Corn and other crops are not adapted to benefit from elevated carbon dioxide levels

CARL R. WOESE INSTITUTE FOR GENOMIC BIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

Research News

 

IMAGE: IN THEIR RECENT PAPER, SCIENTISTS ANALYZED 49 SPECIES OF GRASS CROPS AND FOUND THAT BY REBALANCING THE LEAVES' RESOURCES, PLANTS WOULD BETTER THRIVE IN TODAY'S CLIMATE. PICTURED: THE WEST PROJECT... view more 

CREDIT: WEST PROJECT

The U.S. backs out of the Paris climate agreement even as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels continue to rise. Through photosynthesis, plants are able to turn CO2 into yield. Logic tells us that more CO2 should boost crop production, but a new review from the University of Illinois shows that some crops, including corn, are adapted to a pre-industrial environment and cannot distribute their resources effectively to take advantage of extra CO2.

Most plants (including soybeans, rice, canola, and all trees) are C3 because they fix CO2 first into a carbohydrate containing three carbon atoms. Corn, sorghum, and sugarcane belong to a special group of plants known as C4, so-called because they first fix CO2 into a four-carbon carbohydrate during photosynthesis. On average, C4 crops are 60 percent more productive than C3 crops.

When crops are grown in elevated CO2 that mimic future atmospheric conditions, research shows that C3 crops can become more productive while some experiments suggest that C4 crops would be no more productive in a higher CO2 world.

"As scientists, we need to think several steps ahead to anticipate what the Earth will look like five to 30 years from now, and how we can design crops to perform well under those conditions," said Charles Pignon, a former postdoctoral researcher at Illinois. "We decided that a literature review and a retrospective analysis of biochemical limitations in photosynthesis would be able to give us some insight into why C4 crops might not respond and how we might alter this."

The literature review, published in Plant, Cell & Environment, was supported by Water Efficient Sorghum Technologies (WEST), a research project that aimed to develop bioenergy crops that produce more biomass with less water, with funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).

The team assembled a dataset of photosynthesis measurements from 49 C4 species, including the crops that could reveal photosynthetic limitations. The consistent pattern that emerged was that at low CO2--well below what plants would have experienced before the industrial revolution--C4 photosynthesis was limited by the activity of the enzyme that fixes CO2. However, at today's CO2 levels, C4 photosynthesis was limited by the capacity to provide the three-carbon molecule that accepts the fourth CO2.

"This finding is analogous to a car assembly line where the supply of engines is outpacing the supply of chassis to accept them," said co-author Stephen Long, the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences. "We need to engineer these plants to better balance their resources in one or both of two-ways."

First, the authors suggest that C4 crops need to cut back on the amount of the enzyme used to fix CO2 and re-invest the saved resources into making more of the CO2 acceptor molecule.

Secondly, they need to restrict the supply of CO2 into the leaf by reducing the number of pores (stomata) on the leaf surface. "Lowering the CO2 within the leaf would re-optimize the biochemistry, without lowering the rate of photosynthesis, and with fewer stomata, less water would be lost so we are increasing the crop's water use efficiency," Long said.

The WEST project concluded in 2019. These proposed changes to C4 crops are now being pursued through the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), which is supported by the Department of Energy.

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Water Efficient Sorghum Technologies (WEST) was a research project that helped develop bioenergy crops that require less water per acre to ensure a sustainable source of biofuel. The project was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and led by the University of Illinois in partnership with Cornell University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service.

 

Soil carbon changes in transition areas suggest conservation for Amazon, scientists say

University of Oregon-led project establishes a 1,600-year baseline for understanding how human impacts and climate affect the Amazon-Cerrado transition

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

Research News

 

EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 5, 2020 -- Conservation efforts on the edges of the Amazon forest, especially in light of recent deforestation by human disturbance, could help the region weather the storm of climate change, researchers say.

That assessment comes from an analysis of vegetation changes and carbon isotope signatures in the soil at 83 sites. The project, led by University of Oregon doctoral student Jamie Wright, established a record of soil changes associated with both climate and human activity over the last 1,600 years based on radiocarbon dating.

The study was published online Oct. 30 ahead of print in Global Change Biology.

Woody vegetation expansion into savannas, the research team found, had continued amid increasing moisture levels regardless of human impacts until only recently, mostly from rapid deforestation in the last decade. Climate modeling previously has suggested that local water and carbon cycles, as well as global climate patterns, are at risk.

"The past, like most things, leaves a trace behind and with it a rich history left to be told," said Wright, a member of the UO's Soil Plant Atmosphere Lab headed by co-author Lucas Silva, a professor in the Environmental Studies Program.

The forest-savanna borderlands, known as the Amazon-Cerrado transition, experience broad climatic and ecological influences. The study helped address uncertainties of those influences in the tropical ecosystem.

"Through the use of soil science, specifically with carbon isotopes, we unearthed a history of forest expansion over several millennia. This region is at the epicenter of deforestation and socio-ecological transformations that cause and drive climate change," Wright said.

Previous studies had suggested that forest expansion was primarily driven by increased precipitation, but that work, Silva noted, did not fully consider the impacts of local influences, such as fire frequency and intensity or whether it was occurring because of climate dynamics in the region. Focusing on soil changes, he said, allowed for these factors to be examined.

"Carbon storage in woody savannas and forests plants at this large of scale can be a significant carbon sink," Wright said. "Increasing tree cover also can ameliorate adverse climatic change impacts, such as droughts, by influencing the hydrological cycle and generating rain clouds."

In total, 742 soil samples were taken from forests, savannas and transition zones across a large swath of north-central Brazil, between latitudes 4 to 16 degrees south and longitudes 46 to 56 degrees west -- an area where precipitation and distribution vary significantly.

The research team also measured the leaf index of the ecosystem's cover, mostly the forest canopy, to understand changes in carbon isotope signatures in the soil. Such changes reflect land usage. To determine changes over time, radiocarbon activity and isotopic ratios were profiled in 43 selected depths that represented the different sites.

While the research affirmed that forest expansion has occurred in most of the past 1,600 years, the researchers found a trend of decreasing woody vegetation in the study area's easternmost sites. The decline, they said, may reflect the prevalence of dry deciduous or semi-deciduous tree species in those areas.

The observed incremental expansion into savannas, they wrote, could have significant impacts on carbon-water relations, potentially affecting the balance between precipitation and evapotranspiration as seen in previous research. However, they noted, they did not see a clear effect of changes in vegetation on soil carbon stocks.

Future studies, they said, are needed to focus on the mechanisms that drive the permanence of carbon derived from woody vegetation expansion, especially because of recent documentation of hotter and longer dry seasons, as well as rising mortality rates of wet climate species.

The next phase of understanding, they said, will come from integrating plant, soil and atmospheric data to understand the influence of human activity on ecosystem-climate feedbacks as a path towards improving carbon sequestration and water conservation.

"Our data indicate a regional increase in tree cover prior to modern deforestation, which could help inform conservation and management for climate change mitigation," said Silva, who also is a professor of geography and member of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. "We hope that our research will lead to a greater appreciation of ecological processes in the region and their importance for global climatic stability."

In addition to Silva and Wright, the study's co-authors are Barbara Bomfim, a former postdoctoral researcher in Silva's lab who is now at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Corrine Wong of Boston College, and Ben Hur Marimon-Junior and Beatriz Marimon, both of the State University of Mato Grosso in Nova Xavantina, Brazil.

The research team is continuing to work closely with collaborators in the Amazon region in an effort to secure funding to launch a reforestation project, Silva said.

###

The National Science Foundation and Brazil's National Council for Scientific and Technological Development funded the research. Additional support came from a 2019 Resilience Initiative Interdisciplinary Seed Funding award given by the UO's Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation.

Links:

About Lucas Silva:
https://geography.uoregon.edu/profile/lsilva7/

Soil Plant Atmosphere Research Lab:
https://soilplantatmosphere.com/

Department of Geography:
https://geography.uoregon.edu/

Institute of Ecology and Evolution:
https://ie2.uoregon.edu/

Ants are skilled farmers: They have solved a problem that we humans have yet to

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Research News

 

Fungus-farming ants are an insect lineage that relies on farmed fungus for their survival. In return for tending to their fungal crops--protecting them against pests and pathogens, providing them with stable growth conditions in underground nests, and provisioning them with nutritional 'fertilizers'--the ants gain a stable food supply.

These fungus farming systems are an expression of striking collective organization honed over 60 million years of fungus crop domestication. The farming systems of humans thus pale in comparison, since they emerged only ca. 10,000 years ago.

A new study from the University of Copenhagen, and funded by an ERC Starting Grant, demonstrates that these ants might be one up on us as far as farming skills go. Long ago, they managed to appear to have overcome key domestication challenges that we have yet to solve.

"Ants have managed to retain a farming lifestyle across 60 million years of climate change, and Leafcutter ants appear able to grow a single cultivar species across diverse habitats, from grasslands to tropical rainforest" explains Jonathan Z. Shik, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Biology.

Through fieldwork in the rainforests of Panama, he and researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute studied how fungus-farming ants use nutrition to manage a tradeoff between the cultivar's increasingly specialized production benefits, and it's rising vulnerability to environmental variation.

Ants as clever farmers

We humans have bred certain characteristics -- whether a taste or texture -- into our crops.

But these benefits of crop domestication can also result in greater sensitivity to environmental threats from weather and pests, requiring increasing pesticide use and irrigation. Simply put, we weaken plants in exchange for the right taste and yield. Jonathan Z. Shik explains:

"The ants appear to have faced a similar yield-vulnerability tradeoff as their crops became more specialized, but have also evolved plenty of clever ways to persist over millions of years. For example, they became impressive architects, often excavating sophisticated and climate-controlled subterranean growth chambers where they can protect their fungus from the elements," he says.

Furthermore, these little creatures also appear able to carefully regulate the nutrients used to grow their crops.

To study how, Shik and his team spent over a hundred hours lying on rainforest floor on trash bags next to ant nests. Armed only with forceps, they stole tiny pieces of leaves and other substrates from the jaws of ants as they returned from foraging trips.

They did this while snakes slithered through the leaf litter and monkeys peered down at him from the treetops.

"For instance, our nutritional analyses of the plant substrates foraged by leafcutter ants show that they collect leaves, fruit, and flowers from hundreds of different rainforest trees. These plant substrates contain a rich blend of protein, carbohydrates and other nutrients such as sodium, zinc and magnesium," explains Shik. "This nutritional blend can target the specific nutritional requirements of their fungal crop."

What can we learn from ants?

Over the years, the ants have adapted their leaf collecting to the needs of the fungus -- a kind of organic farming, without the benefits of the technological advances that have helped human farmers over the millenia, one might say.

One might wonder, is it possible to simply copy their ingenious methods?

"Because our plant crops require sunlight and must thus be grown above ground, we can't directly transfer the ants' methods to our own agricultural practices. But it's interesting that at some point in history, both humans and ants have gone from being hunter-gatherers to discovering the advantages of cultivation. It will be fascinating to see what farming systems of humans look like in 60 million years," concludes Jonathan Z. Shik.

 

Better health - for people and the planet - grows on trees

Tropical fruit trees can improve health, reduce hunger, boost incomes and fight climate change; so why don't we grow and eat more?

INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TROPICAL AGRICULTURE (CIAT)

Research News

 

IMAGE: A VIEW OF AN AGROFORESTRY PRODUCTION SYSTEM IN LAMPUNG PROVINCE, INDONESIA IN 2017. view more 

CREDIT: CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL FORESTRY RESEARCH (CIFOR)

Two of humanity's biggest problems - the climate crisis and abysmal eating habits - can partly be solved by one healthy solution: eating more food from trees, specifically tropical ones. While global trends in agriculture and diets are not easily reversed, scientists say that creating incentives to grow and eat more mangos, avocados and Brazil nuts - and dozens of tree-sourced foods most people have never heard of - can be both attainable and sustainable.

Writing in People and Nature, researchers outline the myriad nutritional, economic and environmental-health potential of increasing the production and consumption of tropical fruits. They present an overview of benefits from tree-sourced foods in terms of nutrition and discuss the barriers and risks of scaling up supply to a global level.

"Planting the right type of trees in the right place can provide nutritious foods to improve diets sustainably while providing other valuable ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration," said Merel Jansen, the lead author from ETH Zurich and the Center of International Forestry Research. "It also can contribute to development issues related to poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, and food security."

In spite of the diversity of edible plants - there are more than 7,000 - the global food system is founded on extraordinarily low diversity. Almost half the calories consumed by humans come from only four crops: wheat, rice, sugarcane and maize. The overconsumption of these energy-rich but nutrient-poor foods - in combination with underconsumption of more nutritious foods - has contributed significantly to malnutrition, which afflicts some two billion people. Moreover, their cultivation has caused widespread losses of biodiversity and contributed to climate change.

For these reasons, experts are calling for a transformation of global food systems characterized by the cultivation and consumption of foods that simultaneously deliver nutritional, environmental and health benefits. Because tropical tree species, which may exceed 50,000, have this potential they can be a critical part of the solution, say the authors.

"Leveraging the diversity and local knowledge of tree species in tropical landscapes offers an excellent nature-based solution to match the rising global demand for diversified, healthy and sustainable diets, and to re-valuate native tree species and local farming practices," said Chris Kettle, the principal investigator of this work, from the ETH Zurich and Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.

The world's hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, who have been often pushed aside by the industrialization of food systems, have the potential to be key players in food system transformation. With the right incentives, investments and involvement, smallholder farms could scale up agroforestry systems to produce more, healthy food, while simultaneously diversifying their income sources.

Marginalized groups and women also stand to gain from tree-sourced food sources, especially when the foods are harvested from trees that are not planted but grow spontaneously or and have the potential for natural regeneration that can be managed. This is because, in part, women farmers tend to have limited access to land, credit and other assets.

There are many clear opportunities to incorporate food-producing trees into landscapes. The majority of global cropland does not incorporate trees but has a high potential for doing so. Further, vast tracts of land in the tropics have been cleared for agriculture and then abandoned, and coordinated restoration efforts could include the establishment of sustainably managed agroforestry systems.

Avoiding pitfalls

Increased demand for tree-sourced products has potential downsides. The establishment of industrial cacao plantations in West Africa and oil palm plantations in south-east Asia have deforested landscapes, degraded soils, harmed biodiversity and increased carbon emissions. Avocado farms in Mexico, made profitable by increased demand north of the border, have been recently targeted by organized crime. Dependency on single products can lead to widespread shocks when prices crashed, as has happened to cacao farmers in Côte d'Ivoire.

"A combination of interventions by states, markets and civil society across the supply chain - from producers to consumers - is necessary to guarantee that increases in demand are supplied from sustainable production systems that are diverse, and that will not lead to large-scale deforestation or other unwanted side effects," said Jansen.

To make increased tree-sourced food production an integral part of the global food system transformation, the authors propose the following:

Consumer demand: More information needs to reach consumers about tree-source food. "To radically change diets, extensive behavioral change campaigns will likely be necessary, especially to increase the consumption of underutilized nutritious and healthy foods," the authors say.

Land tenure: One barrier to the implementation of tree-based food production systems is insecure land tenure rights. These are particularly important since tree-crops can require substantial up-front expenses and return on investment can take years. Secure land rights are considered key to overcoming these barriers.

Investment costs and pay-back time: Intercropping with annual crops, payment for ecosystem services, redirecting annual crop subsidies, and provision of micro-credits to establish agroforestry systems can create funding opportunities. These can help alleviate high investment costs and long pay-back times.

Supply chain development: Developing supply chains for potentially popular products is essential for rural communities to access markets. NGOs, private investors and the public sector can all contribute.

Genetic resource conservation: Investment in the conservation of genetic resources that underpin diversity is necessary for crop tree systems to flourish. Additionally, reliable seed sources and seedlings need to be available for the establishment of tree crop farms.

Technological development: Development of propagation methods, planting techniques and post-harvest technologies for currently undomesticated trees can help to better use the enormous diversity of trees in our food systems.

Diversification: To avoid the pitfalls of monoculture systems including price shocks and environmental degradation, sustainable crop tree systems must include a variety of plants and crops.

CAPTION

Mangoes in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says the US still needs several hundred billion dollars a month to repair a coronavirus-stricken economy


Emily Graffeo Nov. 5, 2020, 04:18 PM



Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told CNBC on Thursday that the US still needs several hundred billion dollars a month to repair the economy as coronavirus cases continue to surge. 

"We're still 11 million jobs down from where we were before this thing hit and all of those people are without wages, state local governments are in extreme financial distress, thousands of businesses ... are on the verge of collapse," Krugman said.

Congress has been unable to reach a deal for additional pandemic relief since August, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday a second stimulus should be passed before years end.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman told CNBC on Thursday that the United States still needs several hundred billion dollars a month in economic stimulus to repair the economy as the coronavirus continues to spread and stifle job and business growth.

"We're still 11 million jobs down from where we were before this thing hit and all of those people are without wages, state local governments are in extreme financial distress, thousands of businesses — maybe hundreds of thousands — are on the verge of collapse," he said.

Krugman said it's difficult to pinpoint the exact price of the ideal relief package, but said that a "really, really big," one is needed to keep the US afloat: "We really are still very much in the disaster relief stage."

Last week, 751,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits, a decline from the week before, but much higher than economists' expectations

Benefits from the first fiscal stimulus package that totaled $2 trillion are ending or have already expired, and Congress has been unable to reach a deal for an additional relief bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday that a coronavirus relief package should be passed before the end of 2020.

In late October, Democrats blocked a smaller, $500 billion relief bill from Republicans, blasting it as inadequate to address the economic crisis. The bill would have implemented a $300 federal unemployment benefit through the end of December, provided more forgivable federal loans to small businesses, and provided $105 billion to help schools reopen. It omitted aid to states as well as $1,200 direct payments to taxpayers.

Krugman said enhanced unemployment benefits have been the "most important policy," but he doubted that McConnell would extend the benefits in any subsequent bill.

"That was far more effective than anything else in the package, but we've seen very, very little ... on the part of Senate Republicans to resume enhanced employment benefits," he said.

Amid election uncertainty and viral surge, U.S. economic recovery wobbles

By Howard Schneider

© Reuters/MIKE BLAKE FILE PHOTO: California closes indoor shopping malls as it pulls back from opeing due to sharp rise in positive coronavirus tests

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fresh signs the U.S. economic recovery may be faltering surfaced over the last week with high-frequency measures of retail traffic and jobs both ebbing amid a record-breaking surge in coronavirus cases.


Millions of formerly employed Americans remain sidelined by the recession triggered by the virus, and uncertainty over the future direction of the country - politically and economically - remains especially high in the shadow of this week's still-unsettled U.S. presidential election.

Foot traffic to retail locations turned lower, according to data collected by Unacast https://www.unacast.com/covid19/covid-19-retail-impact-scoreboard and Safegraph https://www.safegraph.com/dashboard/covid19-commerce-patterns and indexed to March 1, before a state of emergency was declared to combat the pandemic. The firms' information is based on cellphone movements matched against a library of identified retail locations.

Estimates of seated diners at restaurants collected by reservation site OpenTable https://www.opentable.com/state-of-industry fell for a third straight week.

Graphic: Retail in real time - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/REOPEN/xegvbjdrnvq/chart.png

The number of people working declined for a second straight week at a sample of around 55,000 small businesses whose employee time is managed by Homebase https://joinhomebase.com/data.

The firm has been providing data on that set of businesses, all of which were open at the start of the year, to see how they fared through the pandemic. The number of them now open has fallen for six weeks in a row, from a post-pandemic high of 45,347 in mid-September to 44,403.

Graphic: A slump in small business? - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/REOPENING/qmyvmjzjapr/chart.png

Employment at a broader set of industries, maintained by UKG https://www.kronos.com/about-us/newsroom/update-us-workforce-activity, has been sluggish, growing at less than 1% through October, virtually flat for the smallest businesses, and falling over the past week.

Graphic: Jobs in real time - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/REOPENING/azgvoaggdvd/chart.png

An index of job openings maintained by the Indeed https://www.hiringlab.org Hiring Lab was relatively flat through October, at around 15% below the levels of a year ago. Estimates from analytics firm Chmura http://www.chmuraecon.com/blog, comparing new job openings to predicted levels without the pandemic, showed a deeper gap of more than 20%.

New claims for unemployment insurance, at 751,000 for the week ending Oct. 31, have changed little in recent weeks, stalled at a level above the peak seen during the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

Dave Gilbertson, UKG's vice president for strategy and operations, said it appears the new wave of infections has led to "extreme caution" when it comes to hiring plans.

The virus has now infected nearly 10 million people and the number of new cases topped 100,000 on Wednesday for the first time. Compared with the more geographically contained outbreak in the spring, centered in densely populated areas around the Northeast, COVID-19 is now in wide circulation, with the highest rates of infection in the Midwest. More than 233,000 people in the country have died.

The overall pace of recovery shows signs of plateauing, and a broader read on that will come on Friday when the U.S. Labor Department releases its monthly employment report for October. The country is expected to have added 600,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, according to a Reuters poll of economists. That would still leave a gap of roughly 10 million from pre-pandemic levels.

Even that data will be backward-looking, rooted in estimates from a government survey conducted three weeks ago.

In the more quickly evolving pandemic economy, economists have turned to alternative data sources to gauge conditions closer to real time.

Those indicators were the earliest to show the initial rebound in May and June. They have turned flat this fall, particularly in October as the coronavirus spread.

Adding to the economic risk now: Uncertainty over the outcome of Tuesday's presidential election and whether a still-gridlocked U.S. leadership will find ways to stem the country's twin health and economic crises.

Early measures helped. Legislation passed by Congress in March unleashed trillions of dollars of federal assistance for households and businesses, keeping establishments solvent and supporting personal income, spending and savings despite continued high unemployment.

New bankruptcy data from Epiq AACER for October showed that, while the number of Chapter 11 filings used by larger companies remains about 30% higher than the last year, the number of new filings fell more than 26% from September. Including personal and other commercial bankruptcies, overall filings are down more than 40% on a year-to-date basis compared to 2019.

A New York Fed https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/policy/weekly-economic-index#/interactive weekly index of projected gross domestic product rose last week and has climbed steadily, tracking the ongoing resumption of economic activity.

Graphic: NY Fed Weekly Economic Index - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/WEI/azgpoagodpd/chart.png

But on a broad basis, the situation is at best uncertain.

An Oxford http://blog.oxfordeconomics.com/topic/recovery-tracker Economics broad recovery index fell for the third straight week and hit its lowest level since mid-August, driven by a sharp drop in health metrics that may be curbing people's willingness to move about and may be starting to suppress demand.

Graphic: Oxford Economics Recovery Index - https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ECONOMY/OXFORDINDEX/yzdvxqzmkpx/chart.png

"The dangerous cocktail of surging Covid infections and fading fiscal support has led to a visible slowdown," wrote Gregory Daco, Oxford's chief U.S. economist. "The economy is sending distressing signals to policymakers."

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

ESPN announces 300 layoffs, citing 'disruption' amid virus

ESPN announced Thursday it is laying off about 300 employees and cutting about 500 jobs from its global workforce

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

The cuts amount to about 10% of the employees at the sports network and are due largely to the impact of the pandemic on its business and the “tremendous disruption in how fans consume sports.”

“In the short term, we enacted various steps like executive and talent salary reductions, furloughs and budget cuts, and we implemented innovative operations and production approaches, all in an effort to weather the COVID storm,” Jimmy Pitaro, ESPN’s chairman, wrote in an email to employees. “We have, however, reached an inflection point.”

In addition to the layoffs, the company is planning to leave about 200 vacant positions unfilled.

ESPN did not say how many of the job cuts would come at its Bristol, Connecticut, campus, but said they would not be concentrated in any one area. On-air talent, the vast majority having personal contracts, is not expected to be heavily affected. But some of those contracts could be allowed to expire.

The company said it has more than 5,000 employees, including about 4,000 in Bristol.

The Disney subsidiary has recently been moving toward more direct-to-consumer offerings, including its ESPN+, a streaming service that has grown to about 8.5 million subscribers.

Pitaro said the discussions on how to reposition the company in a changing media landscape predate COVID-19, but said the pandemic had accelerated those discussions.

“Placing resources in support of our direct-to-consumer business strategy, digital, and, of course, continued innovative television experiences, is more critical than ever,” he wrote. “However, building a successful future in a changing world means facing hard choices. Making informed decisions about how and where we need to go – and, as always, in the most efficient way possible — is by far the most challenging job of any leadership team.”

The layoffs come three years after ESPN cut about 250 jobs, including journalists and on-air talent.

Pat Eaton-Robb, The Associated Press

California voters reject affirmative action measure despite summer of activism

OAKLAND — California voters rejected Proposition 16, a major blow to Democrats and social justice advocates who hoped a national reckoning on racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd would translate into a long-sought repeal of the state’s affirmative action ban.

© Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo

 A California voter with her granddaughter walk after casting her ballot in-person on Election Day.

The measure placed on the ballot by state lawmakers was losing 44-56 after nearly 12 million votes were counted overnight.

Background: Public entities have been barred from taking race, gender or other personal identifications into consideration during admissions, hiring and awarding of contracts since 1996. That year, voters passed Proposition 209, a measure supported by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and former University of California Regent Ward Connerly.

The law is a holdover of conservative policy in a state that has since elected a Democratic supermajority, and it has been blamed for racial enrollment disparities at the UC and California State University systems and a decline in public contracts awarded to businesses owned by women and people of color.

State lawmakers placed Prop. 16 on the ballot, believing they had a unique window of opportunity to repeal Prop. 209. A strong majority of California residents said they backed the Black Lives Matter movement after a summer of racial justice activism in response to the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis.

Despite facing little opposition and polling that showed a significant majority of Californians believed racial and gender equality were among the most pressing issues this election, the Yes on 16 campaign failed to make significant inroads with voters. The campaign lost despite having support from the Democratic establishment and raising $31 million from liberal donors and foundations, compared to $1.6 million against.

Supporters struggled to garner attention in a campaign cycle dominated by expensive ballot fights over issues like gig-worker employment and dialysis clinic regulations that dominated airwaves.

What happened? Some of the lawmakers who helped place Prop. 16 on the ballot said they believe the Prop. 209 repeal language may have unnecessarily confused voters. They also suggested that the campaign needed to do a better job of educating the electorate on what affirmative action is and why it matters — and that was particularly challenging during an unprecedented early voting election with other well-funded campaigns competing for attention.

However, Connerly and other opponents said the California electorate continues to support the principles of Prop. 209 and do not want race or other personal characteristics to have weight in college admissions, public hiring decisions or contracting.

What’s next? Democratic lawmakers made clear in the weeks leading up to Nov. 3 that a defeat would not deter their effort to erase Prop. 209 from the state constitution. Legislative leaders have yet to indicate if they plan to pursue another measure on the 2022 ballot, though any effort to reinstate affirmative action would have to go through the voters.

Democrats’ down-ballot misery continues with state legislative battles


Heading into Election Day, Democrats had hoped to pick up a half-dozen or more state legislative chambers to get a foot in the door when many state politicians get to redraw congressional maps next year, lines that will last for the next decade and help determine which party controls Congress.

The Pennsylvania Capitol. (Julio Cortez/AP)

Instead, it’s possible Democrats end up with no new chambers, and it will be Republicans who leave 2020 with wins. Republicans picked up the New Hampshire House and Senate, giving them total control over governing in that state because they also kept the governor’s mansion. Republicans won another trifecta, as it is called when one party holds the state legislature and governorship, after their victory in the Montana’s governor race.

Arizona’s state House and state Senate are still outstanding and could be Democratic pickups. There’s a long shot chance that Democrats take the Pennsylvania House. But those are all ifs, and they are far from the only victories Democrats had hoped to be talking about right now.

These results are notable for two reasons:

1. It tracks with Democrats’ underperformance down the entire ballot. Democrat Joe Biden still has a path to win the presidency, but Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate majority are narrowing to almost nil. And Democrats will keep their majority in the House, but they may lose seats rather than win the 10 to 15 some in their party had predicted they’d gain. And they could end 2020 without picking up any state legislative chambers, or far fewer than they had expected.

2. The battle for state legislatures was historically static. You have to go back to the 1940s to find an election when so few chambers flipped parties, said Tim Storey, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. On average, an election day brings about 10 chambers flipped. This time, it could be just two. “It’s jaw dropping to me how little change there is,” he said. “It’s almost like trench warfare. There was all this smoke and fire and stuff aimed at each other, and at the end of the day, only inches moved.”

The odds were in Democrats’ favor that they could do better, and not just because history suggests more legislative chambers were going to switch parties this November. Republicans control a majority of state chambers after investing heavily in this level of politics a decade ago. After President Trump’s 2016 win, Democrats finally started paying attention and giving money to state legislative battles. Democrats’ state legislative committee broke fundraising records this year and hoped that 2020 would bring a political realignment back in their favor.

And yet they were unable to flip the state House in Texas — perhaps their No. 1 target — or either chamber in North Carolina. They did not manage to flip the Minnesota state Senate despite that being one of their easiest challenges since they were only two seats away. Nor the Iowa state House.

Democrats say it’s a little too early to say 2020 was a total wipeout for them. They may well pick up state legislative seats, if not state legislative chambers. “The 2020 election is still days away from being settled,” Christina Polizzi, a DLCC spokeswoman, told The Washington Post in a statement earlier Wednesday. “We always knew this election was going to be difficult — we’re running on extremely gerrymandered maps. There are millions of votes still to be counted and we’re going to make sure every one of them is counted.”

And they did win a state Supreme Court seat in Michigan, flipping partisan control of that all-important state’s top court to Democrats.

But the door is shutting quickly on Democrats’ opportunities to pick up actual chambers. Democrats will pick up the pieces on why in the coming days and weeks. It seems immediately clear there’s a partisanship underlying these results from the state legislature on up that Democrats, especially, have not figured out how to work around.

“Voters are just so in line with their party,” Storey said. “Neither party seems willing to change right now or vote for the other side.”

Striking N.L. Dominion store workers suing police for trying to break up picket line

MOUNT PEARL, N.L. — The Dominion stores workers' union in Newfoundland and Labrador says it's suing the police after officers tried to break up its members' picket line last week.© Provided by The Canadian Press

Unifor said today in a news release it is filing notice of civil claim against the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary for breach of charter rights, negligence, negligent or wilful misrepresentation and for intimidation.

Last week, police showed up to a worker picket line outside a Weston Foods bakery and allegedly threatened union members with arrest for blocking trucks from leaving the parking lot.

Unifor says its members are back picketing outside the bakery today to show police and the parent company of Dominion stores, Loblaw Companies Ltd, that they won't be intimidated.

Weston Foods is a subsidiary of George Weston Ltd., which also owns the Loblaws stores.

Unifor says last week's picket line was peaceful and lawful, and that police threatened the workers with arrest.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2020.