WWE Cut Ties With Wrestler Zelina Vega Exactly 10 Minutes After She Came Out in Support of Unions

© TheWrap Zelina Vega

Exactly 10 minutes after WWE wrestler Zelina Vega tweeted that she is a supporter of unions, the organization announced that it had cut ties with her.

"I support unionization," Vega tweeted at 2:46 p.m. Pacific.

𝓩𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖆 𝓥𝖊𝖌𝖆

@Zelina_VegaWWE

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I support unionization.

"WWE has come to terms on the release of Zelina Vega. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors," WWE tweeted at 2:56 p.m. Pacific.

WWE

@WWE

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WWE has come to terms on the release of Zelina Vega. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.

Zelina Vega released

WWE has come to terms on the release of Zelina Vega.

wwe.com

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𝓩𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖆 𝓥𝖊𝖌𝖆

@Zelina_VegaWWE

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I want to say thank you all very much for the last 3-4 years

@WWEUniverse

, it was incredible. I would have never have been able to say “this is for you dad” if certain people did not believe in me. I love you all and I couldn’t have done it without your support

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In its statement WWE didn't cite any reason for cutting ties with Vega, and of course correlation does not necessarily equal causation. But WWE has famously resisted attempts at unionization over the years. For instance, as Jesse Venture explained on Steve Austin's podcast in 2016, he attempted to convince his WWE (then-WWF) costars to unionize in 1986, only to find himself almost fired by WWE CEO Vince McMahahon within hours. Years later, Ventura says, he learned during his ultimately successful unpaid royalties lawsuit against the wrestling organization that he'd been snitched on by Hulk Hogan.

"I want to say thank you all very much for the last 3-4 years @WWEUniverse, it was incredible. I would have never have been able to say 'this is for you dad' if certain people did not believe in me. I love you all and I couldn't have done it without your support Folded hands," Vega said in a follow-up tweet an hour after she was let go.

Vega, real name Thea Megan Budgen, joined WWE in 2017. Prior to that she worked in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling and as an independent wrestler.

WWE didn't immediately respond to a request 

𝓩𝖊𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖆 𝓥𝖊𝖌𝖆

@Zelina_VegaWWE

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12h

I want to say thank you all very much for the last 3-4 years

@WWEUniverse

, it was incredible. I would have never have been able to say “this is for you dad” if certain people did not believe in me. I love you all and I couldn’t have done it without your support

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Homeless Men Moved Into a Tourist Hotel. What Followed Was Unexpected.

Daniel E. Slotnik,
The New York Times•November 13, 2020


NEW YORK — An opera singer who also studied public relations is struggling to find work. His new roommate, released from prison a year ago, is trying to find his footing, too. A neighbor is focused on his sobriety.

All three men live at the Lucerne Hotel, which used to offer spa services and valet parking to tourists on the Upper West Side.

The Lucerne is now one of 63 hotels the city has turned into homeless shelters since the beginning of the pandemic to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus inside dormitory-style shelters where single men and women cannot safely distance.

The conversion of hotels into shelters has sparked the threat of lawsuits, an actual lawsuit, a dozen protests, news conferences and the formation of several neighborhood groups — some opposed to shelters and others in favor. But caught in the middle of the political push-and-pull are displaced men and women, a group whose lives have often been upended by evictions, unemployment and other traumatic events.

“I don’t want to leave because of the love that we experienced,” said a resident of the Lucerne who goes by Shams DaBaron.

For some men living at the Lucerne, the debate has had an unexpected effect: a sense of belonging that eluded them at other shelters. Hundreds of people banded together to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio and his administration to move the men. But other residents, community activists and advocacy groups rallied around the men, and in October a judge delayed a plan to relocate them.

That pause could end Monday if a Manhattan Supreme Court justice decides to move the men to a Radisson Hotel in the Financial District instead of allowing them to stay for now.

DaBaron, 51, has become the de facto representative of the men at the hotel, a role that has kept him busy as he clings to sobriety.

He and some of the other men were flabbergasted when people welcomed them with kind messages in sidewalk chalk and donated clothes.

“Putting their babies in our arms — their babies. I don’t know these women!” said DaBaron. “Bringing their dogs and saying, ‘Hey, hold my dog,’ and, ‘Hey, he loves you,’ and I’m saying, ‘This is crazy. I’ve never experienced this in my life.’”

The Lucerne became the focus for the debate on homeless hotels this summer after more than 200 men moved there in July. Some residents complained about increased loitering, drug use and public urination. A private Facebook group that now has more than 15,000 members became a forum that sometimes veered into racist, degrading language. A group of residents hired Randy Mastro, a powerful lawyer and former deputy mayor for Mayor Rudy Giuliani who has represented de Blasio in the past, to threaten a lawsuit against the city.

Supporters of the men saw the complaints and efforts to move them as pure NIMBYism.
  

Shams DaBaron, the de facto representative of the homeless men living at the Lucerne Hotel in Manhattan, speaks during a presser outside the hotel on Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020. 

(Amr Alfiky/The New York Times)

The debate has been so volatile that people on both sides said they have been doxxed. Mastro’s town house on the Upper East Side was vandalized with graffiti that included the phrase, “Randy Mastro you can’t displace us.”

Mastro and Megan Martin, president of West Side Community Organization, the nonprofit group that hired him, both said their effort to move the men was motivated primarily by concern for their well-being.

Before the pandemic, de Blasio had vowed to end the city’s dependence on hotels as a stopgap to house homeless people. But the city greatly expanded the use of hotels in the wake of the deadly virus, placing about 9,500 homeless people in them so far.

The Department of Homeless Services regards the pandemic hotel program as a success, noting that 104 people in their care have died from the coronavirus, even though the prospects for the nearly 60,000 people in the main shelter system looked dire this spring.

Still, after a visit to the Upper West Side in September, the mayor described the situation as “not acceptable.” The city began moving forward with a plan to relocate the men.

After protests, the city abandoned an original idea to move families out of a shelter near the Empire State Building to make room for the men. The city then settled on moving the men to the Radisson, but a group of residents in the Financial District filed a lawsuit, charging that the site was unsuitable for a shelter, even though it has been used as an emergency hotel for some time and will eventually be turned into a permanent shelter for families, the homeless agency said.

Some of the men at the Lucerne, including DaBaron, got a lawyer and filed affidavits stating that the move would be traumatic for them and others at the hotel.

On Oct. 19, Justice Debra James granted a temporary restraining order that allowed the men to stay at the Lucerne, a decision that came as a bus idled outside the hotel to take them downtown.

Now the men await the judge’s decision, which could let them stay for the time being.

Leaving the Lucerne now would be painful because they connected with an outreach group called the Upper West Side Open Hearts Initiative, which initially formed in response to neighborhood opposition, some men said.

On a recent chilly, rainy Sunday afternoon, a few dozen men came out of the hotel to browse a store the group had set up, many walking away with new jeans, socks or sweaters that had been donated.

Steven Hackett III, the opera singer, found a few ties and a sweater that he liked. He planned to wear the new clothes for job interviews, he said.

Before the Lucerne, Hackett, 35, spent some time in a nursing home in Queens to recover from a seizure he had at a shelter. In the nursing home, he caught the coronavirus and suffered a dangerously high fever for two weeks, he said, recalling other patients dying.

He said he had been approved for housing in nearby Harlem and wanted that apartment to be his next and last move.

Hackett’s roommate, Jerry Lugo, said he went straight into the shelter system after he was released from prison in August 2019. He said one shelter “was like jail.”

“You got to sleep with one eye open; otherwise, anything that’s not nailed down, they take it from you,” he said.

The Lucerne was a relief, but he had mixed feelings about the possible move. While Lugo, 38, appreciated the services there, he said he thought he could have a single room at the Radisson.

And while the Open Hearts group has been welcoming, the neighborhood remains hostile, he said. “I experienced walking down the block and I feel the bad energy: ‘There goes one of those guys from the shelter,’” he said. “We shouldn’t be treated differently.”

DaBaron, though, seems to have found his calling. In a matter of months, he has become a community activist, a turn of events for a man who thought he was going to die earlier this year.

He was staying at the Kenton Hall Men’s Shelter in the Bowery where he said he slept in an open room with more than 30 men. He contracted the coronavirus and was moved to a quarantine facility in Queens, where he said that he was given oxygen after his levels dropped dangerously low.

“I started calling on every god in the book, just so I didn’t get it wrong,” DaBaron said.

After he recovered he was sent back to a shelter downtown, then to the Washington Jefferson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen and finally to the Lucerne in July.

DaBaron, a former rapper, grew up in the Bronx in the foster care system and started living on the streets periodically as a teenager. He said speaking out about the Lucerne has helped his sobriety and reminded him of how he would speak up for himself and other foster children.

He said that he hoped he and the other men would be allowed to stay at the Lucerne, at least through the pandemic.

“We have this unique opportunity,” DaBaron said. “I just hope that the mayor has the compassion to say, ‘Maybe I made a mistake.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company

Universities in Western Canada are going all-in on climate change research
Jaime Weinman 

© Provided by Maclean's This year, the University of Alberta’s Canadian Ice Core Lab began a five-year study of contaminants and melting ice in the Columbia Icefield 

(Courtesy of Steve Beffort/Hakai)


Climate change may not seem to have anything to do with COVID-19, but for university climate change researchers, the connection is obvious. “A pandemic truly touches everyone on the planet, and climate change is the same,” says Alison Criscitiello, director of the University of Alberta’s Canadian Ice Core Lab, one of several university-based institutions studying the ice formations in Western Canada. The struggle for institutions and governments to adapt to COVID is like a trial run for the much bigger disruptions that climate change researchers are helping to forecast. “COVID was a matter of weeks, whereas climate change is sort of a slow, progressive problem that is only going to get more severe,” says Brian Menounos, professor of earth sciences at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC).


One way to get us ready is to provide us with as much information as possible, and universities may be better equipped than any other type of organization to provide it. That’s partly because they are free to devote a lot of time and money to gathering facts other groups might find unpleasant: Menounos says an advantage for university scientists is that they are able to “not worry about the political ramifications if they publish a paper that is suggesting, for example, that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” But it’s also because climate change and universities have something in common: they’re both global and local. Climate change affects the whole world, but it affects different areas in different ways. For universities in Western Canada, studying climate change means understanding the big picture, but also the local and surrounding communities.


READ: Those who suffer most from climate change did the least to cause it

For example, according to Criscitiello, one of the most important projects the Ice Core Lab started this year is a five-year mission to look at the Columbia Icefield in Alberta. The lab will examine the rapid melting of the ice and what Criscitiello calls “the inventory of environmental contaminants that are sitting up there,” contaminants that will leak out into bodies of water such as the North Saskatchewan River. Criscitiello says the study is important not only for what it can tell us about climate records, but also about the impact on places that depend on that particular source for water: the Columbia Icefield is “the headwaters of three huge, major rivers, and the water source for Edmonton and many other communities and cities.”

Menounos, whose university is looking into “how much snow is contained in the mountain watersheds of Western Canada” and the impact of wildfires—another front-and-centre phenomenon in 2020—on glacier melting, is also aware of the local nature of his job. A rewarding part of the work, he says, is “to talk to people who live in communities about climate change and how their mountains are changing.” In August, Nature Climate Change published the results of two new studies on the melting glaciers of Alberta: a University of Calgary study that mentioned the potential for flooding, and a study from the University of British Columbia that called attention to the fact that glacier melting could also cause water shortages in specific Alberta communities. (Climate change creates too much water and not enough at the same time.)


READ: Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.

These observations aren’t cheap to make, and partnerships with other universities and institutions can help. For the past two years, Menounos has been one of the leaders of the Cryosphere Node, a collaboration between UNBC, Vancouver Island University, the province of British Columbia and the Hakai Institute, a B.C.-based research institution. Collaboration allows scientists to observe the changes on B.C.’s central coast with more elaborate tools than any one organization has access to. Menounos is especially excited because they now have “a dedicated aircraft with a series of sensors on board that we use to measure and quantify changes in snow and ice through time.” The plane goes by the name of the Airborne Coastal Observatory, and it will spend the next several years capturing pictures of the area. But even with this new technology, scientists must know the local terrain. Bill Floyd, an adjunct professor in geography at Vancouver Island University and a co-leader of the Cryosphere Node, says researchers still need to go out and manually measure important things such as the amount of water stored in the snow: “Thank goodness, because being in the field is the reason I got into this career.”

© Provided by Maclean's Scientists use the sensors on this plane to measure changes in snow and ice on B.C.’s central coast (Courtesy of Steve Beffort/Hakai)

Recently, governments and private businesses have become more interested in the work of climate change researchers and are more willing to partner with them. Sasha Wilson, an associate professor in the University of Alberta’s department of earth and atmospheric sciences, is part of a group that is working on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), the process of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and repurposing it as minerals. In the past few years, she says, “there has been increasing demand from governments and industry to scale up CDR technologies to pull several billion tonnes of CO₂ out of the atmosphere each year.” This means, she says, that university researchers in this field are now “collaborating more closely with industry and governments than ever before.” Instead of ignoring the warnings of universities, other organizations may be increasingly looking to them for answers.

One thing universities do have to worry about, of course, is how to get work done during a pandemic. Climate change research has been heavily affected by COVID-19, thanks to the closure of borders. Criscitiello explains that a lot of the work she does, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic, “is internationally collaborative. There’s no way to do these things out of one country.” COVID-19 disrupted what was supposed to be one of her biggest projects of 2020, an ice-coring expedition to drill on Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak, for the first time in almost 20 years. The funding and the team were finally in place, she says, “but it’s an international team and it wasn’t possible, with COVID, to travel, so it’s been pushed off a year.” May 2021 is now the target date to start it up again.

Still, as the work goes on, Criscitiello hopes there will be one silver lining from the pandemic: more people may start to take scientists seriously when they warn that something bad is coming. Climate change, she says, “has just been intangible enough that less action has happened,” but now “people are seeing the connection between a health pandemic and climate change because in some ways they’re very, very similar.” Advice about climate change resembles medical advice, Menounos adds: “Your doctor’s telling you to change your lifestyle, but you’re not quite ready to do that.” Are we ready now?

This article appears in print in the 2021 University Rankings issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Listening to the mountains.

China regulator says financial innovation must not create oligopolies

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China should ensure financial innovation maintains fair competition and does not create oligopolies or construct barriers to entry, a Chinese regulatory official said Saturday

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© Reuters/CHINA STRINGER NETWORK FILE PHOTO:

 Surveillance cameras are seen outside the CBIRC building in Beijing

Xiao Yuanqi, chief risk officer at the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBRIC) told the Caixin Summit in Beijing that innovation should not undermine healthy competition or let innovation pioneers become hindrances to further innovation.

Xiao defended the role of financial regulation in maintaining a fair market competition environment, reducing "too big to fail" moral hazards and maintaining financial stability.

"History tells us that before each major financial crisis ... markets were irrationally exuberant. Regulation is meant to return this exuberance to rationality, and resolutely does not support continuing to push exuberance toward crazy so-called innovation," he said.

KARL MARX? 

NOPE, AYN RAND ACOLYTE ALAN GREENSPAN

Xiao's comments follow the scuppering of Ant Group's $37 billion initial public offering shortly after the fintech giant's billionaire founder Jack Ma launched a public attack on China's financial regulators.

Ma said China's regulatory system was stifling innovation and needed to be reformed to fuel growth.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Chinese President Xi Jinping personally decided to pull the plug on the IPO, ordering Chinese regulators to investigate and effectively shut down the stock market flotation.

Xiao did not directly respond when asked for his views on a series of defaults of state-owned enterprises that led to a sharp sell-off in China's corporate bond market this week.

(Reporting by Andrew Galbraith and Steven Bian; Editing by Christina Fincher)

Harris inspiring young Black Canadians toward politics: MPs

OTTAWA — The election of Kamala Harris as vice-president of the United States will inspire more young Black women in Canada to engage in politics and run for office, says Velma Morgan, a Black Canadian activist based in Toronto.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Harris's father was born in Jamaica, her mother in India. She is the first woman and the first Black or South Asian person elected to the vice-presidency.

Through Morgan's work as the chair of Operation Black Vote, a not-for-profit, multi-partisan organization that aims to get more Black people elected at all levels of government, she supported Annamie Paul in her bid for the Green party leadership.

"The combination of those two (Harris and Paul), young girls are seeing themselves," Morgan said in an interview.

"Representation does matter," she said. "You can't be what you don't see."

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who became the first person of colour in Canada's history to run for prime minister during the 2019 election, said Harris's election will encourage a future generation of Canadian women to get involved and run in elections.

"Each person who breaks a barrier inspires more people," he said in an interview.

"We're only here today because of the people who broke barriers before us."

Singh said he was happy about — and proud of — the positive impact he had on young people of colour in Canada during the election campaign last year.

"Young kids would come up to me and literally tell me, 'Thank you. Seeing you running for prime minister makes me feel like I could do anything,'" he said.

Liberal MP Greg Fergus, who is chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, said there is a need to elect more Black people to the House of Commons.

"I remember when there was only one Black MP in the House. And then we went to two, and then we stayed for a number of years, and then we went to five," he said.

Fergus said there has been some progress, but the number of Black MPs do not yet represent the "democratic weight" of the Black population in Canada. According to the 2016 census, there were just under 1.2 million Black people in Canada, making up 3.5 per cent of the country's population.

Morgan said Canada needs more Black policy-makers. Her organization facilitates training sessions and fellowships programs for young Black Canadians to encourage more of them to run in elections.

"We're giving them the tools to participate, whatever way they want to participate, whether it's to run, or to volunteer or to just help out," she said. "We've been trying to get the word out to say, 'You know what, we're here, there's not a lot of us, but we can change that by bringing a lot more people on.' "

NDP MP Matthew Green, a Black person representing the riding of Hamilton Centre, remembers in 2008 when he gathered with his community to celebrate the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States.

But he said the goal shouldn't only be to achieve representation and reflect the diversity of the population. It should also be to achieve inclusion and equity.

"Having diverse people, women elected, for me personally, is only important if their legacy is dismantling the barriers that they faced to get there," he said.

He said people have traditionally been privileged in Canada by race, gender and economics.

"(The system is) disproportionately, advantaging white men … that still remains a fact," he said.

"As a city councillor, the first elected person of African-Canadian descent in my city's history, I was still racially profiled by police in my own community."

He said Harris — a former district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general of California — was part of a system that also incarcerated and disenfranchised Black and Latino communities and low-income people throughout her career. What really matters, he added, is whether she will be able to help marginalized people break barriers.

Former MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who left the Liberal caucus several months before the 2019 election to sit as an Independent, said that claiming "diversity is our strength," as the Liberals often do, is misleading.

"Having people of different colours and different races or ideas within your systems or organizations does not mean that you're going to build strength if those people feel excluded," Caesar-Chavannes said in an interview Friday.

She said collective strength comes when Canadians make spaces inclusive, so racialized people can voice their ideas and feel like they belong.

"That for sure creates a system that is more fair and more just," she said.

Caesar-Chavannes, expected to detail her disillusionment with the Liberal brand of politics in her upcoming book, "Can You Hear Me Now?" to be published in February, said she's not optimistic.

"If we never address the root cause, and we keep putting Band-Aids on a situation, it's not going to get better," she said.

Singh said it's sometimes hard to understand that Canada has systems that are designed to exclude people.

"We look at the way the criminal justice system works, we look at the way policing works, and realize that there are systems in place that have to be changed because, right now, they're designed to discriminate," he said.

Some of these systems have to be changed and some have to be dismantled, he said. But he said he believes there's enough appetite in Canada for a person of colour to be elected prime minister.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 14, 2020

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This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Facebook and Canadian Press News Fellowship.