Coca-Cola CEO wants Congress to act after Georgia's voting law

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business 

Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey is escalating his criticism against recently passed voting laws in Georgia, saying he wants to be "crystal clear and state unambiguously that we are disappointed" in the legislation.

© Fabrice Coffini/AFP/Getty Images Coca-Cola President and CEO James Quincey attends a press conference with International Olympic Committee (IOC) president and China Mengniu Dairy CEO and Executive Director, as part of the 134th Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at the SwissTech Convention Centre in Lausanne, on June 24, 2019.

In a new statement released Thursday, Quincey said that Coke, which is headquartered in Atlanta, has "long championed efforts to make it easier to vote" and has previously opposed legislation that "would diminish or deter access to voting."

"Our focus is now on supporting federal legislation that protects voting access and addresses voter suppression across the country," Quincey said. "We all have a duty to protect everyone's right to vote, and we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the US." 

The federal legislation that Quincey appears to be alluding to is HR 1, a sweeping government ethics and election bill that, among other things, would counter state-level Republican efforts to restrict voting access. The Democratic-led House approved the legislation earlier this month.

Wells Fargo also issued a public statement Thursday echoing the need for Congress to "establish Federal Election Day as a national holiday, thereby establishing the importance of this right."

Business leaders have been under growing pressure to denounce Georgia's voting law and similar measures in other states. Quincey's new statement follows his prior criticism, calling the law "unacceptable" and "a step backwards."

"This legislation is wrong and needs to be remedied," Quincey said in an interview on CNBC Wednesday. "We will continue to advocate for [changes], both in private and now even more clearly in public."

Republicans who passed the law say the measure is needed to prevent fraud and stop illegal voting, playing on discredited claims of widespread fraud in last year's presidential election. Opponents say the legislation amounts to voter suppression efforts that will reduce minority voting.

Several leaders of Georgia-based companies have criticized the law, including Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian. After facing a backlash over his initial statement, Bastian issued a more forceful criticism Wednesday, saying the measure was based on "a lie" about voter fraud.

"I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta's values," Bastian said in a statement to employees. "After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it's evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong."

That prompted a response from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, accusing Bastian of spreading misinformation and not recognizing the upsides for voting security included in the bill.

The "statement by Delta CEO Ed Bastian stands in stark contrast to our conversations with the company, ignores the content of the new law, and unfortunately continues to spread the same false attacks being repeated by partisan activists," Kemp said in a statement.

--CNN Business' Chris Isidore contributed to this report.

‘You’ll become Hindu’: Yoga remains banned in Alabama schools after senate vote

Alabama’s senate has rejected a bill that would have reversed a 28-year ban on practising yoga in public schools.

© Provided by National Post Alabama state legislator Jeremy Gray's bill preserved the ban on the Hindu greeting 'namaste' and made the practise of yoga in public schools voluntary. It was still defeated

Alabama State Rep. Jeremy Gray’s bill was defeated in committee on Wednesday night, despite a provision that would have made bringing yoga back to Alabama public schools voluntary. Yoga was forbidden by the Alabama Board of Education in 1993 after opposition by conservative groups over its Hindu roots.

The committee vote in effect continues a ban believed unique in the United States: “School personnel shall be prohibited from using any techniques that involve the induction of hypnotic states, guided imagery, meditation or yoga” (in addition to banning “namaste,” which means “I bow to you”).

At issue is whether yoga promotes Hinduism.

Groups who argued against the Alabama bill believe it violates the separation of church and state. The act of meditation is spiritual, argues constitutional lawyer Eric Johnston, who works with Christian advocacy groups that have spoken out against the measure.
THEY WANT PRAYER IN SCHOOL

HENCE THEIR PERVERSION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT

“If you pass a law that says you can do stretches and sit in positions and so forth, that’s fine,” Johnston said. “But to say you can teach yoga is an entirely different thing because yoga is an exercise of the Hindu religion.”

Johnston and others say they don’t object to adults participating in yoga but they feel children are impressionable.

“Children at that age are very tech-savvy and if they are taught yoga, all they have to do is Google it and they will immediately find information on the spiritual aspects of it and look at it,” he said. “And if they look at it, it might lead them to believe that’s something they should be involved in.”

Gray, who began practising yoga in college as a football player at the end of his workouts, said yoga is everywhere in the state — there’s even a yoga program available to the state’s prison inmates.

He didn’t realize it wasn’t permitted at schools until he visited a class to speak about politics and lawmaking and told students he meditated to help himself focus. The students and faculty in the room appeared uncomfortable at the mention, he said, and teachers later told him they became certified to teach a course but were not allowed to because a group of parents complained.

No other state has a similar ban, Gray said.

Gray’s proposal tried to mollify his critics: His bill stipulated that “chanting, mantras, mudras, use of mandalas, and 11 namaste greetings shall be expressly prohibited.”

The state legislator told reporters, “This whole notion that if you do yoga, you’ll become Hindu — I’ve been doing yoga for 10 years and I go to church and I’m very much a Christian.”

With additional reporting from The Washington Post

Bright lights, bug city: Study explains why 45 million grasshoppers swarmed Las Vegas

Las Vegas is all about excess and July 2019 was no different when some 45 million grasshoppers descended on its dazzling skyline, a horde of insects that appeared on weather radar like a thunderstorm.

© Provided by National Post 

Grasshoppers swarm a light a few blocks off the Strip on July 26, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Now, new research published in Biology Letters sheds light on the insect invasion. Rather than a biblical plague visited upon the city of sin in the Nevada desert, scientists see a convergence of more common phenomena.

By mapping vegetation and weather surveillance data, researchers found the insects scattered to forage for vegetation at dusk and swarmed Vegas after dark.

The study counted more grasshoppers in a single day than the city gets visitors in an entire year.

“I think that’s one of the cool aspects of this paper — to be able to quantify the number of grasshoppers in those ‘hordes’, and show that their movement is correlated with bright lights and the landscape below,” the study’s lead scientist, Elske Tielens, wrote in an email.

Footage from 2019 show teeming masses of insects painting the Vegas sky and littered throughout roads and parking lots in a deluge that lasted from June until mid-August. The radar picked up more than 45 million grasshoppers when the swarm peaked on July 27, adding up to around 30 metric tons in weight.

Interestingly, the authors found the grasshoppers congregated more around the Vegas strip, flocking to the brightest lit regions of the night sky.

The scale of this influx depends on the coming together of two things: “large grasshopper populations because of favourable conditions, wet winter and spring [with] lots of green vegetation … and the proximity of a large urban ‘light trap,’” Tielens said.

The study newly examines the effect that artificial lights at night have on the behaviour of insects at this scale. Their interactions with man-made environments could help with conserving insect diversity and managing pest species, according to the authors.

Invertebrates that are drawn to light may be “trapped” in unsuitable areas, hindering their ability to forage and mate, they write, adding certain moths drawn to light-polluted areas are known to show greater population declines.

Outbreaks of the very same pallid-winged grasshoppers were found in Arizona in the fifties, sixties and 1998, Tielens points out, including in Phoenix, Casa Grande, Tucson, and surroundings.

“It is likely this kind of event could happen again.”

The day of the locust : West, Nathanael, 1903-1940 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

'Mystery and milieu:' Survey says Canadians have seen more UFOs during pandemic

WINNIPEG — It was a clear afternoon when a man driving down a rural road in Alberta with his son saw a pie-shaped object levitating in the sky just before the thing rotated, turned black and suddenly disappeared.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

"There were no windows, lights, lines or markings on the object's surface and the edges were all rounded," says a transcript of the man's report made to Winnipeg's Ufology Research.

"Within (one minute) of us seeing the object, we witnessed a military plane flying in the direction of our sighting."

The report of the unidentified flying object was one of hundreds counted during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, says a report released Tuesday.

Chris Rutkowski with Ufology Research said sightings of UFOs across Canada — levitating discs, erratic spaceships and floating triangular objects — increased by 46 per cent in 2020.

He said the total of 1,243 sightings last year is one of the highest recorded in a single year. Roughly 30 per cent of the sightings were in Ontario and 24 per cent came from Quebec.

The high number of reports suggests an average of three UFO sightings every day, he said.

"Anything that is seen in the sky that a person doesn't think is a star, planet or plane is (a) UFO," said Rutkowski, who has been collecting unusual sightings in the sky since 1989.

"That's strictly an unidentified flying object by the definition."

One person in Toronto reported seeing a UFO levitating 1 1/2 metres away from his balcony before it folded in on itself. A pilot flying from Thunder Bay, Ont., reported an object about a metre in diameter passing over the plane's right wing even though his radar reported zero traffic in the airway.

Some sightings turned out to be a satellite, a plane flying at an awkward angle or light playing tricks, Rutkowski said. But 13 per cent were classified as unexplained.

"There's a persistent phenomenon that won't go away," he said.

"It certainly is very, very impressive and causes (people) to report them to various agencies from police, RCMP, to national defence and other agencies."

The astronomer said he doubts UFOs are being operated by an extraterrestrial being.

"As an astronomer, my background suggests there probably is alien life out there, but travelling between stars is very, very difficult."

But, Rutkowski said, once in a while a police officer or a pilot, who are considered credible observers, report a UFO sighting and researchers have to take their sightings seriously.

"What do you do with those cases? Do you just chalk them up to one of those things? Or does that make you think there is something behind all the mystery and milieu?"

He suggested there could be two reasons why more Canadians saw objects that seemed out of this world.

Early in the pandemic, the U.S. government released videos of unidentified aerial phenomena recorded by the navy.

"That (drove) some people to look a little more carefully in the sky and believe that UFOs are a little more popular and frequent than one believes."

It's also possible the pandemic has caused people to think a bit more about their lives and to wonder if we're alone in the universe.

"People were spending more time with their families, in their own backyards, and were ... appreciating nature and what's surrounding them (and) UFOs are a part of human culture.

"This is probably a way of just imagining what life is like in the universe, beyond the borders of our little blue speck in space."

Rutkowski encourages Canadians to continue reporting UFOs.

"We really have no information about what aliens might be like."

He adds that any being intelligent enough to travel between stars should have figured out some of the problems that exist on Earth, such as wars, famine and climate change.

"So, if you've seen a UFO, you're in very good company."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2021

— By Fakiha Baig in Edmonton

___

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

The Canadian Press

Bright lights in the sky: A look at some of the UFO sightings in Canada last year

WINNIPEG — A recent survey posted by Ufology Research in Winnipeg says there was a jump in UFO sightings in Canada last year. Here are some of the 1,243 sightings:

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Jan. 23, 2020 — Someone shovelling snow off their Toronto balcony reported seeing a two-metre long object silently levitating about 1.5 metres away. As the person continued staring at the black and silver object, one side folded and disappeared.

Jan. 23, 2020 — On the same day near Guelph, Ont., a person reported seeing two bright lights following a plane. As the plane went in another direction, the lights continued moving forward at a fast speed and a massive circular object appeared behind the lights. The observer said it appeared the lights were escorting the UFO.

Feb. 3, 2020 — It was a clear day when a man driving down a rural road in Alberta with his son saw a grey pie-shaped object levitating in the sky just before it rotated, turned black and suddenly disappeared. Within the next minute, they saw a military plane flying towards the mysterious object. They said the round UFO had no windows or markings.

Video: Rocket debris from satellite launch puts on light show over southern B.C. (cbc.ca)

July 24, 2020 — A pilot of a North Star Air Ltd. plane heading to Sachigo Lake, Ont., from Thunder Bay, Ont., saw an object pass over the plane's right wing. The pilot said the UFO was about one-metre in diameter. The plane's radar indicated there was no object in the vicinity.

Aug. 30, 2020 — A man in Ottawa pulled out his binoculars after observing an object with flashing lights hovering in the clear sky. He described the chevron-shaped UFO as black with green, blue and purple with flashing lights underneath. He also said his wife confirmed that the object levitated in the sky for about 20 minutes before it moved west.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 30, 2021.

The Canadian Press

Sierra Nevada Corp. unveils space station plans

Sierra Nevada Corporation held a news conference Wednesday to reveal its vision for an integrated, free-flying commercial space station, building on key elements of the "Life" habitat and "Dream Chaser" spaceplane design. (March 31)

Duration: 01:04 

CRYPTOZOOLOGY BABY CTHULHU DISCOVERED

FROM THE MEZOLITHIC PERIOD

CANADA

Residential School Survivors' stories and experiences must be remembered as class action settlement finishes

Cindy Hanson, Professor, Dept of Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, Curtis J Shuba, Research Associate, Sociology and Social Studies, University of Regina, and Sidey Deska-Gauthier, Research Associate, Political Science, University of Guelph

March 31 marks the conclusion of the largest class action settlement in Canada’s history. After 14 years, the Independent Assessment Process (IAP) — a compensation process established to resolve claims of serious physical, sexual or emotional abuse suffered at Indian residential schools — is officially over.

Students of the Metlakatla Indian Residential School, B.C.
© (William James Topley. Library and Archives Canada, C-015037) 

Despite the fact that it collected claims from more than 38,000 Indian residential school survivors, the IAP remains relatively unknown.

The court-ordered destruction of IAP testimonies and records, the biased and superficial mainstream news media reports and the continued emphasis on compensation and costs ensure that if it is remembered, it will be through a colonial gaze.

This gaze represents the perspective through which the process is framed, what is explicitly valued or absent, and whose story is remembered: the colonial narrative is privileged and the Indigenous voice limited.

Our national study seeks to understand perspectives and the framing of the IAP to create public knowledge, in the wake of the destruction of records. The study analyzes government documents (Hansard Index, the traditional name of the transcripts of Parliamentary debates), national and Indigenous media, along with transcripts produced through interviews and focus groups with survivors, health support workers, adjudicators, judges and lawyers. The results presented here are preliminary.

Read more: Residential school literature can teach the colonial present and imagine better futures

A bit of background

Of the 38,000 survivors who applied to the IAP, almost 27,000 attended adjudications — an out-of-court process. The adjudication gave survivors the opportunity to tell their story of abuse to an adjudicator and government representative, with optional supports including a lawyer, health support worker, elder, translator or family. The fate of the records and testimonies from these hearings — 800,000 documents — was decided by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2017.

The court upheld the position of the Indian Residential School Adjudication Secretariat, the body responsible for administering the IAP, that the testimonies would be destroyed unless individual survivors decided to claim or share their records. Currently only a handful of survivors have requested their transcripts or offered to make (sometimes redacted) versions publicly accessible through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). In 2027, any remaining survivor testimonies and records will be destroyed.

In January 2020 an Ontario Superior Court ruling blocked the creation of static reports. These included information the secretariat gathered during the IAP about variables like the child’s age and sex, particularities of residential schools, types of abuses and community impacts. The case was appealed by the NCTR and the Ontario Court of Appeal’s judgment is pending.

Coverage of the IAP: Colonial and wanting

Media coverage of the IAP is sparse. Preliminary results of our study reveal a focus on the trials and tribulations of a bureaucratic process that attempted to combine class action law with reconciliation-based gestures. Lost in this narrative is the survivors’ lived experiences within the IAP and a critical evaluation of the IAP’s overarching goals: healing and reconciliation.

Through our study, “Reconciling Perspectives and Building Public Memory: Learning from the Independent Assessment Process,” we established factors that played key roles in healing: giving testimony, and supporting, believing and validating the survivors. This perspective was largely forgotten by the media and instead reports often focused on the credibility of survivors’ claims of abuse, financial compensations and court cases. It was, however, acknowledged in the IAP’s final report.

© (Bud Glunz/Library and Archives Canada, PA-134110) 

Cree students sit in class at All Saints Indian Residential School 

in Lac La Ronge, Sask., in March 1945.

The dominant narrative conflated success of the IAP with compensation. For example, the secretariat reported success when the claimant garnered a cash settlement (89 per cent success rate with an average of $91,000 in compensation). And although compensation metrics are certainly one indicator of success, the experiences of survivors telling their stories are key to considering the IAP’s larger goals.

The defensive posture of the federal government recently surfaced. An independent review of claims (specifically those from St. Anne’s Indian Residential School) was recently announced following critiques by survivors and public officials like former senator Murray Sinclair and MP Charlie Angus.

Elected officials in the House of Commons had an opportunity to contribute to public memory based on meaningful reconciliation, but it was largely swept away in partisan politics. Looking at Hansard Index debates from 2004-19, we found the IAP was discussed only 28 times.

Read more: Indian day school survivors are seeking truth and justice

The significance of Indian residential school abuses, the damage the system did to families and communities, the litigation and compensation settlements that came after the IAP can only be fully comprehended within Canada’s long history of denial of Indigenous human and gender rights.

The move from explicit systems of violence to concealed structures of domination cannot be mistaken for reconciliation. We must examine the ways in which Indigenous rights are both explicitly and implicitly advanced or denied: this was highlighted in an earlier IAP study that found that although residential schools taught girls domestic tasks, unpaid work caring for children was not acknowledged or compensated in the IAP model.

Remembering for a common future

We fear additional tragedies are inevitable without abundant data regarding abuse factors, or intergenerational and community impacts. These data add a quantifiable dimension to the horrors of residential schools and remind us of the consequences of racist public policy. Such policy is not just about the individuals impacted; it affects the consciousness of collectives and communities.

Public records are valuable for understanding how public memory is created, and who is directing its narrative. Unless attention is paid to the ways in which the media and Canada continue to decentre Indigenous voices and experiences the colonial gaze will endure.

How residential schools and the IAP are remembered is not only relevant to Canada’s identity but for government-Indigenous and public-Indigenous relations, now and into the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cindy Hanson received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Insight Grant) for the study this article is based on.

Curtis J Shuba is a paid research associate on this SSHRC Insight Grant (on which this article is based).

Sidey Deska-Gauthier is a paid research associate on this SSHRC Insight Grant (on which this article is based).

Scientists: Grizzlies expand turf but still need protection

The bears now occupy about 6% of their historical range in the contiguous U.S., up from 2% in 1975.

BILLINGS, Mont. — Grizzly bears are slowly expanding the turf where they roam in parts of the northern Rocky Mountains but need continued protections, according to government scientists who concluded that no other areas of the country would be suitable for reintroducing the fearsome predators.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday released its first assessment in almost a decade about the status of grizzly bears in the contiguous U.S. The bruins are shielded from hunting as a threatened species except in Alaska.

BOTH PARKS BORDER ON CANADA BEARS KNOW NO BORDERS
Grizzly populations grew over the past 10 years in two areas — the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, with more than 700 bears; and around Glacier National Park in Montana, which is home to more than 1,000 of the animals.

Grizzly numbers remain low in other parts of the Northern Rockies, and scientists said their focus is on bolstering those populations rather than reintroducing them elsewhere in the country.

The bears now occupy about 6% of their historical range in the contiguous U.S., up from 2% in 1975.

Conservationists and some university scientists have pushed to return bears to areas including Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and California’s Sierra Nevada.

The 368-page assessmen t makes no recommendation on the topic, but scientists looked at the possibility of bears in more areas as part of an examination of their remaining habitat.

That analysis showed grizzlies would be unable to sustain themselves in the San Juans, the Sierra Nevada or two other areas -- Utah’s Uinta Mountains and New Mexico’s Mongollon Mountains.

“They were looking for areas that could sustain grizzly bears as opposed to areas that would continuously need for humans to drop bears in there,” said Hilary Cooley, the Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly bear recovery co-ordinator.

In each case, officials said, bears would face the same challenge — not enough remote, protected public lands, high densities of humans and little chance of connecting with other bears populations to maintain healthy populations.

An estimated 50,000 grizzlies once inhabited western North America from the Pacific Ocean to the Great Plains. Hunting, commercial trapping and habitat loss wiped out most by the early 1900s. The bears were last seen in California in the 1920s and the last known grizzly in Colorado was killed by an elk hunter in 1979.

Grizzly bears have been protected as a threatened species in the contiguous U.S. since 1975, allowing a slow recovery in a handful of areas. An estimated 1,900 live in the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington state.

The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2019 in a bid to force officials to consider restoring grizzlies to parts of seven more western states. A U.S. District judge ruled last year that the government was not compelled to draft recovery plans for the bears in new areas.

Protections for bears in the Yellowstone region were lifted under former President Donald Trump but later restored under a court order just as Idaho and Wyoming prepared to hold public hunts for grizzlies for the first time in decades. Five Republican U.S. senators from the region this week introduced legislation to strip protection from Yellowstone-area bears and put them under state jurisdiction.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso said in a statement that President Joe Biden's administration had missed an opportunity Wednesday to declare restoration efforts in the region a success and lift protections.

Biologists say Yellowstone grizzlies are “biologically-recovered." But an appeals court last year said the government had not done enough to make sure hunting and other pressures don’t reduce the population size in the future to where the bears’ genetic health could be harmed.

Centre for Biological Diversity attorney Andrea Zaccardi said state officials, hunting groups and the agriculture industry had too much influence on decisions about bears made under Trump. She urged officials under Biden to take a “less politically-motivated look at grizzly bear recovery.”

Wyoming ranchers who want grizzlies under state control sided with the government in the legal dispute over where bears should be restored. They would oppose any attempt by the new administration to reverse course, said Will Trachman with Mountain States Legal Foundation, which represents the ranchers.

“We hope they won't roll over on their own victory,” he said.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who oversees Fish and Wildlife Service, co-sponsored legislation while in Congress to increase protections for bears and reintroduce them on tribal lands. Haaland declined to say how she would approach the issue when questioned during her February confirmation hearings.

“I imagine at the time I was caring about the bears,” she said.

Matthew Brown, The Associated Press

A new survey suggests grizzly bear numbers in Alberta's central Rocky Mountains have doubled since 2005.   

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The survey says there are about 88 grizzlies in 7,300 square kilometres of summits and foothills between the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 11 roughly 200 kilometres to the north. That's up from 42 bears in 2005.

"That population has doubled," said Gordon Stenhouse, the biologist who led the survey done between 2005 and 2018.

The results follow an earlier survey in another region that saw bear populations double. That work, also by Stenhouse, found that grizzly numbers in the northern Rockies had increased to 74 from 36 between 2004 and 2014.

Stenhouse also released a survey of bears in the Swan Hills region in northwestern Alberta. He estimated 62 bears live there — "more bears than we thought were there," Stenhouse said.

The new survey didn't include Banff National Park. Parks Canada says 62 bears live in the park at least some of the time.

Stenhouse's tally was done by setting up scent lures of rotting cattle blood mixed with canola oil and surrounding them with barbed wire. The bears climbed over or under the wire and left tufts of hair behind, which were then subjected to DNA analysis.

Stenhouse credits two main factors for the bruin boom: "Not as many bears being killed and food resources are plentiful."

Alberta ended its grizzly hunt in 2006, which removed a major cause of bear deaths.

Logging has also created a younger, more open forest favourable to bears, Stenhouse said.

"When you have more young forest, you have more young whitetail deer and moose and species that are associated with younger forest stands. Those are prey items for grizzly bears."

Stenhouse credits the industry with logging in ways that are easier on bears.

"Much more attention has gone into road planning and access management. (Foresters) have been using some of the research tools that we've generated."

The younger forest does create problems of its own.

Some species, including caribou and weasels, need old forests. Forestry also creates roads and more access for humans is generally bad news for wildlife.

"But as long as we can keep human-caused mortality down, it looks like bear foods and habitat are doing OK," Stenhouse said.

"This is great news for grizzly bears," said Aerin Jacob, a biologist with the Y2Y Initiative, which works to preserve wildlife corridors from Yellowstone in the United States to Yukon.

But prime bear habitat has to be balanced with other forest stands that support different species, she said.

"We need to maintain natural variability."

Forests are also coming under increased pressure from recreational and industrial users. Permitted roads for coal exploration, for example, already exceed limits in Alberta's grizzly bear recovery plan in some parts of the animal's range.

"Some of the ways we have to focus conservation efforts are about roads and about human-wildlife coexistence," said Jacob. "We know very clearly that more roads is bad news."

Provincial statistics from 2009-18 show that 129 of 208 human-caused grizzly deaths were accidental or as a result of illegal kills — both related to roads.

Jacob said it's also important to keep the big picture in mind.

"This might be good news in a couple of these bear management areas, but let's think about how grizzly bears are doing overall and how much of their habitat has been lost overall."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 31, 2021.

— Follow @row1960 on Twitter

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press

Reversing Trump, Pentagon to release new transgender policy


WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Wednesday will sweep away Trump-era policies that largely banned transgender people from serving in the military, issuing new rules that offer them wider access to medical care and assistance with gender transition, defence officials told The Associated Press.

© Provided by The Canadian PressThe new department regulations allow transgender people who meet military standards to enlist and serve openly in their self-identified gender, and they will be able to get medically necessary transition-related care authorized by law, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions not yet made public.

The changes come after a two-month Pentagon review aimed at developing guidelines for the new policy, which was announced by President Joe Biden just days after he took office in January.

Biden's executive order overturned the Trump policy and immediately prohibited any service member from being forced out of the military on the basis of gender identity. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin then gave the Pentagon two months to finalize the more detailed regulations that the military services will follow.

The new rules also prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Their expected release Wednesday coincides with International Transgender Day of Visibility.

Austin has also called for a reexamination of the records of service members who were discharged or denied reenlistment because of gender identity issues under the previous policy. Results of that review have not been released.

Until a few years ago, service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender, but that changed during the Obama administration. In 2016, the Pentagon announced that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly, and that by July 2017, they would be allowed to enlist.

After Donald Trump took office, however, his administration delayed the enlistment date and called for additional study. A few weeks later, Trump caught military leaders by surprise, tweeting that the government wouldn’t accept or allow transgender people to serve “in any capacity” in the military.

After a lengthy and complicated legal battle and additional reviews, the Defence Department in April 2019 approved a policy that fell short of an all-out ban but barred transgender troops and recruits from transitioning to another sex and required most individuals to serve in what the administration called their “birth gender.”

Under that policy, currently serving transgender troops and anyone who had signed an enlistment contract before the effective date could continue with plans for hormone treatments and gender transition if they had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

But after that date, no one with gender dysphoria who was taking hormones or had transitioned to another gender was allowed to enlist. Troops that were already serving and were diagnosed with gender dysphoria were required to serve in the gender assigned at birth and were barred from taking hormones or getting transition surgery.

The new policies being released Wednesday are similar to those developed in 2016.

As of 2019, an estimated 14,700 troops on active duty and in the reserves identify as transgender, but not all seek treatment. There are more than 1.3 million active-duty troops and close to 800,000 in the National Guard and Reserves.

Since July 2016, more than 1,500 service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria; as of Feb. 1, 2019, there were 1,071 currently serving. According to the Pentagon, the department spent about $8 million on transgender care from 2016 to 2019. The military’s annual health care budget tops $50 billion.

All four service chiefs told Congress in 2018 that they had seen no discipline, morale or unit readiness problems with transgender troops serving openly in the military. But they also acknowledged that some commanders were spending a lot of time with transgender people who were working through medical requirements and other transition issues.

Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press