Some 15 dead and another 21 injured are the preliminary result of a new brawl between inmates at a prison in Ecuador, adding another violent act to the country’s recent prison record and fueling debate over the lack of oversight in these types of facilities.

The fight took place Monday at the Cotopaxi Deprivation of Liberty Center near the city of Latacunga, about 80 kilometers from Quito, according to the National Service for Comprehensive Care of Adult Deprived of Liberty and Juvenile Offenders (SNAI). Twitter.

According to Jorge Flores, deputy director of the SNAI, the incident began after a census was conducted to collect data on the prison inmates at this center in Cotopaxi, one of the largest in the country and with a capacity for 4,300 inmates.

According to the Chinese government channel CGTN Noticias, the causes could lie in rivalries between national and international drug trafficking groups.

Last April, 12 prisoners died in a riot for control of El Turi prison in the city of Cuenca.. In 2021, 316 people were killed in clashes in Ecuadorian prisons.

That The most violent prison confrontation in recent memory took place in Guayas province in September 2021, leaving 24 dead and 48 injuredin various pavilions of the so-called Litoral Penitentiary.

In October 2021, the government of Ecuador declared a state of emergency for 60 days for its entire territory due to the general escalation of violence.

“In recent years, Ecuador has gone from being a country of drug trafficking to a country that also uses drugs. This is reflected in the number of crimes linked directly or indirectly to the sale of drugs today,” Guillermo Lasso said on October 18, 2021.

During this period, the ruler warned that a heavy military and police presence would be detected in the streets, patrol operations, inspections, drug requests and other actions, but no exceptional or permanent measures regarding control were announced. prisoner

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Xi Jinping will soon be confirmed for a third term as General Secretary of the Communist Party and chief of the armed forces. Is your conquest of such undisputed power good for China or the world? Not. It’s dangerous for both of them. It would be dangerous even if he had proved himself a ruler of unparalleled competence. But it didn’t. The risks are currently ossification in Germany and increased friction abroad.

Ten years is always enough. Even a first class leader decays after such a long tenure. One with undeniable power tends to decay faster. Surrounded by the people he has chosen and protective of the legacy he has created, the Despot becomes increasingly isolated and defensive, even paranoid.

reform stands. Decision making is slower. Unwise decisions are not contested and therefore remain unchanged. The Covid zero policy is an example. If we look outside of China, we can see the madness fueled by Putin’s continued power in Russia. In Mao Zedong, China has its own example. In fact, Deng Xiaoping, a genius of common sense, adopted the termlimit system because of Mao, which Xi is now overturning.

The advantage of democracies is not that they necessarily choose wise and wellmeaning leaders. They often choose the opposite. But these can be fought safely and deposed without bloodshed. In personal despotism none of this is possible. In the case of institutionalized despotism, dismissal is conceivable, as Khrushchev noted. But it’s dangerous, and the more dominant the leader, the more dangerous it becomes. It’s just unrealistic to expect Xi’s next decade to be any worse than the previous ones.

How bad was your first decade?

In a recent article in China Leadership Monitor, Claremont McKenna College’s Minxin Pei believes Xi has three main goals: personal mastery; revival of the Leninist party state; and the expansion of China’s global influence. He triumphed in the former; formally successful in the second; and had mixed success in the latter. While China is now a recognized superpower, it has also mobilized a powerful coalition of eager opponents.

Pei does not count economic reform among Xi’s main goals. The evidence suggests that this is quite true. Is not. In particular, reforms that could undermine stateowned enterprises have been avoided. Stricter controls were also imposed on famous Chinese businessmen like Jack Ma.

Above all, the deep macroeconomic, microeconomic and ecological difficulties remain largely unresolved.

All three were lumped together as “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable” in former Premier Wen Jiabao’s description of the economy.

The fundamental macroeconomic problems are the excess savings, the associated excess investment and the resulting mounting mountains of unproductive debt. These three things go together: One cannot be solved without solving the other two. Contrary to the widespread thesis, oversaving is only partly due to the lack of a social safety net and the resulting high level of household savings. It is so high because household disposable income makes up such a small proportion of national income, while profits make up much of the rest.

The result is that national savings and investment exceed 40% of gross domestic product. If investments were not so high, the economy would collapse permanently. However, as growth potential has waned, much of this investment has been in unproductive, debtfinanced construction. This is a shortterm remedy with the longterm negative side effects of bad debt and reduced return on investment. The solution is not just to reduce household savings, but to increase households’ share of disposable income. Both threaten powerful selfinterest and have not materialized.

The basic microeconomic problems were widespread corruption, indiscriminate interference in the private sector, and waste in the public sector. In addition, environmental policy, in particular the country’s massive carbon dioxide emissions, remains an immense challenge. To his credit, Xi has acknowledged this issue.

More recently, Xi instituted policies to keep out a virus that is circulating freely in the rest of the world. China should have imported the best global vaccines and reopened the country after administration. That would have made sense and would also signal further confidence in openness and cooperation.

Xi’s renewed central control program is not surprising. It was a natural response to the erosive effect of greater freedoms on a political structure based on power that is inexplicable except from the bottom up. Widespread corruption was the inevitable consequence. But the price of trying to suppress it is risk aversion and ossification. It is hard to believe that a topdown organization under one man’s absolute control could reasonably, let alone effectively, govern an increasingly sophisticated society of 1.4 billion people.

Not surprisingly, China has become increasingly selfassured. Western reluctance to adapt to China’s rise is clearly part of the problem. But it was also China’s open hostility to the core values ​​that the West (and many others) hold dear. Many of us cannot take seriously China’s adherence to Marxist political ideals that have proven unsuccessful in the long run.

Yes, Deng’s brilliant eclecticism worked, at least as long as China was a developing country. But reintroducing old Leninist orthodoxies into today’s highly complex China has to be a dead end at best. At worst, with Xi remaining in office indefinitely, it could become something even more dangerous for China itself and the rest of the world.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves

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Trending mindfulness meditation and yoga are as effective at lowering blood sugar levels as diabetes medication, research suggests.

Researchers from the University of Southern California reviewed data from dozens of randomized controlled trials conducted around the world over the past 30 years.

The studies included people with type 2 diabetes who also used mind and body wellness techniques along with their medications.

These ranged from meditation, yoga and breathing techniques to qigong, a slow martial art similar to tai chi.

The researchers then compared this group’s health outcomes to those of people who relied solely on medication to lower their blood sugar for three months.

They found that meditative practices increased scores by 0.8 percent overall — but yoga was even more effective at 1 percent.

This compares to the most popular diabetes drug, metformin, which is taken by around 14 million Americans and 850,000 Brits.

Trending mindfulness meditation and yoga are as effective at lowering blood sugar levels as diabetes medication, research suggests (file image)

dr Fatimata Sanogo of USC’s Department of Population and Public Health Sciences and lead author of the study said, “The most surprising finding was the magnitude of the benefit these practices provide.”

“We anticipated a benefit, but never expected it to be this big,” she added.

Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease, which is characterized by the body’s inability to properly use insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas.

What is meditation?

Think of it as fitness for your mind.

Meditation calms the body, lowering blood pressure and stress levels, and improving overall mood.

The goal of engaging in mind-body activities is to use your thoughts to positively affect your body’s physical responses to the outside world.

The practices are part of an overarching wellness trend that has been touted by celebrities and tech giants for years.

These activities include…

mindfulness

The process of focusing the breath and concentrating on a specific thought, object, or activity to promote a stable emotional state.

Mindfulness is the ability to be fully present and aware of your surroundings.

A common technique is to silently focus on each of the senses.

Pilates and yoga

They involve breathwork and coordinated, focused movement.

Both of these low-impact exercises improve strength, flexibility, and posture.

In yoga, you take poses and hold them or fly into another position.

Pilates sees people take positions and then work their core muscles by moving their arms or legs.

Qi Gong, Tai Chi

Martial arts that promote both physical fitness and mental discipline.

Qigong and Tai Chi are traditional self-healing exercises that originated in ancient China.

They feature coordinated movements that focus on posture, deep breathing, and mental focus.

Qigong can involve movement or simply meditation while seated or standing.

Tai Chi, on the other hand, involves complex and choreographed movements that follow your own breath.

While some people can control their blood sugar through diet and exercise, around 37 million Americans rely on insulin treatments.

Mindfulness activities like yoga and meditation are known to help control their blood sugar levels — 66 percent of Americans with type 2 diabetes do this — but scientists haven’t been able to quantify the benefits until recently.

A team of researchers from the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine reported that mind-body activity reduced hemoglobin A1c, a measure of average blood sugar levels over the past 3 months, by an average of 0.84 percent.

Their analysis was published in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine.

The scientists analyzed 28 published clinical studies that tested different practices, including yoga, qigong, meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Qigong, a coordinated posture, movement and meditation practice with roots in ancient China, has been linked to a 0.66 percent drop in A1c.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction practices, including meditation, contributed to a 0.48 percent decrease.

Yoga was the best-studied mind-body practice and had the greatest benefits for type 2 diabetics, lowering hemoglobin A1c by about 1 percent.

This reduction, the authors note, is comparable to the 1 percent reduction in A1c caused by the common diabetes drug metformin.

People who did yoga several times a week saw the steepest decrease in their A1c.

The analysis suggests that mindfulness activities combined with prescription medications can double the effectiveness of the medications.

dr Richard Watanabe, professor of population and public health sciences and physiology and neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine, said, ‘What’s important about this study is that the effect is very powerful and is exceeding standard of care.’

Type 2 diabetes can be prevented by adopting a healthy lifestyle, e.g. B. through a good diet, exercise, giving up smoking and losing excess weight.

About 96 million Americans are prediabetic, meaning their blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be diagnosed as type 2 diabetes.

People with prediabetes are susceptible to type 2 diabetes, as well as heart disease and stroke.

Participating in physical activity could be helpful for those who are at high risk of developing diabetes.

dr Sanogo said, “This could be an important tool for many people because type 2 diabetes is a major chronic health problem and we can’t control it well enough.”

“Although this study doesn’t treat it as a preventive measure, it does suggest that it may help people with prediabetics reduce their risk of future type 2 diabetes.”

Moscow on Thursday, October 6, castigated statements by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who referred to it “preemptive strikes” NATO against Russia, Kyiv and then specified that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was talking about preventive sanctions and not about nuclear strikes.

Volodymyr Zelensky spoke Thursday during a video conference with Australian think tank Lowy Institute.

“So they know what’s happening to them”

“What should NATO do? Eliminate the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons. But above all, I appeal once again to the international community, as before February 24: pre-emptive strikes, so they know what will happen to them if they use them.”said the Ukrainian leader.

“Not the other way around, waiting for nuclear attacks from Russia so you can say, ‘Oh good, you’re doing that, so take that from us now!’ Check how they put pressure, that’s what NATO has to do, check how they use it.continued Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Following these statements, Volodymyr Zelensky’s spokesman Serguiï Nykyforov stated that these statements referred to pre-emptive sanctions that could be imposed before the February 24 offensive against Moscow, and not pre-emptive military strikes.

“The President spoke about the period before February 24th. Then it would have been necessary to take preventive measures not to allow Russia to start the war. I remind you that the only possible measures at that time were sanctions.he posted on Facebook and said that Kyiv would not call ” never “ for the use of nuclear weapons.

Several senior Russian officials sharply criticized Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statements on Thursday evening.

“Monstrous Consequences”

“Such statements are nothing more than a call to start a new world war with monstrous and unpredictable consequences”said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, quoted by Ria Novosti agency.

He calls on the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union to respond to these statements, as he believes these countries are leaders “de facto” Kyiv shares.

Russian diplomatic spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, for her part, accused the West “to start a nuclear war “.

“Everyone on Earth needs to realize that this unbalanced, weapon-packed character, Zelensky, this puppet, has turned into a monster capable of destroying the planet.”she wrote on Telegram.

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