires in 2021 and the recent surveillance scandal, while suffering only a minor impact to its ratings,” said Wolfango Piccoli, co-founder of risk analysis company Teneo.
He added that the government is now scrambling to ensure it’s not hurt politically by the crash.
“It is following a similar strategy in wake of the train crash, with Mitsotakis playing a central role in establishing the narrative and swiftly announcing action aimed at getting ahead of the story,” Piccoli said.
Missed warnings
People are especially outraged because the tragedy appears to have been avoidable.
The rail line was supposed to use a modern electronic light signaling and safety system called ETCS that was purchased in the early 2000s, but never worked.
Even the current outdated system was not fully operational, with key signal lights always stuck on red due to technical failure and station managers only warning one another of approaching trains via walkie-talkie.
The rail employees’ union sent three legal warning notes in recent months to the transport minister and railcompanies asking for speedy upgrades to railway infrastructure.
“We will not wait for the accident to happen to see them shed crocodile tears,” said one sent on February 7.
In mid-February, the European Commission referred Greece to court for the eight-year delay in signing and publishing the contract between the national authorities and the company that manages rail infrastructure.
Last April, the head of the automated train control system resigned, complaining that trains were running at 200 kilometres per hour without the safety system.
The government even voted to allow Hellenic Train a five-year delay in paying any compensation for an accident or a death, while EU rules call for a 15-day time limit. The company said on Sunday it would not use the exemption.
On Monday, Mitsotakis met with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and she pledged that Brussels would help Greece “to modernize its railways and improve their safety.”
All of that is grim news for a party aiming to win a second term in office.
“Historically, when the state, instead of stability, causes insecurity, it is primarily the current government that is affected, but also all the governing parties, because the tragedy brings back memories of similar dramas of the past,” Routzounis said.
The second edition of the Safety Perceptions Index finds an increase in harm from severe weather and rising global anxieties associated with the state of employment, economic conditions, and ‘ambiguous risk.’ Uzbekistan leads the Index while Mali falls to last place, primarily driven by internal conflict and terrorism.
LONDON, England, February 23, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Today marks the launch of the second edition of the Safety Perceptions Index (SPI), a collaboration between Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a global safety charity, and the Institute for Economics & Peace, an international think tank.
Key results
There was a 5-percentage point increase in the number of people saying they felt less safe in 2021.
There has been a global rise in ‘ambiguous risk,’ the feeling that people are at risk but are unsure from what.
Both worry and the experience of harm in relation to food and water improved; however, low-income and conflict-ridden countries have recorded substantial deteriorations.
In 2021, more people reported experiencing harm from severe weather than in 2019, but levels of worry decreased.
Anxieties associated with employment and economic conditions rose between 2019 and 2021, likely caused by the economic downturn.
The country most impacted in the SPI was Mali, which has experienced two recent coups and has been racked by multiple violent conflicts.
Counterintuitively, the overall SPI score improved following the onset of COVID-19, likely due in part to COVID-related lockdowns and the restriction on movement globally.
The second Safety Perceptions Index report, released today, provides a comprehensive measure of global perceptions of safety. The report is based on two iterations of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, the first conducted in 2019 and the second in 2021, and provides commentary, trends, and insights into these two sets of data.
In 2021, the SPI improved globally across two domains – food and water and violent crime – and deteriorated in two – severe weather and mental health. Uzbekistan recorded the best overall score, while Mali recorded the worst overall score. Mali is currently suffering from a violent internal conflict, has high rates of terrorism, and saw its government overthrown in successful coups in both 2020 and 2021.
Sub-Saharan African countries are the most risk-impacted in the world. Many countries in the region are among those with the highest worry rates globally and are represented in the top five most impacted countries for food and water, mental health, and workplace safety.
The only domain in which the average levels of both worry and experience of harm increased was the mental health domain, likely due in part to the proliferation of COVID-19 lockdowns and other disruptions to regular social life. The World Health Organisation estimates that COVID-19 led to a 25% increase in rates of anxiety and depression, with women and young people hit the hardest.
“The Safety Perceptions Index 2023 report digs deeper into the World Risk Poll data to provide us with valuable insights into how perceptions of safety differ across countries, and how the various aspects of risk are connected,” said Sarah Cumbers, Director of Evidence & Insight at Lloyd’s Register Foundation. “The report will be useful in the decades ahead as it will provide insight into the shifts in perception that might be associated with any future pandemics or other global shocks, and how to manage those changes.”
Safety perceptions – the shifting risk landscape
Over half of the countries surveyed recorded substantial deteriorations in feelings of safety compared to five years earlier. In Myanmar, 11% of the population reported feeling less safe in 2019, rising to 59% in 2021. In Vietnam, 37% of the population also reported feeling less safe, an increase of 26 percentage points from 2019. However, many countries improved. In Sweden, the percentage of the population feeling more safe rose from 12% in 2019 to 32% in 2021. Zambia recorded a notable increase, rising from 19% to 37%.
Rise in ‘ambiguous risk’
The 2023 SPI report finds a rise in ‘ambiguous risk.’ This refers to people’s feeling that they are at risk, but are unsure from what. The rise in ambiguous risk can be seen in the responses to the World Risk Poll question on the greatest perceived threat in people’s daily lives. Between 2019 and 2021, the largest changes in response rates were for those saying that no risk existed in their lives, which fell by half, and those saying they did not know what their greatest risk was, which nearly doubled.
COVID-19 and risk
The 2023 SPI highlights the changing dynamics of risk that accompanied the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world is less certain about its future than at any time since the Cold War. The pandemic continues to impact every corner of the globe, inflation is rising, Russia’s war in Ukraine has disrupted international relations, and economic growth has slowed and, in some cases, reversed. As COVID-19 only ranked as the fourth most cited threat to people’s daily safety, these findings suggest that it was the societal experience of the pandemic – more than the virus itself – that most impacted worries and experiences of risk.
Regional & country findings
Uzbekistan was the highest-scoring country overall and, on average, the Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia region had the best scores globally. This is a noteworthy result, given that countries in the region do not typically rank highly in other measures of security and development.
The worst-scoring country in the 2023 SPI was Mali, which has experienced two recent coups and has been racked by multiple violent conflicts.
On average, sub-Saharan Africa was the worst-scoring region in the SPI; all five countries with the worst scores are in the region, with four of them currently suffering from violent conflict.
The SPI report focuses on the risks with the potential to cause the most disruption and have the most significant impact on the lives of people across the world. It measures two themes: worry about harm and recent experience of serious harm, analysing them across five domains: food and water, violent crime, severe weather, mental health, and workplace safety. These themes and domains are combined into a composite score which reflects perceptions of safety by country and region. The survey was completed prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has significantly stressed global food supply chains.
About Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the World Risk Poll
Lloyd’s Register Foundation is an independent global safety charity that supports research, innovation, and education to make the world a safer place. Its mission is to use the best evidence and insight, such as the World Risk Poll, to help the global community focus on tackling the world’s most pressing safety and risk challenges. The Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll is the first global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety.
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) is the world’s leading think tank dedicated to developing metrics to analyse peace and to quantify its economic value. It does this by developing global and national indices, calculating the economic cost of violence, analysing country-level risk, and understanding Positive Peace. The research is used extensively by governments, academic institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organisations and by intergovernmental institutions such as the OECD, The Commonwealth Secretariat, the World Bank, and the United Nations.
PARIS — French parents had better think twice before posting too many pictures of their offspring on social media.
On Tuesday, members of the National Assembly’s law committee unanimously green-lit draft legislation to protect children’s rights to their own images.
“The message to parents is that their job is to protect their children’s privacy,” Bruno Studer, an MP from President Emmanuel Macron’s party who put the bill forward, said in an interview. “On average, children have 1,300 photos of themselves circulating on social media platforms before the age of 13, before they are even allowed to have an account,” he added.
The French president and his wife Brigitte have made child protection online a political priority. Lawmakers are also working on age-verification requirements for social media and rules to limit kids’ screen time.
Studer, who was first elected in 2017, has made a career out of child safety online. In the past few years, he authored two groundbreaking pieces of legislation: one requiring smartphone and tablet manufacturers to give parents the option to control their children’s internet access, and another introducing legal protections for YouTube child stars.
So-called sharenting (combining “sharing” and “parenting,” referring to posting sensitive pictures of one’s kids online) constitutes one of the main risks to children’s privacy, according to the bill’s explanatory statement. Half of the pictures shared by child sexual abusers were initially posted by parents on social media, according to reports by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, mentioned in the text.
The legislation adopted on Tuesday includes protecting their children’s privacy among parents’ legal duties. Both parents would be jointly responsible for their offspring’s image rights and “shall involve the child … according to his or her age and degree of maturity.”
In case of disagreement between parents, a judge can ban one of them from posting or sharing a child’s pictures without authorization from the other. And in the most extreme cases, parents can lose their parental authority over their kids’ image rights “if the dissemination of the child’s image by both parents seriously affects the child’s dignity or moral integrity.”
The bill still needs to go through a plenary session next week and the Senate before it would become law.
PARIS — The French data protection authority’s president Marie-Laure Denis warned Tuesday against using facial recognition as part of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics security toolkit.
“The members of the CNIL’s college call on parliamentarians not to introduce facial recognition, that is to say the identification of people on the fly in the public space,” she told Franceinfo.
The French government is seeking to ramp up France’s arsenal of surveillance powers to ensure the safety of the millions of tourists expected for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. The plans include AI-powered cameras for the first time — but not facial recognition.
The Senate’s plenary session starts to vote today on the law introducing the new powers. Senators are divided between those who want to add privacy safeguards and those who want to push the surveillance and security arsenal further, mainly by introducing facial recognition.
“The amendment [to include facial recognition] was rejected in the Senate’s law committee, but it can come back [in the plenary session],” the CNIL’s chief cautioned.
Civil liberties NGOs such as La Quadrature du Net and the Human Rights League are currently campaigning against the experimental AI-powered surveillance cameras. Denis however tried to assuage concerns.
The CNIL will monitor algorithmic training to ensure there is no bias and that footage of people is deleted in due time, she said. The experiment will “not necessarily” become permanent, she added.
When you’re feeling under the weather, the last thing you want to do is trek from pharmacy to pharmacy searching for basic medicines like cough syrup and antibiotics. Yet many people across Europe — faced with a particularly harsh winter bug season— are having to do just that.
Since late 2022, EU countries have been reporting serious problems trying to source certain important drugs, with a majority now experiencing shortages. So just how bad is the situation and, crucially, what’s being done about it? POLITICO walks you through the main points.
How bad are the shortages?
In a survey of groups representing pharmacies in 29 European countries, including EU members as well as Turkey, Kosovo, Norway and North Macedonia, almost a quarter of countries reported more than 600 drugs in short supply, and 20 percent reported 200-300 drug shortages. Three-quarters of the countries said shortages were worse this winter than a year ago. Groups in four countries said that shortages had been linked to deaths.
It’s a portrait backed by data from regulators. Belgian authorities report nearly 300 medicines in short supply. In Germany that number is 408, while in Austria more than 600 medicines can’t be bought in pharmacies at the moment. Italy’s list is even longer — with over 3,000 drugs included, though many are different formulations of the same medicine.
Which medicines are affected?
Antibiotics — particularly amoxicillin, which is used to treat respiratory infections — are in short supply. Other classes of drugs, including cough syrup, children’s paracetamol, and blood pressure medicine, are also scarce.
Why is this happening?
It’s a mix of increased demand and reduced supply.
Seasonal infections — influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)first and foremost — started early and are stronger than usual. There’s also an unusual outbreak of throat disease Strep A in children. Experts think the unusually high level of disease activity is linked to weaker immune systems that are no longer familiar with the soup of germs surrounding us in daily life, due to lockdowns. This difficult winter, after a couple of quiet years (with the exception of COVID-19), caught drugmakers unprepared.
Inflation and the energy crisis have also been weighing on pharmaceutical companies, affecting supply.
Last year, Centrient Pharmaceuticals, a Dutch producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients, said its plant was producing a quarter lessoutput than in 2021 due to high energy costs. In December, InnoGenerics, another manufacturer from the Netherlands, was bailed out by the government after declaring bankruptcy to keep its factory open.
Commissioner Stella Kyriakides wrote to Greece’s health minister asking him to take into consideration the effects of bans on third countries | Stephanie Lecocq/EPA-EFE
The result, according to Sandoz, one of the largest producers on the European generics market, is an especially “tight supply situation.” A spokesperson told POLITICO that other culprits include scarcity of raw materials and manufacturing capacity constraints.They added that Sandoz is able to meet demand at the moment, but is “facing challenges.”
How are governments reacting?
Some countries are slamming the brakes on exports to protect domestic supplies. In November, Greece’s drugs regulator expanded the list of medicine whose resale to other countries — known as parallel trade — is banned. Romania has temporarily stopped exports of certain antibiotics and kids’ painkillers. Earlier in January, Belgium published a decree that allows the authorities to halt exports in case of a crisis.
These freezes can have knock-on effects. A letter from European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides addressed to Greece’s Health Minister Thanos Plevris asked him to take into consideration the effects of bans on third countries. “Member States must refrain from taking national measures that could affect the EU internal market and prevent access to medicines for those in need in other Member States,” wrote Kyriakides.
Germany’s government is considering changing the law to ease procurement requirements, which currently force health insurers to buy medicines where they are cheapest, concentrating the supply into the hands of a few of the most price-competitive producers. The new law would have buyers purchase medicines from multiple suppliers, including more expensive ones, to make supply more reliable. The Netherlands recently introduced a law requiring vendors to keep six weeks of stockpiles to bridge shortages, and in Sweden the government is proposing similar rules.
At a more granular level, a committee led by the EU’s drugs regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), has recommended that rules be loosened to allow pharmacies to dispense pills or medicine doses individually, among other measures. In Germany, the president of the German Medical Association went so far as to call for the creation of informal “flea markets” for medicines, where people could give their unused drugs to patients who needed them. And in France and Germany, pharmacists have started producing their own medicines — though this is unlikely to make a big difference, given the extent of the shortfall.
Can the EU fix it?
In theory, the EU should be more ready thanever to tackle a bloc-wide crisis. It has recently upgraded its legislation to deal with health threats, including a lack of pharmaceuticals. The EMA has been given expanded powers to monitor drug shortages. And a whole new body, the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) has been set up, with the power to go on the market and purchase drugs for the entire bloc.
But not everyone agrees that it’s that bad yet.
Last Thursday, the EMA decided not to ask the Commission to declare the amoxycillin shortage a “major event” — an official label that would have triggered some (limited) EU-wide action— saying that current measures are improving the situation.
A European Medicines Agency’s working group on shortages could decide on Thursday whether to recommend that the Commission declares the drug shortages a“major event” — an official label that would trigger some (limited) EU-wide action. An EMA steering group for shortages would have the power to request data on drug stocks of the drugs and production capacity from suppliers, and issue recommendations on how to mitigate shortages.
At an appearance before the European Parliament’s health committee, the Commission’s top health official, Sandra Gallina, said she wanted to “dismiss a bit the idea that there is a huge shortage,” and said that alternative medications are available to use.
And others believe the situation will get better with time. “I think it will sort itself out, but that depends on the peak of infections,” said Adrian van den Hoven, director general of generics medicines lobby Medicines for Europe. “If we have reached the peak, supply will catch up quickly. If not, probably not a good scenario.”
Helen Collis and Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif contributed reporting.
PARIS — France is seeking to massively expand its arsenal of surveillance powers and tools to secure the millions of tourists expected for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
Among the plans are large-scale, real-time camera systems supported by an algorithm to spot suspicious behavior, including unsupervised luggage and alarming crowd movements like stampedes. Senators on Wednesday will vote on a law introducing the new powers, which are supposed to be temporary, with some lawmakers pushing to allow controversial facial-recognition technology.
The stakes are high: The government badly wants to avoid “failures” like the ones that dented its reputation during the Champions League final last summer, and the trauma of the 2015 Paris terror attacks still looms large over the country.
But the plans are already causing an uproar among privacy campaigners. “The Olympic Games are used as a pretext to pass measures the [security technology] industry has long been waiting for,” said Bastien Le Querrec from digital rights NGO La Quadrature du Net, who’s leading a campaign against algorithmic video surveillance.
TheFrench government already backtracked on deploying facial recognition after lawmakers within President Emmanuel Macron’s majority party raised concerns. It was also forced by the country’s data protection authority and top administrative court to build in more privacy safeguards.
For now, the law would allow for “experimentation” with the surveillance systems, and the trial is supposed to end in June 2025 — 10 months after the sports competition wraps up.
Critics, however, fear the law will lead to unwanted surveillance in the long term.
One key question is what will happen to the AI-powered devices once the Olympic Games are over, especially since the legislation mentions not only sports events but also “festive” and “cultural” gatherings. In the past, Le Querrec warned, security measures initially designed to be temporary — for example, under the state of emergency that followed the 2015 attacks — ended up becoming permanent.
Whether the tech survives the Olympics will depend on how the final law is written, according to Francisco Klauser, a professor at the University of Neuchâtel, who has written about surveillance and sporting events.
“In the history of mega-events, there is always a legacy,” he said. Countries staging major events are under “extraordinary circumstances and time pressure” that often mean systems get deployed that otherwise “would have been debated much more heavily,” he added.
For the 2024 Olympics, France already has the cameras but will need to buy the software to analyze footage, an official from the interior ministry told POLITICO.
MP Philippe Latombe said that French companies such as Atos, Idemia, XXII and Datakalab would be able to provide certain software items | Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
Philippe Latombe, an MP from the centrist Macron-allied party Modem, said that French companies such as Atos, Idemia, XXII and Datakalab, among others, would be able to provide such tech. The lawmaker is co-chairing a fact-finding mission on video surveillance in public spaces.
After the Senate votes on the law to allow “experimentations” with the surveillance systems, the legislation will go to the National Assembly, and lawmakers in both chambers are expected to fight over the balance between privacy and security.
Time is already running out, Latombe warned, as algorithms will need to be trained on datasets for months before the Olympics kick off.
For years, studies have shown that cooking indoors with gas stoves is potentially harmful to our health, particularly for children with asthma.
Now a U.S. safety agency has weighed in on the potential dangers, warning that they may move to regulate their use. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death, announced they are turning up the heat on gas stoves.
“This is a hidden hazard,” Richard Trumka Jr., an agency commissioner, told Bloomberg. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
About 38% of U.S. households use gas stoves, but that number rises to around 70% in states such as California and New Jersey.
For this reason, many cities and counties across the country have begun to adopt policies to require or encourage consumers to switch from fossil fuels to all-electric homes and buildings.
In New York City, for example, the building code requires all-electric for new low-rise buildings in 2024 and taller buildings in 2027. Los Angeles passed legislation to ban most natural gas-fueled appliances in newly constructed residential and commercial buildings starting this month.
The Inflation Reduction Act also offers tax credits for those who go electric. Middle-income households are now eligible for over a half-dozen tax credits for electric stoves, cars, and solar panels.
Gas advocates push back
Not everyone is in favor of banning the blue flame.
The American Gas Association says that a ban on gas stoves is unwarranted.
“The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and EPA do not present gas ranges as a significant contributor to adverse air quality or health hazard in their technical or public information literature, guidance, or requirements,” said Karen Harbert, AGA president. “The most practical, realistic way to achieve a sustainable future where energy is clean, as well as safe, reliable and affordable, is to ensure it includes natural gas and the infrastructure that transports it.”
Others argue that the problem is in ventilation, not the gas itself.
“Ventilation is really where this discussion should be, rather than banning one particular type of technology,” Jill Notini, a vice president of The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers told Bloomberg. “Banning one type of a cooking appliance is not going to address the concerns about overall indoor air quality.”
But Trumka disagrees, saying the Consumer Safety Commission will issue a proposal and possible ban in the coming months.
“There is this misconception that if you want to do fine-dining kind of cooking it has to be done on gas,” he said. “It’s a carefully manicured myth.”
***Update***
After we reported on this story, Richard Trumka Jr walked back his comment about banning gas stoves,, The story caused an uproar among some consumers and politicians, including Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
This is a recipe for disaster. The federal government has no business telling American families how to cook their dinner. I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on. https://t.co/8IEFM44UvE
“We are not looking to go into anyone’s homes and take away items that are already there. We don’t do that,” Trumka told CNN. “If and when we get to regulation on the topic, it’s always forward looking. You know, it applies to new products. Consumers always have the choice of what to keep in their homes and we want to make sure they do that with full information.”
In the United States, TikTok is a favorite punching ball for lawmakers who’ve compared the Chinese-owned app to “digital fentanyl” and say it should be banned.
Now that hostility is spreading to Europe, where fears about children’s safety and reports that TikTok spied on journalists using their IP locations are fueling a backlash against the video-sharing app used by more than 250 million Europeans.
As TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew heads to Brussels on Tuesday to meet with top digital policymaker Margrethe Vestager amid a wider reappraisal of EU ties with China, his company faces a slew of legal, regulatory and security challenges in the bloc — as well as a rising din of public criticism.
One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation. Such comments have gone hand-in-hand with aggressive media coverage in France, including Le Parisien daily’s December 29 front page calling TikTok “A real danger for the brains of our children.”
New restrictions may be in order. During a trip to the United States in November, Macron told a group of American investors and French tech CEOs that he wanted to regulate TikTok, according to two people in the room. TikTok denies it is harmful and says it has measures to protect kids on the app.
While it wasn’t clear what rules Macron was referring to — his office declined to comment — the remarks added to a darkening tableau for TikTok. In addition to two EU-wide privacy probes that are set to wrap up in coming months, TikTok has to contend with extensive new requirements on content moderation under the bloc’s new digital rulebook, the DSA, from mid-2023 — as well as the possibility of being caught up in the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook, the Digital Markets Act.
In answers to emailed questions, France’s digital minister Jean-Noel Barrot said that France would rely on the DSA and DMA to regulate TikTok at an EU level, though he “remained vigilant on these ever-evolving models” of ad-supported social media. Barrot added that he “never failed to maintain a level of pressure appropriate to the stakes of the DSA” in meetings with TikTok executives.
Ahead of Chew’s visit to Brussels, Thierry Breton, the bloc’s internal market commissioner, warned him about the need to “respect the integrality of our rules,” according to comments the commissioner made in Spain, reported by Reuters. A spokesperson for Vestager said she aimed to “review how the company was preparing for complying with its (possible) obligations under our regulation.”
That said, the probes TikTok is facing deal with suspected violations that have already taken place. If Ireland’s data regulator, which leads investigations on behalf of other EU states, finds that TikTok has broken the bloc’s privacy rulebook, the General Data Protection Regulation, fines could amount to up to 4 percent of the firm’s global turnover. Penalties can be even higher under the DSA, which starts applying to big platforms in mid-2023.
Spying fears
And yet, having to fork over a few million euros could be the least of TikTok’s troubles in Europe, as some lawmakers here are following their U.S. peers to call for much tougher restrictions on the app amid fears that data from TikTok will be used for spying.
TikTok is under investigation for sending data on EU users to China — one of two probes being led by Ireland. Reports that TikTok employees in China used TikTok data to track the movements of two Western journalists only intensified spying fears, especially in privacy-conscious Germany. (TikTok acknowledged the incident and fired four employees over what they said was unauthorized access to user data.)
One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users | Pool photo by Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Citing a “lack of data security and data protection” as well as data transfers to China, the digital policy spokesman for Germany’s Social Democratic Party group in the Bundestag said that the U.S. ban on TikTok for federal employees’ phones was “understandable.”
“I think it makes sense to also critically examine applications such as TikTok and, if necessary, to take measures. I would therefore advise civil servants, but also every citizen, not to install untrustworthy services and apps on their smartphones,” Jens Zimmermann added.
Maximilian Funke-Kaiser, digital policy spokesman for the liberal FDP group in German parliament, went even further raising the prospect of a full ban on use of TikTok on government phones. “In view of the privacy and security risks posed by the app and the app’s far-reaching access rights, I consider the ban on TikTok on the work phones of U.S. government officials to be appropriate. Corresponding steps should also be examined in Germany.”
For Moritz Körner, a centrist lawmaker in European Parliament, the potential risks linked to TikTok are far greater than with Twitter due to the former’s larger user base — at least five times as many users as Twitter in Europe — and the fact that up to a third of its users are aged 13-19.
“The China-app TikTok should be under the special surveillance of the European authorities,” he wrote in an email. “The fight between autocratic and democratic systems will also be fought via digital platforms. Europe has to wake up.”
In Switzerland, lawmakers called earlier this month for a ban on officials’ phones.
Call for a ban
So far, though, no European government or public body has followed the U.S. in banning TikTok usage on officials’ phones. In response to questions from POLITICO, a spokesperson for the European Commission — which previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp — wrote that any restriction on TikTok usage for EU civil servants would “require a political decision and will be based on the careful assessment of data protection cybersecurity concerns, and others.”
The spokesperson also pointed out that “there are no official Commission accounts” on TikTok.
A spokesperson for the European Parliament said its services “continuously monitor” for cybersecurity issues, but that “due to the nature of security matters, we don’t comment further on specific platforms.”
POLITICO reached out to cybersecurity agencies for the EU, the U.K. and Germany to ask if they had or were planning any restrictions or recommendations having to do with TikTok. None flagged any specific restrictions, which doesn’t mean there aren’t any. In Germany, for example, officials who use iPhones can’t use or download TikTok in the section of their phone where confidential data can be accessed.
The European Commission has previously advised its employees against using Meta’s WhatsApp | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
For Hamburg’s data protection agency, one of 16 in Germany’s federal system, restricting TikTok on official phones would be a good idea.
“Based on what we know from the available sources, we share, among other things,the concerns of the U.S. government that you mentioned and would therefore welcome it appropriate for government agencies in the EU to refrain from using TikTok,” a spokesperson said.
This suggests that the most immediate public threat for TikTok in Europe is privacy-related. Of the two probes being conducted by Ireland’s privacy regulator, the one looking into child safety on the app is the closest to wrapping up, according to a spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission.
Depending on the outcome of discussions between EU privacy regulators — the child safety probe is likely to trigger a dispute resolution mechanism — TikTok could face new requirements to verify age in the EU. The other probe, looking into TikTok’s transfers of data to China, is likely to wrap up around mid-year or toward the end of 2023 if a dispute is triggered, the spokesperson said.
Antoaneta Roussi contributed reporting.
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Nicholas Vinocur, Clothilde Goujard, Océane Herrero and Louis Westendarp
KYIV — When the Russians first came to the school where Larysa taught history in southeastern Ukraine, they asked for all the history and Ukrainian language textbooks.
The director refused to hand them over.
The school closed — but then reopened virtually on September 1, with up to 80 percent of its 700 pupils attending online. More than half of them remain in occupied Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia region, said Larysa, who left in April for the Odesa region.
“Some go to Russian school and do homework with us,” she said. “We do all we can to make it incognito. We deleted all electronic lists, never put up any photos or screenshots or write names.”
Larysa did not give her surname or name the school for security reasons. Half of her colleagues are still on occupied territory and teaching online, risking imprisonment or worse from occupying forces — two were already detained and later released in September.
“They’re holding lessons in extreme conditions,” Larysa said. “Some were saved just because someone was on lookout. The wife was teaching a lesson and her husband was watching from the window so that she had time to hide everything before they came.”
After reopening in autumn 2021, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, Ukrainian schools have moved mostly back online following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But from bombs to blackouts to displacement to occupation, millions of Ukrainian children and young adults face an education interrupted, with educators struggling to work under desperate conditions.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed, according to the Ministry of Education. School buildings are at risk of shelling or lack heating after massive damage to the country’s energy infrastructure, while blackouts and interrupted internet connections hamper learning from home.
Meanwhile, thousands of students and teachers living under occupation face pressure to switch to Russian schooling.
Education, with its propaganda potential to influence young hearts and minds, has become a front line in the war.
Ideological battle
Crimea, under Russian control for more than eight years, is an example of how Russian education in occupied territories aims — with eventual success — to erase Ukrainian identity and militarize children.
History lessons there claim that Ukraine was always part of Russia. Army cadet courses and classes sponsored by law enforcement agencies start for children as young as six, says Maria Sulyanina from the Crimean Human Rights Group.
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, more than 3,000 educational institutions in Ukraine — 10 percent of the total — have been damaged or destroyed | Genya Savilov AFP via Getty images
“We see that these children who were small kids when the occupation started, after eight years they have been turned into Russians,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has steadily been moving its educational system away from that inherited from the Soviet Union. It has relegated Russian to foreign language teaching; moved Russian literature to part of the study of world literature; and revised history courses to include events like the Holodomor, the Soviet-caused famine in the 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians and is still largely denied in Russia.
Yet despite Russia’s carrot-and-stick approach — from September, parents in recently occupied territories are paid a one-off of 10,000 rubles (€145) to send their children to Russian school, plus 4,000 per month that they stay — many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it.
But the war has made Ukrainian education extremely tenuous.
When Russia invaded and occupied Kupiansk, a town in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, the vocational school where Viktoria Scherbakova taught was pressured to switch to the Russian system, and later damaged and looted.
Now, her classroom — and office — is the kitchen table at a small rented flat she shares with her two children and elderly parents in Kyiv, after she and her children fled the Russian occupation. The flat is also her daughter’s Kharkiv university virtual lecture hall and her son’s Kyiv ninth-grade classroom on days when air raid sirens sound and he can’t attend school.
The motor transport vocational college in Kupiansk where Scherbakova taught, which offered practical training for mechanics and drivers along with courses in transport logistics to some 300 pupils aged 14 to 18, exists as a displaced, virtual entity, with no home of its own. Although she is offering lessons online, Scherbakova doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to teach there again in person.
“We’re not in Kyiv, not in Kharkiv, not in Kupiansk,” she said. “We’re not anywhere.”
The education front line
As of October, about 1,300 schools were on Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia. Teachers have been targeted for collaboration and detained, threatened and mistreated. Staff have been sent to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea for retraining in the Russian education system or told they would be replaced by teachers from Russia if they refused to work.
In Kupiansk, after the then-mayor surrendered to the Russians on February 27, educational establishments stayed open. However, many parents kept their children out of school — including Scherbakova, whose 14-year-old son stayed at home although she herself continued to work at the college.
Apart from hoisting a Russian flag outside, the occupiers left them alone — until June. But by the end of term, it became clear that staff would be forced to decide: leave, or start the next school year under the Russian system.
“And if you didn’t work for them, it wasn’t clear what the consequences would be,” said Scherbakova. “If you openly said you didn’t support them, you would end up in their prisons or cellars.”
Many families are sticking to a Ukrainian education for their children, and teachers are still teaching it | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
One school director in Kupiansk, who refused to open her school after occupation, spent almost a month detained in the basement of the police station.
Of nearly 50 teaching and administrative staff in the vocational college, only seven refused to work with the Russian occupying authorities, according to Scherbakova.
“I’m ashamed of my college,” she said.
Spurred by the apparent ultimatum, Scherbakova and her children managed to leave Kupiansk for free Ukrainian territory in early June. The college was moved to operate virtually in Ukrainian-controlled territory, with her role shifting to acting director. With a colleague, they printed diplomas for those graduates who were reachable — 35 out of 53 — and developed a program to start the new teaching year.
But when she and a colleague started calling students, they found out that the teenagers had been enrolled to start the year in the college in Kupiansk — under the Russian system.
The physical and the virtual college started teaching parallel courses on September 1. Eight days later, Ukrainian forces took back Kupiansk.
When Scherbakova went back to Kupiansk after liberation, she found that though the college had been completely looted of its equipment and training vehicles, the library was full of untouched new Russian textbooks.
Some of the college staff who had remained in Kupiansk fled to Russia. Others got in touch with Scherbakova asking if they could work with her.
“At first I didn’t have an answer. I’m not the SBU [Ukrainian security services], I can’t judge them,” she said.
Some are under suspicion of collaboration. Later, the Ministry of Education clarified that teachers who had collaborated or brought in the Russian education system were banned from teaching. According to Ukrainian legislation on collaboration adopted in early September, teachers who engage in Russian propaganda in schools can be sentenced to prison terms. By mid-September, 19 proceedings had been opened against teachers in Ukraine.
Back in Kyiv,Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine.
Her students, scattered around the country by war, face power outages too. Others, displaced abroad, are fitting lessons around schooling in Germany or England. And some remain in Kupiansk, recently liberated from occupation, where there is no internet, and the town comes under Russian shelling morning and night.
Viktoria Scherbakova conducts online lessons and end-of-term exams amid daily power cuts since Russia began bombing essential infrastructure in Ukraine | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty images
“Those ones, all I can do is call and ask: ‘Are you alive? How did the night go? This is your exam question, just tell me something, whatever comes into your head,’” said Scherbakova.
“Of course, I can’t give them good marks. But I can’t abandon them.”
Lost generation
The physical challenges of war and the ideological battle as Russia seeks to impose its education system threaten the very basis of education in Ukraine: participation.
Scherbakova says her students, many of whom come from low-income families, are dropping out of online courses. “They need to survive. They dropped everything to find work,” she said. “Many of them had to leave their homes, and they need to live on something.”
Teachers are leaving the profession too — due to migration, retirement, low salaries, and war-related stresses and bans. The Kharkiv region has lost nearly 3,000 of 21,500 teachers since February, according to its education department.
In Kupiansk, as in many liberated towns and villages, the will to learn is not matched by the necessary infrastructure of electricity, internet and teachers. Children can only get an education if they move.
“We don’t want to leave. This is our land, and we want to live here,” said Iryna Protsenko, who was recently collecting humanitarian aid in Kupiansk with her daughter Zlata, 6. The family ran a small dairy business in the town before the war and stayed throughout occupation. “But now I’m afraid we will have to leave, because of school.”
Zlata, smiling shyly next to her mother, wants to learn, said Protsenko. She should start school this year. For the moment they read books together at home — easier now that electricity has been restored. “But she’s lonely.”
Ukrainian children were already starved of live interaction due to pandemic restrictions. Now, with only online teaching, plus the interrupted routines and safety restrictions of war, they are becoming increasingly stressed and withdrawn.
“It’s not so much the quality of education as the communication. They are losing socialization,” said Larysa, the teacher from Berdiansk.
Some parents compare the situation to that of their grandparents, who missed years of education during World War II. When the war was over, they had to study together with much younger children, earning themselves the name ‘pererostki,’ or ‘overgrown.’
“I think it will be like my grandma,” said Maria Varenikova, a journalist living in Kyiv with her son Nazar, 11. “Something will have to be figured out in Ukraine, given that for years children don’t have an education because of COVID, and now war.”
“They try hard and worry so much. They are lost children” said teacher Viktoria Scherbakova | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty images
Nazar’s school opened in person this September, keeping going with generators, bottled water and a basement bomb shelter. But Nazar is repeating the largely lost previous school year.
Scherbakova’s son, on top of the trauma of fleeing his home, had to cram in most of the last school year in extra classes over the summer in order to progress to the next grade in Kyiv.
“They try hard and worry so much,” said Scherbakova. “They are lost children.”
SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has ripped apart Moscow’s ties with the EU and the U.S. on everything from energy to trade to travel — but there’s one partnership they can’t escape.
Tucked away in a quiet sun-soaked corner of southern France, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) — an effort to harness the power of nuclear fusion to unleash vast amounts of clean energy — continues to purr along with the participation of Russian scientists and Russian technology.
Earlier this month, scientists at ITER hailed a major breakthrough announced by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which said it had overcome a major barrier — producing more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in.
The 35-nation ITER — born out of U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1985 meeting after decades of Cold War tensions — has no way of removing a member gone rogue; there’s no path to kicking Russia out of the experiment without torpedoing the entire scheme.
The €44 billion project aims to test nuclear fusion — a process occurring in the center of stars — as a viable source of carbon-free energy that’s minimally radioactive. By injecting hot plasma that reaches 150 million degrees Celsius into a deviceand confining it with magnetic fields, hydrogen nuclei fuse into a helium nucleus and additional neutrons, releasing huge amounts of energy.
The EU shoulders around half of ITER’s costs and manages its participation through the bloc’s Barcelona-based Fusion 4 Europe (F4E) agency; India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. each have a roughly 9 percent share.
As an active participant in ITER, Russia still has around 50 staff, including engineers, working onsite.
Flags of participant nations fly outside the ITER complex | Photo by Victor Jack/POLITICO
Immediately after Moscow launched its full-scale assault on Ukraine in February, the project was left in a tight spot, especially as Russian government representatives form part of the high-level decision-making board, the ITER Council, alongside their European and American counterparts.
“It’s a difficult balance between condemning a member and facing the consequences for the project,” said ITER Communication Officer Sabina Griffith, who adds that there were initially intensive discussions about how to respond. Staff even briefly discussed putting a banner on the project’s website condemning the war, before scrapping the idea.
Even if “the organization itself is apolitical … many people were questioning” what to do after the invasion began, according to ITER’s chief engineer Alain Bécoulet, who added that there was “a lot of sadness” among the staff.
“The political situation so far is stable, [with] all members … declaring that they want to continue to work together,” he said, adding that the first ITER Council meeting after the invasion in June was “very constructive.”
ITER Council members again “reaffirmed their strong belief in the value of the ITER mission” when they met at the site for their latest gathering in October.
The experiment — over budget and over deadline — has already had its fair share of controversies. France’s nuclear safety authority in January suspended the assembly of the fusion reactor over safety concerns. F4E has been plagued by accusations of a high-pressure and overwork culture that critics have linked to at least one suicide.
Vladimir Tronza | Photo by Victor Jack/POLITICO
Unlike Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN — a collaborative research center that suspended its ties with Russia after the war began — ITER is an international agreement like the U.N., making it hard to suspend Moscow, said Bécoulet.
That’s because up to 90 percentof the funding comes not in the form of cash but “in-kind” contributions of equipment, with participant countries each manufacturing a one-of-a-kind bespoke piece of the overall reactor that is then put together like a giant puzzle.
While the set-up was designed to create specialized fusion expertise across the world and stimulate domestic manufacturing, it now means that if one member doesn’t deliver a part, the entire project could collapse, wasting billions.
Even if they wanted to, countries couldn’t formally kick Russia out of the project, as there’s no clause in ITER’s constitution that would allow them to do so— instead, every other country would have to pull out.
Going nuclear
But that doesn’t mean the project hasn’t been impacted by Russia’s war.
For one, Western sanctions and Moscow’s counter-sanctions have made it a minefield to procure Russian-made parts, according to Bécoulet.
“It turns out 2022 is one very important year in terms of Russian deliveries” for the project, he said, with Moscow producing crucial parts including busbars — aluminum bars feeding the reactor with a huge electric current — and a 200-ton ring-shaped magnet that shapes the plasma and keeps it suspended in the reactor, called a poloidal field coil.
Transporting the busbars by truck and the field coil — which is on its way from St. Petersburg to Marseille — by ship required “more paperwork, more justification to explain to the various European countries that no, we are not subject to sanctions — we have derogations,” he said. The “painful” process delayed deliveriesby up to two months, he added.
It also left Russian staff in the lurch, including Moscow-born assembly engineer Vladimir Tronza, who’s worked onsite since 2016.
“In the beginning, everyone was like, ‘What’s going to happen? Should we look for another job? Should we pack and go back?’” he said, adding that Russian staff members were initially concerned that Moscow would exit the project.
But Tronza said he hasn’t heard of Russian staff going home, with the “majority not interested to go back” given many have settled in southeastern France.
“Collaboration is important — it’s important to keep the ties and … talk,” he said, adding that the project is “a global good.”
Just like people, cats and dogs like shiny things, wrapped gifts, and nibbling on snacks. This time of year, the temptations are plentiful.
That said, keeping them away from the Christmas tree (or any holiday decor) can be like teaching them a new trick.
So how do you keep your tree pet-free? Use these 10 tips to keep everyone jolly all season long.
Try a fake tree. Not only can you use them year after year, but they won’t have any of those pesky pine needles that could land your pet in the pet ER if eaten. Cats in particular are balls of curiosity, so they’ll check out anything that looks like it’s worth exploring. Even the strong smells can be a problem for your furry friends, especially when they have asthma or trachea problems (common in older dogs).
Prevent pouncing. A tree can seem like a huge activity center for pets. Keep your tree away from furniture they could use as a jumping off point to get at that tree and possibly knock it over. This isn’t as much of an issue with older pets, but better safe than sorry. You can also try a smaller table-top tree that won’t be as much of a danger if it tips.
Secure the tree.Kids and pets alike see a tree and think, “I should touch this! I should pull this!” But there are things you can do to help prevent a dangerous toppling tree. Use a heavy-duty tree base and make sure it is secure. And attach the tree to hooks on the wall or ceiling with fishing line or ropes (you can find decorative ones at holiday time).
Cover the water. Your pet doesn’t know the difference between their own bowl of water and the one at the bottom of the tree that may have toxic fertilizers and breed harmful bacteria. Tree water could cause nausea or diarrhea if your pet drinks it. Cover any water with a Velcro tree skirt or some other covering so pets can’t drink it.
Make your tree boring and unpleasant (to your pets!).Cats love sparkly things, so ditch the tinsel. It’s harmful to kitty tummies. Cats and dogs don’t like the smell of citrus. They also don’t like aluminum foil. One tip: Wrap the base of your tree in foil and line with orange or lemon peels. Just be careful with the strong smells if your pet has asthma or trachea problems. Talk to your vet if you’re unsure.
Keep your furry friends active.Make sure your petshavelots to do while you’re busy with holiday baking and online shopping.“Keeping your [cats and dogs] – especially the younger ones occupied and allowing them to get all of their energy out is key,” says Kim Johnson, DVM, an emergency vet in Ventura, CA. And, Johnson says, even with lots of their own toys and activities, never leave your pet unattended around the tree.
Watch out for glass and lights. Ornaments look like fun toys to cats. Glass from a broken ornament can cut your feline family member or could damage their sensitive digestive tract if eaten. “I tell my clients to move them about 3 feet higher on the tree,” says Johnson. They will be harder for furry paws to swipe. This goes for lights too, says Johnson, which can cause shock and organ failure if chewed on by your kitty.
Avoid the ‘Home Alone’ problem. Don’t leave your pets alone with the tree – or lit candles, or unattended food, or holiday plants. “No matter how old your pet is, they have the mind of a 2- or 3-year-old toddler,” says Johnson. “Think about that in human terms. You wouldn’t leave your toddler around the Christmas tree alone, so it’s the same for cats and dogs.”
Consider a pet fence around the tree. You can use a small indoor fence to surround the tree so no little paws can get close. You can pick one of these up at your local pet store or online if you don’t have one already. They come in all shapes and varieties – even clear plexiglass so pets (and kids) can look but not touch! But talk to your vet first – these may not be practical for particularly large or athletic pets.
Get wild – go treeless. You can create your own pet-safe centerpiece to replace a traditional tree. Look online for creative ideas made from metal, wood, or even from a collection of holiday cards arranged in the shape of a tree. It just might become your tradition – and certainly party topic – for years to come.
The holiday season is often full of good things – family get-togethers, gift-giving, delicious food, and festive decorations. Your pet can be part of the fun, but there are a few things you might need to do to keep them safe – because there’s nothing festive about an unplanned visit to the veterinarian.
Kim Johnson, DVM, an emergency vet in Ventura, CA, recalls a time when a patient brought in her cocker spaniel during the holidays.
“This lady had just returned from Europe and had several ounces of fine French chocolate for gifts,” says Johnson. “She was only gone a few hours and put the chocolate out of reach (so she thought) only to return to find candy wrappers everywhere!”
Johnson and her team were able to get the pup’s tremors and rapid heartbeat under control after some treatment and an overnight stay. But they were lucky, says Johnson. “He had eaten about 3 pounds of chocolate. … Thankfully he was OK.”
So how do you keep your fur kids safe and happy all season?
Decorating Don’ts
It’s so much fun to decorate for the holidays – until your pet gets into something that can hurt them. Holiday decor like sparkly tinsel and tree ornaments can look like toys to some pets. Tinsel can cause tummy trouble and dehydration. Pets may get sick enough to require surgery in some cases. The same goes for those pretty, shiny ornaments: Broken pieces could cut your pet or damage their insides if eaten.
Watch out for certain holiday plants too. Mistletoe – great for kissing, not great for pets. If eaten, it can lead to stomach or heart issues. Holly – great for decking halls, but it can cause diarrhea and vomiting in your four-legged loves. Lilies (more common at Easter) can lead to kidney failure in your furry friends. For extra safety, opt for fake plants, made of plastic or silk, or even pet-safe bouquets.
Put potpourri out of reach. The liquid kind is toxic to pets and can be an issue for sensitive pet skin, eyes, and their mouth. And the crumbly kind is not safe to eat either. Strong scents like pine and potpourri can also cause issues for pets with asthma.
Lights, from scented candles to Christmas or Hanukkah decorations, are attractive to pets but can be harmful. A candle can be tipped over and cause a fire or burn.
And if your pet chews on holiday lights, the electric shock can be very serious as well. “Do not let your pets get a shock,” says Johnson. “They get fluid in their lungs from [electric] shocks. There is no easy treatment for that, so it’s very dangerous.” She recommends unplugging holiday lights when you can’t watch your pet.
When Good Snacks Go Bad
We all love snacking during the holidays – including your pet kids. But some snacks that humans like can be toxic to pets. These include:
Chocolate
Grapes, raisins, and currants (Think fruitcake!)
Caffeine
Onions
Alcohol
Turkey skin
Bread dough
Meats with bones
Food with any added fat (oil, butter, etc.)
Fatty meats like beef, pork, lamb, or duck
These foods can cause an upset stomach, gas, pancreatitis, or worse, depending on the amount. So keep them out of reach and, of course, don’t feed them to your pet.
Xylitol: Be careful if you or your loved ones are eating a low-carb or Keto diet, as the popular sugar alternative xylitol is toxic to pets. It can cause your pet’s blood sugar to drop and even lead to liver failure. Keep purses and backpacks away, since they tend to have packs of sugar-free gum or mints containing xylitol.
Safe stuff: “Most carbs like rice or pasta are just fine for pets,” says Johnson. “Just make sure they aren’t cooked with butter, oil, or seasoning. Plain veggies like carrots or green beans are also fine, but stay away from leafy greens that can cause gas.”
Party Poopers
Some pets, like people, love a good party. Others would rather keep to their more quiet routine. Either way, risks abound. Guests that want to engage with your pets and make them happy may not know the dos and don’ts. Be open with your guests. Tell them about house rules and pet preferences, and even pet injuries if they have any.
If you’re especially worried about pet accidents, bad behavior, or other problems, consider setting your pet up in a separate area. Just keep in mind that a pet alone in another room with nothing to do may become anxious and destructive. So be sure to leave them with a chew toy or activity treat like a Kong toy with peanut butter inside.
If that’s not enough, consider leaving them with a pet sitter or at a boarding facility. Wherever you put them, be sure that they get their exercise and bathroom time and their regular food and water too.
Safe Travels
Some airlines require a written health certificate to get your pet on the plane. This can take planning, so it’s best to speak to your vet well in advance.
Meds: Some pets need calming medication for travel as well. Talk to your vet about the right meds and the right dose.
Secure your pet safely in the car or plane. Talk to your vet about how best to do this.
Make sure your pet is up to date on all shots and exams.
Bring along pet health records and vaccine records, as well as all necessary prescriptions.
Weather Wisdom
During the holidays, the weather can be cold and icy. But outdoor winter activities can still be lots of fun for you and your pet as long as you take some precautions. Here are some ideas:
Protect the paws. Snow boots are one option but can be hard to put on your pup. Same for cats, where a puss in boots is no problem in a movie. Allow your pets time to get used to any pet clothing. Or use a balm to protect their paws from extreme cold.
Melt the ice. Keeping your pet’s paws safe also means using pet-safe ice melt. All pet owners know pets lick their paws. Make sure they aren’t eating something toxic that could hurt their stomach or worse. Morton, a company known for table salt, has a pet-safe ice melt for about $20 at most pet stores. Check out other brands as well.
Keep them warm. Our pets feel cold – especially shorthair breeds like chihuahuas. Go ahead and dress them in a sweater if you see them shivering a lot. Keep walks short if you can, and dry them off with a warm towel if they’ve been in snow or ice.
The holidays are stressful enough. Don’t add an emergency vet visit – which can cost $2,000 or more. Pets are unpredictable, even with the best-laid plans. A few simple changes can help keep your pets safe and happy all season long.
Dec. 8, 2022 – Sarah Combs, MD, has been an attending physician in the emergency department at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, for 6½ years.
“Toy-related injury can mean children pick up a little marble and pop it in the ear canal, let’s say, or it can mean the more severe injuries, such as aspiration of uninflated balloons into the airway area, which unfortunately I have also seen,” Combs says.
That first-hand knowledge includes death.
“I won’t be too specific here for patient privacy reasons, but I can say that the case that really sticks with me, even though it was years ago now, involved a small child who aspirated [sucked from their mouth into their airway] an uninflated balloon. Absolutely tragic.”
The mother of two small children says it can sometimes be tough treating kids for toy-related injuries.
“On the one hand, it can lead to increased empathy with the parents; on the other, it can be hard not to worry excessively. My 6-month-old is currently in the phase where literally anything and everything she can reach goes directly into her mouth,” Combs says.
She says the most severe injuries – the ones that can be fatal – are the ones that involve the airway.
“Those are the big bad ones we worry about,” she says. “So that’s why we really worry about giving uninflated balloons to little children in particular, any kid under 8, because the issue is once you suck one of those balloons down to your airway, it’s this kind of floppy flap that will continually cover your airway. And then in that same vein, the ones that we see that are severe, often marbles, very small marbles that again get lodged and stuck in the back of the throat.”
‘Trouble in Toyland’
This year, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group’s 37th annual toy safety report “Trouble in Toyland 2022” is focused solely on recalled toys. Some of these toys can still be purchased online after they were recalled for being dangerous. It’s a reminder to all that buying some toys online can come at a heavy price.
Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog with the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, and author of the report, set out to determine the scope of the problem and see how many recalled toys were out there for consumers to buy.
Murray bought them from eight merchants.
“We were absolutely shocked that it was so easy to buy recalled toys online,” she says.
“And the vast majority of the toys we purchased were new, new in the box or new with tags, not like used toys that you might get at a garage sale or something like that.”
She and her team bought more than 30 toys that had been recalled, even though it is illegal to sell recalled toys. Illegal, yes, but those toys are still not hard to get.
According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, every year, about 200,000 people end up in an emergency room because of a toy-related injury.While that number has dropped a bit over the last decade, it doesn’t include injuries not severe enough to require a trip to the ER.
“We’re not talking about, ‘OK you got cut by something, or you got poked in the eye a little bit or you got burned by something,”’ Murray says. “But something that is serious enough that would cause somebody to go to the emergency room, you know it’s pretty serious.”
And 79,000 of those patients are children 4 and under.
Land of Recalled Toys
Toys are recalled for a variety of reasons, including having small parts that can break off and cause choking, containing toxic chemicals, being flammable, and being able to cause cuts and strangulation.
But the common thread is a dangerous defect was discovered, often after a severe injury happened.
The report focuses on three areas of concern: recalled toys that can still be purchased, the role parents and caregivers play in protecting their children, and counterfeit toys sold in stores and online.
Many of them come from overseas and don’t meet U.S. safety standards.
The toys Murray purchased included stuffed animals, activity balls for infants, action figures, musical toys, and bath toys. Two contained toxins with high levels of phthalates or lead – a chemical banned in the 1970s:
Army Action Figure Playsets by Blue Panda
6-inch Aflac Plush Promotional Ducks by Communicorp
Some posed a choking hazard due to small parts breaking off. Those were:
Disney Baby Winnie the Pooh Rattle Sets from Walgreens
Activity Loops by The Manhattan Toy Co.
Early Learning Centre Little Senses Lights & Sounds Shape Sorter Toys by Addo Play
Forky 11” Plush Toys from Disney Pixar’s Toy Story
Kid O Hudson Glow Rattles by PlayMonster
The other toys included:
DigitDots 3-millimeter and 5-millimeter Magnetic Balls by HD Premiere, which cause injuries to the digestive system if two or more are swallowed
Blue’s Clues Foot to Floor Ride-on Toys by Huffy Corp., which can tip forward and cause falls
Kidoozie Play Tents and Playhouses by Epoch Everlasting Play, which don’t meet industry flammability standards
Ubbi Connecting Bath Toys by Pearhead, which can cause cuts when pieces break off, creating a choking hazard
Online Marketplaces Raise Risks
Murray believes major online platforms like Facebook Marketplace and eBay need to better screen listings and not allow recalled toys to be sold on their sites.
“These companies, these major marketplaces do have the capacity to detect when a recalled toy has been listed on their site, so the fact that they’re for sale, it’s a problem,” she says. “If you’re the person who unknowingly buys a dangerous recalled toy and you give it to somebody that you love and they get hurt with it, it’s a big problem.”
Facebook Marketplace did not respond to a request for comment, but eBay did.
“eBay works closely with a range of regulatory agencies across the world to promote product safety and protect consumers from unsafe products. We take product recalls very seriously and monitor announcements from the CPSC to ensure recalled items are blocked or removed. We are pleased the PIRG team received one of our recall notices demonstrating our commitment to monitoring for and notifying consumers of recalls.”
Murray says the emails she received from eBay that the items had been recalled were sent after she had already received the toys.
Older children are not immune from dangerous toys. Hoverboards, scooters, and other riding toys pose a significant threat and can result in head injuries and broken bones. Toys that can connect to the internet through WiFi and Bluetooth and make play more interactive are wildly popular, but they can also expose children to possibly risky situations.
Parents should make sure they understand all the toy’s features, including cameras, microphones, and data gathering.
“Not to say it’s necessarily a problem for a child to interact with a toy,” Murray says, “but the parents need to know what that toy can do and what information it’s gathering about your little kid and, more importantly, what it’s going to do … with that information.
“You don’t want information about your child ending up in some database in a foreign country.”
Warning the Public and the Industry
Alexander Hoehn-Saric, chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, says they are focused on warning the public about unsafe products. He says in the last year, they’ve removed more than 40,000 dangerous products from e-commerce sites, including many of the recalled toys on this list.
“Always pay attention to age labeling and safety warnings on toys to make sure they are appropriate and safe for that child,” Hoehn-Saric says. “Think about everyone in the house in case the kid you’re buying the present for has a younger brother or sister.”
Safety standards are in place for all toys sold in the U.S. intended for use by children 12 and under. They must be tested by a third party and certified that they conform to the federal toy safety standard set by Congress. There are different standards for different age groups.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, chair of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection of the Senate Commerce Committee, is leading the charge on Capitol Hill.
“I am just astonished and appalled at the numbers of recalled products freely available on Facebook Marketplace and eBay,” he says. “I am just flabbergasted at the absence of any real responsibility on the part of these platforms for what they are selling. Literally they are a source of ‘Trouble in Toyland,’ potentially dangerous and even deadly toys freely available without any warning to parents and caregivers.
While buyers have some responsibility, he says, “buyer beware is not enough. These platforms have a moral and a legal responsibility, in my view, to do better.”
In August, Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed into law, a bill called Reese’s Law.It directs the Consumer Product Safety Commission to create safety standards for button cell, lithium coin, and other small batteries that can injure or kill children if swallowed. The bill was named after 17-month-old Reese Hamsmith, who died in 2020 after swallowing a button battery from a remote control. It burned a hole in her esophagus.
The law requires that these batteries have warning labels telling adults to keep them out of children’s reach; that battery compartments be made difficult to open by children 6 years old and under; and that battery packaging follow federal standards and be child-resistant.
Two years before the bill was even introduced, battery maker Duracell picked up the mantle and began coating three sizes of its popular button batteries to make them taste bitter, hoping to discourage kids from licking or swallowing them.
The bitter batteries are being lauded by Blumenthal, Murray, and Combs, who believe other battery makers should follow suit.
How to Protect Your Family
Dev Gowda, assistant director of Kids in Danger, an organization dedicated to fighting for product safety and protecting children, has this tip to share with parents: “Look for the small parts warning label on packaging of toys.”
If the toy is safe for children under 3, it’ll have an age grade that includes those ages. If it is for children ages 3-6 and has small parts, it’ll have a warning. If you don’t have the packaging, you can do the toilet paper tube test right at home. If a toy or part of a toy fits through the toilet paper tube, then the toy is not suitable for children under 3.
And there are new federal guidelines for tiny high-powered magnets. Loose magnets or those that could possibly come out of a toy must now be too large to swallow or too weak to connect inside the body if more than two are swallowed.
The report had disturbing examples of these types of injuries:
A 3-year-old boy swallowed magnets from a set owned by his sister. He had surgery to remove more than 150 small magnets and magnetic balls.
A 9-year-old boy swallowed two magnets.At the hospital, an emergency endoscopy to retrieve them was not successful. He was admitted and given medication to help pass them.
A 2½-year-old-boy swallowed four very strong magnets from a cooking toy. They attached to each other and created holes in his intestines.After having emergency surgery to remove the magnets and repair the holes, he still had to have other surgeries.
A 12-year-old boy swallowed 10 magnets. An emergency procedure removed nine of them, and he had to have surgery to remove the last one.
Joan Lawrence, senior vice president of regulatory affairs at the Toy Association in New York, says toy safety is the top priority for the toy industry.
“Bringing safe and fun toys to children and families is what we work on year-round,” she says. “In the U.S., we have mandatory toy safety standards for all toys sold here, and all toys sold in the U.S. must comply with over 100 different safety standards.”
Because of this, she says, toys in this country are among the safest consumer products in our homes. But with the increase of online shopping, Lawrence warns of counterfeit and knockoff products.
“We always say if a deal on a hot toy looks too good to be true, it probably is,” she says. “It’s probably better to buy the real thing or wait for a trusted retailer to restock the product than to buy a fake or cheaper alternative that has the potential to be unsafe.”
But if a Toy Association survey of 2,000 parents is any indication, there is still a long way to go. In it, 65% said they would knowingly buy counterfeit toys if they couldn’t find the real thing and 63% would buy counterfeits if they were cheaper than the actual toy.
For Sale, But Not Necessarily Safe
Ben Hoffman, MD, has been a pediatrician for more than 30 years. He’s spent the last 11 at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland.
The father of three and nationally recognized expert in child injury prevention and education is the past chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention. He’s seen his share of toy-related injuries in both young and older kids.
“There have been explosions associated with things like the hoverboards, you know significant burns,” he says “And we do see everything, unfortunately, and the sad fact is, all this is preventable.”
There is an assumption by the public, he says, that if something is being sold, that it’s safe, that somebody has determined that it’s safe, and it’s gone through some process to ensure that.
“But the fact of the matter is things, anything can be sold, and the regulatory process ends up being more reactive than proactive, and so things get in the market and, you know, end up in people’s homes without any proof that they’re safe for kids,” he says. “That to me is especially scary and unfortunate.”
Hoffman wants people to understand what they may be getting into when they jump online to buy toys. He believes parents should be “very leery” of buying stuff on electronic marketplaces. Especially sites they don’t recognize.
“I think it’s one of the unfortunate consequences of e-marketplaces, is that it gives cover for unscrupulous people to make a buck at the significant expense of kids,” he says.
When a product is recalled, it’s because there’s identified risk associated with it. And unfortunately, he says, “we know that a lot of products that end up being recalled never get returned. They do end up in secondary marketplaces, and we used to see them in consignment stores and stuff like that. But now, with the electronic marketplaces, with web-based marketplaces that are nameless and faceless, it becomes even more complicated.”
Combs see this issue through the lens of stronger legislation.
“I certainly understand the struggle that parents and caregivers feel, as you want your children to explore and play but you also want them to do so safely,” she says. “It’s a balancing act – and a difficult one at that, which is why having some legislation and regulations in place is so important.”
LONDON — The United Kingdom wants to police the internet. Shame the European Union got there first.
Brexit was supposed to let Britain do things quicker. But less than a month after the 27-member bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) went into force, London is still struggling to cobble together its own version of the rulebook, known as the Online Safety Bill.
On Monday it tried again, with Britain’s Digital Secretary Michelle Donelan presenting a tweaked bill to parliament. It got the backing of MPs, but faces fresh committee scrutiny before heading to the House of Lords. And the path to a settled law still looks far from certain.
The bill, which seeks to make Britain “the safest place in the world to be online” has not only been a casualty of the country’s political instability — it has also proved a divisive issue for the country’s governing Conservative Party, where a vocal minority of backbenchers still view it as an unnecessary limit to free speech.
“Far from being world-leading, the government has been beaten to the punch in regulating online spaces by numerous jurisdictions, including Canada, Australia and the EU,” said Lucy Powell, the opposition Labour Party’s shadow digital secretary.
Powell said the latest version of the Online Safety Bill was also at risk of getting stuck due to “chaos in government and vested interests,” adding that it was imperative the bill pass through the legislature by April, when the current parliamentary session ends.
Much of the disagreement over the bill has centered on rules policing so-called legal-but-harmful content. That’s been largely dropped from the latest version of the planned law, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government bowed to pressure from right-wing MPs within his own party, who argued that the provisions threatened free speech.
In the previous iteration of the bill, Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications and media regulator, was on the hook for enforcing rules that required social media giants to take action against potentially harmful but technically legal material like the promotion of self-harm.
The government’s scrapping of legal-but-harmful content hasn’t been universally welcomed, however. Nadine Dorries, Donelan’s predecessor as digital secretary, proposed the provisions and has griped that they’d already passed parliamentary scrutiny before the bill was paused.
Long and winding road
Britain’s attempts to regulate the internet really got going under Theresa May, who became prime minister in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and as lawmakers were beginning to become more tech-skeptic.
The Tories’ May 2017 election manifesto promised that “online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline,” but by the time Boris Johnson published his 2019 election offering, the Conservatives were also promising to protect the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content. Under Johnson’s close ally Dorries, a version of the legislation tackling legal-but-harmful content started to make its way through Parliament, before it was put on pause after he was ousted by Tory MPs.
Johnson, the former prime minister, often seemed caught between his own personal free speech philosophy and his populist instincts of attacking Big Tech.
The summer Tory leadership contest to replace Johnson reignited the debate, with contenders promising to look again at the law before the legal-but-harmful content provisions were ultimately watered down. Donelan replaced Dorries, becoming the seventh culture secretary since Brexit.
The EU’s path to its online rulebook has been quicker. In part that’s because questions over free speech haven’t yet become the political touchpaper that they now are in the Anglosphere. Nevertheless the EU mostly side-stepped the issue by keeping its own rulebook more squarely aimed at purely illegal content, and the European Commission has made it clear public it does not want to create a so-called “Ministry of Truth.”
That means the EU hasn’t had to contend with the deep divisions the Online Safety Bill has prompted in the U.K., especially among the governing Tories.
Instead, Brussels’ institutions have been mainly aligned on the key aspects of its framework, the DSA. The European Parliament and Council of the EU — representing the 27 European governments — largely supported the European Commission’s cautious approach to create rules to crack down on public-facing content illegal under EU or national laws like child sexual abuse material or terrorist propaganda.
When it comes to legal-but-harmful content, the EU’s approach requires very large online platforms — those with more than 45 million European users — to assess and limit the spread of content like disinformation and cyberbullying under the watch of regulators. Europe’s rules also have gone further than those on the other side of the channel by including mandated risk assessment and audits for tech giants like Meta and Alphabet so that they can be held accountable for potential wrongdoing. In the U.K., the main enforcement has been left to Ofcom via investigations.
Disagreements, when they came in Europe, have been on the edges, rather than at the core of the debate. Rows focused on limits to targeted ads and the level of obligations for online marketplaces like Amazon to carry out random checks on dangerous products on their platforms. In another example, some EU countries like France and Germany pushed and failed to force a 24-hour deadline for online platforms to take down illegal content.
Not just free speech
In the U.K., it’s not just free speech issues that have proved controversial. The EU set out separate rules aiming to clamp down on child sexual abuse material online, but the U.K. poured similar provisions into the Online Safety Bill.
That means high-stakes questions over how and whether the monitoring requirements undermine privacy — especially in encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp — are being dealt with separately in the EU. But in the U.K. they’ve been thrown into the same mix as wide-ranging free speech debates.
Differences between the rulebooks also raise the prospect of costly regulatory misalignment. While the U.K. bill slaps general monitoring requirements on the tech companies themselves, that’s explicitly banned by the EU. Last month, the British regulator and its Australian counterpart created a new Western coalition of online content regulators, though failed to invite any EU counterparts to those discussions. Only Ireland’s watchdog joined as an observer.
“This is about setting up our international engagement in expectation of setting up our rules,” Melanie Dawes, Ofcom’s chief executive, told POLITICO when announcing that initiative. “The success of this is about bringing together international partners.”
Clothilde Goujard reported from Brussels.
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Vincent Manancourt, Annabelle Dickson, Clothilde Goujard and Mark Scott
Twitter needs to comply with EU rules on content moderation and other online policies, French President Emmanuel Macron told Elon Musk in a meeting on Friday.
“Transparent user policies, significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech: efforts have to be made by Twitter to comply with European regulations,” Macron said after what he called a “clear and honest discussion” with the Twitter CEO in the U.S.
Twitter’s decision to stop enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policy has come under fire in the EU.
Earlier this week, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton warned Musk that EU rules require platforms to moderate content, tackle disinformation and have transparent user policies, and that Twitter risked EU sanctions if it doesn’t comply.
Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, meanwhile, said that Twitter’s policy changes had drawn Brussels’ attention: “In my view, Twitter now is jumping to the front of the queue of the regulators,” she told POLITICO.
Twitter’s policy changes are “a big issue,” Macron said on Thursday in an interview on Good Morning America, adding: “What I push very much for is exactly the opposite: more regulation.”
“Free speech and democracy is based on respect and public order. You can demonstrate, you can have free speech, you can write what you want, but there are responsibilities and limits,” he argued.
Musk told Macron that Twitter would follow the Christchurch Call, which is aimed at restricting the spread of terrorist material on the internet, and would cooperate to improve child protection online, the French president said following their meeting.
As the busy holiday season approaches, thousands of people head to the airports, jetting to see loved ones or just to get away from it all. Many more will take trains or buses — or pack up the car and cruise onto the highways. But whether by land, sea, or sky, there are likely to be delays along the way.
For people with serious health problems like diabetes and heart disease — and for young children — those travel glitches can be more than an inconvenience. To stay well when you’re traveling, you’ll need to plan well. Here’s how.
If You Have Diabetes
Eat close to your regular schedule. “That’s especially important for diabetics,” says Inyanga Mack, MD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
Since meal service has been discontinued on most flights, getting to the airport early leaves you time to eat before the flight. Also, bring along healthy snacks to offset the risk of hypoglycemia, whether on the road or in the air, she says.
Wear an appropriate medical alert bracelet. Carry the name of an emergency contact person and your primary care physician, Mack suggests. Keep a list of your medications and doses, so someone can get access to your medication in an emergency.
Take medications with you, not packed in luggage. Carry a few days’ supply of your medications. Then if luggage gets lost, or if you’re trapped in the airport or on the plane for extended periods, your health won’t be in jeopardy. Always eat and take medications according to your regular schedule, even if everything else is in turmoil.
Make sure medications are properly labeled. All prescriptions must have the pharmaceutical label or professionally printed label identifying the drug. If you are not permitted to board with your medications and supplies, ask to speak with the airport’s FAA representative or the security director. You may even want to call ahead of time to be sure you can get on board with what you need.
FAA requirements: Diabetic people carrying syringes and/or needles must also carry the injectable medication. Diabetic people traveling in the U.S. can bring syringes and other such equipment in carry-on bags, but insulin vials must have a professional, printed medication label. Better yet, keep insulin in its original box, since it has the pharmaceutical company label. Needles must be capped. The glucose meter must have the manufacturer’s name on it. Injectable glucagon should also be in its original plastic kit with the pre-printed pharmaceutical label.
If You Have Heart Disease
Don’t get dehydrated or fatigued. Get plenty of rest, says Ronald Krone, MD, professor of medicine and cardiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If you feel fatigued, find someone to carry your bags. Don’t rush. Getting around a long airport can be like a stress test. Carry as little as possible on board, so you’re not struggling to lift something overhead. Minimize your workload.”
If traveling abroad, give yourself a day to recover. “You should not be on a go-go schedule,” Krone says. “Allow time to get plenty of rest, and make sure you’re well hydrated.”
Carry a copy of your ECG. If you’ve had heart bypass surgery, get a note from your surgeon. This should detail the number of veins and arteries that were used to do the bypass, Krone says. If you’re in a foreign country and need an emergency catheterization, “the cardiologist at your destination would know exactly how to perform the catheterization,” Krone says. “It would make the whole thing much simpler.”
If you’re taking Coumadin and will be abroad a month or more, consider making arrangements at your destination to have your blood checked. Many countries require that you see a local doctor to monitor your blood and write a prescription if necessary. The U.S. embassy can easily make these arrangements, Krone says.
If You’re Traveling with Kids
Have a game plan. “Really consider the amount of time you’re going to be waiting,” says Andrea McCoy, MD, director of primary care at Temple University Children’s Medical Center in Philadelphia. “It’s tough to travel with kids to begin with, and delays and changes in time zones make it even more difficult,” she says.
Let kids run when there’s a chance. “You can’t expect young kids to sit like little soldiers,” McCoy says. “Mom can let kids run in a hallway while Dad stands in line. It’s thankless enough to stand there as a grown-up; you can’t expect your kids to do it.”
Take along snacks, drinks, and activities. Books to read, puzzle books, game boys, and portable checkers keep kids busy. For younger kids, coloring books, little games, action figures will work. Plan activities you know they will like, says McCoy. “Also plan something new and different, something they don’t see every day, or have never seen before. The novelty will help a little bit.” Another idea: keep individual toys wrapped, then bring them out at just the right moment.
Take light snacks. Carry something like bagels, which are starchy and don’t require refrigeration, to offset both hunger and airsickness.
Carry prescription medications on board. Remember to put medications in an icepack if they need to be refrigerated. Let your doctor know ahead of time that you will be traveling, in case a second-choice medicine is more convenient to carry.
Carry acetaminophen — something kids can suck or swallow. These are for normal aches and pains, plus ear pain, McCoy says. The swallowing or sucking action will help clear a child’s ears if you’re flying.
Make sure booster or car seats are available. If you’re renting a car, make the appropriate arrangements at your destination. Also, consider having a car seat on board for a safer flight.
Check at your destination — is it child proof? The same things that apply at home still count when you’re away. Are there gates at the tops of stairs? If you’re staying with someone who has a gun, is it stored out of children’s reach? When you’re done unwrapping gifts, make sure the ribbons and wrappings picked up, so little children won’t suffocate or choke on them. And make sure that leftover party food gets stored safely, so kids won’t get into it if they wake up before you.
