Category Archives: Around the World

Schengen lebt wieder – vive l’espace Schengen!

Deutsche Welle: Coronavirus latest: Europe reopens borders for summer travel. “Germany and France are among many European countries reopening their borders to fellow European travelers, three months after coronavirus lockdown measures went into force.”

We live about 27km (17 miles) from the French border. Thanks to the Schengen agreement there have never been border controls since we moved to this area. In fact, border controls between France and Germany (and other Schengen countries) were abolished in March 1995, so it had been 25 years without controls when the Corona pandemic forced the borders closed earlier this year. Even though we don’t go there very often, it feels good that the borders are open once again. I almost feel like driving there this afternoon, just because I can!

Deutsche Welle: Europas Grenzen öffnen sich wieder. “Polen, Tschechien, Frankreich, Norwegen: Die wegen der Corona-Pandemie eingeführten Beschränkungen an innereuropäischen Grenzen fallen nach und nach weg. Die “günstige Entwicklung” macht’s möglich.”

Schengen lebt wieder. “Die wegen der Corona-Krise geschlossenen EU-Binnengrenzen sind wieder weitestgehend offen. Deutsche und Franzosen freuen sich in Kehl und Straßburg über das Ende der Personenkontrollen.”

Schön, dass heute nach drei Monaten die Grenze zu Frankreich wieder geöffnet ist. Die Grenzkontrollen zwischen uns und unseren Nachbarn sind aufgrund des Schengen-Abkommens vor 25 Jahren weggefallen – bis die Corona-Pandemie kam. Hoffen wir, dass die Infektionszahlen sich so günstig entwickeln, dass die Grenzen nicht wieder geschlossen werden müssen!

““This is a flu. This is like a flu,“ Trump said on Feb. 26.”

The Washington Post: Fact-checking Trump’s letter blasting the World Health Organization.

“In previous administrations, a letter to an international organization signed by the U.S. president generally would have been carefully vetted and fact-checked. But President Trump’s May 18 letter to World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus contains a number of false or misleading statements. Here’s a sampling, as well as a guide to some of his claims”.

See also: NPR: Fact-checking And Assessing Trump’s Letter Of Rebuke To WHO.

“Still, Trump’s threats are already causing substantial damage to the global agency tasked with coordinating the world’s response to the pandemic, said Benjamin Mason Meier, associate professor of global health policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“For the United States to blame the World Health Organization for its own months and months and months of inaction seems factually untrue and designed to divide the world at a moment when global solidarity is needed most,” Meier said. “It undercuts the World Health Organization’s efforts to provide a collective response to this common threat [of the COVID-19 pandemic].””

“There is the mammal way and there is the bird way”

The Atlantic: Why Birds Do What They Do. “The more humans understand about their behavior, the more inaccessible their world seems.” By Jenny Odell.

“In all this struggling to imagine, I encounter a certain irony: The more I know about birds, the more inaccessible their perceptual world seems to me. From Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, I learned that birds such as the vinous-throated parrotbill and the black Jacobin hummingbird make sounds beyond our range of hearing, while the mating displays of male black manakins feature a “high-speed somersault“ so fast that humans can see it only in slowed-down video. Birds see colors that we never will, and distinguish among colors that look the same to us. Writing about how they interpret a wall of foliage as “a detailed three-dimensional world of highly contrasting individual leaves,“ Ackerman laments that she has tried to see what birds see, but humans just can’t differentiate among the greens.

Learning more also means having more questions. Both books include recent research that illuminates new behavior, whose mechanics and purpose remain hypothetical or totally unknown. Ackerman writes that veeries, a type of North American thrush, can anticipate hurricanes months in advance, adjusting their nesting and migration schedules accordingly—but the way they do it is a “deep mystery.“ “

Link via MetaFilter.

Die beiden Bücher aus dem Artikel sind:

  • Jennifer Ackerman: The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think
  • David Allen Sibley: What It’s Like to Be a Bird

    • “A Robust Public Health Care System”

    The New York Times: A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low. “The pandemic has hit Germany hard, with more than 92,000 people infected. But the percentage of fatal cases has been remarkably low compared to those in many neighboring countries.”

    “All across Germany, hospitals have expanded their intensive care capacities. And they started from a high level. In January, Germany had some 28,000 intensive care beds equipped with ventilators, or 34 per 100,000 people. By comparison, that rate is 12 in Italy and 7 in the Netherlands.

    By now, there are 40,000 intensive care beds available in Germany.

    Some experts are cautiously optimistic that social distancing measures might be flattening the curve enough for Germany’s health care system to weather the pandemic without producing a scarcity of lifesaving equipment like ventilators.

    “It is important that we have guidelines for doctors on how to practice triage between patients if they have to,“ Professor Streeck said. “But I hope we will never need to use them.“

    The time it takes for the number of infections to double has slowed to about eight days. If it slows a little more, to between 12 and 14 days, Professor Herold said, the models suggest that triage could be avoided.

    “The curve is beginning to flatten,“ she said.”