Settlers raze large tracts of Palestinian land south of Nablus

NABLUS, Wednesday, December 23, 2020 (WAFA) – Israeli settlers today razed large tracts of Palestinian land belonging to Awarta town, south of Nablus city, according to a local activist.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors Israeli colonial settlement activities in the northern West Bank, said that settlers escorted several bulldozers to an area of the town’s land, known as al-Khirbeh, where the heavy machineries leveled the land to expand the nearby colonial settlement of Itamar.

Located some seven kilometers to the south of Nablus city, Awarta has a population of some 7,500 and occupies a total area of 13,450 dunams.

Under the Oslo Accords, an agreement made 25 years ago that was supposed to last just five years towards a self-governing country alongside Israel, the Palestinian Authority was given limited control over 39 percent of the village’s land (some 5,300 dunams).  In contrast, Israel maintains control over the remainder, classified as Area C.

Since the start of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, like so many other villages in Palestine, al-Khader has been subjected to almost continual land theft for Israeli settlements, bypass roads, and military installations.

Israel has seized an area of at least 2,450 dunums for the construction of Itamar colonial settlement, located to the northeast of the village. It has also seized more land to set up two military bases and five colonial outposts on the eastern hills of the settlement.

It has also isolated some 3,000 donums of land belonging to Awarta and other nearby Palestinian villages for the benefit of colonial settlement expansion, pushing the villagers into a crowded enclave, a ghetto, surrounded by walls, settlements and military installations.

K.F. 

Israel settlers launch systematic attacks on

Palestinian properties

Israeli flags can be seen around a Palestinian house which was
illegally occupied by settlers under the protection of occupation
forces in the West bank city of Hebron on 26 July 2017.
[Mamoun Wazwaz /Anadolu Agency]

Ongoing attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians are part of a large campaign aimed at seizing more Palestinian lands and imposing new realities on the ground, B'Tselem warned yesterday.

"These attacks are being carried out with full support from the Israeli army and government," Kareem Jubran, director of the field research department at B'Tselem, said, stressing that the Israeli army and government support the extremist stances of the Israeli Jewish settlers.

Speaking to Palestine Voice Radio, Jubran said that the Israeli settlers have recently increased their attacks in many Palestinian towns and villages across the occupied West Bank. The settlers' attacks, he said, are protected by the occupation army and police.

Meanwhile, Director of Anti-Wall and Settlements Committee, Murad Ishtiwi, said: "There is another campaign carried out by the Israeli occupation army and police targeting Palestinian shops, homes and vehicles."

He said that this campaign is being carried out in parallel with the one carried out by the extremist Jewish settlers against Palestinian properties.

READ: Settlers' attacks undermine efforts to revive peace process, insists PA

SolarWinds roundup: Fixes, new bad actors, and what the company knew

Reporting since the SolarWinds hack was revealed indicates the company was warned about insecurities years ago, and another hack has been discovered.

By Andy Patrizio, Network World | DEC 23, 2020 

v-graphix / Getty Images

The SolarWinds Orion security breach is unfolding at a rapid pace, and the number of vendors and victims continues to grow. Each day brings new revelations as to its reach and depth. Of particular concern are the rate of infection and impact on government systems.

In case you missed it, a backdoor was found in the SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management software. A dynamic link library called SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, a SolarWinds digitally-signed component of the Orion software framework, was found to contain a backdoor that communicates via HTTP to third-party servers.

After an initial dormant period of up to two weeks, the Trojan retrieves and executes commands, called jobs, that include the ability to transfer files, execute files, profile the system, reboot, and disable system services. In short, a total takeover of the machine.

The malware hides its network traffic in the Orion Improvement Program (OIP) protocol and stores its ill-gotten data within legitimate plugin configuration files, allowing it to blend in with legitimate SolarWinds activity.

SolarWinds has said that less than 18,000 of its 300,000 customers have downloaded the Trojan, but that's still 18,000 too many. Victims reportedly include consulting, technology, telecom, and oil and gas companies around the world as well as US government agencies, such as the Defense, Treasury, and Commerce departments.

The latest victim is Cisco Systems, which found the Orion Trojan on internal systems. "Following the SolarWinds attack announcement, Cisco Security immediately began our established incident-response processes," the company said in a statement.

"We have isolated and removed Orion installations from a small number of lab environments and employee endpoints. At this time, there is no known impact to Cisco products, services, or to any customer data."

FireEye and Microsoft were among the first to identify the flaw, and more security experts are digging into it due to SolarWinds’ widespread use.

One thing is for certain, the final shoe has not dropped yet. Here's a roundup of what has emerged in the last few days.

Killswitch Found

FireEye first documented the Trojan on December 13 in a detailed writeup on the malware, saying the Orion software could have been compromised as far back as March 2020. FireEye told the security site KrebsOnSecurity that it found a domain that has since been seized by Microsoft and has been reconfigured to act as a killswitch to prevent the malware from continuing to operate in some circumstances.

"SUNBURST is the malware that was distributed through SolarWinds software. As part of FireEye's analysis of SUNBURST, we identified a killswitch that would prevent SUNBURST from continuing to operate," the company said in a statement sent to me.

Depending on the IP address returned when the malware resolves avsvmcloud[.]com, under certain conditions, the malware would terminate itself and prevent further execution. FireEye collaborated with GoDaddy and Microsoft to deactivate SUNBURST infections.

"This killswitch will affect new and previous SUNBURST infections by disabling SUNBURST deployments that are still beaconing to avsvmcloud[.]com. However, in the intrusions FireEye has seen, this actor moved quickly to establish additional persistent mechanisms to access to victim networks beyond the SUNBURST backdoor. This killswitch will not remove the actor from victim networks where they have established other backdoors. However, it will make it more difficult to for the actor to leverage the previously distributed versions of SUNBURST," it added.

Second Group Found

Microsoft announced that a second hacking group had deployed malicious code that affects the Orion software, but this malware, known to researchers as Supernova, is different from the original Trojan because it does not appear to involve a compromise of the supply chain, Microsoft said.

While Russian hackers are suspected to be behind the first Orion software Trojan, Microsoft isn’t sure who is behind this second compromise. "[T]he investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor," the Microsoft research team said in a blog post on Friday.

The company noted that Microsoft Defender Antivirus, the default antimalware solution on Windows 10, detects and blocks the malicious DLL and its behaviors. It quarantines malware, even if the process is running.

They Were Warned Three Years Ago

A SolarWinds security adviser warned of security risks three years prior to the suspected hack and later quit when he felt the company wasn’t taking him seriously, according to an article published Monday by Bloomberg. Ian Thornton-Trump gave a 23-page PowerPoint presentation to three SolarWinds executives back in 2017 urging them to install a cybersecurity senior director because he thought a major breach was inevitable, the article says.

Thornton-Trump told Bloomberg he resigned from SolarWinds a month after his presentation because he claimed the company wasn't interested in making the changes he had suggested to improve cybersecurity. "My belief is that from a security perspective, SolarWinds was an incredibly easy target to hack," Thornton-Trump said.
Insider trading?

The Washington Post reported last week that that top investors in SolarWinds sold millions of dollars in stock in the days before the intrusion was revealed. SolarWinds’s stock price has fallen more than 20 percent in the past few days. The Post cited former enforcement officials at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) saying the sales were likely to prompt an insider-trading investigation.

Private equity firms Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, which owned three-quarters of outstanding SolarWinds shares, sold 13 million shares of stock at $21.97, worth $286 million, just one week before the disclosure of the supply-chain vulnerability. The stock closed the following Monday at $16.12. In November, outgoing SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson also sold more than $15 million shares, according to the Post.

"Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake were not aware of this potential cyberattack at SolarWinds prior to entering into a private placement to a single institutional investor on 12/7," the companies said in a joint statement to the Post.

About 
Andy Patrizio is a freelance technology writer based in Orange County, California. He's written for a variety of publications, ranging from Tom's Guide to Wired to Dr. Dobbs Journal.

'Mistakenly unsealed' FBI affidavit reveals white supremacists planned attack on US power grid if Trump lost

December 23, 2020
Alex Henderson, AlterNet

Members of the National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) during a march in Phoenix, Arizona.

 (John Kittelsrud)

Although terrorist attacks by far-right white supremacist and white supremacist groups existed long before the Trump era, the last four years have found such groups emboldened. And according to Associated Press reporter Amy Forliti, one plot that white supremacists had in mind for the Summer of 2021 involved attacking power stations in the southeastern United States.

Forliti reports that in an affidavit that was "mistakenly unsealed," the FBI alleges that an Ohio-based teenager and informant said he wanted the white supremacists to fast-track their plot if President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In addition to winning 306 electoral votes, President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote.

The NBC News reporter explains, "The teen was in a text group with more than a dozen people in the fall of 2019 when he introduced the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in militant training, according to the affidavit, which was filed under seal along with a search warrant application in Wisconsin's Eastern U.S. District Court in March. The documents were inadvertently unsealed last week before the mistake was discovered and they were quickly sealed again."

Forliti notes that the teenager "also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot 'Lights Out,' and there were plans to carry it out in the Summer of 2021, the affidavit states."00:0201:53

The teenager, according to Forliti, allegedly received a text from a white supremacist in Texas who said, "Leaving the power off would wake people up to the harsh reality of life by wreaking havoc across the nation."

"The affidavit says the Ohio teen also spoke numerous times about creating Nazi militant cells around the country like those of the neo-Nazi network the Atomwaffen Division," Forliti explains. "Atomwaffen Division members have promoted 'accelerationism,' a fringe philosophy espousing mass violence to fuel society's collapse. More than a dozen people linked to the group or an offshoot called the Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with serious crimes in recent years."

Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Ohio, told NBC News that she couldn't offer more information about the plot but said, "we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter."

The Trump era has seen some vicious attacks by White racists, from a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 aimed specifically at Latinos to the October 27, 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And earlier this year, a combination of white nationalists and militia extremists, according to the FBI, planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and possibly kill her.

Experts: FedEx prioritizes packages over worker safety

December 23, 2020
Pro Publica

FedEx employees Adrian Steele (L) and Aurra Wilks help sort packages in the company's small package sorting system at the Memphis World Hub in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S., December 15, 2009. REUTERS/Lance Murphey/File Photo


Fannie Stanberry had been on the job for two months as a package handler at FedEx Express' massive World Hub when, toward the end of her overnight shift, packages started to fall from a huge shipping container that rolled past her.

As Stanberry, then 61, bent to pick up the packages, she fell and became trapped between the catwalk she'd been standing on and the wheeled platform carrying the shipping container, also known as a dolly. “I thought I was a goner," Stanberry said. She broke eight ribs and her left arm and lacerated her liver, she said. “I had to learn how to walk over again."

FedEx, which is headquartered in Memphis, reported the Nov. 22, 2016, incident to the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency charged with protecting workers. TOSHA asked the shipping giant to investigate itself and suggest corrections, according to state records reviewed by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica and reported here for the first time.

FedEx told TOSHA it would train employees on safe work methods, and the agency declared the company's response sufficient and closed its case.

Nearly three years later, a strikingly similar incident at the same location claimed the life of Duntate Young, a 23-year-old temporary worker who'd been on the job just shy of a month. Like Stanberry, his job was to unload packages from shipping containers pulled by motorized tugs.

A worker closed but didn't lock the vinyl door of a container, a practice that was common. When packages fell against the door, it swung open, hitting Young in the back of the leg. He fell chest first into a metal pole. The church musician, devoted father and rapper was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

This time, TOSHA did an on-site investigation. It concluded that FedEx was aware from Stanberry's injury of the hazards associated with containers and the equipment ferrying them around, but that the company had not done enough to fix the problem.

FedEx, whose annual revenue tops $75 billion, was fined $7,000 in March for failing to provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees."

The penalty was later reduced to $5,950, after FedEx provided TOSHA with a list of measures it took to prevent similar incidents.

As FedEx faces what is its busiest season ever — delivering holiday packages and long-awaited COVID-19 vaccine doses across the country — experts say what happened to Young and the citation that resulted raise key questions about the company's safety practices.

Young's death was “extremely preventable," said Peter Dooley, a certified industrial hygienist for the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which promotes worker safety.

“The fact that this similar circumstance ends up in fatality several years later just shows how inadequate the investigation and follow up was into the previous incident."

Workers interviewed by MLK50 and ProPublica said that they were pressured to work faster than they felt was safe, and that the training they received, if any, bore little resemblance to what they actually did on the job.

“A lot of stuff they just overlook because everybody is just trying to rush to get through," said former FedEx employee Aisha Prater, who was packing shipping containers at the hub the night Young was killed.

FedEx's data shows the rising hazards to its workers: The number of fatalities at FedEx locations increased from seven in its 2017 and 2018 fiscal years to 10 last year, according to its most recent Global Citizenship Report. Its rate of time off taken after nonfatal, traumatic injuries rose 28% in North America between fiscal 2017 and 2019, though the data is not broken out for its World Hub or other locations. That rate is higher than for competitor UPS, whose own global sustainability report says that it has expanded safety mentoring for new employees because research shows most injuries happen in the first year on the job.

Last month, Young's father, Leanell “Troy" McClenton, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against FedEx and Satco Inc., the manufacturer of the shipping container involved in Young's death, seeking $3 million in compensatory damages for Young's two sons.

The lawsuit alleges that FedEx didn't provide adequate training for temporary workers and allowed workers to engage in dangerous practices “because it valued getting their customers packages delivered on time (and making money) more than it valued the safety of its employees and temporary workers."

In a statement, FedEx stressed its core commitment to “Safety Above All" and the “hundreds of millions" it spends on safety training each year, as well as the millions spent on equipment and technology to prevent injuries and accidents.

“We fully cooperated with the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration throughout its investigation, and we have implemented and are continuing to implement measures to further enhance our safety measures and training," the statement said.

“While we cannot comment about ongoing litigation, we will defend the lawsuit. ... The safety and well-being of our team members is our top priority, and we are committed to providing a safe and secure work environment for our team members." (Read the full statement here.)

In its Global Citizenship Report, FedEx attributed the rise in lost time to an increase in its North America operations. “We have investigated the root causes of this increase and are working to improve safety performance going forward through new training methods, additional implementation of industry-leading technology, and initiatives to make sure our Safety Above All approach is reflected in every action."

Satco officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A year after his son's death, McClenton remembered his son's insatiable sweet tooth and all the times they'd played music together at church Young on drums, McClenton on guitar and vocals and his wife, Jeanette, on keyboard and vocals. It feels like his son's life was disposable, he said.

“I don't think they actually care about them," said McClenton, a maintenance technician who lives in West Memphis, Arkansas. “The only thing they want is them to move those packages out, and that's it."

Area's Largest Employer and “Major Contributor" to State

One in six Memphis metro area workers labor in the logistics industry, and FedEx is the industry's giant, with 30,000 employees in the region. More than a third of them work at the World Hub, which is next to the Memphis International Airport.

The company's name marks the FedExForum, where the Memphis Grizzlies play, the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis and the World Golf Championship-FedEx St. Jude Invitational.

The city's growth is inextricably linked to FedEx's; a $1.5 billion expansion and modernization project underway at the airport will be completed in 2025. FedEx's World Hub contributes $4.7 billion in wages to the regional economy, according to a 2018 Memphis Business Journal article.

FedEx is also playing a starring role in the nation's fight against the coronavirus pandemic. FedEx trucks provided the backdrop for a Dec. 3 roundtable discussion about vaccine distribution at the airport, featuring Vice President Mike Pence, who was joined by top FedEx officials. As of Tuesday, the company's stock had risen 80% this year, exceeding the benchmarks for its peer companies and the transportation sector.

The logistics industry, which plays an essential role in the nation's economy, can be dangerous. Of the major occupational groups, transportation and material moving has the highest number of fatal work injuries and the second-highest rate of fatal work injuries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2019 data.

Between 2016 and 2019, more than 70 injuries were reported at the site where Stanberry was hurt and Young was fatally injured, according to a log that FedEx turned over to the state as part of its investigation into Young's death. OSHA requires employers to keep for five years the logs of work-related injuries and illnesses, which include a brief description of what happened.

The physical toll of hazardous jobs falls hardest on workers of color: In the past six years, four workers have died at FedEx Memphis' hub; all but one was Black. Studies using data from the U.S. census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show Black workers nationwide are more likely than whites to work in dangerous industries and more likely to be injured on the job.

A 2018 video of FedEx's World Hub shows a bustling operation, as loaders lift and lower shipping containers on and off planes. Motorized tugs pull cargo containers on dollies across the facility, which spans 880 acres, an area larger than New York's Central Park.

“As you can see, the process happens very quickly. However, safety guidelines require strict adherence to procedures that ensure safety comes before schedule," the narrator says as shipping containers like the one involved in Young's death are loaded onto a plane.

But TOSHA investigation reports and interviews with former workers show that FedEx didn't enforce its own guidelines.

“I Did It as Fast as I Could"

For many workers, FedEx's lure is that it pays above minimum wage, no small feat in a state whose share of minimum wage jobs exceeds that of more than 40 states. In Memphis, 1 in 4 Black residents live below the poverty line but fewer than 1 in 10 white residents do.

Stanberry, who like many of the hub employees is Black, was working at the Food Rite in Somerville, Tennessee, about 40 miles east of Memphis, when she met a FedEx recruiter. After two years at the grocery store, Stanberry was still making minimum wage and didn't have any benefits.

So she quit the store and joined FedEx as a part-time employee, where she'd earn just over $11 an hour and have health insurance. FedEx even provided transportation from the town's post office parking lot to the World Hub, the company's largest sort facility in the world.

Stanberry worked in an input area. Massive aluminum shipping containers are unloaded from planes and are loaded onto dollies, which pull them up to one of several lines in the input area.

Stanberry stood on a grated catwalk just inches from the shipping containers and the tug. Her job was to take packages out of the containers and place them on conveyor belts.

“You gotta be fast when you take the packages off," she said. “I just wasn't fast like I should have been. ... I did it as fast as I could for somebody my age."

Most hub employees work overnight shifts, handling packages coming in from around the world and heading back out around the globe.

Stanberry wasn't the only one to notice that almost all of her co-workers were much younger. One co-worker “asked why they put me on that line because I was a little too old to be sorting the packages," she recalled.

A key part of the safety protocol is the commands team members issue, such as “standby," when co-workers need to move away from equipment preparing to move, and “clear," when they need to stand still, facing the moving equipment.

After 2 a.m. on Nov. 22, 2016, according to the TOSHA report, workers had unloaded the containers when an employee gave the “clear" command, “which means to face forward, back to the belts, and do not move," a FedEx staffer noted in the report it sent TOSHA. “As the containers moved forward, some freight fell out."

Stanberry doesn't remember exactly what happened next, only what she was told when she regained consciousness in the hospital: She bent to pick up the packages, lost her footing and her balance, fell and was trapped under the dolly.

“All I know (is) they said they had to lift the big ole silver thing up off me," she said, referring to the shipping container.

FedEx reported the incident to TOSHA as required for all workplace incidents that lead to in-patient hospitalizations, loss of limbs or an eye, or death — and the agency responded by letter.

“While ... this letter is not a citation, and we do not intend to conduct an investigation at this time, we ask that you immediately conduct your own investigation into the incident and make any necessary changes to avoid further incidents," a TOSHA representative wrote to FedEx in a Dec. 1, 2016, letter.

FedEx returned a two-page form and in three sentences described the corrective actions recommended and taken: To review the safety procedures that instructed workers to stand with their backs against the belts when containers are moving and wait until equipment has come to a complete stop to move.

Injured two days before Thanksgiving, Stanberry spent that holiday, as well as Christmas, New Year's and her birthday in the hospital, followed by weeks of rehab.

In hindsight, she regrets leaving the grocery store and a 35-year career in food service. “I was just with FedEx to get some extra money, because I had to pay rent."

Stanberry, who received a small settlement from FedEx, is now unemployed and collects Social Security. “My arms and everything was messed up. I can't even lift nothing heavy no more. ... I can't go back to work even if I wanted to."

She acknowledges that workers were trained to stand still when the containers were moving, but when working the line, she followed what her more experienced co-workers did.

Dooley, of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, wasn't surprised that the safety protocols in the training didn't match what workers did on the job.

“The pace of work and the pressure to be doing so many unloads in a certain amount of time ... challenges any conformity with procedures and rules," Dooley said.

Between the time of Stanberry's accident and Young's death, more than 50 people were injured at the hub seriously enough to require treatment beyond first aid, according to the OSHA logs. The logs include bare-bones descriptions of the incidents and the number of days missed from work. Many more were injured but didn't require further care.

In one incident, a worker missed 119 days of work after being caught between a container and dolly. In another, an employee missed 46 days of work after being struck by a package.

Caught-under incidents can be deadly. The night before Thanksgiving in 2017, Ellen Gladney, 60, was working on a crew unloading packages from a 777.

Gladney's job that night was to make sure the loader didn't make accidental contact with the plane. It was her third day on the team, one worker told TOSHA.

There were no witnesses to the incident, but workers discovered Gladney under a platform attached to the cargo loader's deck. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

“Ms. Gladney was following procedures," TOSHA's compliance officer wrote, but faulted FedEx for failing to correct for the blind spots and failing to have procedures to ensure all crew members were accounted for before the cargo loader started moving.

Standing in front of moving equipment and out of sight of the loader operator is “easily recognized as a serious safety hazard," the TOSHA report said.

While team leaders typically watch crew members to be sure safety rules are being enforced, a worker told TOSHA, “Employees take short cuts all the time when Managers aren't around. Doing the right thing is based on your own integrity."

As in Young's death, FedEx was fined $7,000. FedEx told TOSHA that it had since amended its aircraft ramp operations manual to make sure the ground crew is out of the loader's path before it moves.

“They Said I Couldn't Touch Him"

Young started working at FedEx in mid-October 2019, hired at around $14 an hour by Volt Workforce Solutions, a temporary agency that supplied workers to FedEx.

Staffing agencies regularly supply seasonal workers to FedEx, but the lawsuit alleges that the company doesn't provide them with enough training.

A Volt manager said she could not comment on the “tragic" incident that killed Young, but she did say FedEx is still a client and that all Volt temporary workers there are supervised by a full-time FedEx employee.

It isn't unusual for temp workers to receive different or less training than permanent employees for doing the same work, said Dave Desario, director of Temp Worker Justice, an advocacy organization.

Young convinced two childhood friends — Kevin Donnerson and Drekeon Smith to join him, and they too got hired through Volt. All emerging rappers, they planned to save their earnings to record a music video.

They shared a home in suburban Germantown, Tennessee, and on Nov. 12, 2019, Young drove them to work in what Donnerson said was essentially the family car.

Smith and Donnerson worked in a mailroom indoors, but they say Young told them how unsafe it was where he worked, in the courtyard input area described in the TOSHA investigative report as a sprawling, 70,000-square-foot covered space. (A football field is 57,600 square feet.)

Containers are taken off planes, placed on dollies and pulled via a motorized tug to one of four lines in the input area. Each line had room for three tugs pulling containers.

The 10-foot-long, 8-foot-tall container involved in Young's death was manufactured by Satco, a California-based company. It had the company's “exclusive curve contour," a rounded back that fit neatly into cargo planes.

Another plus of this container's design: speed. “Taking only seconds to open and close, the patented fabric roll-up door assembly has proven to be the most cost effective door assembly ever produced by Satco," the company says on its website.

On the night he was killed, Young was working on an input line, standing with more than a dozen co-workers on an elevated grated walkway 14 inches off the ground. On the other side of the walkway was a three-tier conveyor belt system.

Handlers such as Young would take the packages from the containers and put them onto one of the belts. Even if containers weren't fully unloaded, the tug would move forward, witnesses told TOSHA. It was common for containers' roll-up doors to be left partly open or unlocked, and common for packages to fall out of the containers. Both happened that night, the TOSHA report said.

Toward the end of what would be Young's last shift, workers were still unloading the last container on line No. 2 when a worker gave the “standby" command, alerting workers to exit the containers because the tug was about to move. Interviews revealed that a worker lowered the last container's roll-up door but didn't lock it at the bottom.

An employee made the “clear" sign — forearms crossed at head level — which tells workers to stand with their backs to the conveyor belts. When a worker signaled for the tug operator to pull forward, six workers stood with their backs to the conveyor belts, per the safety protocol. But the team leader, as well as Young and six others walked in the direction the tug was moving.

Young was the worker at the end of the line, and as the tug driver pulled forward, packages in the last container fell out, pushing the partially locked door over the grated walkway and into Young's leg. He fell into a metal rail on the conveyor belt system, “stood up, took a few steps, and fell back onto the grating," according to the TOSHA report.

When the shift ended around 3 a.m., Donnerson and Smith waited for Young in their usual meeting spot, the clock out lobby.

When he didn't show, they went to the car, where their phones were locked inside. (FedEx doesn't allow workers to have cellphones inside the hub.) They went back to the lobby where they saw some of Young's co-workers, who were uncharacteristically mute. “Everyone was just looking at us weird," Donnerson recalled.

Finally, a FedEx human resources employee told them to get in touch with the family.

The family was already at Regional One Health, the area's only Level 1 trauma unit, by the time Donnerson and Smith found a ride there.

Bresha Mitchell, the mother of Young's youngest son, knew the news wasn't good when the hospital moved the family into a private waiting room. “I was just hoping for a miracle," she said.

When the family went into the hospital room, Young was lying on a gurney.

“They said I couldn't touch him," McClenton recalled. “I remember leaning over and whispering in his ear, and I said, 'Wake up.'"

The hospital gave Young's car keys to McClenton, as well as his wallet, which McClenton carries every day. It had $8 inside.

“Inconsistencies" Between Policies and Practice

Just like in the incident that killed Gladney, TOSHA found that in Young's death FedEx didn't have adequate procedures to protect employees from known hazards.

The manufacturer Satco told TOSHA that the door is only secure when it's rolled up all the way, or closed and locked on the bottom. Workers told TOSHA that they didn't know whether doors were supposed to be completely open, partially opened or locked when the containers moved with packages inside, the report said. A manager told TOSHA that it was a “judgement (sic) call" by employees whether to close the doors partially or leave them open when the containers moved.

TOSHA interviewed more than a dozen workers in the input area and all said they were trained on line calls and safety procedures, including standing with their backs to the conveyor belt when the containers moved. But many also said that employees move when the containers move and eight said they'd seen the roll-up doors swing over the grated walkway, as the door did in Young's death.

“Interviews revealed inconsistencies between the written procedures and employee practice," the report said.

Again, speed may have been a factor: “Employees don't always stop moving when the freight moves," one temporary worker told TOSHA during the investigation. “Employees were expected to move as the freight moved in order to get the freight unloaded quicker."

For about a month or two after the incident, team leaders “made it a necessity to stop moving while the freight moved but now it is back to the way it was before the incident," the worker said. “The only thing that has changed since the incident is that Temp employees are now given safety vests to wear."

This worker had a near accident when a partially closed door “caught my pant leg and dragged me up the line," the worker told the TOSHA compliance officer. “I reported the incident to two Team Leaders but neither one of them reported it to a Manager because I was not injured severely enough to be reported."

Two managers received warning letters and an employee was fired following the incident that killed Young, according to disciplinary records FedEx provided to TOSHA.

Safety concerns and the pressure to work faster eventually led Prater, 26, to leave the job she started the same month Young did. Her job was to take packages from a conveyor belt and load them into the shipping containers lined up behind her and her co-workers.

Before she started, she watched about four hours of training and safety videos, which would have been sufficient, she said, “if we were actually going to do what the videos showed us how to do."

“But it seemed like it was a waste, 'cause you get out there and it's nothing like what they say they want you to do in the video."

Workers aren't supposed to throw boxes from the conveyor belt into the containers, but they did, she said, and sometimes co-workers would be struck by flying packages. The protocol for stacking boxes in the containers was routinely ignored.

She narrowly avoided being injured herself, when one night she slipped on ice inside one of the containers she was loading. She managed to catch herself on the container's wall. She reported the hazard to her supervisor, but it took hours for the icy container to be replaced and in the meantime, packages piled up.

By February, she'd had enough. FedEx wasn't her first warehouse job, but she vows it will be her last. She's studying to be a dental assistant. “I do not recommend it for anybody," she said. “I tell everybody it's hell out there."

FedEx did not respond to questions about the experiences of Prater and other employees. Instead its general statement reiterated the company's concerns about employee safety.

Workers “at the Mercy of" TOSHA and Employers

When Stanberry was injured in 2016, TOSHA conducted what's called a rapid response investigation, but the term is a misnomer, as it doesn't involve sending an inspector to the site to interview workers.

Instead, TOSHA asked the employer to investigate itself, which FedEx did.

The practice of sending a letter to the employer and then waiting for the employer to write back is “horrible," said Eric Frumin, health and safety director of Change to Win, a federation of labor unions. He worked as a union labor health and safety expert for more than 40 years and has focused on issues in the South.

“There's almost no worker involvement in it, and the workers are at the mercy of the relationship between OSHA and the employer."

But when FedEx reported the fatal incident that killed Young, TOSHA's investigators collected witness statements, the medical examiner's report, surveillance videos, police reports, FedEx's safety procedures, Satco equipment manuals and other documents. Those, along with the investigative report, fill more than 450 pages. Many parts are redacted because they contain witnesses' names or because FedEx contends the information contains trade secrets, such as a six-page document titled “FedEx Express How to be Safe!"

The fixes that FedEx suggested were all focused on training and safety, but it's a mistake to focus simply on training and not the equipment too, said Michael Felsen, a retired U.S. Department of Labor attorney during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Employers concerned about safety should also focus on “engineering controls," such as modifying the equipment, which “do not rely on the workers having to behave in a particular way, but rather they're protected by virtue of the nature of the process," said Felsen, who litigated and supervised worker safety cases for OSHA in the New England region. This is particularly true in the case of temporary workers, he said.

While Felsen and other experts placed the majority of the onus for workplace safety on the employer, a top TOSHA official noted that the workers bore some responsibility too.

“Employers train their employees to follow the rules and in some cases, we can't protect employees from hazards," said Larry Hunt, TOSHA's assistant administrator.

“Employees can get complacent. What FedEx needs to do is to ensure that its training system is effective, and it's not just training, but enforcement of their own rules."

Given the similarities between the incident that injured Stanberry and the one that killed Young, one safety expert wondered why TOSHA didn't cite FedEx with a repeat violation, or even a willful violation, which comes with steeper fines and allows for criminal prosecution.

Hunt said he didn't think TOSHA could have proven that the 2016 and 2019 incidents were similar enough to sustain a willful violation with the information the agency had available.

“We have to prove that the employer had knowledge that these doors weren't latched and the disregard allowed that situation to continue. I don't think that they could prove that," he said. “It's difficult to determine everything that's going on when you show up on the site to do the inspections."

Asked how TOSHA could be confident that FedEx would do now what it said it'd do in 2016 when Stanberry was injured, Hunt said workers can file complaints by mail or online. “We can't know what's going on in every place, that's just not practical," he said.

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has made no secret of his desire to make the state attractive to businesses.

When FedEx announced an additional financial investment in its Memphis hub modernization project last year, Lee highlighted the company's role as a major job producer.

The state of Tennessee awarded FedEx $21 million in tax incentives for the project, an amount Lee declared fitting.

“They are a major contributor to what happens in this state," Lee was quoted in the Commercial Appeal as saying. “So our office, our administration, has regular communication about what they're doing and what their plans are and what we can do to create a business environment not only for FedEx, but for every company."

That business-first approach from the state's highest elected office invariably filters down to workplace safety enforcement and investigations, Felsen said.

“If states are all going to be competing against one another to make sure that they're as business-friendly as possible, who's there to protect the workers?

“We want (FedEx) to help save the lives of people by shipping the vaccine. We don't want their own workers to be sacrificing their lives because of the crunch of having to do that."

“The Anger Is Gone. The Disappointment Is There."

Young's funeral was held on a gray Saturday at a West Memphis Baptist church. Hundreds of mourners filed by the shiny casket, and when Young's mother approached for a last look, she collapsed in tears on her son's chest.

McClenton, himself a Baptist pastor, mustered the strength to preach his son's eulogy. He vacillated between bold proclamations of his faith in God and wrenching grief and confusion.

“To this day, I don't know what the hell happened to him," McClenton said that day. “Ain't nobody telling me nothing."

“Right now, what you looking at before you, you looking at an atomic bomb," he told those gathered. “I'm not an advocate for violence, but I am so angry."

A year later, McClenton's grief was still raw, but his rage had been replaced.

“No one at FedEx is wanting to cooperate as far as I'm concerned," he said. “No sympathy letters, no flowers, no actual concern about the family. I mean we lost a child. We lost a child. ... The anger is gone. The disappointment is there."

In a statement, FedEx said that a manager offered condolences to the family at the hospital. “We also reached out to the family on multiple occasions afterward to again offer condolences and seek an opportunity to discuss what happened."

Young's eldest son turned 6 the day Young died. His youngest son is his namesake, Duntate Young Jr., who is not quite 2 years old.

“These young boys will have to grow up not knowing their father, only looking at pictures and whatever memories they have of him," McClenton said.

Donnerson and Smith never went back to FedEx. They too say they're done with warehouse work. After Young's death, his friends published “Long Live Tate," an album of songs they'd done together.

Mitchell can see Young's sense of rhythm in Duntate Jr. and wants to nurture it. “I just make beats with him and I try to play his dad's music," Mitchell said. “I think he can recognize his voice because he will just stare at the speaker."

In an odd coincidence, she worked at FedEx in 2017, the year before she met Young. She was hired through a temp agency to unload shipping containers and remembers feeling unprepared to do the job.

“We didn't know what to do, we were kind of just looking at each other, asking the people that were working there," she said. “You learn as you go."

Mitchell is now studying music recording at the University of Memphis, working a part-time marketing job from home and raising her son, who pulled on his mother's braids as she did a Zoom interview.

The death benefits mandated through the state worker's compensation means that the temporary agency that hired Young will pay the mothers of both sons $97 per week until the boys are adults.

But to the people who loved Young, that's not nearly enough, and it's not justice.

“Justice to me," Mitchell said, “would be just restructuring (FedEx's) whole process or setup as far as safety of the employees."

GOP Senator Worth $39 Million Was Biggest Opponent of the $600 Stimulus Checks

From left: Sens. David Perdue, Pat Toomey, Ron Johnson and Mitch McConnell are all wealthy opponents of direct relief payments.

CAROLINE BREHMAN, CHIP SOMODEVILLA, JIM LO SCALZO, SAMUEL CORUM / GETTY IMAGES; MIAMI HERALD; EDITED: TRUTHOUT

For months, lawmakers negotiated the stimulus package that passed Monday night, and though most members of Congress don’t yet know the entirety of what’s included in the over 5,000-page bill, it’s clear from the last months of tense talks that one of the most contentious points was the $600 direct payments that ended up being squeezed in very late in the game.

These checks are half the amount that the government sent to individuals in March and have been a subject of much scrutiny among many on the left who say that $600 is not nearly enough. According to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Democrats have pushed for $1,200 checks, but Republicans batted it down to $600. And still, they have been a sticking point for some lawmakers who think that $600 is still too much if an individual is already receiving unemployment benefits or that the government simply shouldn’t be spending to help the American people during a deadly global pandemic that has caused a recession with record unemployment levels.

All of this hand wringing and austerity has come from Republicans in the Senate who have a median net worth of $1.4 million, with much of the loudest opposition to the one-time $600 check coming from those personally worth tens of millions of dollars.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been one such wealthy opponent of the direct relief payments, and last week twice blocked another round of checks, citing spurious deficit concerns. “I wasn’t supportive of the first round. I don’t think I’d be supportive of the second,” he said in July. “This is not a classic recession that requires financial stimulus.” His sudden concern about the deficit is charming, considering he led the charge in 2017 for special tax breaks which would net him about $205,000. Those same tax breaks, which mostly benefited wealthy individuals and corporations were funded by almost $2 trillion in added debt.

According to OpenSecrets, Johnson is worth an estimated $39.2 million.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, though not vocally against the checks, did not include them in his September “skinny bill” — but did include his pet obsession, a liability shield from COVID-related lawsuits for businesses and schools. It’s unclear when he changed his mind, though it was probably relatively recently, as The New York Times reports that he made the case for the inclusion of the checks last week, fearing that Republican opposition would hurt their chances in the Georgia Senate runoffs. McConnell is worth an estimated $34.1 million.

Speaking of the Senate runoffs, Republican Sen. David Perdue, who is up for re-election in Georgia, has been vocally against the checks. Perdue expressed direct opposition to the stimulus checks in the CARES act, saying he “personally opposed” them. Earlier this month, Perdue and fellow runoff candidate Sen. Kelly Loeffler released a joint statement with no mention of the checks, saying that they support “targeted relief,” which is just another way that Republicans have been saying that they oppose the stimulus checks. Perdue is worth an estimated $25.8 million, while Loeffler and her husband are worth a whopping $800 million, according to Forbes.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) also joined the ranks of Republicans who are vocally opposed to the stimulus checks, saying, without evidence, that the “vast majority” of the checks have been sent to families that he assumes probably have not been financially hurt by the pandemic. OpenSecrets estimates Toomey is worth $2 million. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) voted against Monday’s bill saying that, “when [conservatives] vote to pass out free money, you lose your soul and you abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.” Paul’s estimated worth is about $774,000.

Congressional journalists have reported that the checks have divided Republicans; last week, the number two ranking Republican Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) suggested that some lawmakers were trying to prevent those who were receiving unemployment benefits from getting the $600 check. Despite their efforts, many polls have shown that the stimulus checks are actually quite popular among the American people. Perhaps that’s why, though there is clear opposition to helping those most in need, many Republicans have not gone on the record to oppose the payments. Many have, however, implied their opposition by broadly railing against adding to the deficit and rejecting the general idea of another stimulus.

Among Republicans who have recently railed against any additional stimulus of any size are: Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), worth $568,000; Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida), worth $259.7 million; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), worth $3.2 million; and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska), worth $2.8 million. And worth a special mention are the politicians who went on the record opposing the stimulus checks back in May, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), worth $969,000, and Sen. Mike Braun (R-Indiana), worth $136.8 million, as well as Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), who opposed stimulus payments during negotiations for the CARES Act.

 

 

‘We Are Slammed’: USPS Faces Historic Number Of Packages, Causing Delays


BOSTON (CBS) – Elaine O’Callaghan shipped a special package to her grandchildren by priority mail last week, only to find it was in Nashua, New Hampshire on Monday.

“I’m like, very discouraged. I could have driven across country in that amount of time and delivered it in person,” the Tewksbury mother said.

As more and more people turn to e-commerce in the pandemic, a historic number of packages are threatening to overwhelm the U.S. Postal Service less than two weeks before Christmas.

John Flattery, the President of the Central Massachusetts Chapter of the American Postal Workers Union says employees are working round the clock.

“We have people who are working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Flattery said. “We are slammed with parcels like we’ve never been slammed before.”

Private Carriers like Fedex and UPS have cut off deliveries from some retailers, sending more packages through the Postal Service. Add in COVID-19 infections among postal workers and Flattery says delays are inevitable.

“I’m sure there are some delays right now. You can only put so much through the funnel,” he said.

Trump viewed as ‘one of the country’s worst presidents’, Fox News poll indicates

Poll was carried out earlier this month

Matt Mathers@MattEm90

Some 42 per cent of voters say they will remember Donald Trump as "one of the country's worst presidents".

That's according to a recent poll by Fox News, Mr Trump's once favoured network.

Pollsters spoke to a random national sample of 1,007 registered voters by phone, in interviews conducted between 6-9 December.

They asked Americans a number of questions on how they viewed the president, who is set to leave the White House in January next year.

Some 8 per cent of respondents said Mr Trump will be remembered as "below average".

Nearly a fifth (16 per cent) said he will go down in the history books as "above average".

Meanwhile, 22 per cent said the defeated incumbent is "one of the greatest" presidents the US has ever seen.

Those figures highlight how polarising a character Mr Trump has become in the past four years.

Despite losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, who is now president-elect, Mr Trump still secured more than 74 million votes.

His campaign team claims that is more votes than any other sitting president in US history.

Fox said the poll, carried out in conjunction with Beacon Research, had a margin of sampling error of +3 percentage points.

And while Mr Trump won almost 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2017, he has garnered more negative feelings than any other president, CNN reported.

The only other commander-in-chief who was so poorly favoured at the end of his presidency in a five category poll was George W. Bush, the outlet added.

Some 36 per cent of voters surveyed by Gallup in a 2009 poll said Mr Bush would be remembered as a "poor president".

Only 1 in 3 Brits Think Black Lives Matter Protests Were Positive for the UK

But according to the results of a YouGov survey shared with VICE World News, half of Britons have a favourable view of the Black Lives Matter.

By Ruby Lott-Lavigna
23.12.20



BLM DEMONSTRATORS MARCH IN LONDON IN JULY. 

Half of Britons have a favourable view of the Black Lives Matter movement, but only a third say this year’s protests had a positive impact on the UK, according to a YouGov survey shared exclusively with VICE World News.

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, sparking anti-racism protests across the world. In the UK, millions took to the streets and marched.

Only 8 percent of Britons have not heard of Floyd, according to YouGov’s survey of 1,725 British adults, which was conducted this autumn.

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RUBY LOTT-LAVIGNA 11.11.20


But 45 percent have never heard of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was shot in her apartment by police looking for someone else entirely.

Discussion around racism has risen thanks to the movement, according to the survey.

Thirty-four percent of Britons have discussed racism with a relative since the protests, while 3 in 10 have discussed racism more with friends from the same ethnic background. Fewer, however, have discussed racism with a friend of a different race – only one in five. Young people and BAME people – a UK designation meaning Black, Asian and minority ethnic – are more likely to have discussed racism with friends and family.

The results come at a time where more scrutiny has been placed on racism across the UK. Earlier this month, Millwall Football Club fans booed while players took the knee – a sign of solidarity shown by players in light of the BLM protests. When asked about fans’ behaviour, Cabinet minister and Conservative MP George Eustice told Sky News that “obviously the issue of race and racial discrimination is something that we all take very, very seriously,” but that “Black Lives Matter – capital B, L and M – is actually a political movement that is different to what most of us believe in, which is standing up for racial equality.” His remarks were condemned by anti-racism groups.

A spokesperson for Black Lives Matter UK told VICE World News: “The BLM protests in the summer of 2020 were the largest anti-racist mobilisations in British history. We are encouraged that more people than ever are thinking and talking about anti-racism. However, with the hostile environment, institutionally racist policing and a likely recession in the coming months, there is still a lot of work to be done.”

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More and More Cops Are Working in London Schools
RUBY LOTT-LAVIGNA27.11.20


Nick Treloar, research analyst for anti-racism charity Runnymede Trust, said: “The trend this year has been a positive one with more awareness around issues of racial inequality. The tragic murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement has forced people to sit up and listen.”

“However, in terms of actual action that will save lives and make society more equal, this has been sorely lacking,” he added. “In the UK for example, a disproportionate number of BME people continue to die from COVID. 2020 has been a seminal moment for shining a light on racial inequalities, but we can not allow, in 2021, the goodwill that has been built up, nothing to change and let racism continue to plague Black and ethnic minority individuals from cradle till grave.”