AS SKIERS SCHUSSED AND SWERVED in a snow park outside Beijing during the 2022 Winter Olympics, a few may have noticed a string of towers along the way. Did they know that those towers were collecting wavelengths across the spectrum and scouring the data for signs of suspicious movement? Did they care that they were the involuntary subjects of an Internet of Things–based experiment in border surveillance?
This summer, at the Paris Olympic Games, security officials will perform a much bigger experiment in the heart of the City of Light, covering the events, the entire Olympic village, and the connecting roads and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect “predetermined events” of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks.
I recorded the Madrid end of an interview for Gastropod. The interview, with Stefanie Malan-Müller, is woven into the Gut Feeling episode: https://gastropod.com/gut-feeling
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
When Marie and her partner failed to conceive a baby for almost a decade, they ran into a wall. “We did a [gamete] donation procedure in France that didn’t work,” she says. At the same time they had to face another problem: the wait lists for assisted reproduction were two years long. “And when it doesn’t work, you have to wait another two years,” Marie points out. The delays made them fear the worst: ageing past the limit of 45 years old that France imposes on women for accessing ART. “If you can financially handle it, you’ll go to another European country which has the same assisted reproduction procedures, but faster,” she explains.
