Rocketing: Israel escalates Lebanon conflict

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing.

You a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day.

Yeah.

Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. Cmintmobile.com.

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world. We all know that the planet is getting hotter and hotter, but what does this mean for elite athletes competing at the peak of physical fitness? High level sport is getting harder and deadlier. And it was a chance observation that changed the path of Francisco Lopera, a Colombian doctor who spent his life investigating the genetic markers of Alzheimer's disease. Our obituary's editor remembers him. But first.

So around 6pm Lebanon and Israel time on Thursday evening, Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of of Hezbollah, the Shia movement which basically controls Lebanon, was delivering his televised speech to his membership. Israel began carrying out a large series of airstrikes of the Hezbollah missile launch pads in Lebanon, mainly southern Lebanon, also partly the Bekka Valley.

Anshul Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent.

From what we've heard from Israeli military officials, they hit over 100 of those launch areas. And this is probably the largest airstrikes that we've seen in the 11 month war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Until on Tuesday, there were thousands of pagers exploding across Lebanon. On Wednesday, walkie talkies and at the time we asked was this the attack or was it the precursor to a bigger thing? It now seems pretty Clear that this was the precursor to something much bigger. Is that right?

Well, the expectation was that a military operation would happen immediately after these pager and then the walkie talkie explosions because they created so much chaos in the Hezbollah ranks that that would have been the ideal moment to open a military offensive. And instead it took a couple of days. So I think what we're seeing here is more series of stages of escalation in between which Israel is putting out messages, direct or indirect, to Hezbollah to see if there's any chance that they are going to commit to some kind of a ceasefire and not a ceasefire connected to the other ceasefire which has been under discussion and terminal rounds of negotiations in Gaza.

So what has Hezbollah said about this?

So this was basically Nasrallah's message on Thursday evening. He admitted he accepted the fact that his movement had taken a hit in these explosions. He obviously blamed Israel for it. But he also said that we are not going to stop attacking Israel as long as the war is happening also in Gaza. So so far, at least on an official level, Israel's attempt to decouple these two fronts, the Gaza front and the Hezbollah front, hasn't yielded anything. But from the Israeli officials, I'm hearing they didn't expect Nasrallah to suddenly accept a ceasefire. This was a that they were expecting. And therefore these further stages of escalation were already in place.

How strong actually is Hezbollah then?

Well, it's a very good question. We know that Hezbollah has tens of thousands of highly trained fighters, over 100,000 missiles. Basically, Hezbollah, even though it's not a state organization, has at its disposal an army that rivals that of many states. But at the same time, following these explosions of the pages and the walkie talkies, the thousands of its members, probably quite important commanders, have been hospitalized, Their communication networks have been totally disrupted. So they are certainly at a tactical disadvantage at this moment.

So what might we expect to see in the coming days?

So the next stage would be one of two things. Either further airstrikes, perhaps deeper in Lebanese territory, taking out more of Hezbollah's missile arsenal. And the other option, of course, is a ground offensive. And the Israeli armies already said that they've deployed a second division up north near the border with Lebanon, which will be training over the weekend. That would indicate that there is a plan to go in on the ground to occupy a buffer zone, a security area of a few kilometers at least, which will prevent short range missile strikes by Hezbollah on Israeli communities near the border. Now, as far as I know, the decision to launch Such an offensive hasn't been taken and the troops and the tanks are not yet in place for that. But that is certainly the next ratcheting up on the escalation scale.

And as you say, it's escalating quickly. Is there any prospect that it might de escalate?

Well, it looks like Israel's leaving space of a day or two between these stages for diplomacy for the Americans and for other mediators to speak to the Lebanese government, to speak to Hezbollah and see if there is any indication of Hezbollah being prepared to end this campaign, which has been going on for over 11 months, of firing at Israel. For most of the past 11 months, the idea that most people had was that there would be a ceasefire in Gaza, which would lead to a ceasefire also on Israel's northern border with Lebanon. Now, with the prospects of a ceasefire in Gaza seeming very dim, this is an Israeli attempt to try and divide these two issues and push Hezbollah to agree to a ceasefire even though the war in Gaza continues.

Anshal, thank you so much. May we one day speak on happier occasions?

I'm looking forward to that, Rosie.

It's always incredible to watch athletes at the top of their game. And we've had a bumper year of sport with the Euros and the Olympics. But these days, athletes aren't just competing against each other. They're also battling with rising temperatures. At the US Open earlier this month, it hit 35 degrees. That proved too much for some in.

The heat, the humidity that eventually overwhelmed him. Sick on court several times last year.

Sky Sports captured the moment. Daniel Medvedev, one of the top seeds, questioned how players were going to cope on such scorching chords.

One player gonna die and they're gonna see.

One player's gonna die and they will see. And you know, he's talking about the.

And it's a continuation of the discussion.

That we've been having in this set. Yeah, he's sending a very strong statement there. Seriously.

Heat has a really strong impact on athletic performance and actually on athletes health. And as the world is warming, that is making sports events more dangerous and more difficult to hold.

Rachel Dobbs is an environment editor at the Economist.

And yet simultaneously, you are also seeing a big expansion in the areas where big sports events are being held. And these two things are definitely in conflict with one another.

So what difference can heat actually make to the performance of elite athletes?

It can make a really significant difference. So there was a study that was conducted around the 2019 World Athletics Championships, which were held in Doha, which is very hot and Very humid, and they were measuring how the athletes performed in endurance events compared with their own personal best. And they found that almost all of the athletes that they studied overwhelmingly did worse than their personal bests and it was between 3 to 20% worse. And the degree to which they underperformed was, they thought, correlated with how hot and how humid it was outside. And, you know, getting up to 20% reduction in performance is really, really significant. And I also think that it should be noted that this was going on despite the fact that the organisers of that event had already taken some pretty severe measures to try and mitigate against the heat and humidity that you would have holding an event like this somewhere like Doha. So the women's marathon, the start time was 11:59pm so, you know, they're running in the middle of the night. All the events that could possibly be in a gigantic air conditioned stadium were. And so even with that, you're seeing a really, really significant level of performance reduction.

So, Rachel, we've all had the experience of being outside in the heat and finding it hard to exert ourselves. But tell me what actually happens in the body when it's very hot?

So if you want the really geeky answer, this is a classic thermodynamics thing, which is that your body is converting energy sources like you get from food into kinetic energy. All of those processes create waste heat. And so when it is very hot outside, not only is your body trying to regulate its temperature against the ambient temperature, it is also having to then fight against the fact that it is generating more heat internally. There's also a lot of things that your body will do to try and cool you down, which make activities feel more strenuous. For example, your body will be sending blood to your skin because that's how heat moves towards the surface. And that means that you are not getting as much blood sent to your muscles, which you need. You are going to be sweating more, which means you're going to be getting dehydrated more quickly. All of which is going to have an impact on performance. But in the case of sport in particular, one of the really, really dangerous scenarios is a thing called exertional heatstroke, which is basically when your body is generating too much heat that it cannot dissipate. And that can start with symptoms like confusion and evolve into very, very serious symptoms like organ failure and ultimately death. It is thought to be one of the third leading CA of sudden death amongst young American athletes. For hospitalised cases, the fatality rate is around 15%. But if untreated, it's thought to be up to 80%.

You mentioned that there can be adjustments made, such as holding marathons at night and things, but what else can be done to mitigate the effects of a heating climate for the athletes?

So this is obviously very important to do. And I think that it should also be noted that these problems do not only arise when you are holding an event somewhere like Doha this summer. Paris had the Olympics. Temperatures There are about 3 degrees on average higher in August than they were last time that Paris had the Olympics in 1924. So, you know, probably the most important thing and this is starting to happen is understanding when conditions just are too dangerous for certain events to be played. And you have seen a trend in recent years of international federations starting to set guidelines around their own specific sport. The United States Tennis association, for example, will suspend play when the combined heat and humidity gets to too high threshold, which, you know, is a good precaution to take. Although the threshold that they set for that does still seem to be very high. It is significantly above the threshold that was recommended by places like the American College of Sports Medicine. So there are a certain amount that still needs to be done on finessing these guidelines to the fact that these are very, very strenuous activities, often which run for hours at a time.

Sport is obviously huge business these days. Is there a risk that athletes are going to be pushed beyond what's safe because the financial stakes of cancelling or postponing a tournament are so high?

Possibly, yes. And you are seeing actually a growing number of athletes starting to speak out about the fact that they fear that having to compete in extremely high temperatures is going to be very damaging for them. I think the other thing that you have to remember is that very, very highly paid athletes are actually quite rare. Most working athletes, even if they are competing at Olympic level, they have to do a lot of sponsorship to make money. So the numbers of athletes that we're seeing now saying, you know, I feel like this is dangerous, I feel like this is a threat to my life, is this is conjecture and I am guessing, but I would expect is less than the actual total number who feel something like this, because it is a hard thing to do, particularly if you are up and coming or from a smaller sport or whatever that doesn't get as much public attention.

Rachel, thank you so much. Great to talk to you.

Thanks for having me. Rosie.

When Francisco Lopera was a boy, he used to dream about flying saucers and think that he would be an astronomer because all the great mysteries lay out in the cosmos.

Ann Ro is the Economist Debitry's editor.

That idea faded when he began to get more interested in medicine, and it disappeared completely when he went to visit his grandmother with his father one day when he was in his first year at medical college. The grandmother was sitting simply staring blankly at them, and she didn't recognize either of them when they came in. And it made his father cry. His own mother didn't know him. And from that point, Francisco made a pledge that he wouldn't let that happen to anyone's granny if he became a doctor. He kept that pledge, and it took every ounce of his considerable energy to keep it, because the Alzheimer's that his grandmother suffered from was incurable. He knew very well that hundreds of drugs had been tried to cure it and not one had worked. It was a sly disease because it built up for years. It was asymptomatic, perhaps for 30 years. And then people would start forgetting things, and then they'd forget how to work, and eventually they'd forget who they were in the final horrible stages of the disease. There were many myths in his native Colombia about how Alzheimer's was caught. People thought you perhaps had to touch the bark of a certain tree or be contaminated by the blood of an Alzheimer's victim. Some even said that it was the result of a curse that had been put on various parts of the country by priests or statues. All sorts of tales. And they were particularly rife in in the northern part of Colombia, which Francisco d' Opera actually came from, called Antioquia. That was a very poor, mountainous district, and main city was Medellin, which in those days had a terrible reputation being the murder capital of the world. It was a region that was locked in conflict between Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries for much of the time that he was working there. But he was still interested in trying to pursue why there was such a high prevalence of Alzheimer's there, because, strangely, there was. And it all came into focus in 1982 when a 47 year old man was brought to see him. It was clearly Alzheimer's, but he was very young to have it. And it turned out that his father had had Alzheimer's too, and his grandfather and several of his aunts. And that was extremely interesting because it meant that here was possibly a whole population of families who were related to each other and all to some degree carriers of the disease. And what he had to do, he saw quite clearly, was to go out into the villages which were very remote and forage through the records, the parish rolls, the birth certificates and death certificates, to find out who was related to whom and try to draw up a great big genealogical chart of the families in the whole region. He found that it was really very common for most of them to die in their 40s or 50s. This was early onset Alzheimer's. And it was terrifying to the carers because when they were younger, they could not imagine what they would do if they caught this disease. And they lived in dread of going down with it because, of course, they had relations with it. But the other thing he had to ask them for was to let him have the brains of those who'd recently died from Alzheimer's. In fact, to let him have those brains as soon as possible. And this they found extremely difficult. So it was from the brains that he began to discover what the mutation was that had given them this tendency. He found there was a single mutation on chromosome 14 and that single mutation had gone down the generations. And it seemed in the end, if it carried on with no preventive measures, that perhaps half the people in the region, and certainly half the people among those 6,000 families, would come down with early onset Alzheimer's. He was asked, seeing that a cure was obviously some way of what could be done to mitigate the terror of Alzheimer's, which now has quite a grip on the world. As people get older, they fear it more and more. He said that it shouldn't be seen as a tragedy to him, although it was a very serious disease, there were ways of dealing with it if you could manage to instill an atmosphere of happiness and support around it. In fact, he said, Alzheimer's really should be looked on as a new form of life.

Anne Rowe on Francisco Lopera, who has died aged 73. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Timo Saylor. Our senior producers are Rory Galloway and Sarah Larnyuk. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Maggie Khadifa and Benji Guy, with extra production help this week by Jonathan Day. Our assistant producer is Henrietta McFarlane. We'll all see you back here for the weekend. Intelligence tomorrow.