New Bill Proposes Cutting Pentagon Spending to Fund Vaccines for Poor Nations

"We can't bomb our way out of a global pandemic," said Rep. Mark Pocan, the sponsor of the legislation, "Shifting funds from weaponry and military contractors to producing Covid vaccines will save hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of lives around the world."


Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby speaks to the media on January 28, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)


JAKE JOHNSON

August 20, 2021

Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin introduced legislation this week that would cut billions of dollars from the Pentagon's massive budget and invest those funds in global coronavirus vaccination efforts, which are badly lagging as rich countries continue to hoard doses and rush ahead with booster shots.

"Shifting funds from weaponry and military contractors to producing Covid vaccines will save hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of lives around the world."
—Rep. Mark Pocan

The Covid Defense Act proposes transferring $9.6 billion in U.S. military spending to Covax—a global vaccination initiative led by the World Health Organization—to assist with the procurement of doses for the people of low-income nations. Thus far, just 1.3% of people in poor countries have received at least one vaccine dose.

In a press release, Pocan's office said that the funding—which represents just 1.3% of the $740.5 billion in U.S. military spending approved for 2021—"could lead to an additional 1.8 billion Covid vaccine doses for lower-income countries in 2021 and early 2022." If passed, Pocan's office said, the new legislation could provide vaccine access to another 30% of the world's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

"We can't bomb our way out of a global pandemic," Pocan said in a statement. "Right now, Covid is the greatest risk to our national security as well as the world's security. Shifting funds from weaponry and military contractors to producing Covid vaccines will save hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of lives around the world."

"At a time when America spends more on its military than the next 11 closest nations combined," the Wisconsin Democrat added, "we should be able to sacrifice a little over 1% of that to save lives, build global goodwill, and actually make the world a safer, healthier place."



Pocan unveiled his legislation as Covax's vaccine distribution effort—which relies heavily on donations from rich countries—continues to falter, in large part due to inadequate supply. As the New York Times reported earlier this month, "Covax has struggled to acquire doses: It stands half a billion short of its goal."

"Covax hasn't failed, but it is failing," Dr. Ayoade Alakija, a co-chair of the African Union's vaccine delivery program," told the Times. "We really have no other options. For the sake of humanity, Covax must work."

The Covid Defense Act would authorize President Joe Biden to direct $9.6 billion in funding to coronavirus vaccine production and distribution efforts benefiting low-income countries, many of which are currently being ravaged by Covid-19.

According to survey results released Thursday by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, nearly 70% of likely U.S. voters want the Biden administration to invest in global vaccination efforts, particularly a worldwide vaccine manufacturing program.

"The American public overwhelmingly supports doing what's right and necessary: massively ramping up coronavirus vaccine production so that everyone on the planet can be vaccinated," Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. "That's a humanitarian imperative as the disease spreads faster and faster among low-vaccinated low- and middle-income countries. It's also a requirement even to end the pandemic in the U.S."

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Nearly Half the World's Children at 'Extremely High Risk' for Facing Effects of Climate Crisis, Report Finds

"Virtually no child's life will be unaffected" by the climate emergency, said the director of UNICEF.


A village official evacuates a child from a flooded area following heavy rains in Dazhou in China's southwestern Sichuan province on July 12, 2021. 

(Photo: STR/AFP via Getty Images)

JULIA CONLEY

August 20, 2021

On Friday, the third anniversary of climate campaigner Greta Thunberg's lone protest outside the Swedish Parliament, a global report revealed the scale of risks posed by the climate emergency for the world's children.

The United Nations' agency for children's rights, UNICEF, introduced the first-ever Children's Climate Risk Index, which shows that nearly half of the world's children are at "extremely high risk" for being faced with dangerous effects of the planetary crisis.

"The climate crisis is a child rights crisis," said UNICEF.

About one billion children live in dozens of developing countries that are facing at least three to four climate impacts, including drought, food shortages, extreme heat, and disease, the report, launched in collaboration with Fridays for Future, found.

"For the first time, we have a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire," said Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, in a statement.

"Our futures are being destroyed, our rights violated, and our pleas ignored."
—climate activists Greta Thunberg, Adriana Calderón, Farzana Faruk Jhumu, and Eric Njuguna

Some of the highest-risk countries include India, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic—countries which are among the least responsible for rampant fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions contributing to the climate crisis.

"The top 10 countries that are at extremely high risk are only responsible for 0.5% of global emissions," Nick Rees, lead author of the report, told The Guardian.

UNICEF used high-resolution maps of climate impacts as well as maps showing children's vulnerability to poverty, lack of access to clean water, and other factors that make young people less able to survive climate-related catastrophes like extreme weather events.

While nearly half of the world's children are at extreme risk for experiencing multiple effects of the climate crisis firsthand, nearly every child on Earth was found to be at risk for at least one impact, including heat waves and air pollution.

"Virtually no child's life will be unaffected," Fore said.

According to the report, 820 million children—more than one-third—are at risk for experiencing extreme heatwaves like the deadly ones that have affected the United States' Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Western Europe this year. One in seven children are at risk for facing flooding rivers, and two billion are currently highly exposed to air pollution.


"Children are not afraid—and nor should they be—to demand that adults do everything they can to protect their future home."
—UNICEF

Thunberg, who is 18, was among the young climate leaders who wrote the foreward to the report, demanding urgent action by the world's policymakers as she did outside the Swedish Parliament in 2018 and then at weekly Fridays for Future demonstrations that quickly spread across the world, with millions of children and young adults joining.

"Our futures are being destroyed, our rights violated, and our pleas ignored. Instead of going to school or living in a safe home, children are enduring famine, conflict and deadly diseases due to climate and environmental shocks," wrote Thunberg, Adriana Calderón of Mexico, Farzana Faruk Jhumu of Bangladesh, and Eric Njuguna of Kenya. "These shocks are propelling the world's youngest, poorest, and most vulnerable children further into poverty, making it harder for them to recover the next time a cyclone hits, or a wildfire sparks."

The young advocates also published an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday to mark the release of the report.

"The fundamental goal of the adults in any society is to protect their young and do everything they can to leave a better world than the one they inherited," they wrote. "The current generation of adults, and those that came before, are failing at a global scale."

The report calls for children to be included in worldwide policy discussions and decision-making regarding the mitigation of the climate crisis, including the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) scheduled for November.

Policymakers attending the conference hope to secure a plan for global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, mobilize financing from rich countries to help the developing world mitigate the crisis, and finalize regulations to make the Paris climate agreement operational.

"There is still time for countries to commit to preventing the worst, including setting the appropriate carbon budgets to meet Paris targets, and ultimately taking the drastic action required to shift the economy away from fossil fuels," reads the report. "We must acknowledge where we stand, treat climate change like the crisis it is and act with the urgency required to ensure today’s children inherit a liveable planet."

Considering that decisions made at COP26 "will define their future," Fore told The Guardian, "children and young people need to be recognized as the rightful heirs of this planet that we all share."

The report also recommends increasing the resilience and delivery of social services including healthcare, access to clean water, and social safety nets to "mitigate the worst impacts of climate change" and nature-based solutions to the crisis including wetland restoration and ecosystem protection.

UNICEF highlighted some positive recent large-scale changes including the falling cost of renewable energy sources and increased recognition by the financial system of "the risks that a degrading climate poses," leading to divestment from pollution-causing fossil fuel projects.

"One of the biggest reasons for hope is the power of children and young people. In recent years, children and young people have taken to the streets to demand action on climate change, and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic they have continued their protest online," reads the report. "They have revealed the depth of frustration that they feel at this intergenerational form of injustice, as well as their courage and willingness to challenge the status quo, and their role as key stakeholders in addressing the climate crisis."

"Children are not afraid—and nor should they be—to demand that adults do everything they can to protect their future home," said UNICEF.

"Movements of young climate activists will continue to rise, continue to grow and continue to fight for what is right because we have no other choice," said Jhumu, Njuguna, Calderón, and Thunberg in the report. "We must acknowledge where we stand, treat climate change like the crisis it is, and act with the urgency required to ensure today’s children inherit a liveable planet."

ACADEMIA
Letters
Government leadership and social mobilisation for crises planning: 

From wartime mobilisation to pandemic response to climate action

Laurence Delina
As we continue working towards containing COVID-19, we see how public resources have been deliberately re-adjusted towards this public health disaster. Many governments went on to adopt a wartime-like mobilization approach to produce necessary testing kits and pro-tective gears in quantities at a period of time never previously thought out (Kreitman 2020;Mulder 2020; Yglesias 2020). Research funds were also made available at quick speed to develop vaccines (Piper 2020). Communities started producing their own foods reminiscent of Victory Gardens during World War 2 (Sarmiento 2020; Rao 2020). Everywhere, we hearthe translation of wartime lingo to everyday conversations from ‘frontliners’ to ‘heroism to‘a common enemy.’ Crisis mobilisations, such as for the present pandemic and the past Great War, provides some lenses to strategize about another lingering emergency—that of acceler-ating climate change.These strategies, which I explored in details in my book (Delina, 2016), call for the mobil-isations of technologies, finance, labour, and policy to speed up the transition to sustainable and renewable energy systems.

 Deploying systems that will generate energy from wind, water, and sunlight to replace existing fossil fuel-based energy assets require massive investments of money, time, skills, and capacity. Factoring in the need to accomplish this project as quickly possible and across all communities, cities, and countries in light of the climate emergency would necessitate extraordinary mobilisation of vast resources. Sounds impossible but the present response to the pandemic and the historical stories of mobilisations for war seem to provide some sorts of a blueprint

https://www.academia.edu/44790571/Government_leadership_and_social_mobilisation_for_crises_planning_From_wartime_mobilisation_to_pandemic_response_to_climate_action?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Hurricane Henri: How the climate crisis is changing hurricanes

In the same week that Tropical Storm Fred caused catastrophic flooding in North Carolina, and Hurricane Grace made its second landfall in Mexico, Hurricane Henri is barreling toward New England, where it's expected to be the first to make landfall there in 30 years.

© Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images An aerial view of damage in the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian on September 5, 2019.

By Rachel Ramirez, CNN

Hurricanes -- also called tropical cyclones or typhoons outside North America -- are enormous heat engines of wind and rain that feed on warm ocean water and moist air. And scientists say the climate crisis is making them more potent.

The proportion of high-intensity hurricanes has increased due to warmer global temperatures, according to a UN climate report released earlier this month. Scientists have also found that the storms are more likely to stall and lead to devastating rainfall and they last longer after making landfall.

"We have good confidence that greenhouse warming increases the maximum wind intensity that tropical cyclones can achieve," Jim Kossin, senior scientist with the Climate Service, an organization that provides climate risk modeling and analytics to governments and businesses, told CNN. "This, in turn, allows for the strongest hurricanes -- which are the ones that create the most risk by far -- to become even stronger."

© David J. Phillip/AP Evacuees wade down a submerged section of Interstate 610 in Houston after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 caused widespread flooding.

Scientists like Kossin have observed that, globally, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories -- 3, 4 and 5 -- in recent decades, a trend that's expected to continue as global average temperature increases. They are also shifting closer to the poles, moving more slowly across land, growing wetter, and stalling in one location, Kossin found.

"There's evidence that tropical cyclones are more likely to stall," said Kossin, naming hurricanes Harvey, in 2017, Florence, in 2018, and Dorian, in 2019, as examples. Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 60 inches of rain on some parts of Texas, causing about $125 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, and killing more than 100 people.

"All of these were devastating to the places where they stalled," he added. "The combination of slower movement and more rain falling out of them increases coastal and inland flooding risk tremendously."

A 2020 study published in the journal Nature also found storms are moving farther inland than they did five decades ago. Hurricanes, which are fueled by warm ocean water, typically weaken after moving over land, but in recent years they have been raging longer after landfall. The study concludes that warmer sea surface temperatures are leading to a "slower decay" by increasing moisture that a hurricane carries.

And as storms like Henri makes landfall, torrential rain, damaging winds and storm surge become the most significant, often pernicious, threats. Storm surge, produced by wind blowing ocean water onshore is also expected to get worse over time due to stronger hurricane winds and climate change-fueled sea level rise, according to Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

.

© David Goldman/AP In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in 2017, Bob Richling carries Iris Darden out of her flooded North Carolina home as her daughter-in-law, Pam Darden, gathers her belongings.

"It's a very dangerous phenomenon," he said. "And it's responsible for a lot of the loss of life in the storms."

For every fraction of a degree the planet warms, according to the UN report, rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture. Earlier this week, what had been Tropical Storm Fred dumped more than 10 inches of rain on western North Carolina, according to the National Weather Service, which pushed the Pigeon River near Canton 9 feet above flood stage and killed at least four people.

The science behind climate change attribution, which attempts to determine how much of a role it played in extreme weather, has made significant advances in the past decade, according to the UN climate report. Heat waves, flooding, drought and higher coastal storm surge are things that scientists are more confident now in linking to climate change. But there are still some questions around hurricane development that need answers, according to Emanuel.

"Knowing where they develop and where they move is critical to understanding the threat," Emanuel said. "So we have to take into account changing tracks, changing intensity, changing frequency, and changing genesis -- and we're confident about some of them and we're not so confident about other elements."

Although it's hard for scientists to tell whether odd storm tracks in the North Atlantic, like Henri's, are becoming more frequent because of climate change, long-term changes along the coast in the Northeast will ultimately influence the storms that do make landfall there.

"One thing that we might be able to speculate on is that the very unusually warm ocean along the US Northeast coast and Canada has a likely human fingerprint on it," Kossin added. "These warm waters should allow Henri to maintain greater intensity as it moves northward."

Bob, in 1991, was the last hurricane that made landfall in the New England region. However, Irene, in 2011, and Sandy, in 2012, were destructive for the Northeast when they came ashore, even though they did not make landfall as hurricanes.

The 2020 hurricane season tore through the alphabet so quickly that it was forced to use Greek letters as names from September through November. This year's season is already above average: Atlantic storms beginning with the letter H typically occur toward the end of September, meaning Henri formed more than a month ahead of average.

As the planet rapidly warms, extreme weather events will become more disastrous and possibly harder to predict. Unless climate and emergency management policies are fixed, Emanuel says infrastructure damage and potential loss of life will increase.

"The forecasters' nightmare is going to bed with a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a populated area, and waking up with a Category 4," Emanuel said. "And as the climate warms, that becomes more and more likely."

Accent: Climate change is impacting the world’s tiniest organisms


A PhD student in the Boreal Ecology program at the Vale Living with Lakes Centre is studying how the large scale impacts of climate change can affect microscopic organisms in the Hudson Bay lowlands.

Working in the far north of Ontario and Manitoba, Adam Kirkwood is examining how permafrost thaw is changing the activity, composition, and abundance of microbial communities.

These microbes play an important role in processing different chemical elements in the environment. For example, they can break down carbon to produce greenhouse gases like methane or transform inorganic mercury into its more toxic, organic form.

By collecting samples and using molecular techniques like DNA sequencing, Kirkwood’s research highlights how climate change is altering the way that these organisms behave.

“The Hudson Bay lowlands is the world’s second largest northern peatland. It has an area of 372,000 kilometres squared, which is almost the same size as the province of Newfoundland and Labrador,” said Kirkwood.

“It’s a really big peatland that stores a lot of carbon, which is the element that is the main constituent of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. It also stores a lot of metals like mercury.”

The area is also very cold. This means that it has permafrost, which is any ground that remains completely frozen throughout the year.

“This permafrost has captured and stored all of this carbon and mercury, which means it hasn’t been cycled like it would somewhere like Sudbury where the ground freezes and thaws each year,” he said.

“Now, with climate change, this area is getting warmer and the permafrost is starting to thaw. That means that this carbon and mercury is becoming available for decomposition by microbial communities.”

These microbial communities are groups of microorganisms that live together in the same space. Communities are made up of tiny microbes like bacteria that interact with each other and different elements in the ecosystem.

“As the permafrost thaws in the Hudson Bay lowlands, it creates very unique environments and each of these different environments will have different habitats for microbial communities,” said Kirkwood.

“These permafrost thaw environments are very warm, and they have a lot of moisture. This creates suitable habitats for microbes called methanogens, for example, which decompose carbon and produce methane that is released into the atmosphere.”

Studying the behaviour of these methanogens was the focus of Kirkwood’s master’s thesis. For his PhD, he has turned towards microbes that play a role in processing mercury.

“Inorganic mercury is stored in the soils, and as the permafrost thaws, microbes now have access to this mercury. They take in this inorganic mercury, and though the microbe’s metabolic processes, its byproduct is the organic version – methylmercury,” said Kirkwood.

“It’s taking mercury from the ground and converting it into another kind of mercury, but that mercury is highly toxic.”

Once this mercury gets into the water and other aquatic ecosystems, he added, it can move up the food chain, and when it is consumed by humans, it can have negative health consequences.

This phenomenon has big implications for nearby communities that rely on subsistence fishing from their traditional territories.

“In the Hudson Bay lowlands, particularly around Attawapiskat and other communities, there has been a lot of focus on studying methylmercury in fish,” said Kirkwood.

“They have found that there is a significant amount of methylmercury in different types of fish, but we are interested in learning where this mercury in the water is coming from.”

The environment in the Hudson Bay lowlands, he added, is fairly pristine. There aren’t that many human-caused sources of mercury in the area, like from mining operations, for example.

“I am interested in kind of teasing out the linkages between the land and the water and whether this increase of mercury in the fish is coming from the land as a response to climate change,” he said.

Kirkwood will travel to far north communities to extract soil and permafrost samples – some of these samples will be sent to Western University to be analyzed for mercury content.

Back at the Living with Lakes Centre, Kirkwood will do a DNA extraction on the soils and send that for sequencing.

“We can use this information and put it through a database that tells us what kinds of microbes are in each sample. For example, it can tell me whether there are bacteria capable of methylmercury production present,” he said.

“That gives us an idea of what the microbial community looks like and it allows us to compare microbial communities from these different thawed environments.”

Once they know the composition of these microbial communities and how much mercury is in each sample, researchers can “tease out” environments more likely to produce methylmercury.

This information will be useful to inform policy decisions.

“One of the goals of my research is to be able to make a rough map. We should be able to say this area has lots of mercury stored in it and we also show that it has high potential for mercury methylation. Or we might find an area that has lots of mercury but a low potential for mercury methylation,” said Kirkwood.

“By making a map or an estimate of these environments, we can use that to help guide policy. We can say, OK, you really need to avoid development in this area because development and the destruction of the landscape could really lead to accelerated permafrost thaw and the production of methylmercury.”

Permafrost is very sensitive to changes, said Kirkwood. If you build a road over permafrost, for example, the heat from that road can leach into the ground and cause the permafrost to warm.

“Because the Hudson Bay lowlands is already a very southern area of permafrost, it’s very sensitive,” he said.

“Even changing the amount of snow cover on permafrost can lead to the initiation of thaw.”

Any development in the area that is not strategically placed could have negative impacts on the environment.

“Stepping away from microbes for a second and thinking about the bigger picture, permafrost is so important because it is basically the foundation of the north. As it thaws, it has implications for the people who live there,” said Kirkwood.

“In speaking with local communities, they’ve said that in the last 60 or 70 years, things like traveling across the land have become a lot harder because the permafrost is thawing. There are lots more ponds, swamps, and muskegs.”

Kirkwood said that historically, most research on permafrost thaw has been done in the western Canadian Arctic, the High Arctic, and in Nunavik in northern Quebec.

“Not many people have studied the permafrost in the Hudson Bay lowlands until about the last decade or two,” he said.

“There have been a few studies that came out showing pretty quick thawing of the permafrost near the Attawapiskat area. I have looked at air photos of my study area on the Hudson Bay coast from the 1950s until now. You can see that the degradation is quite extensive. We can only assume that’s because this area is warming up significantly.”

Kirkwood, who refers to himself as a veteran student of Laurentian University, completed both his undergraduate and master’s degree at the school.

“If you had asked me five or six years ago if I would be studying permafrost, I would have thought you were crazy – why would I want to study frozen dirt?” he said.

“But I started taking courses on it with my supervisor and something just clicked. I found it very interesting and I love the idea of how large-scale changes to the landscape can lead to such small-scale changes for things like microbes.”

He has been working on his PhD at the Living with Lakes centre for about a year and half.

The COVID-19 pandemic prevented fieldwork last summer, but he’s looking forward to heading north and collecting samples this year.

“What I really love about this work is that I don’t have to just sit in a lab,” he said.

“I actually get to go out there and see how these microbes are changing based on these bigger environmental changes.”

The Local Journalism Initiative is made possible through funding from the federal government.

sud.editorial@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @SudburyStar

Colleen Romaniuk, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Sudbury Star

BAD BIDEN #ENDWOLFHUNTING

Biden backs end to wolf protections but hunting worries grow

FARIBAULT, Minn. (AP) — President Joe Biden's administration is sticking by the decision under former President Donald Trump to lift protections for gray wolves across most of the U.S.

 But a top federal wildlife official on Friday told The Associated Press there is growing concern over aggressive wolf hunting seasons adopted for the predators in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Wolves under federal protection made a remarkable rebound in parts of the U.S. over the past several decades, after being driven from the landscape by excessive hunting and trapping in the early 1900s.

States took over wolf management last decade in the Northern Rockies and in January for the remainder of the Lower 48 states, including the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest.

The removal of Endangered Species Act protections had been in the works for years and was the right thing to do when finalized in Trump's last days, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Assistant Director for Ecological Services Gary Frazer told AP.

On Friday, attorneys for the administration asked a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from wildlife advocate s that seeks to restore protections, signaling the conclusion of Biden's promise on his first day in office to review the Trump move.

But wolf management policies in place at the state level have shifted dramatically since protections were lifted, and Frazer suggested the federal government could take steps to restore protections if population declines put wolves back on the path to extinction.

“Certainly some of the things we’re seeing are concerning,” he said.

Wisconsin moved quickly to reduce the state’s wolf numbers, after a pro-hunting group with close ties to conservative Republicans won a court order that allowed hunters — some using hounds — to kill 218 wolves in four days.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated legislatures in Idaho and Montana loosened hunting rules to allow tactics shunned by many wildlife managers, including hunting wolves at night and from the air and payments for dead wolves reminiscent of bounties that drove them to near-extinction.

Frazer said the different states showed a common approach: legislatures and politically appointed wildlife commissions taking determined steps to reduce populations.

“We're aware that circumstances have changed and we'll be watching closely to see how the population responds," he added.

The lead attorney in the lawsuit to restore protections for wolves outside of the Northern Rockies said he was disappointed in the Biden administration for not responding immediately to the push by states to cull more packs.

“Why should we hammer the population back down and lose all the gains that have been made before any kind of remedial action?" asked Tim Preso with the environmental law firm Earthjustice. "The writing's on the wall. Montana and Idaho are clear on what they're intending and Wisconsin is right behind them.”

Montana wildlife commissioners on Friday adopted hunting rule changes in accordance with new state laws that allow the use of snares to kill wolves, night hunting and use of bait — methods criticized as unethical by some hunters and former officials. The new rules went further than recommended by state wildlife experts, who for example wanted to limit snare use to private land only.

Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission Vice Chair Patrick Tabor, a hunting outfitter from the Whitefish area, said in voting in favor of the changes that he was proud of his hunting ethics. Tabor said the loosened rules “allow more opportunity for hunters, to give them in essence better odds in trying to be successful because they (wolves) are an incredibly difficult animal to hunt.”

Defenders of the move to lift federal protections noted efforts to put wolves under state management enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington going back to President Barack Obama.

Yet the policies adopted by the states reflect an increasingly partisan approach to predator management in legislatures dominated by Republicans.

The wolf population in the Midwest has grown to more than 4,400 wolves, according to government figures disputed by some scientists who say officials undercount wolves killed by poachers.

There's been growing frustration in recent years among livestock producers and hunters over attacks on cattle and big game. In Wisconsin, a Republican-controlled board set the state’s fall hunt quota at 300 animals, rejecting a 130-animal limit recommended by state wildlife managers.

Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general is seeking a court order to oust the board’s chairman, whose term expired in May. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has appointed a successor, but the incumbent is refusing to step down until the Senate confirms the appointment. The Senate, dominated by Republicans, hasn’t held a hearing on the appointment.

Hundreds of wolves are now killed annually by hunters and trappers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The Northern Rockies' population has remained strong — more than 3,000 animals, according to wildlife officials — because wolves breed so successfully and can roam huge areas of wild land in the sparsely populated region.

Some state officials are intent on reducing those numbers to curb livestock attacks and protect the big game herds that wolves prey upon. Supporters of restoring protections warn that will tip the scales and reduce wolf numbers to unsustainable levels, while also threatening packs in nearby states that have interconnected populations.

An indication of how deeply federal officials are worried about the states' wolf policies is expected in the next several weeks, when they respond to petitions filed in June to again put wolves in the U.S. West under federal protections.

___

This story has been corrected to reflect the name of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official. He is Gary Frazer, not Frazier.

___

Iris Samuels contributed from Helena, Montana. Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

Matthew Brown And John Flesher, The Associated Press

A game changer for the French Resistance: The Barbès metro attack, 80 years on

Issued on: 21/08/2021 - 

The German poster announcing the September 1941 Barbès-Rochechouart metro station attack in Paris and the repression that would follow in occupied France. © Musée de la Résistance nationale, historical collection, 1985

Text by: Stéphanie TROUILLARD


French Resistance member Pierre Georges shot dead a German naval midshipman on August 21, 1941, at Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in occupied Paris – the first deadly attack on the occupiers, which prompted the Nazis to kill hundreds of hostages they were holding in the occupied zone. FRANCE 24 looks back at this seminal moment for La Resistance, 80 years on.

The crisp bureaucratic prose of the Paris police report captures the daring and drama: “This morning, at 8:05am on August 21, at Barbès-Rochechouart station, line 4, at the platform for the Porte d’Orléans direction, a German naval officer, Mr. [Alfons] Moser, was shot twice as he was getting into the first-class carriage. [...] An individual standing at the door of the carriage fired two shots from a gun, through his pocket, at the officer approaching the other door. The perpetrator and another individual quickly got off the train, ran to the exit, jumped over the barriers and fled the scene.”

The Resistance fighter who killed the naval officer was Pierre Georges, 21, who soon became known by his nom de guerre Colonel Fabien. Georges had been made second-in-command of the Communist youth battalion at the start of August 1941.

“The attack was his brainchild,” noted Gilles Ferragu, a professor at the University of Paris Nanterre and author of an overview of hostage-taking throughout history, Hostages, une histoire.

Sprinting through the streets of Paris, Georges shouted: “We’ve avenged Titi!” Two of his comrades, Samuel Tyszelman and Henri Gautherot, had been executed two days earlier after their arrest at an anti-Nazi demonstration earlier in the month. General Otto von Stulpnagel, German military commander in occupied France, issued a decree on August 14 that all communist activity was henceforth punishable by death.


The Barbès attack changed the nature of the Occupation. The Wehrmacht (German army) commander in the Paris region announced two days afterwards that “any French people arrested – whether by the German authorities in France or by the French for the Germans – are considered hostages”.

“In response to any other such act, and corresponding to its gravity, a number of hostages will be shot,” the decree continued.

“The killing of the German naval officer was a pretext for the Nazis’ intensified repression in France, focused on the hostage policy,” Ferragu noted.

“Of course, the Wehrmacht was quite happy to take French hostages after the June 1940 capitulation without shooting them,” he added. “But that changed in August 1941.”

Mass executions

Hatred of communism was at the centre of Hitler’s worldview, with a Nazi canard maintaining the ideology was a Jewish plot as part of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory. But French communists kept a lid on their activities in light of the Nazis’ Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with the USSR – until Hitler tore up the agreement, invading the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.

“The French Communist Party kept a low profile until then,” said Dominique Tantin, head of the Association pour un Maitron des fusillés et exécutés (an association for the memory of Nazi execution victims known as Maitron), which works to honour the memory of French Resistance members killed by the Nazis.

“After Operation Barbarossa, the communists became fully involved in the Resistance – despite initial concerns, such as a reluctance to kill soldiers because they could well have been members of the working class,” Tantin continued.

“The executions of Tyszelman and Gautherot provoked the communists to ramp up their activities – and Georges decided to set an example.”

The first Nazi hostage killings in retribution took place in early September and intensified over the course of the month. A September 16 decree from Berlin created a climate of terror by encouraging the German occupiers to engage in massive reprisals – targeting communist and Jewish prisoners, whom the Nazis deemed “ideologically guilty”.

The decree unleashed mass executions. The best-known in France is the killing of 48 hostages in Paris, and Nantes and Châteaubriant in western France on October 22, 1941, in reaction to the assassination of senior Wehrmacht officer Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Hotz.

“This was the first huge execution, and it caused a major shock,” Tantin wrote.

Two days later, 50 hostages were executed in Gironde in France’s rural southwest in retaliation for an attack on a German naval officer in Bordeaux. But it was on December 15, 1941, that the killings reached a record, with 95 hostages shot dead.

In total, from September to December 1941, the Nazis killed 243 French hostages, including 154 non-Jewish communists and 56 Jews, most of whom were communists.

Nazis ‘should have stayed home’

General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of Free France – the London-based government-in-exile that rejected the June 1940 Armistice – said on an October 23 BBC broadcast: “French killings of the German occupiers are absolutely justified. If the Germans don’t want to be killed, they should have stayed home and not gone to war with us.”

But De Gaulle also urged the Resistance to engage only in strikes of major symbolic value, on the grounds that “it’s currently too easy for the enemy to retaliate with massacres”.

However, despite their toll in French blood and tears, the Nazi reprisals achieved a major Resistance goal of winning over French hearts and minds.

“In spite of everything, it was the horror of the German hostage killings in revenge that achieved the Resistance’s objective – rousing French people from their apathy and shifting public opinion decisively in the Resistance’s favour,” as Tantin put it.

The Vichy puppet regime was also involved in the reprisals. “When the occupiers wanted to take revenge for the Nantes attack, the Nazis asked [Marshal Philippe] Pétain’s regime to provide a list of hostages – and Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu complied, furnishing the Germans with a list of 61 people, mainly communists,” Tantin noted.

But these reprisals were counter-productive for Vichy as well as for the Nazis. They were no deterrent; the Resistance attacks continued. A new Nazi measure on November 7 decreed that captured Resistance fighters had to be deported to Germany.

‘Forgotten in collective memory’

As French public opinion soured further into disgust with the Nazi occupiers – and as Germany needed French labour to help provide military materiel – the hostage-killing policy ended by the end of November 1942.

However, the Nazis revived the policy on one final occasion after that – taking 50 French hostages from a prison camp near Paris and shooting them dead, a few days after the assassination of an SS colonel in Paris in September 1943.

According to Maitron’s research, the Nazis killed 819 hostages in the occupied zone (northern France and the entire Atlantic Coast, directly occupied by the Nazis, as opposed to the central and southern zone run by the Vichy regime collaborators) between 1941 and 1943.

The group have been working to compile biographies of each and every French hostage the Nazis killed. “They have been forgotten in the collective memory, and we need to show people their stories and their characters," Tantin said.

As the poet Louis Aragon wrote in Les Martyrs after he recovered the testimonies and letters in 1942 of the Resistance fighters killed at Châteaubriant: “Do such things really happen in France? Yes, they do, you can be sure of that. These 27 men embodied France – in a way that the people who identified them to their German executioners do not. Their blood will not have been shed in vain.”

This article was translated from the original in French.

RACIST, ANTI MIGRANT, ANTI VAXXER, WHITE NATIONALIST PARTY LEADER

People's Party Leader Maxime Bernier will not be in federal election debates
CBC/Radio-Canada 

© Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier will not be invited to participate in the upcoming election debates.

Leaders' Debates Commissioner David Johnston has confirmed that leaders of five political parties will be invited to participate in the upcoming election debates - but People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier is not among them.

The leaders of the Bloc Québécois, Conservative Party of Canada, Green Party of Canada, Liberal Party of Canada and New Democratic Party met the criteria to take part.

In order to be eligible as a participant, the leader must meet one of these three criteria:
The party has at least one MP in the House of Commons who was elected as a member of that party.

The party's candidates in the 2019 federal election received at least four per cent of the total number of valid votes cast.

The party has a national support level of at least four per cent, five days after the date the election is called. That is measured by leading national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations' most recently publicly reported results.

Earlier today, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he did not think Bernier should be invited to the debates on the grounds that he is "opposed to science" and has put out "dangerous rhetoric."

Bernier has said he does not plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine because he is relatively young and healthy, so he would be unlikely to experience severe symptoms if he became infected with the virus.

In the past, Bernier has flouted COVID-19 health restrictions by attending a number of rallies protesting against public health measures. He was arrested by Manitoba RCMP in June for violating public health orders.

A French-language debate will be held on Sept. 8 from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT, and an English-language event will be held the next day from 9 to 11 p.m. EDT. Both debates will take place at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que.

The debates are being produced by a coalition of media outlets: CBC News and Radio-Canada, APTN News, CTV News, Global News, L'actualité, Les coops de l'information, Le Devoir, Noovo Info and La Presse.

‘This is a crisis’: Yukon minister urges action on climate change


The Yukon might be the only jurisdiction in Canada with a climate scientist sitting in cabinet.


In the 1970s and 1980s, John Streicker committed himself to convincing others that climate change was real. In 2007, he was one of the reviewers for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report for the polar chapter. In May 2021 he became the Yukon’s Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources.

Now he’s in a position to do something about it.

“What the 2021 IPCC report is good for, is that it helps to reinforce that this stuff is unequivocal,” Streicker says.

The Intergovernmental Panel has had the herculean task to convince the world that climate change was man-made and could be solved with a move to a new energy economy.

“It’s that they’ve had to fight this crazy fight around denialism, which is not over. The U.S. is not over; but in Canada, it’s mostly done.”

Streicker cautions, that even though much of scientific debate is quieted, the challenges carry forward.

“It is not just the warming that is concerning – it’s the rate at which we are warming.”

He uses a teacher’s example. “Yes, a meteor strikes the earth, and it cools the planet very quickly because it puts up so much dust into the atmosphere. Yes, that’s faster. But other than that, this is the fastest that we know in the geologic record.”

Streicker makes the point that what is happening in the Yukon right now, like the record snowfalls, and flooding and the fires in British Columbia are not included in the report, because the science in the report is already two years old.

“But we do know is that what is happening now will be more frequent and more severe in the future. It’s off the charts, literally.”


It took a long time to get the climate moving. It takes an even longer time to put the brakes on.

Streicker explains further, “What people don’t understand, even with this report, is that suppose tomorrow we dropped our emissions to zero, we would still have decades of temperature rise, we would still have centuries to millennia of changes to our oceans.”

But this is not a reason to do nothing; it only adds to the urgency. As he says, “it should just motivate us to get more proactive around solutions.”

And for that, he points to the Yukon’s climate change document, Our Clean Future.

Streicker says there are several reasons why the Yukon’s prioritization of climate change actions needs to differ slightly from southern jurisdictions. One is the extreme seasonality of renewable energies, another is the predominance of transportation as a contributor to emissions.

For example, over half of Yukon’s emissions are attributed to transportation, whereas in southern Canada transportation only accounts for 25 per cent. Also, that data does not account for the whole picture – emissions are only tabulated from the time a truck crosses into the Yukon from British Columbia.

Both fuel and food are primarily trucked into the territory.

It is this kind of consideration that brings Streicker to his top four actions for the territory: electrification of transportation infrastructure (for everything from bikes to Zambonis to semi tractor-trailers); agriculture, as part of local food production; biomass (strategized to reducing fire risk); and retrofitting old houses and buildings.

He admits that increased production and seasonal storage of renewable energies are needed to change things up – either a new disruptive technology such as drastically improved battery life, or a project like the Moon Lake pump station as proposed in Yukon Energy’s 10-year electrical plan.

Streicker knows that the recently released IPCC report isn’t everything. There are still three more reports to come in 2022 as part of the Sixth Panel — Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; Mitigation of Climate Change; and a final Synthesis Report.

And, he acknowledges that Indigenous ways of knowing are absent from this report, for many reasons, including the rigorous scientifically-focused review process, but Streicker hopefully suggests that the importance of Indigenous means of habitat protection and the creation of corridors and pathways may find their way into subsequent studies. Some of those are in the Yukon’s strategy.

After all these years, John Streicker, the Yukon’s minister of energy,mines and resources still retains a scientist’s faith in the science behind the problems, and an optimist’s faith in the do-ability of the Yukon’s solution sets. He just hopes that there is enough public support.

As he said, “This is a crisis. We need to think of it in that kind of framework.”

Lawrie Crawford, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Yukon News

LIVE FIRE ON PEACEFUL PROTESTERS

Israel fires on protesting Palestinians in Gaza, 24 wounded

Issued on: 21/08/2021 

Palestinian medics and protesters evacuate an injured man hurt in clashes with Israeli security forces on Saturday SAID KHATIB AFP

Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP)

Israeli troops fired at Palestinian protesters who hurled firebombs and burned tires from behind the Gaza Strip's border fence Saturday, with the Gaza health ministry reporting 24 injuries.

"Twenty-four civilians were injured, including 10 children," the ministry said in a statement.

"Two of the injuries are critical, one of whom is a 13-year-old boy, who was hit in the head east of Gaza City."

The Israeli army told AFP "hundreds of rioters and demonstrators" had gathered along the border fence.

"Troops are prepared in the area and are using riot dispersal means, and if necessary, .22 calibre rounds," the army said.

The Hamas Islamic movement that rules Gaza had called a protest Saturday to mark the burning 52 years ago of Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

"Al-Aqsa Mosque is a red line, and any attack on it will be met with valiant resistance from our people," the movement said in a statement.

The protest came exactly three months since Israel and Hamas reached a truce following their deadliest fighting in years.

Over 11 days in May, Israel pounded Gaza with airstrikes in response to rockets fired from the enclave.

Hamas said it took action after Israeli security forces stormed Al-Aqsa.

Reconstruction in Gaza has stalled since a May 21 ceasefire, in part because of a crippling blockade Israel has maintained on the enclave since Hamas seized power in 2007.

On Thursday, Israel announced it would allow funds from Qatar to reach impoverished Palestinians in Gaza. Other restrictions remain.

In 2018, Gazans began a protest movement demanding an end to Israel's blockade and a right for Palestinians to return to lands they fled after the Jewish state was founded.

The Hamas-backed weekly demonstrations, often violent, sputtered as Israel killed some 350 Palestinians in Gaza over more than a year.

© 2021 AFP