abhor

If You're Adventurous and Weird This Is Your Cruise

On a typical day sailing through remote parts of Quebec aboard the M/V Bella Desgagnés, you will stop in multiple ports and watch the crew load and unload shipping containers packed with beer, food, medical supplies, trucks, snowmobiles, building material, and maybe even a mobile home or caribou shot by Indigenous hunters.

For people who crave water travel but abhor mainstream cruises, this mixed cargo/passenger ship delivers an adventure that can safely be praised as unique. Every Monday, the Bella leaves Rimouski near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River on a seven-day, 1,370-mile trip, stopping to deliver essential goods to 11 communities on the way to Blanc-Sablon and the same 11 on the way back.

“Provisioning, exploring,” is the company slogan and so make no mistake — cargo comes first and passengers must have flexible and adventurous spirits.

The Francophone, Anglophone, and Innu Quebecers who live along the Lower North Shore and Anticosti Island use the Bella as a ferry that connects their remote communities with the outside world. These residents tend to stay aboard only long enough to chill in airplane-style leather seats watching satellite TV, eat cafeteria poutine, and maybe overnight in a cabin where space is sold by the bed.

Tourists prefer all-inclusive round trips in private cabins with dining room meals. Some bring RVs or motorcycles to Blanc-Sablon, take a ferry to Newfoundland, explore the island and then catch a different ferry back to mainland Canada.

I am one of five tourists that sign on for a December voyage, mindful that the Bella often runs late due to the state of the sea so seven days may stretch into eight or nine. We are told to track the ship’s position on the Relais Nordik website. Captain Corey Deveau warns they occasionally skip ports and send passengers home by chartered bus or plane when they’re way behind schedule. It’s a slight letdown when we return precisely on time.

My cruise feels more unusual than most. June to September is high season with up to 100 tourists, quick tours of some communities, and the chance to buy Indigenous-made crafts on the wharf. May and June bring iceberg season and icebreakers that clear the Bella’s path. For a nominal fee, you can BYOB (bring your own bike) to explore the villages.

Winter is quiet — no tours or icebreakers, a few hundred locals travelling to play bingo, catch a hockey game or Christmas shop — and it gets dark ridiculously early. The Bella works 24/7 and so I miss most of the 22 stops because I’m sleeping or reluctant to wander around alone at night. A few villages are right by the wharfs, but many are miles away. There are no taxis and it’s damn cold.

Here’s another Bella oddity. Because she sails through the night, the crew sleeps staggered hours and there are no public announcements, just a TV channel that notes the rough time of arrival and departure at the next few stops.

Stopovers revolve around how much time is needed to unload and load cargo, so passengers may get one to three hours in port. In the captain’s briefing notes given to all of us, it says: “You are an explorer, a traveller, an admirer of open spaces, a tourist, a vacationer … all this simultaneously.”

In Sept-Îles, population 26,000, purser Julie Plamondon calls a taxi to take me to the Musée Shaputuan, an Innu cultural museum, so I can live up to the captain’s challenge.

The Innu (the word means “human being”) are a nomadic people who traditionally nourished themselves with beaver, porcupine and muskrat in fall, caribou in winter, geese and ducks in spring, and salmon and berries in summer. “The caribou was a sacred animal that gave food, clothing, weapons and shelter,” the museum’s Francis and Jean St.-Onge tell me, explaining the Innu “circle of life.”

There is time to check out a boutique called Atikuss where Indigenous women make fair trade moccasins and a taxidermied albino beaver is a conversation piece.

Harrington Harbour is the Bella’s most popular port. Population 255, the postcard-esque fishing village boasts wooden boardwalks instead of roads, ATVs instead of cars, and a seafood processing plant that supplies lobster for the ship cafeteria’s lobster rolls. It’s also the place where the 2003 Quebec comedy Seducing Doctor Lewis (La Grande Séduction) was filmed. Roberto Thomassin, the Bella’s passenger service manager, loans me the DVD. There’s a cameo by the Nordik Express, Bella’s predecessor.

As we travel along the St. Lawrence River, into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and as far as the Strait of Belle Isle just before the North Atlantic Ocean proper, I find deep background about the ship on my TV.

The Bella was custom built in Croatia and finished in Italy in 2013. She has eight decks and can hold 381 passengers and 39 crew. Cruising speed averages 12.5 knots, less in areas where endangered North Atlantic right whale are protected from ship strikes. There’s an observation deck to watch the built-in crane swing up to 40 tonnes of cargo from the deck to the pier. Sometimes I watch the action from my cabin window.

Cargo is controlled by first officer Mathieu Roy. Unheated blue containers carry vehicles and building materials. Blue containers with open tops transport dangerous goods. White containers are temperature controlled. Oversized cargo and farm animals get special containers. On the dock, forklifts help with transfers.

There are no dead caribou on my trip, just a few dogs that stay in the ship’s kennels. We do carry a road grader, reams of Budweiser and Bud Lite, and hazardous medical waste.

The Bella slings about 3,000 containers a year between April and January, stopping in February and March because the Lower North Shore folks are busy zipping from village to village by snowmobile.

She has her share of quirks and perks.

The Bella stays in “ship time” and ignores a time zone change halfway through the journey. Cannabis consumption is legal in Canada, but forbidden on ships. Don’t worry, this is Quebec so there is an excellent wine list.

The biggest perk is not the four-machine fitness center, children’s arcade or extremely limited free wifi, but heated floors in cabin bathrooms that are perfect for drying wet clothes. We must make our own beds and cleaning staff do just a quick daily refresh of the garbage, floor and bathroom. There is a coin laundry. It feels like the cruise version of City Slickers, the 1991 comedy about people who would actually pay to work on dude ranches.

If the Bella is a lifeline for Lower North Shore folks, then chef Carl Parisé and server Christina Green are my lifeline three times a day. I gravitate to Quebec comfort food — crêpes, pâté, veal liver with bacon and onions, pea soup and Pudding Chômeur (Unemployment Pudding) served with a cheerful “bon appétit.”

I spend most of my cruise writing, pondering the arbitrariness of time zones and geographic borders, wondering where the hell I am, and enjoying the Bella’s shudders, lurches and groans. I tour the engine room and wheelhouse, where I am charmed by the ship’s giant windshield wipers and baffled by talk of ballast systems and azipods.

On my final full day on the Bella, I do my laundry and feed potatoes to wild deer on Anticosti Island where there are 160,000 white-tailed deer and 200 people (90 in winter).

Dominique and Christian Matte drive me from the Bella to the town of Port-Menier to see deer. “There — we have one at the front door of our house,” says Dominique. “It’s a buck.” Christian, who runs the food co-op, hurries inside to grab potatoes and quarters them with a shovel so we can feed the buck by hand. They shrug at piles of deer poop in their yard and explain the island is renowned with hunters.

The Bella often transports deer meat, but this time she picks up 13 white pickup trucks used by the government agency that manages the island and promotes hunting tourism. When the cruise ends the next day and I walk down the gangway a final time, the crane swinging a container holding one of those white trucks is the last thing I see.

Young People Lead The Charge To Change The World – OpEd

We are living amongst the largest generation of young people in history; young people who are better educated, better informed and more widely connected than ever before. Around 42% of the world’s population is under 25 years of age, 25% are under 15 – that’s 1.8 billion. The largest group is in South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the median age is only 19, compared to 38 in America, and an aging 45 in Germany, Italy and other parts of Europe.

This huge army of young people is cause for great optimism; they are more politically and socially engaged and certainly more environmentally aware than previous generations, are less conditioned by ideologies, and despite the widespread notion that anyone under 35 is self-obsessed and uncaring, in many cases they are the ones leading the global charge for change. They abhor dishonesty, don’t trust politicians and rightly believe that unity and tolerance of others are essential to right relationships and social harmony.

Many feel frustrated at the state of the world they have been born into, are angry with inept politicians and unaccountable international institutions, and enraged at the environmental vandalism that is taking place throughout the world. Anger and disillusionment has led to committed engagement among large numbers of young people throughout the world; they swell the ranks of the global protest movement forming the vanguard at demonstrations for action on climate change, demanding social justice and freedom, rational changes in US gun law and an end to austerity and economic injustice.

They formed the driving force behind what were arguably the two most significant social/political movements in recent years: the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, and whereas in the past young people have been less engaged than older generations in voting and party activism, this too is changing – in Britain, for example, the Labour party, with an overall membership of 504,000 – the largest in Europe, has over 100,000 members under 25, and they are extremely active.

As well as demonstrating, working on environmental campaigns and human rights issues the impulse to contribute to the local community is strong, and many act upon it: a survey made by the Royal Society of Arts in Britain found that a staggering “84 percent of young people want to help others,” and that “68 percent of young people have participated in volunteering or other forms of social action.” These statistics reflect the high level of social responsibility that exists in countries throughout the world amongst this generation. The study also revealed that whilst there is a strong desire to bring about large scale change, working locally to support someone in need – befriending, or helping an elderly person with their shopping for example – is recognized to be of enormous value.

It is a generation brought up with social media and, according to The Millennial Impact Project, they use it alongside traditional forms of participation. Millennial’s “interest in the greater good is driving their cause engagement today, and their activism (or whatever you want to call it) is increasing.”

Appalled by the level of inaction and the scale of the crisis, large numbers of young people have committed themselves to the environmental cause. One of the most inspirational forms of climate change activism is the Schools Strike for the Climate initiated by 15-year-old Greta Thunberg. Following a record-breaking summer, in August 2018 Greta began a solo protest for climate change outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm. Every Friday since, instead of going to school she sits outside her country’s parliament: she has vowed to “continue to do so until [world] leaders come into line with the Paris agreement [on climate change].”

Apathy is often disguised by arguments of individual inadequacy in the face of the scale of the problems confronting humanity. Well, a loud answer to such feeble excuses is Greta Thunberg’s one-girl protest; following her example hundreds of thousands of school children around the world have staged their own School Strike for the Climate. Although all teaching bodies should support the actions, some don’t, and whilst disappointing, their view is largely irrelevant, what matters is that teachers, along with politicians, big business and the general public pays attention to what these young people are saying: keep fossil fuels in the ground, invest in renewables, live environmentally conscientious lives; it is our future you are destroying, act now before it’s too late.

The man-made environmental crisis is the result of a certain way of life, an approach to living that places enormous value on material wealth, on image, pleasure and success. It is, we are told, a ‘dog eat dog’ world in which only the ‘strong’ survive. This fear-inducing view has polluted life, fuelling social division and widespread mental health conditions, particularly amongst under 25-year-olds. In November 2017 the World Youth Parliament met in Beijing to discuss, ‘Interpersonal Relationships: Keys for a new Civilization’.

In their conference report, they call for the creation of a kinder, friendlier society. They extol forgiveness, which they describe as the “most sublime and integral form of love” and make clear their view that the current “competitive culture (which places our goals against the goals of others) and the wrong use of technology” is detrimental to human well being. And they should know: as a result of the ‘competitive culture’ and the pressure to ‘achieve’ – in education, in a career and socially – unprecedented numbers of young people are suffering from anxiety and stress, panic attacks and depression, leading some to self-harm and suicide.

Despite being conditioned into competition by an outdated education system, which is designed to train compliant workers, not free-thinking creative individuals, young people instinctively recognize that cooperation, not competition is an integral part of human nature, and that working collectively for the common good is the best way of dealing with the many challenges facing humanity. It is, in fact, the only way we will overcome the various crises confronting us; unity is the way forward and young people know this.

The future belongs to the 3 billion or so under 25-year-olds of the world, many of whom are inspired and inspiring. If we are to collectively overcome the challenges facing humanity we need to listen to what young people have to say, to draw on their energy and dynamism; they are in tune with the times, are overflowing with creativity and are a powerful voice for change.

Scientists, officials in China abhor gene editing that geneticist claims

By Christian Shepherd and John Ruwitch

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese officials and scientists denounced on Tuesday the claims of a geneticist who said he had created the first gene-edited babies, and a hospital linked to his research suggested its ethical approval had been forged.

More than 100 scientists said in an open letter the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to edit the genes of human embryos was risky, unjustified and harmed the reputation and development of the biomedical community in China.

In videos posted online, scientist He Jiankui defended what he said he had achieved - embryonic gene editing to help protect twin baby girls born this month from infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"Pandora's box has been opened. We still might have a glimmer of hope to close it before it's too late," the scientists said in their letter, a copy of which was posted by the Chinese news website the Paper.

"The biomedical ethics review for this so-called research exists in name only. Conducting direct human experiments can only be described as crazy," the approximately 120 scientists said in the Chinese-language letter.

Yang Zhengang, a Fudan University professor, told Reuters he signed the letter because gene editing was "very dangerous".

China's Genetics Society and the Chinese Society for Stem Cell Research said in a statement He had acted as an "individual" and his work posed "tremendous safety risks for the research subjects".

"We believe the research led by He is strongly against both the Chinese regulations and the consensus reached by the international science community," the two groups said in a statement posted online.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a technology that allows scientists to essentially cut-and-paste DNA, raising hope of genetic fixes for disease. However, there are also concerns about its safety and ethics.

(Graphic explaining the Crispr DNA editing technique, https://tmsnrt.rs/2ReKG1R)

He, who is due to speak at a summit on human genome editing at the University of Hong Kong on Wednesday, did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The Shenzhen Harmonicare Hospital, listed on China's online clinical trial registry as having given ethical approval for He's experiment, denied having ever taken part in any clinical operations relating to "gene-edited babies".

The signatures on the online form were suspected of having been forged and "no relevant meeting of the Medical Ethics Committee of the hospital in fact took place", Hong Kong-listed Harmonicare Medical Holdings said in a statement.

'VERY SHOCKED'

The Southern University of Science and Technology, where He holds an associate professorship, also said it had been unaware of the research project and that He had been on leave without pay since February.

The Shenzhen City Science and Innovation Committee, a municipal fund which was also listed on the clinical trial registry as having backed the trial, said in a statement on Monday it had never been involved in the project.

Xu Nanping, vice minister of China's science and technology ministry, told reporters he was "very shocked" on hearing He's claim, adding that such work had been prohibited since 2003.

Details of the case were still unclear, Xu said.

"We don't know if this work is real or fake. If it's real, then this is certainly banned in China."

The official Xinhua news agency said ethics could not be ignored.

"Scientific exploration is never-ending ... but this does not mean that the morals of science can be abandoned or that ethical standards can be ignored," the news agency said in a comment posted on social media.

The National Health Commission said on Monday it was "highly concerned" and had ordered provincial health officials "to immediately investigate and clarify the matter".

The government's medical ethics committee in Shenzhen said it was investigating the case, as was the Guangdong provincial health commission, according to Southern Metropolis Daily, a state media outlet.

The committee organizing the Hong Kong conference where He is due to speak - the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing - said in a statement on Monday it had only just been informed of He's work on the genes of the twin girls.

"Our goal is to help ensure that human genome editing research be pursued responsibly," the committee said.

(Reporting by John Ruwitch and Alexandra Harney in Shanghai; Christian Shepherd, Ryan Woo and Yawen Chen in Beijing; Additional reporting by Holly Chik and Anne Mare Roantree in Hong Kong; Editing by Darren Schuettler, Robert Birsel)