… is value in studying one book at a time. Pick Genesis … , and just read through the book over and over and over … again. Studying one book at a time helps you … this approach is that some books are just hard to plow …
EU Questions Ukrainian President’s Sanctions On TV Stations
The European Union has questioned a move by … February 3, the spokesperson of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell … Power Broker Pull Strings
The EU statement contrasts with the response …
EU will not respond to ‘threats’ from London over Northern Ireland border disruption, says Dublin
The EU will not scrap or alter controversial Brexit border arrangements for Northern Ireland in response to “unilateral demands or threats” from London, Ireland’s foreign minister has warned.
Simon Coveney said that the Northern Ireland Protocol was a result of the negotiation stance taken by Boris Johnson, telling those who fought for a hard Brexit: “You’ve got to own the consequences of your own decisions.”
While Dublin wanted to be “helpful” in smoothing trade by the use of existing flexibilities in the agreement, DUP first minister Arlene Foster’s demand for the removal of the protocol was “unrealistic” he said.
Cabinet minister Michael Gove is demanding an extension to January 2023 of grace periods to ease the flow of goods between Northern Ireland and the British mainland, following disruption which has seen empty shelves in supermarkets and long delays for lorries at ports.
And Mr Johnson has threatened to invoke safeguard measures in Article 16 of the protocol to suspend elements of the agreement, just days after he condemned Brussels for making the same threat over the export of vaccines.
Ms Foster today called on the PM to scrap the protocol, which her party has denounced as an “unmitigated disaster” for Northern Ireland.
“The Northern Ireland Protocol has not worked, cannot work and in light of our proposals to the government, needs to be replaced,” she wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
“Indeed, across Northern Ireland there is growing anger at the current arrangements. The delicate political balance and relationships in Northern Ireland have been damaged and disturbed by the Protocol.”
Ms Foster was speaking after the UK and EU stood down some controls at Belfast and Larne ports following an “upsurge in sinister and menacing behaviour”.
But Mr Coveney told BBC Radio Ulster: “That’s unrealistic from Arlene Foster.
“This isn’t something that’s being imposed on Northern Ireland by the European Union. It’s something that was agreed and negotiated as a consequence of the kind of Brexit that the British government advocated and wanted, and was also supported in doing so by the DUP.”
Mr Coveney acknowledged that there had been “problems” with the implementation of the the arrangements, which effectively create a customs border in the Irish Sea, subjecting businesses to onerous paperwork and checks.
But he said: “The protocol isn’t going to be changed, this is about implementation and the flexibilities that are there.”
He said that the UK had failed to provide access to data on goods movements to EU observers as promised in the protocol.
In a letter to EU vice-president Maros Sefcovic ahead of a video meeting on Wednesday, Mr Gove demanded concessions including an extended grace period by the end of the week.
And Mr Johnson told the House of Commons: “We will do everything we need to do, whether legislatively or indeed by triggering Article 16 of the protocol, to ensure that there is no barrier down the Irish Sea.”
After discussions which both sides characterised as “constructive” last night, Mr Sefcovic is due to travel to London for further talks next week.
But Mr Coveney said: “The EU isn’t going to respond on the basis of unilateral demands or threats of consequences if they don’t give the British government what they want.
“There needs to be real engagement that has begun in relation to what’s possible within the parameters of the protocol.
“Certain parties have opposed the protocol from the outset, they also opposed the backstop, they also opposed the concept of sharing the customs union and the single market.
“You’ve got to own the consequences of your own decisions. If you force a certain type of Brexit, then that has consequences.
“And when the problems that all of us had been warning would flow from that kind of Brexit actually happen in reality, you’ve got to take responsibility for that.”
He added: “I’m not suggesting that there aren’t some issues that need to be resolved and some very real problems for businesses in Northern Ireland that we need to work on solutions to solve.
“But the core issue here is that this is the result of Brexit, not the result of the protocol. The protocol is about providing solutions to the disruption that Brexit actually forces on everybody.”
Israeli-born Margaret Karram elected president of Focolare movement
The international Focolare Movement that promotes unity and universal kinship has a new president for the next six years — Margaret Karram — an Arab Catholic, born 1962 in Haifa, Israel.
Karram is an expert in interreligious dialogue and will be the third president of Focolare for a six-year term.
Focolare was founded by Italian teacher Chiara Lubich in 1943 and aims to build “a more united world in which people value and respect diversity.
“We are inspired by Jesus’ prayer to the Father, ‘May they all be one,'” (John’s gospel. 17:21), says the movement on its website.
The election was held Jan. 31 and her appointment became effective Feb. 1 after it was confirmed by the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, the Family and Life.
AMERICAN JEWISH UNIVERSITY
Karram received her degree in Jewish studies from the American Jewish University in Los Angeles and held various roles in the Focolare movement in Los Angeles and Jerusalem.
“Margaret was 15 years old when she first learned about the Focolare Movement and the spirituality of Chiara Lubich; a spirituality of unity that she embraced in a place where racial and religious intolerance still exists,” the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem wrote.
“Here I am! I am at your service. I am at the service of the Church, of the movement and humanity together with all of you,” said Karram, on her election by two-thirds of the 359 representatives in the Focolare General Assembly.
The election on Jan. 31 has been approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, in accordance with the Movement’s Statutes, Catholic News Service reported.
The new president by Focolare’s statutes will always be a woman.
The current assembly is occurring entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic after beginning on Jan. 24 and it will conclude on Feb. 7.
The participants in the assembly represent some of the different cultures, generations, vocations, members of different churches and religous faiths who are part of the Focolare Movement.
The interim World Council of Churches general secretary Rev. Ioan Sauca sent a congratulatory message to Karram on her election.
CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM DIALOGUE
“Your commitment to promoting the dialogue between Christians, Jews, and Muslims as well as your engagement in a sustained dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians are inspiring assets for the worldwide Movement of Focolare and beyond.
“With your vast academic, ecumenical and interreligious experience I trust that you will become a bridge-builder and an ambassador of the central message and spirituality of the Focolare.”
Karram speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Italian and English. She has worked with various commissions and organizations dedicated to promoting interreligious dialogue among followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Focolare said.
She worked at Italy’s consulate general in Jerusalem for 14 years and since 2014 had served as councilor for Italy and Albania at the Focolare’s international center; she was also co-responsible for dialogue between ecclesial movements and new Catholic communities.
She and Jewish scholar Yisca Harani received the Mount Zion Award for Reconciliation in 2013 for their work in fostering dialogue between different cultures and religions.
Karram received the St. Rita International Award in 2016 for promoting dialogue among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians.
She succeeds Maria Voce, who was in office for two six-year terms. According to the Focolare movement’s statutes, the president should always be a woman and be chosen from among consecrated members who have perpetual vows.
Assembly members reelected Feb. 1 Spanish Father Jesus Moran Cepedano, 63, to a second term as co-president. The co-president must be a Focolarino priest and his primary role is to support and collaborate with the president.
The Focolare Movement operates in 180 nations and has over 140,440 members.
The word “Focolare” is Italian for “hearth” or “family fireside”.
While Focolare is the common moniker given to this organization, its official name when approved in 1990 as an International Association of the Faithful of Pontifical Right, was “Work of Mary”, according to Wikipedia.
The Lies Told About The EU Copyright Directive’s Upload Filters May Help Get Them Thrown Out In Court
from the freedom-to-conduct-business dept
Although the main fight over the EU’s Copyright Directive was lost back in March 2019, there are plenty of local battles underway. That’s a consequence of the fact that an EU Directive has to be implemented by separate national laws in each of the region’s 27 member states. Drawing up the local legislation is mostly straightforward, except for the controversial Article 17, which effectively brings in a requirement to filter all uploads. Trying to come up with a text that meets the contradictory obligations of the Directive is proving difficult. For example, although the law is supposed to stop unauthorized uploads, this must not be through “general monitoring”, which is not permitted in the EU because of the e-Commerce Directive.
As the various countries struggle to resolve these problems, it is no surprise that they are coming up with very different approaches. These are usefully summed up in a new post on the Kluwer Copyright blog. For example, France is implementing the Copyright Directive by decree, rather than via ordinary legislative procedures. As Techdirt reported, the French government is pushing through an extreme interpretation that ignores requirements for user protections. Germany, by contrast, is bringing in wide-ranging new law that contains a number of positive ideas:
a new “minor use” exception that would legalise minor uses of third party works on online platforms.
In addition, the proposal also introduced the ability for uploaders to “pre-flag” any uploads as legitimate, protecting them from automated blocking.
It limited the scope of the requirement for platforms to obtain licences to “works that users typically upload”. Platforms can meet their best efforts obligation to obtain authorisation by approaching collective management organisations and by responding to licence offers from rightsholders with a representative repertoire.
There is an irony here. One of the main reasons for introducing the Copyright Directive was to make copyright law more consistent across the EU. Article 17 is causing copyright law there to diverge even more.
The Kluwer Copyright blog has two more recent posts about Article 17, written by Julia Reda and Joschka Selinger. They look at an aspect of upload filters that could be of crucial importance in the case brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) by Poland, which seeks to have upload filters removed from the Copyright Directive.
On several occasions, the CJEU has thrown out blocking injunctions for violating the service providers’ freedom to conduct a business. In a recently published study on behalf of German fundamental rights litigation organization Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V., the authors of this blog post argue that when ruling on the request for annulment of Article 17, the CJEU will have to balance all relevant fundamental rights, including the freedom to conduct a business. In this blog post, we will put the spotlight on this under-examined fundamental right. In part 1, we will discuss its relevance for the court case pending before the CJEU. We will examine the ways in which Article 17 places new burdens on online platforms that are fundamentally different from the voluntary copyright enforcement schemes employed by some of the larger platforms today. In part 2, we analyse those new platform obligations in light of the CJEU case law on the freedom to conduct a business and discuss the role of the proportionality mechanism included in Article 17 (5). We find that the legislator may have grossly underestimated the impact of Article 17 on the freedom to conduct a business.
The basic argument is simple. During the debate on the Copyright Directive, its supporters were deeply dishonest about how it would work in practice. They repeatedly claimed that it would not require upload filters, and denied that it would be hard to implement in a way that was compatible with existing EU laws. Unfortunately, the politicians in the European Parliament were taken in by these claims, and passed what became Article 17 without amendments.
But the case before the CJEU gives another chance to point out the truth about upload filters. The fact that they only exist for things like music and video, not all copyrightable material as Article 17 requires; that those don’t work well; and that even these flawed systems can only be afforded by Internet giants like Google. In practical terms, this means that smaller companies that allow user uploads will be unable to comply with Article 17, since it would require the use of technology that would be expensive to develop or license, and which wouldn’t even work properly. As such, a key argument in the CJEU case will be that upload filters represent an unjustified interference in the freedom to conduct a business in the EU, and should be thrown out. Let’s hope the CJEU agrees.
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Filed Under: article 17, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, france, general monitoring, germany, upload filters, user protections
How the EU spent €469M on COVID-19 research in a year
The European Commission has invested €469 million in 105 COVID-19 research projects, with funding for 45 clinical trials taking the biggest share, of €118.9 million, according to the latest data.
Four vaccines projects received €108.2 million, while basic research projects analysing the biology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were awarded €38.2 million. A further 27 projects worth €88.3 million looked into crisis management and preparedness, and 28 projects worth €53.4 million aimed to increase health system resilience.
The 105 projects were funded through Horizon 2020 funding calls, the first of which was launched on 30 January 2020, the day the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a public health emergency. These are the biggest projects; in total the European Commission is putting €1 billion from Horizon 2020 into pandemic-related research, of which €780.8 million has been mobilised.
Of the total, €400 million is being distributed through InnovFin, of which €178.5 million has been allocated to vaccine development, including financing for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which was the first to be approved for use in the EU.
The Commission also awarded €100 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which has put money into a portfolio of COVID-19 vaccines. Another €25.3 million went to the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership.
Grants worth €171.6 million were awarded to smaller projects and SMEs through the European Innovation Council and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology
Widening 2.0: draft work programme details EU plans to plug the east-west R&D gap
A Horizon Europe draft work programme sheds more light on Widening 2.0, the European Commission’s strategy to help countries reform their R&D systems, attract talent and use structural funds for targeted research projects.
The Commission officially launched Horizon Europe on Tuesday, but it won’t publish the final work programmes and first funding calls until April. A draft work programme circulating online, dated October 2020 could see some change in the meantime, but chances are the main funding directions will remain the same.
Drafts posted on the websites of research associations, universities and consultancies give member states enough detail to get ready to tap into the new widening programme, designed to help them plug the west – east research and innovation performance gap.
In 2019, EU research ministers agreed to ring fence 3.3 per cent of the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe budget for Widening, a move seen as a big victory for MEPs and countries behind a long-running push to create a more level playing field in the EU’s research programme.
With the notable exception of Estonia, EU data indicates R&D performance is below the EU average in all member states that joined the bloc after 2004. The Commission hopes reinforcing Widening helps them catch up. Achieving this requires the Commission to coordinate with national governments on national R&D budgets, and on measures to retain home grown talent by increasing salaries and improving working conditions.
In a break with the past, member states are now allowed to spend up to five per cent of structural fund money on research and innovation projects that meet Horizon Europe standards, but which fail to win grants because of the high level of competition. At the same time, state aid rules are to be relaxed, allowing member states to use structural funds to fund science-based start-ups.
Reforming EU research and innovation
The Commission has allocated a significant part of the draft work programme to projects that promote reform of national R&D systems, aligning them with EU policy objectives. It wants member states to use money from Widening to set up multiannual joint calls funding collaborative R&I projects.
In addition, Widening will support joint projects to translate research to the market and encourage adoption.
Research organisations in Widening countries can get funding for initiatives to help research management staff gain greater understanding of EU networking and mobility schemes for researchers.
A “hop-on” scheme will back efforts to help institutions in countries with weak research systems take part in Horizon Europe collaborative research projects. The scheme will be introduced in the first calls in April, but won’t be fully implemented until 2023, once the Commission gathers proof from the first projects that research institutions are able to host additional partners.
European Research Area
EU research commissioner Mariya Gabriel has long been advocating for a revamp of the European Research Area (ERA), a strategy to create a single market for research and innovation, that was never fully implemented and has had a limited impact on EU’s R&D performance.
The October draft of the work programme says Horizon Europe will fund projects that help universities to attract and retain talent, reducing brain drain from member states with weak research systems.
The Commission also wants to establish a framework for research careers and a common academic career structure, that promotes widespread recognition of the competences that PhD students and postdocs in various stages of their careers have obtained, both within and outside academia, and regardless of sector, discipline or location.
Building trust in science
The Widening draft work programme also details research calls aimed at reducing mistrust in science and experts. The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis have resurfaced entrenched attitudes towards scientific breakthroughs in vaccination and mitigating climate change. The aim is to come up with recommendations for governments to open the way for funding agencies, research institutes and universities to tackle this mistrust in science, research and innovation.
“Societal confidence in the research system and in its outcomes is vital to ensuring the EU’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals and achieving the European Green Deal targets, for the uptake of innovation in society, and for continued public investment in R&I,” the draft work programme says.
EU auditors to scrutinise Horizon 2020 Widening efforts
The European Court of Auditors is assessing if measures in Horizon Europe to reduce the east-west innovation gap have had any impact, with a report expected by the end of the year on the Widening programme.
Over the past seven years, the EU has invested €1 billion in Widening, to help member states improve weak R&D systems through funding capacity building, and creating international links between leading research institutions and low-performing regions. As part of the programme, the Commission allocated €43 billion (in 2014 prices) from structural funds to research and innovation.
But many Widening countries report hurdles to participation, and low success rates have dampened expectations.
“I think that the Romanian institutions have applied, but, indeed, the application rate was low and the success rate was also low,” Daniel David, rector of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, told Science|Business.
Similarly, Lithuania has only one ERA chair, an outstanding EU-funded researcher whose brief is to help the country’s institutions to attract and retain high quality researchers. In the EU Twinning programme, designed to support transnational relationships between institutions, Lithuania did not win its first grant until the last call in Horizon 2020. Meanwhile, in the Teaming pillar, which finances the creation or updating existing centres of excellence, the country received funding to develop a business plan for a research centre, but has not received support to implement it.
“Lithuania did not take full advantage of the programme,” said Brigita Serafinavičiūtė, head of the Lithuania RDI Liaison Office in Brussels.
Looking at the core components of Widening, David identifies five issues, starting with weak dissemination and difficulty understanding the different mechanisms of the programme. When it came to funding, many participants had trouble securing matching funding from other sources, such as national and EU structural funds.
Universities found it particularly difficult to engage in the projects, many of which require a business plan and a commercial outlook. “Our legislation is not encouraging commercial activities for public universities, despite the fact that, on paper, in theory, the third university mission [of] socio-economic impact, is supported,” said David. “Because of such ambiguous legislation, the universities are very cautions to be engaged in large projects.”
A key issue appears to be the general lack of public investment in university research in Romania, where most funding goes to research institutes independent from universities. As a consequence, David says, universities are cautious about entering big European projects demanding excellence and sustainability.
Some of the institutions in Widening also had a hard time convincing western counterparts to participate in the programme, as they did not see the €1 billion funding as worth their time. In the end, Serafinavičiūtė says, the programme “reinforced the links with existing partners, but I doubt many new networks were formed.”
Slow and uneven
Despite the Widening programme, since 2012 the innovation gap has barely narrowed and remains far larger than the gap for most other economic indicators, such as GDP per capita. An interim Commission report on the effectiveness of Widening found progress is slow and uneven, with little change in the newest member states.
In the face of this, funding for Widening in Horizon Europe will almost triple, with 3.3%, or €2.8 billion (in 2018 prices), of the overall budget dedicated to closing the gap. Starting in 2023, there will also be a new “hop-on” programme allowing research institutions in Widening countries to join Horizon Europe collaborative research projects.
But Serafinavičiūtė said it will take more than this to address the imbalance. “Doubling the funding is not a key solution that will change everything. We need to think more holistically about what measures we need to take.”
For one, she says, if Horizon Europe is intended to address societal problems, excellence should not be the only measure by which projects are assessed. Challenges exist everywhere and often require local measures to deal with them.
“The question is what we are hoping to achieve with this programme,” said Serafinavičiūtė. “If we want more countries to participate, we have to admit that excellence should not be the only criterion.”
The EU auditors will take the changes in Horizon Europe into account in their evaluation of the EU Widening efforts in Horizon 2020, looking at the likely impact on research excellence imbalances in this decade.
Meanwhile, the EU must also maintain other programmes that aim to bring more geographical balance to the research ecosystem. David says Romania has had more success in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme, another scheme encouraging cross-border networking.
And waiting for help is not enough. Widening counties should roll up their sleeves and do their homework, believes Serafinavičiūtė. “We can’t expect the EU15 to drag us along with them, and why should they? Who wants new competition?”
EU declares a €4B research war on cancer
The EU on Wednesday set out a €4 billion Beating Cancer plan, including the most concerted push ever for research and its translation through to better treatments.
The plan, an all-hands-on-deck effort across the commission with a focus on 10 top line priorities, will fund technology development, create new research networks, improve access to therapies, promote disease prevention and early detection and offer better support for people who survive cancer.
Repurposing medicines to fight cancer and developing new artificial intelligence (AI) applications to detect tumours faster also make the list, as does a broader push to increase skills, among other recommendations. Underpinning the whole is a focus on greater data sharing and collaboration.
One of the first actions, the European Cancer Imaging Initiative in 2022 will compile a tumour atlas of anonymised cancer scans that can be used by researchers and hospitals to train diagnostic AI tools, improving their accuracy and reliability.
“Early detection saves lives. We need to screen more and screen better. This means adopting better technology,” EU health chief Stella Kyriakides said.
Supporting this, a new Knowledge Centre on Cancer will be launched this year within the Joint Research Centre, the EU’s in-house science service, to help coordinate scientific and technical cancer-related initiatives. The centre brief is to act as a ‘knowledge broker’, issuing guidelines to inform the design and rollout of the plan.
Later this year the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the EU’s public private partnership in medical research, will launch projects on the use of AI to support health workers, carers and patients in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, and projects on overcoming cancer drug resistance.
Meanwhile, the European Health Data Space, set to be up and running by 2025, will “enable cancer patients to securely access and share their health data between healthcare providers and across borders in the EU.”
Europe accounts for a tenth of the global population, but a quarter of the world’s cancer cases. It is not one disease but essentially hundreds. It is the second biggest killer after cardiovascular disease, but by 2035, cases are set to increase by almost 25%, making it the leading cause of death. There is also increasing concern about the economic costs of cancer, which have risen to more than €100 billion a year across the EU.
There are huge disparities in access to cancer services across the EU, with a recent Eurostat study showing that in one member state, 82% of women aged 50-69 had a mammogram within the last two years, while in another the figure stands at 0.2%.
A cancer inequality registry will be set up by 2022 to help member states identify problem areas and where to direct support, Kyriakides said.
Currently the COVID-19 pandemic is the number one health priority in Europe. But over one million people died of cancer on the continent last year, roughly twice the COVID-19 death rate. The pandemic has severely affected cancer care, disrupting treatment, delaying diagnosis, and affecting access to medicines. “This in itself is very worrying,” said Kyriakides.
Cancer moonshot
At the centre of the EU’s cancer plan is a large and targeted programme of research – or moonshot – to inject more urgency into the development of more effective cancer therapies.
The EU Mission on Cancer, part of the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe science programme, will be the main budget line for research, investing up to €2 billion over the next seven years.
The effort draws inspiration from the US Cancer Moonshot. In 2016, 45 years after Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer”, President Barack Obama announced the moonshot, with the then vice president Joe Biden at its head.
The Trump administration chose not to continue the federal Moonshot programme, but funding continued, with the initiative injecting $1.8 billion into an orchestrated programme of research that has the aim of achieving in five years what would otherwise have taken a decade. Some researchers are already eyeing up a successor programme.
On top of the mission funding, research money in the Beating Cancer plan will flow through several other pots, including the expanded EU health programme, called EU4Health, and the Digital Europe programme.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the Horizon Europe programme that provides grants for work and research placements, will continue developing cancer researchers’ skills.
The Digital Europe programme will offer up to €250 million for cancer-related digital projects. Meanwhile, funding from the EU4Health programme will go towards the development of an app that tells people how to reduce their cancer risks.
There will also be special grants under the Euratom nuclear research programme for research to improve radiotherapy.
Member states will be encouraged to spend EU regional funds on cancer services, for instance on mobile healthcare units for cancer screening, or new laboratory diagnostics. “This is particularly important for those living in the most deprived and isolated communities with restricted access to large urban centres,” the plan says.
Calculating how much the EU normally already spends on cancer research is complicated, because so much expenditure is tucked into so many budgets. The Commission says that, under Horizon 2020, it awarded over €1 billion in cancer research grants for roughly 1,000 cancer-related research projects from 2014 – 2020.
More data, more sharing
Among other initiatives in the plan, the Commission pledges a big drive to repurpose approved drugs. “Building on experiences with repurposing of medicines to treat COVID-19, an additional project will be launched that uses high-performance computing to rapidly test existing molecules and new drug combinations,” the plan says.
Towards the end of the year, the Commission will announce the ‘Cancer Diagnostic and Treatment for All’ initiative, which will drive investment into next generation sequencing of tumour cells, a field that is both rapidly advancing cancer research and supporting the use of therapies targeted at particular genetic defects.
Getting the National Comprehensive Cancer Centres in every member country to work more closely together is a key part of the plan. “We need to bring all of this together,” Kyriakides said. Many believe a stumbling block to advances in cancer research may be poor collaboration among researchers.
The Commission promises a network, pegged for 2025, to better link the 27 national centres. Officials say this will look something like the European Reference Networks, which were set up in 2017 allow clinicians to pool their knowledge of rare diseases.
Also foreseen is the European Initiative to Understand Cancer – a broad research effort that will look at how cancers develop, and help identify individuals at high risk.
The existing European Cancer Information System, which monitors the cancer burden in Europe, will be expanded in 2021 to include new indicators, and a new section on childhood cancers.
Looking after cancer survivors
Another offshoot of the Beating Cancer plan will provide resources to improve life for cancer survivors.
By 2022, a ‘Cancer Survivor Smart-Card’ will be available for patients to summarise their clinical history and aid follow-up care. This personalised and voluntary system, which could in fact be an app, will connect the patient directly with doctors, the Commission said.
It will come alongside a new ‘European Cancer Patient Digital Centre’, to be created under the cancer mission that will foster the voluntary exchange of patient data. The added objective of these initiatives is to collect a wider pool of data for researchers.
The Commission will also use the plan to set public health targets, such as getting tobacco use down by 20 per cent in the EU by 2040, and harmful drinking to drop 10 per cent in the same period.
Cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use is responsible for 15-20% of all European cancer cases, making this the top avoidable risk factor, an EU policy document said. The continent has the highest levels of alcohol consumption in the world, meaning alcohol-attributable cancer is also high.
The EU will also spend money on healthy diet promotion, and require member states to put new warning labels on alcohol.
Penn Lecture Series Explores Race and Religion
Steven Weitzman thinks the story of race and religion in America goes beyond the Black and white binary, a narrative that excludes many Jews of color.
After the racial justice protests that swept the nation last summer, the director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania decided to create a lecture series to explore the topic.
“I really wanted to push this series beyond the two-dimensional approach that a lot of people bring to the topic, and to really explore many different dimensions of a kind of multiracial justice,” Weitzman said of “Jews, Race, and Religion,” a program he has developed in partnership with the Center for Jewish Ethics.
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The talks focus on intersections of race and religion, the history of anti-Semitism, the role of Jews in the racialized culture of the United States and the role of race in Jewish identity. The lineup features scholars from all over the country who hail from diverse racial and religious backgrounds.
The program, which features 11 lectures, is offered in conjunction with the academic course Religious Studies/Jewish Studies 207 taught by Weitzman, but is also a stand-alone series open to the public. More than 1,500 viewers registered for the first lecture.
Weitzman said communities across the country were spurred to examine their own role in the fight for racial justice after the killing of George Floyd, and the Jewish community was no exception.
“Being privy to some of the conversations, I thought it would be helpful to learn more about the intersection of race and religion and Jewish identity and how Jews relate to other people within the United States, and how it fits into the larger struggle against racism,” Weitzman said.
The first installment, “Is the Talmud Racist?,” took place on Jan. 28 and featured Rabbi Mira Wasserman, director of the Center for Jewish Ethics and assistant professor of rabbinic literature at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Her goal was to challenge both anti-Semitic conceptions of the Talmud as consistently hostile to non-Jews and aspects of the Talmud that perpetuate hateful ideas among Jewish people about different groups.
Wasserman argued the rabbis inherited a diversity of views on the meaning of Jewish identity and on the nature of the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. In the Book of Ruth, the titular character is a Moabite woman celebrated for converting and dedicating her life to the Jewish people.
“Ruth is revered as the great-grandmother of King David, which makes her an ancestor of Messiah, as well. For the Book of Ruth, boundaries between Jews and others are permeable, and people of non-Jewish backgrounds are not only welcome but embraced and celebrated when they throw their lot in with Israel,” Wasserman said. “The Book of Ezra takes a very different view, railing against Israelite men who married women who are of Moabite or other non-Israelite backgrounds.”
Marc Dollinger, a professor of Jewish studies at San Francisco State University, will present “Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s” on Feb 25.
He said the scale and scope of the Black Lives Matter protests are similar to the civil rights movement, but there are key differences in how white liberal Jews perceived racism then and how they perceive it now. Whereas activists in the ’50s and ’60s viewed racism as hateful behavior, segregation and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, today’s activists are more focused on structural racism, or systems of oppression that benefit some while harming others.
Dollinger said white Jewish leaders actually understood systemic racism during the civil rights movement, although it was not discussed as widely.
“They understood the limits of their own movement. And they understood that there was going to be tension between white Jews and Blacks around racial difference,” he said. “So what we have happening today is really an even deeper and more profound understanding of the fundamental differences based on race when it comes to allocating resources on society, whether it’s education, health care, criminal justice, all of that.”
Viewers can register for the lectures at katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/jews-race-and-religion.
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