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The Strange Saga of Jack Teixeira Reveals New Security Challenges

Moments before his arrest by armed FBI agents on Thursday, a helicopter from a local news station caught footage of 21-year-old Jack Teixeira reading a book on the sun-splashed back porch of his house in North Dighton, Mass. In his front yard, meanwhile, FBI agents in camouflage tactical gear were climbing out of an armored vehicle, tightening the straps of their bullet-proof vests and gripping long guns. The dramatic scene playing out in a sleepy, riverside exurb underscored the peculiarity of a case that exposed military documents, complicated relations with U.S. allies, and triggered national embarrassment. Intelligence leaks of this magnitude in the past have been the result of an alienated whistle-blower, double agent or successful spy operation. Now arguably the most damaging disclosure of U.S. government documents in a decade may have stemmed from the hubris of a junior enlisted member in the Massachusetts Air National Guard who shared them in a small online chat group called Thug Shaker Central.

Available in: https://time.com/6271787/jack-teixeira-arrest-leaks/.

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    More children have died of leukaemia since large soya plantations have gradually replaced cattle farms in parts of Brazil, suggesting that pesticide exposure could be involved. However, the number of deaths is low and the exact cause hasn’t been determined.

    Over the past two decades, parts of the Amazon have experienced a 20-fold expansion of soya farming, with previously cleared cow pastures converted into croplands. In the Cerrado, a vast savannah region which neighbours the Amazon, such farming has tripled.

    Southern Brazil has a long-standing soya farming industry, with a transition in land use taking place more recently in the north and centre of the country. Brazil overall uses more pesticides than anywhere else. While carrying out agricultural research in the Amazon, Marin Skidmore at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign heard local people talking about a recent rise in childhood cancers, with previous research linking pesticide exposure to childhood leukaemia. “I wanted to see whether this phenomenon that I was hearing about on the ground would really bear out in the data,” she says.         Skidmore and her colleagues collected information about deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia in children under 10 years old – who usually develop a form of the condition called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – between 2004 and 2019 in rural areas of the Cerrado and Amazon, covering about 1.75 million square kilometres.

    Healthcare workers in these places don’t necessarily report all lymphoid leukaemia diagnoses to government databases, says Skidmore. The researchers therefore focused on deaths, which were well documented, she says.

    They compared that information with data about land use and the location of people’s homes relative to water sources and paediatric oncology centres.

    The team found that for every 10 per cent increase in land used for soya farming, there were an additional 0.4 lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths of children under 5 years old per 10,000 people and an additional 0.21 such deaths for children under 10 per 10,000 people. A statistical analysis indicates this wasn’t a chance finding. Death rates were higher in areas more than 100 kilometres away from a paediatric oncology centre. This makes sense, since ALL in particular is “a highly treatable cancer”, says Skidmore. Looking specifically at children who were born after the soya farming surge began in 2004, approximately half of the 226 deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia may not have occurred without the growth of that industry, she says.

    Critically, the team found that lymphoid leukaemia-related death rates were especially associated with living downstream from a soya farm, which suggests the children, or their mothers during pregnancy, may have been consuming pesticide-laced water. Previous research has linked pesticide exposure during pregnancy to cancer in infants.

    The results don’t prove that pesticides from soya farming caused the deaths, but “I buy it”, says Pablo Menéndez at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. Nevertheless, the number of lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths is very low overall, he says.

    Chensheng (Alex) Lu at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, says that while the correlation between the deaths and the soya farming expansion seems clear, the cause isn’t definite. If the results are confirmed in further research, this will underline the importance of government-regulated pesticide policies, says Skidmore. These could include training protocols for anyone applying pesticides and access to competent healthcare to ensure early diagnoses and accessible treatment, especially for rural populations, she says.

    Agricultural intensification, via widespread pesticide use, is probably going to be part of global food security strategies, says Skidmore, who is “not advocating for a wholesale stop to these inputs”. “I think, safety first – making sure public health is taken care of as we see potentially more intensification happening in regions that are potentially under-resourced or haven’t seen these types of chemicals in the past,” she says.

New Scientist. 2 November 2023. Adapted.

Text for question

    More children have died of leukaemia since large soya plantations have gradually replaced cattle farms in parts of Brazil, suggesting that pesticide exposure could be involved. However, the number of deaths is low and the exact cause hasn’t been determined.

    Over the past two decades, parts of the Amazon have experienced a 20-fold expansion of soya farming, with previously cleared cow pastures converted into croplands. In the Cerrado, a vast savannah region which neighbours the Amazon, such farming has tripled.

    Southern Brazil has a long-standing soya farming industry, with a transition in land use taking place more recently in the north and centre of the country. Brazil overall uses more pesticides than anywhere else. While carrying out agricultural research in the Amazon, Marin Skidmore at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign heard local people talking about a recent rise in childhood cancers, with previous research linking pesticide exposure to childhood leukaemia. “I wanted to see whether this phenomenon that I was hearing about on the ground would really bear out in the data,” she says.         Skidmore and her colleagues collected information about deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia in children under 10 years old – who usually develop a form of the condition called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – between 2004 and 2019 in rural areas of the Cerrado and Amazon, covering about 1.75 million square kilometres.

    Healthcare workers in these places don’t necessarily report all lymphoid leukaemia diagnoses to government databases, says Skidmore. The researchers therefore focused on deaths, which were well documented, she says.

    They compared that information with data about land use and the location of people’s homes relative to water sources and paediatric oncology centres.

    The team found that for every 10 per cent increase in land used for soya farming, there were an additional 0.4 lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths of children under 5 years old per 10,000 people and an additional 0.21 such deaths for children under 10 per 10,000 people. A statistical analysis indicates this wasn’t a chance finding. Death rates were higher in areas more than 100 kilometres away from a paediatric oncology centre. This makes sense, since ALL in particular is “a highly treatable cancer”, says Skidmore. Looking specifically at children who were born after the soya farming surge began in 2004, approximately half of the 226 deaths due to lymphoid leukaemia may not have occurred without the growth of that industry, she says.

    Critically, the team found that lymphoid leukaemia-related death rates were especially associated with living downstream from a soya farm, which suggests the children, or their mothers during pregnancy, may have been consuming pesticide-laced water. Previous research has linked pesticide exposure during pregnancy to cancer in infants.

    The results don’t prove that pesticides from soya farming caused the deaths, but “I buy it”, says Pablo Menéndez at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. Nevertheless, the number of lymphoid leukaemia-related deaths is very low overall, he says.

    Chensheng (Alex) Lu at Southwest University in Chongqing, China, says that while the correlation between the deaths and the soya farming expansion seems clear, the cause isn’t definite. If the results are confirmed in further research, this will underline the importance of government-regulated pesticide policies, says Skidmore. These could include training protocols for anyone applying pesticides and access to competent healthcare to ensure early diagnoses and accessible treatment, especially for rural populations, she says.

    Agricultural intensification, via widespread pesticide use, is probably going to be part of global food security strategies, says Skidmore, who is “not advocating for a wholesale stop to these inputs”. “I think, safety first – making sure public health is taken care of as we see potentially more intensification happening in regions that are potentially under-resourced or haven’t seen these types of chemicals in the past,” she says.

New Scientist. 2 November 2023. Adapted.

T E X T

The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning

    The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.

    All of these factors have rendered the term “viral” nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is nothing viral?

    “Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world. Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the norm.”

    “Because the concept of virality has been so watered down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of partners and business development at Linktree, a platform that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.

    A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation between viral content and the vast majority of media that users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller, and most sharing was manual (people emailing and messaging links to each other) or via early internet aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

     Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a year, worming its way through the internet as it gained traction. When social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said. Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s content in attempts to force virality.

    Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were.

    Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.

    “The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms race among tech platforms to see which could inflate metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.

    A new class of content creators also has raised the bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to explode, things really started to change in the landscape,” Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of views per video.”

    Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a higher total amount of content online per day, especially members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media through the internet and social platforms, rather than via newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so much more content in a given sitting,” she added.

    This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching 50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1 million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.

Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/

Leia o texto para responder a questão.

    The effects of alcohol on young people are not the same as they are on adults. While alcohol misuse can present health risks and cause careless behaviour in all age groups, it is even more dangerous for young people.

    Because young people’s bodies are still growing, alcohol can interfere with their development. This makes young people particularly vulnerable to the long-term damage caused by alcohol. This damage can include: cancer of the mouth and throat; sexual and mental health problems, including depression and suicidal thoughts; liver cirrhosis and heart disease.

    Drinking alcohol in adolescence can harm the development of the brain. Young people might think that any damage to their health caused by drinking lies so far in the future that it’s not worth worrying about. However, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people in their twenties dying from liver disease as a result of drinking heavily in their teens.

    Alcohol interferes with the way people think and makes them far more likely to act carelessly. If young people drink alcohol, they are more likely to end up in dangerous situations. For example, they are more likely to climb walls or other heights and fall off. Or they might verbally abuse someone who could hit them. They are also more likely to become aggressive themselves and throw a punch.

(www.nidirect.gov.uk. Adaptado.)