'Milk Tea Alliance' activists across Asia hold rallies against Myanmar coup

By Fanny Potkin, Patpicha Tanakasempipat
FEBRUARY 28, 2021

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Activists across Asia held rallies on Sunday to support protesters in Myanmar fighting against a military coup, showing the growing influence of cross-border youth movements pushing for democracy with the rallying cry “Milk Tea Alliance”

Myanmar citizens shout as they join a Thai an anti-government protest in Bangkok, Thailand February 28, 2021. REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun

Following a call for help from Myanmar pro-democracy campaigners, around 200 people in Taipei and dozens in Bangkok, Melbourne and Hong Kong took to the streets waving #MilkTeaAlliance signs and flags.

The hashtag, which originated as a protest against online attacks from nationalists in China, was used millions of times on Sunday. Its name originates from the shared passion for the milky drink in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.[L4N2FJ12F]

Activists in Indonesia and Malaysia held online protests and thousands more, from Southeast Asia and elsewhere, took part in a social media campaign, posting messages and artwork.

The rallies in Asia took place on the bloodiest day of weeks of demonstrations in Myanmar, after police fired on protesters, including in the country’s biggest city of Yangon, where some activists held their own “Milk Tea Alliance” signs. [L2N2KY00J]

At least 21 protesters have been killed since the military seized power and detained elected government leader Aung San Suu Kyi and much of her party leadership on Feb. 1.

“When we see courageous people in Myanmar take to the streets, brave the water cannon, tear gas, batons and bullets, painful memories stir,” said Debby Chan, a Sino-Myanmar relations researcher who took part in a Hong Kong rally on top of city landmark Lion Rock.

“Hong Kong protesters also suffered from this in 2019,” she said. “Today we want to show our solidarity.”

Hong Kong campaigners climbed the small mountain and held #MilkTeaAlliance signs calling for an end to dictatorship in Myanmar.

Pro-democracy advocates say the budding pro-democracy pan-Asian solidarity coalition is now playing a consistent role in helping activists mobilize.

“Myanmar activists have been very active in engaging with Milk Tea Alliance since the coup,” said Thai activist Rathasat Plenwong who went to show his support for the Myanmar protests in Bangkok on Sunday.

“We feel like we’re in this together.”


Reporting by Fanny Potkin in Singapore and Patpicha Tanakasempipat in Bangkok; additional reporting by Ann Wang in Taipei; editing by Philippa Fletcher

POLITICO MAGAZINE EXCERPT

When the Left Attacked the Capitol

Fifty years ago, extremists bombed the seat of American democracy to end a war and start a revolution. It did neither, but it may have helped bring down a president.


Getty Images, AP, iStock / POLITICO illustration

By LAWRENCE ROBERTS

02/28/2021

Lawrence Roberts, a former editor for the Washington Post and ProPublica, is the author of MAYDAY 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets, and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest.


In the winter of 1971, you could still find vestiges of an age of innocence in Washington. The previous decade had been one of the most unstable in the country’s history, rocked by political assassinations, racial violence and explosions at public buildings. But at the U.S. Capitol, it was still easy to stroll through without having to empty your pockets or show a driver’s license. No metal detectors or security cameras. You didn’t need to join a tour. Which is why two young people who melted into the crowd of sightseers were free to scour the building for a safe spot to set their bomb.

They were members of the Weather Underground. Since 1969, the radical left group had already bombed several police targets, banks and courthouses around the country, acts they hoped would instigate an uprising against the government. Now two of these self-described revolutionaries wandered the halls with sticks of dynamite strapped under their clothing. They slipped into an unmarked marble-lined men’s bathroom one floor below the Senate chamber. They hooked up a fuse attached to a stopwatch and stuffed the device behind a 5-foot-high wall.


Shortly before 1 a.m. on March 1, the phone call came into the Capitol switchboard. The overnight operator remembered it as a man’s voice, low and hard: “This is real. Evacuate the building immediately.”

It exploded at 1:32 a.m. No one was hurt, but damage was extensive. The blast tore the bathroom wall apart, shattering sinks into shrapnel. Shock waves blew the swinging doors off the entrance to the Senate barbershop. The doors crashed through a window and sailed into a courtyard. Along the corridor, light fixtures, plaster and tile cracked. In the Senate dining room, panes fell from a stained-glass window depicting George Washington greeting two Revolutionary War heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette and Baron von Steuben. Both Europeans lost their heads.




Workers begin the job of cleaning up debris in a hallway on the Senate side of the Capitol on March 1, 1971, following the explosion of a bomb nearby. Officials reported extensive damage but no injuries. | AP Photo

Shocked lawmakers condemned the attack. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana), called it an “outrageous and sacrilegious” hit on a “public shrine.” House Speaker Carl Albert (D-Oklahoma) said the bombing was “doubly sad” because it would likely lead to tighter security at the Capitol and less freedom for visitors. The Washington Post’s editorial page lamented “the easy contagion of extremism in a time of dark frustrations and deep disillusionment.”

Fifty years later, we find the nation assessing the physical and psychic wreckage left by another Capitol attack, this one at the hands of the radical right. It would be wrong to give these events equal weight on the historical scale, to simply regard them as insurrections from opposite ends of the spectrum. Dangerous and criminal as it was, the bombing amounted to a kind of guerrilla theater, a symbolic destruction of federal property to protest the disastrous military intervention in Vietnam. The Jan. 6 mob that ransacked the Capitol, causing five deaths, embodied a far more perilous delusion: that a national election was fraudulent and should be overturned with threats and violence against lawmakers. “Stop the War” versus “Stop the Steal.”

Still, the attacks do share historical context. Each arose from a cauldron of political polarization and distrust of government. They were carried out by splinter groups that had abandoned faith in American democracy and would have been pleased to see the system collapse. Both led to heightened security in Washington. Thus it may be valuable to examine the events of 1971, and what lessons those days may hold for our new era of extremism.

One big difference is that the 1971 attack was meant to oppose, not support, the sitting president, Richard Nixon. Another is that the case remains cold. While the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in broad daylight, their faces captured by security cameras, their own social media feeds or witnesses with smartphones, the Weather Underground set the bomb in secret. Members were much harder to track down, since they lived together in small cells under false identities.

The radical group gave the action a code name: Big Top. At first, it looked like a failure.

It’s unusual that we know so much about this particular attack. Even now, ex-Weather members appear to honor an omertà about their activities. Perhaps it was youthful pride that led them to reconstruct the caper in the mid-1970s for the documentary “Underground,” directed by Emile de Antonio. They identified themselves by name, while keeping their faces obscured. Over the years, additional details have emerged from associates, friends and relatives of the bombers, who spilled anonymously to historians and authors including Susan Braudy (Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left), Ron Jacobs (The Way the Wind Blows), Bryan Burrough (Days of Rage) and Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Destructive Generation).

So we know Big Top became a project for two teams. One team posed as tourists and scouted the building. A trash can? A closet? A tunnel? Finally, they found the 5-foot wall. Full of dust, so it probably wasn’t checked regularly. On Saturday, February 27, 1971, the two members of the other team strapped the dynamite and timer to their bodies and assembled the device in the bathroom. As they lifted it into its hiding place, it didn’t sit securely. “There was a ledge where the people who did it thought there had been a shelf,” Weather member Jeff Jones explained in the documentary. “It fell several feet.” After a sickening few seconds, they let out their breath. The bomb appeared intact, still set to go at 1:30 a.m. They left the building.



Top: George M. White, newly named architect of the Capitol, talks of damage to the building during a Senate Public Works subcommittee hearing, investigating the recent bombing, in Washington on March 2, 1971. Bottom left: Sen. Lowell Weicker Jr., R-Conn., stands in crater blasted out of a Senate washroom in the Capitol, on March 1, 1971, as he talks with Chief James Powell of the Capitol Police. Bottom right: Sen. Robert Dole, R-Kan., discussed Senate security at a news conference on March 9, 1971, in St. Louis, after the explosion in the U.S. Capitol. | AP Photos


The group had mailed copies of a letter to the New York Post and The Associated Press, taking responsibility. Sent by special delivery, it carried the group’s logo, a rainbow with a lightning bolt. That night, they placed their warning call. The Capitol police searched, found nothing. Zero hour came and went, and no bomb exploded. The fall must have broken the timer.

“So the organizers had a series of quick calls around the country and came up with a plan,” Jones said, “which was to take a much smaller device and go back in, and put it on top of the one that had been put there the day before. Sort of like a little starter motor.”

The next day, Sunday, the bombers returned, placed the new device, and called the switchboard again. U.S. Capitol Police searched as many rooms as they could in half an hour. According to an FBI report, one man checked the bathroom that held the bomb, saw nothing, and moved on. Only seven minutes later, it blew. Damage was estimated to be at least $100,000, equivalent to $650,000 today. (This week, officials put the cost of the Jan. 6 riot at $30 million.)

Neither Jones nor anyone else in the documentary named the bombers. However, at least three published accounts have identified them as two women then in their late 20s—Kathy Boudin, one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village explosion, and Bernardine Dohrn, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s law school whose looks, brains and take-no-prisoners attitude had made her a romantic icon within the left. Neither Boudin nor Dohrn has publicly admitted or denied placing the Capitol bomb. Neither responded to questions for this article.

According to Destructive Generation, it was Dohrn who called Rennie Davis in 1971. A few years ago, I visited Davis at his Colorado home as I researched my book MAYDAY 1971, about the clash between Nixon and the antiwar movement. His memories of the old days were generally quite sharp, except when it came to the Capitol bomb. He confirmed he’d been alerted about the attack in advance, but said he wasn’t told where or when it would blow. He also said he didn’t remember who called him, and he didn’t recall, if he ever knew, who actually placed the device. Davis died earlier this month from cancer, at the age of 80.

Three days after the bombing, Dohrn, already on the FBI’s most-wanted list for other crimes, nearly had been captured in the Bay Area, when she and others picked up some money wired to a Western Union office. A federal agent recognized them, but they sped away and later switched cars to elude the authorities. One of the drivers was Rennie’s brother John. His were among the fingerprints the FBI later found in a San Francisco apartment where the band had been handling explosives.

But the bureau hadn’t identified Dohrn as one of the possible Capitol bombers. The FBI and Justice Department remained focused on Washington.

As recent events have borne out, the federal government often underreacts to perceived security threats from the right and overreacts to those coming from the left.

The 1971 bomb blew at a crucial moment for Richard Nixon. On that particular morning he was winging his way to Iowa to shore up political support in the heartland. The president was struggling politically, his approval rating dropping. Republicans had lost a slew of congressional seats and governorships in the 1970 midterms, despite Nixon’s hope that moderates would approve the way he was handling the Vietnam War—stepping up the fighting while slowly withdrawing U.S. troops. Next year’s reelection campaign was looking fierce; polls showed him trailing the presumed leader among the Democratic challengers, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

Nixon had largely built his career on antipathy to liberals and the left, and he didn’t need any additional fuel for his visceral distaste of the antiwar movement. A successful Spring Offensive threatened to not only complicate his Vietnam policies, and thus his second term, but also could distract from his grand plan to reopen diplomatic ties with China and remake the Cold War world.

One of his aides, Egil “Bud” Krogh Jr., who would later run the notorious White House “Plumbers” unit that plugged damaging leaks to the media and sought to undermine the president’s opponents, fired off a memo suggesting the Capitol bomb could be a rare opportunity. Handled right, it might counter the trend of “softer” support for the administration’s Vietnam policies from “middle of the road Americans.” The explosion, wrote Krogh, “is a chance for us to point out that we have not been tough for nothing. A bomb detonating in the breast of the Senate is as close as one can get to the heart of super-liberal thought in this government.”

Early in his presidency, Nixon had urged the FBI and Justice Departments to crack down harder on the antiwar movement, even contemplating giving written approval to illegal tactics such as burglarizing the homes and offices of activists. Before the Spring Offensive, Attorney General John Mitchell insisted the protests would turn out to be violent, no matter what organizers said. He secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on the Mayday Tribe and three other groups. Now, the bombing fed the president’s belief that there wasn’t much difference between underground militants and peaceful protesters. Reporting to Nixon on the FBI’s hunt for the bombers, his chief domestic policy adviser listed the suspects: “It’s the Bernadette (sic) Dohrn, Rennie Davis bunch.”

The FBI shifted agents from all parts of the Washington field office to the case. They tailed Mayday activists, including four young people who drove north the day after the bombing, finally stopping them on a Pennsylvania highway. The agents, brandishing shotguns, searched their car but found no reason to detain them.

After all the investigating, only one person was taken into custody in connection with the bombing. She was a tall 19-year-old blonde from California named Leslie Bacon, who had been helping book musicians for the rallies. The FBI found witnesses who said they saw Bacon in the Capitol the day before the blast. When she denied it, she was charged with lying to the grand jury. Weather wrote an open letter to Bacon’s mother, saying she was innocent: “Mrs. Bacon, we cannot turn ourselves in to save Leslie. She is a committed revolutionary and understands this.”

At least a dozen other activists were subpoenaed before grand juries in New York, Detroit and Washington. All refused to answer questions. Some taunted the feds, like Judy Gumbo Albert, the driver of the car stopped in Pennsylvania, who declared of the bombing: “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.” Prosecutors had to decide whether to bring Bacon to trial anyway. But by the time the matter came up, the Supreme Court had issued a decision that effectively would have forced the government to disclose details of its surveillance. The Watergate burglars had just been caught, and the last thing the administration needed was another bugging scandal. Nixon himself ordered the Bacon case dropped. She and the other activists went free. Bacon has continued to say she had nothing to do with the bombing.


The FBI, on Oct. 14, 1970, added to its 10 Most Wanted list of fugitives Bernardine Rae Dohrn, a self-proclaimed Communist revolutionary who advocates widespread terrorist bombings. The FBI described Dohrn, 28, as a reputed underground leader of the "Violence-Oriented Weatherman Faction of Students for a Democratic Society." | Getty Images

The Weather Underground continued to stage nonlethal bombings in the 1970s, notably a blast inside a Pentagon bathroom and at the State Department. (They called ahead on those, too.) When the Vietnam War finally ended, the group lost its center of gravity. By 1980, Weather had effectively disbanded. Dohrn, along with her husband and fellow member, Bill Ayers, came out of hiding. They didn’t go to prison. The government had dropped most charges against them for the same reason they couldn’t prosecute Leslie Bacon, and also because agents on a desperate hunt for clues had been caught conducting illegal break-ins at homes of the fugitives’ friends and relatives. The FBI’s overreach had backfired, but the era of left-wing extremism imploded on its own.

Kathy Boudin was one of the few who remained underground. In 1981, she helped a group called the Black Liberation Army rob an armored Brink’s truck outside New York City. Two police officers and a guard were killed, the militants were captured. Boudin and her romantic partner, David Gilbert, went to prison. She left their 14-month-old son to be raised by her closest friends, Dohrn and Ayers, who became academics in Chicago.

A grand jury subpoenaed Dohrn in the Brink’s case. When she refused to give a handwriting sample, she was jailed for eight months. Her friend Boudin spent 22 years in prison, winning parole in 2003, and now serves as co-director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University.

Neither has disclosed anything specific about Weather’s activities, but Dohrn has spoken in general about those days, with some regret if not quite an apology. “Now, nobody in today’s world can defend bombings,” she said in a November 2008 interview with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now.” “How could you do that after 9/11, after, you know, Oklahoma City? It’s a new context, in a different context … the context of the time has to be understood.”

A letter, postmarked Elizabeth, N.J., received on March 2, 1971, by the Associated Press in Washington, signed by Weather Underground, which claims responsibility for the March 1 bombing of the U.S. Capitol building. | AP Photo

In the same interview her husband said: “I think that if we’ve learned one thing from those perilous years, it’s that dogma, certainty, self-righteousness, sectarianism of all kinds is dangerous and self-defeating.”

As a slogan of the 1960s went, what goes around comes around. That 14-month-old son who Dohrn and Ayers raised for Boudin? He became a Rhodes scholar, a lawyer and a public defender. In 2019, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco, a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris. And on Jan. 6, as the pro-Trump mob attacked, Chesa Boudin sent out a tweet: “Hoping everyone who works in the Capitol is safe from this despicable effort to take down our democracy.”

Fifty years on, it seems remarkable how fast the 1971 attack faded from collective memory, even as it exercised a profound effect on the end of an era of political activism that would be unrivaled until the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The bombing supercharged Nixon’s paranoia, leading the president and his aides to ramp up their crackdown on the New Left. They ordered the biggest, and most unconstitutional, mass arrests in U.S. history during the Mayday protests, rounding up more than 12,000 people. And then weeks later, the White House launched illegal measures to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. On Labor Day weekend, Krogh dispatched operatives to break into the office of Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, searching for compromising material. Nixon’s men were field-testing the tactics they’d soon be caught using against their political opponents in the 1972 election. Thus, you can draw a line, if a dotted one, from the bombing to the demise of Richard Nixon in 1974. Donald Trump, meanwhile, still awaits the consequences of the Jan. 6 attack.

READ THE REST HERE
When the Left Attacked the Capitol - POLITICO

 

Clean break: the risk of catching Covid from surfaces overblown, experts say

Prioritising eye protection and face masks will prevent the spread of coronavirus more than disinfecting surfaces, research shows

A cleaner at the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. Surface transmission is not as significant a factor in Covid-19 spread as once feared, experts say. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Melissa Davey

@MelissaLDavey

Sat 27 Feb 2021 

When cases of Covid-19 first began emerging in Australia, some people reported disinfecting their groceries before bringing them into their homes, and there were also concerns that the virus could be living on the surfaces of packages in the mail. During Victoria’s extended lockdown, teams of workers could be seen walking city streets disinfecting traffic light buttons, benches and even fences.

An epidemiologist with La Trobe University, Associate Prof Hassan Vally, said just over one year later it has become clear surface transmission is not as significant a factor in Covid-19 spread as once feared. While surface transmission is not impossible, Vally said its role in spread needs perspective.

“I want to be clear that nothing should change in terms of washing our hands and personal hygiene,” Vally said. “We can, however, be less anxious about washing every surface 20 times a day, and just concentrate on good hand hygiene and social distancing, and staying home when sick, which should be more than enough to stop us from spreading the virus.”

Australia Covid vaccine tracker: how is the rollout progressing and when will you get the jab?

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Close contact aerosol spread is the driving factor in Covid-19 transmission, primarily when an infected person is in close contact with another person and transmit small liquid particles [droplets and aerosols] containing the virus, especially when they cough and sneeze. These aerosols then get into the nose, mouth and eyes of people nearby.

In a piece for the Conversation, Vally said: “This isn’t to say surface transmission isn’t possible and that it doesn’t pose a risk in certain situations, or that we should disregard it completely. But, we should acknowledge the threat surface transmission poses is relatively small.”

Emanuel Goldman, a professor of microbiology at Rutgers University in the US, wrote in medical journal the Lancet that studies warning of surface transmission had been conducted in the lab, and “have little resemblance to real-life scenarios”.

“In my opinion, the chance of transmission through inanimate surfaces is very small, and only in instances where an infected person coughs or sneezes on the surface, and someone else touches that surface soon after the cough or sneeze (within 1–2 hours),” Goldman said.

“I do not disagree with erring on the side of caution, but this can go to extremes not justified by the data.” Periodically disinfecting surfaces and use of gloves may be reasonable precautions in settings like hospitals, he said, but is probably overkill for less risky environments.

Fuelling the concern about surface spread were seemingly alarming but overblown studies, including one from the Australian government agency CSIRO that found a droplet of fluid containing the virus at concentrations similar to levels observed in infected patients could survive on surfaces such as cash and glass for up to 28 days.

What many of the news reports about the study failed to mention was that it was carried out in the dark to remove the effect of ultraviolet light which helps to kill viruses. Humidity and temperatures in the real world vary constantly, which is different to carefully controlled temperatures in a laboratory. Mail, for example, will go through different humidities and temperatures throughout the system and will also be exposed to light, making survival of the virus in the post extremely unlikely.

The science wasn’t wrong, Vally said, but the interpretation and explanation of the results was.

But isn’t too many hygiene measures better to be absolutely safe?

Pfizer Covid vaccine 94% effective in peer-reviewed, real-world mass study

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Vally said the issue was compliance fatigue.

“There’s been a lot of psychological research done that says that we only have a certain amount of willpower and a certain amount of detail that we can focus our attention on,” Vally said. “That’s why Apple founder Steve Jobs wore the same clothes every day, based on the idea you can only make so many decisions each day, and exercise certain amount of willpower.

“To me as we learn more about the virus, we should make sure we are not being worried about things we shouldn’t be worried about, we don’t want to focus our attention on things disproportionate to the threat that they pose. That way, we will have more energy to focus on the things that are important, and that helps us to save money and time as well.”

Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and professor with the Australian National University, agreed all the available evidence says it’s people in close proximity with each other talking, coughing, singing and breathing heavily that drives virus spread.

“They’re breathing them in and it’s getting into their nose and eyes and that is the major risk factor,” he said. It’s why eye protection, particularly in quarantine hotels and hospitals, should be prioritised as much as masks and social distancing, he said.

Collignon cites a large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found 19% of healthcare workers became infected, despite wearing three-layered surgical masks, gloves and shoe covers and using alcohol rub. After the introduction of face shields, no worker was infected.

“I think we’ve underappreciated how important the eyes are and overemphasised surfaces,” Collignon said.

A SCAB IS A SCAB

Molson posted job ads for temporary workers almost three weeks before lockout at Toronto brewery

A LOCK OUT IS NOT A STRIKE, ITS UNION BUSTING

By Josh Rubin

Business Reporter
Tue., Feb. 23, 2021

Almost three weeks before locking out 300 employees at its Toronto plant, Molson posted help wanted ads looking for temporary brewing, packaging and warehouse workers.

The ads, posted on a number of websites, including LinkedIn and Indeed, are a sign the company is playing hardball in its dispute with the Canadian Union of Brewery and General Workers Local 325, according to labour advocate Deena Ladd.

“They’re showing they’re playing hard ball. It’s not a good look for them,” said Ladd, executive director of the Workers Action Centre.

A posting for “brewing operator” said the successful candidate would have the opportunity to “work within a World Class Manufacturing environment that actively supports and benefits their community.” The temporary jobs would pay $16.94 per hour, according to the postings. A permanent brewing worker at the top of the wage scale earns $35.35 an hour.

A company spokesperson said the jobs were a routine annual posting for summer help, and not related to contract negotiations.

The postings were put up just around the time a no-board report declaring in impasse in negotiations was requested by the company. A no-board was declared Feb. 4. The brewing, packaging and warehouse jobs were listed by LinkedIn three weeks ago.

Saturday, Molson locked out 300 workers at one of its biggest plants in the country, just hours after workers overwhelmingly rejected the company’s final offer. The workers have been without a contract since their old collective bargaining agreement expired Dec. 31.

Labour lawyer Laurie Kent, who represents the union, said Local 325 was “surprised and disappointed” by the lockout, because the two sides had been making progress at the bargaining table.

“It is especially disappointing that Molson would do this during a pandemic when their workers have been declared essential,” said Kent, adding that Local 325 is optimistic that the company won’t actually use replacement workers during the lockout.

“The union would be deeply disappointed if the company chose to hire replacement workers, but is hopeful that it won’t come to that,” said Kent, a partner at Koskie Minsky.

Molson didn’t bring in replacement workers during a 2017 strike at the plant that lasted more than a month.

In 2007, the company took a harder line with workers at its Edmonton brewery, closing it permanently during an ongoing strike, throwing 136 people out of work.

Ladd said if the company brings in replacement workers this time, it would extend the labour dispute rather than bringing it to a quick conclusion.

“The whole point of something as drastic as a strike or a lockout is to move negotiations along. Hiring replacement workers takes the pressure off for getting something done,” said Ladd.



The company presented its final offer on Feb. 10. Employees voted on it Thursday and Friday

The three-year offer included raises in each of the three years for two different tiers of employees, and a $1,000 ratification bonus.

The company’s offer also included transferring all but the most senior employees from a defined-benefit pension plan to a newer defined-contribution plan.  THIS IS A TERRIBLE CHANGE, 

A DBP IS WAY BETTER

The union had asked the company to gradually eliminate the two-tier wage system, which had been in place at the plant since 2010. It caps new hires at 84 per cent of the previous wage scale. Employees hired before that point can hit the top of the scale.

A company proposal to bring in a “continental” schedule could have also meant 12-hour shifts with no overtime pay, said Kent.

The Toronto brewery, on Carlingview Dr. near Pearson airport, is one of Molson’s biggest in the country, and produces dozens of brands. Several industry sources said the plant produces three million hectolitres of beer per year. That’s 300 million litres, or roughly equivalent to 880 million bottles of beer.

Josh Rubin is a Toronto-based business reporter. Follow him on Twitter: @starbeer

Biden Denounces Union-Busting Tactics Ahead of Amazon Union Voice in Alabama

Biden at his campaign kick off in Pittsburgh in 2019 (UPI)

BY: MIKE ELK FEBRUARY 28, 2021


Tonite, President Joe Biden released a video voicing his support for unionization efforts including those at Amazon in Alabama, where 6,000 workers are voting this month on whether to unionize.

“Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace,” Biden said on a video posted to twitter. “This is vitally important — a vitally important choice, as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race — what it reveals is the deep disparities that still exist in our country.”

Biden asserted in his comments that the federal government had a role in helping to promote unionization in the US.

“You should all remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist, it said that we should encourage unions,” said Biden.

Biden also took a step to denounce some of the union busting tactics that companies including Amazon regularly use to bust unions.

“There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. No supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences,” said Biden.

Labor historians hailed the speech as a landmark turning point in how presidents help unions.

“Politicians always give great speeches at union conventions and avoid union organizing campaigns because of the possibility of failure. But Biden broke this norm,” tweeted University of California Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lictenstein.

RWDSU, which is seeking to unionize workers at Amazon in Alabama, welcomed the statement.

“Thank you, President Biden, for sending clear message support for the BAmazon Union workers seeking to bring the first union to an Amazon warehouse with RWDSU,” said RWDSU president Stuart Applbaum in a statement. “As President Biden points out, the best way for working people to protect themselves and their families is by organizing into unions”.

Unions Petition Biden to Get Involved in Amazon Union Drive - Molson Use Scabs to Bust Union - El Paso Nursing Assistants Strike – Payday Report

Vaccine tourism is both unethical and bad for business, experts say

Executives who engage in so-called "vaccine tourism" show both an ethical disregard for those less fortunate and a surprising lack of business acumen, experts argue.

© Provided by The Canadian Press
Their comments came after the head of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mark Machin, stepped down after admitting to travelling to Dubai to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

"The reputational damage — the lasting scar of you being caught, outed and tarred and feathered in the public square over your decision to engage in vaccine tourism — will linger," said Wojtek Dabrowski, managing partner of Provident Communications.

He said it will likely be some time until Machin, once a highly respected money manager, lands a new gig, as most companies will be loath to have their names associated with his.

"You have to think about what kind of organization would take on a leader with this in their background," Dabrowski said.

Decisions to travel abroad for COVID-19 vaccines also raise questions about the culture a person expects to cultivate in their company, he added.

"As the CEO, the buck stops with you every time," Dabrowski said. "Whether that's on business performance, whether that's on culture, or whether that's on modelling the behaviour that you want to see elsewhere in the organization."

In this case, he said, the Canada Pension Plan itself is likely to come out unscathed, in part because Machin left his post so quickly.

But if the company is not so well-known or highly regarded to begin with, and doesn't act swiftly to rectify the situation, the executive's actions could have broader implications, he said.

Some regions have also clamped down on vaccine tourism, not wanting to be associated with the practice.

In January, the Florida government changed its vaccination rules to prevent non-residents from flying in, getting jabbed and flying back out. The state now requires would-be vaccine recipients to provide proof of at least part-time residency.

And while Dabrowski noted that executivrs may find it desirable — though unadvisable — to combine vaccination with a vacation, that's not always how things play out.

In late January, the head of the Great Canadian Gaming Corp. and his wife were ticketed after allegedly flying to a remote Yukon community to get vaccinated.

Dabrowski said the consequences of travelling to hop the vaccine line are perhaps even greater now, in a time when many people believe corporations should consider more than just profits.

"This whole idea that a corporation has this broader social imperative that's not just focused around making money, but rather, improving and bettering and serving the communities in which these companies operate, is emerging as a very pressing imperative for a lot of organizations," he said.

And there's little question about whether vaccine tourism betters the community, he added.

Bioethicist Kerry Bowman said he was shocked to learn that a prominent figure would travel abroad to get a COVID-19 vaccine, especially after the furor that erupted in late December and early January over jet-setting politicians defying public health advice to avoid international travel.

"You're really jumping the vaccine queue," he said. "We've got elderly people in this country, and particularly the province of Ontario, that have still not even received a preliminary dose."

Vaccine tourism also erodes trust in a health-care system that should ideally, treat everybody equally, Bowman said.

"It feeds into what a lot of people already know: That people with privileges and connections are going to find a way through the system."

The phenomenon differs, Bowman said, from other forms of medical tourism in which people cross the border to pay for quicker access to treatment.

"If you're going abroad for surgery, the secondary effect on other people from a point of view of justice is very different," he said, noting that the pandemic makes everything more complicated.

"If a person is coming back from overseas, even if they've been vaccinated, the vaccine is really not coming up to strength for a few weeks," he said. "So you've also got a potential health risk that's being introduced."

Bowman said the costs of vaccine tourism far outweigh any benefits.

"Critics will say vaccine tourism is just taking pressure off the system, and it's no big deal," Bowman said. "But, you know, fairness is very, very important."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 28, 2021.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press

Canada's spy agency wants more power. 

How would that work? BADLY
Catharine Tunney POSTMEDIA

© Andrew Burton/Reuters Section 16 of the CSIS Act limits the spy agency's ability to gather foreign intelligence if the data and messages are hosted in other countries.

The agency he runs fell afoul of the Federal Court — and now the country's chief spy is intensifying his campaign for new powers and sounding the alarm about the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's ability to keep tabs on hostile foreign states.

But civil liberties advocates are urging Parliament to be skeptical if it agrees to crack open the legislation that governs CSIS.

In a rare public speech earlier this month, CSIS director David Vigneault took aim at the spy agency's legislation.


"We need to ensure that CSIS authorities continue to evolve so that they are able to address the challenges of the significantly more complex environment around us," he said.

"Our act sets technological limitations on intelligence collection that were not foreseen by the drafters of the legislation in 1984 and unduly limit our investigations in a modern era."

His speech, delivered virtually to the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said that hostile foreign governments — notably China and Russia — are "aggressively" targeting Canada to obtain political and economic advantages.

Leah West, a former federal lawyer who is now a lecturer on national security issues at Carleton University, said the service has been constrained for years by two words in its enabling law: "within Canada."

CSIS isn't able to collect foreign intelligence in the way the CIA or MI6 does. Section 16 of the CSIS Act allows the service to collect foreign intelligence relating to the capabilities, intentions or activities of any foreign state — as long as the information itself is located within Canada.

"There's a huge gap in Canada's foreign intelligence collection abilities," West said.

"In this day and age, having a good understanding of the intents and abilities and priorities of foreign governments is really important. We are living in a global pandemic. This information is extremely important these days."

The limitations placed on CSIS's sphere of operations by the law make it unclear whether, for example, the intelligence agency could access a target's information if the data in question were sent via an email hosted on a server outside of Canada

© Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press In a rare public speech earlier this month, CSIS Director David Vigneault took aim at the spy agency's legislation.

Meanwhile, the Communications Security Establishment — Canada's foreign signals agency — is prohibited from collecting intelligence on people within Canada.

"There's a gap for people in Canada who store their data outside of Canada," said West. "And that's a gap that, if I was a foreign state entity, I'd be looking to take advantage of."
Federal Court has pushed back at CSIS

In recent years, the Federal Court has ruled against CSIS over its approach to foreign intelligence.

Just this month, a judge denied the service's request to collect foreign information, ruling that a proposed technique would stray beyond the spy service's legal mandate.

The court has noted in the past that Parliament imposed the "within Canada" requirement because collecting intelligence in other countries could harm Canada's international relations — an interpretation CSIS rejects.

"The court's interpretation of the 'within Canada' limitation in the context of new technology significantly impacts the ability [of] CSIS to provide advice to the minister of foreign affairs or national defence," CSIS spokesperson John Townsend told CBC News this week.

The government of Canada has filed an appeal of that recent Federal Court decision posing specific questions pertaining to the interpretation of CSIS's authority to collect foreign intelligence.

Stephanie Carvin, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University and a former national security analyst, called Vigneault's speech a plea for attention from Parliament.

"What the director is effectively saying is, 'Look, we've stressed our mandate as far as it goes, but it's no longer adequate to address some of these threats,'" she said.

"I think there's this real misconception that intelligence services want to operate in the dark and in the shadows and things like this, and to a certain extent they do. But they also really like legal certainty."

But lawyer Lex Gill, an affiliate with the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, said lawmakers should be reluctant to entertain CSIS's requests for greater authority in light of the court's concerns.

"The greater a state actor's ability to infringe [on] our privacy rights and our other constitutional rights, the more robust the mechanisms for prior judicial authorization, oversight and review must be," she wrote in an email to CBC News.

"It's fair to say that intelligence agencies in Canada have had a track record of asking for more of the former without due regard for the latter."
CSIS's request for 'modern tools' questioned

Vigneault also said the act needs to be updated so that the service can "use modern tools and assess data and information" — in part to keep up with the flood of information.

"When the CSIS Act was drafted in 1984, telephone books and alligator clips on phone lines were among the tools used to identify threat actors and collect information. Information was stored in silos," said Townsend.

"The changes contemplated are not about addressing the issue of encryption. Rather, it is about ensuring CSIS analysts have the tools and authorities to help them make sense of exponentially growing data, in strict accordance with Canadians' expectations of privacy."

That worries Brenda McPhail, privacy director at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

"To me, that sounds like they're looking to leverage artificial intelligence applications and they want to be able to potentially combine large data sets to train and draw inferences from combining different sets of data," she said.

That kind of data collection and surveillance can be particularly alarming for people of colour, said McPhail.

"It comes from a place of incredible privilege to say, 'I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear.' So a middle aged white woman like me might be able to say that and think she means it," she said. "But a young Black man who's ever been stopped simply for the crime of driving Black would be deeply and intimately aware that it doesn't matter if you're blameless.

"People are unjustly and disproportionately targeted and as people in Canada we should care about that. "
Who gets to hear CSIS's secrets?

CSIS also has signalled it wants Parliament to take another look at the part of the act that says who it can provide classified briefings to.

Section 19 of the act says the agency can advise "the government of Canada".

Townsend said the agency can still give "sanitized threat overviews" and unclassified briefings to external stakeholders, but stressed that threats to Canada's COVID-19 vaccine rollout have shown that private sector firms play a role in national security.

Carvin said that, for years, espionage was focused on governments targeting other governments' secrets and military plans.

"That has changed. We are now looking at governments that are targeting NGOs, activist groups in Canada, for clandestine foreign influence purposes, that they're targeting cities and provinces because they control critical infrastructure in Canada and businesses who have lots of important data that is now strategic," she said.

"The nature of the threat is such that maybe [CSIS] needs to be talking to groups that are being targeted, say by China."

The B.C. Civil Liberties Association has tried to take CSIS to task for sharing information on protesters with the National Energy Board (NEB) and petroleum industry companies — something the advocacy group sees as a violation of section 19 of the CSIS Act.

The spy agency's watchdog dismissed BCCLA's complaint and the association is now taking its case to the Federal Court.
Government 'will always work with security agencies'

Updating the CSIS Act was not mentioned in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. The minister's spokesperson, Mary-Liz Power, said the government is opening to working with CSIS but wouldn't say if the Liberal government would undertake a review of the law any time soon.

"Canadians expect their government's agencies to keep pace with evolving threats and global trends, and we agree. The National Security framework in Canada is always evolving to meet the moment. It is critical that this work be done in accordance with the rule of law, and never at the expense of Canadians' Charter rights," she said.

"We will always work with security agencies and expert partners across government to ensure our agencies have the tools they need to keep us all safe."

The Liberal government overhauled parts of the national security law in 2019, including the rules governing CSIS's use of data sets.

NDP public safety critic Jack Harris said any discussion of changing the law would have to proceed with caution.

"Any request for new powers would need to be clearly substantiated and considered along with assurances that any such powers would be used appropriately," he said in a media statement.

"In light of CSIS's history and judicial comments on their relationship with the court, we need to be vigilant."

McPhail said she wants to see nuanced conversations about CSIS's powers take place both in Parliament and in public — but the agency needs to be more open about what it wants.

"If there are specific authorities that are needed in order to create specific tools that will have genuine benefit to national security, then we need more than a vague, 'We need more modern authorities,'" she said.

"We need a statement that says, 'We want to use artificial intelligence applications for the following purposes.' Not operational details, just [a] broad policy level statement.

"There's everything to be gained and nothing to be lost from an open public conversation ..."

Carvin said studying and opening the legislation would allow politicians and the public to engage with difficult questions about privacy, national security and foreign intelligence.

"In the pandemic, intelligence has become extremely important on so many levels," she said. "So I think there is the potential for Parliament to actually do something."