UN commission urges equality for women in decision-making
CAMEROON, Cameroon — The U.N.’s premiere global body fighting for gender equality called for a sharp increase of women in global decision-making in a hotly debated final document adopted last Friday night that saw continuing pushback against women’s rights and a refusal to address issues of gender identity.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Commission on the Status of Women reaffirmed the blueprint to achieve gender equality adopted 25 years ago at the Beijing women’s conference and shone a spotlight on several major issues today, including the imbalance of power between men and women in public life and the growing impact of violence against women and girls in the digital world.

Diplomats were negotiating until almost the last minute over language on women human rights defenders, gender-based violence, and earlier on reproductive and sexual health and rights. Some Western nations sought unsuccessfully to get the commission to recognize gender non-conforming and transgender women. The closest they got was a reference to women and girls “who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination" and face “diverse situations and conditions."

The European Union said it would have liked to see “more ambitious language” in the 23-page document, stressing that “the systematic attempts by some delegations to derail the process and question international commitments and obligations on gender equality show that the pushback against women’s rights continue.”

Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy for The International Women’s Health Coalition, said at a briefing earlier Friday that this year “Russia has been very vocal and on the front lines” in pushing “for language that is often regressing and that seeks to deny women and girls ... their rights.” The Holy See often joined their positions, and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Cuba were also vocal opponents on many issues, she said, while China opposed any reference to women human rights defenders.

“Russia played an exceptionally disruptive role in the negotiations,” an EU diplomat said. “Today’s low common denominator result demonstrates that a pushback against women’s rights continues at the U.N., and that Russia is doing all it can to undermine progress on the issue.” The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of private discussions.

The “Agreed Conclusions” were negotiated by the 193 U.N. member nations and adopted by consensus by the commission’s 45 members at the end of a two-week meeting. The U.N. women’s agency said more than 25,000 members of civil society registered to participate in the partly in-person but mainly virtual meeting that saw 200 side events led by member states and more than 700 events by civil society representatives.

After Ambassador Mher Margaryan, the commission chair, banged the gavel signifying consensus, about two dozen countries spoke.

Saudi Arabia stressed that any reference to gender “means women and men” and to marriage as “between women and men.” China said it would not join consensus on the role of women human rights defenders.

In the document, the commission supports the important role of civil society in promoting and protecting the human rights and freedoms of all women, “including women human rights defenders.”

U.N. Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said areas in the outcome document “do not please everybody,” and the conclusions could have been “more ambitious” and the recommendations “even bolder and decisive.”

She urged member states to use the recommendations “as a building block and to outperform what is contained in these Agreed Conclusions.” She said next week’s mainly virtual Gender Equality Forum in Mexico City, another follow-up to the 1995 Beijing conference, “will take forward what we have learned from the discussions of this commission and look at how we take concrete actions.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka said the conclusions “contribute to important advances” on women’s participation in public life, the main focus of the meeting along with tackling violence against women which increased during last year’s COVID-19 pandemic.

The commission recognized that despite some progress women have a long road to reach equality with men in elections or appointments to decision-making bodies and administrative posts, she said. And it recognized that temporary special measures, including quotas, substantially contribute to increasing women’s representation in national and local legislatures, and called on all governments to set specific targets and timelines to achieve the goal of 50/50 gender balance in elected positions.

On violence against women in the digital world, Mlambo-Ngcuka said the commission noted the lack of preventive measures and remedies. She said member states should take action to encourage women's digital participation and protect them, including from cyberstalking and cyberbullying.

The Beijing declaration and platform approved by 189 countries in 1995 called for bold action in 12 areas to achieve gender equality, including combating poverty and gender-based violence, ensuring all girls get an education and putting women at top levels of business and government, as well as at peacemaking tables.

It also said, for the first time in a U.N. document, that women’s human rights include the right to control and decide “on matters relating to their sexuality, including their sexual and reproductive health, free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”

In Friday's outcome document, the commission urges governments at all levels to “ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.”

It also urges governments to provide information on sexual and reproductive health and HIV prevention, gender equality and women’s empowerment” to adolescent girls and boys and young women and men, “with appropriate direction and guidance from parents and legal guardians."

On a positive note, the International Women’s Health Coalition’s Kowalski said the commission’s meeting saw “very strong leadership” from a number of Latin American and Pacific island countries and the “really strong and vital return of the United States as a leader and defender of sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender equality and women’s rights more broadly.”

A highlight of the meeting was the virtual appearance by U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, who told the commission "the status of women is the status of democracy” and President Joe Biden’s administration will work to improve both.

Edith M. Lederer, The Associated Press

Chinese celebs, netizens slam 'two-faced' Hugo Boss over Xinjiang

BEIJING (Reuters) - At least three Chinese celebrities on Saturday dropped German fashion house Hugo Boss, the latest foreign brand caught in a concerted boycott by Chinese consumers over Western accusations of forced labour in Xinjiang

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© Reuters/THOMAS PETER 

People walk past a store of German fashion house Hugo Boss in Beijing

Among the celebrities who ended their pacts with Hugo Boss was actor-singer Li Yifeng, who said in a statement through his agent on the Twitter-like microblog Weibo that he would only cooperate with brands that specifically support and procure cotton from the farwestern Chinese region.

Activists and U.N. rights experts have accused China of using mass detainment, torture, forced labour and sterilisations on Uighurs in Xinjiang. China denies these claims and says its actions in the region are necessary to counter extremism.

Hugo Boss, in a post on its Weibo account on Thursday, said it would "continue to purchase and support Xinjiang cotton." But it said on Friday that it was not an authorised post, and had been deleted accordingly.

In an email to Reuters on Friday, company spokeswoman Carolin Westermann said an undated English-language statement on its website stating that "so far, HUGO BOSS has not procured any goods originating in the Xinjiang region from direct suppliers" was its official position.

On Saturday, the brand's Weibo account issued a new statement saying it cherished all longstanding relationships with partners in China.

Hugo Boss China did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.

Chinese internet users have accused Hugo Boss for backtracking on its position, saying the brand was being "two faced", with some vowing to boycott the brand for good.

"A two-faced person is the most disgusting. I'll boycott you forever," said a Weibo user.

The United States on Friday condemned what it called a "state-led" social media campaign in China against U.S. and other international companies for deciding not to use cotton from China's Xinjiang region over forced labour concerns.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

New Balance, Under Armour, Tommy Hilfiger and Converse, owned by Nike, are among companies that have come under fire in China for statements that they would not use cotton produced in the far-western Chinese region due to suspected forced labour.

The United States and other Western countries have imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the United States has said have amounted to genocide.

"Several companies are starting to cave in to China's threats by removing their forced labour policies from their websites, and even going as far as promoting "Xinjiang

Cotton" on their websites, which reports show is tainted with Uighur forced labour," the World Uyghur Congress said in a statement.

"This is the ultimate moral test for these companies: opt for respecting human rights or embolden the genocidal regime of the Chinese Commmunist Party," said the largest group representing exiled ethnic Uighurs.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Michael Perry)

New wave of ‘hacktivism’ adds twist to cybersecurity woes

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© Reuters/Kacper Pempel FILE PHOTO: Man holds laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture

(Reuters) - At a time when U.S. agencies and thousands of companies are fighting off major hacking campaigns originating in Russia and China, a different kind of cyber threat is re-emerging: activist hackers looking to make a political point.

Three major hacks show the power of this new wave of "hacktivism" - the exposure of AI-driven video surveillance being conducted by the startup Verkada, a collection of Jan. 6 riot videos from the right-wing social network Parler, and disclosure of the Myanmar military junta's high-tech surveillance apparatus.

And the U.S. government’s response shows that officials regard the return of hacktivism with alarm. An indictment last week accused 21-year-old Tillie Kottmann, a Swiss hacker who took credit for the Verkada breach, of a broad conspiracy.

"Wrapping oneself in an allegedly altruistic motive does not remove the criminal stench from such intrusion, theft and fraud," Seattle-based Acting U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said.

According to a U.S. counter-intelligence strategy released a year ago, "ideologically motivated entities such as hacktivists, leaktivists, and public disclosure organizations," are now viewed as "significant threats," alongside five countries, three terrorist groups, and "transnational criminal organizations."

Earlier waves of hacktivism, notably by the amorphous collective known as Anonymous in the early 2010s, largely faded away under law enforcement pressure. But now a new generation of youthful hackers, many angry about how the cybersecurity world operates and upset about the role of tech companies in spreading propaganda, are joining the fray.

And some former Anonymous members are returning to the field, including Aubrey Cottle, who helped revive the group’s Twitter presence last year in support of the Black Lives Matter protests.

Anonymous followers drew attention for disrupting an app that the Dallas police department was using to field complaints about protesters by flooding it with nonsense traffic. They also wrested control of Twitter hashtags promoted by police supporters.

"What’s interesting about the current wave of the Parler archive and Gab hack and leak is that the hacktivism is supporting antiracist politics or antifascism politics,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist at McGill University, Montreal, who wrote a book on Anonymous.

Gab, a social network favored by white nationalists and other right-wing extremists, has also been hurt by the hacktivist campaign and had to shut down for brief periods after breaches.

DISRUPTING QANON

Most recently, Cottle has been focused on QAnon and hate groups.

"QAnon trying to adopt Anonymous and merge itself into Anonymous proper, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back," said Cottle, who has held a number of web development and engineering jobs, including a stint at Ericsson.

He found email data showing that people in charge of the 8kun image board, where the persona known as Q posted, were in steady contact with major promoters of QAnon conspiracies https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2021/01/07/exposed-email-logs-show-8kun-owner-in-contact-with-qanon-influencers-and-enthusiasts.

The new-wave hacktivists also have a preferred place for putting materials they want to make public - Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency site that took up the mantle of WikiLeaks with less geopolitical bias. The site’s collective is led by Emma Best, an American known for filing prolific freedom of information requests.

Best’s two-year-old site coordinating access by researchers and media to a hoard of posts taken from Gab by unidentified hackers. In an essay this week, Best praised Kottmann and said leaks would keep coming, not just from hacktivists but insiders and the ransomware operators who publish files when companies don’t pay them off.

"Indictments like Tillie's show just how scared the government is, and just how many corporations consider embarrassment a greater threat than insecurity," Best wrote https://ddosecrets.substack.com/p/hacktivism-leaktivism-and-the-future.

The events covered by the Kottmann indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1377536/download?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery took place from November 2019 through January 2021. The core allegation is that the Lucerne software developer and associates broke into a number of companies, removed computer code and published it. The indictment also said Kottmann spoke to the media about poor security practices by the victims and stood to profit, if only by selling shirts saying things like “venture anticapitalist” and “catgirl hacker.”

But it was only after Kottmann publicly took credit for breaching Verkada and posted alarming videos from inside big companies, medical facilities and a jail that Swiss authorities raided their home at the behest of the U.S. government. Kottmann uses non-binary pronouns.

"This move by the U.S. government is clearly not only an attempt to disrupt the freedom of information, but also primarily to intimidate and silence this newly emerging wave of hacktivists and leaktivists," Kottmann said in an interview with Reuters.

Kottmann and their lawyer declined to discuss the U.S. charges of wire fraud for some of Kottmann's online statements, aggravated identity theft for using employee credentials, and conspiracy, which together are enough for a lengthy prison sentence.

The FBI declined an interview request. If it seeks extradition, the Swiss would determine whether Kottmann’s purported actions would have violated that country’s laws.

DISDAIN

Kottmann was open about their disdain for the law and corporate powers-that-be. “Like many people, I’ve always been opposed to intellectual property as a concept and specifically how it’s used to limit our understanding of the systems that run our daily lives,” Kottmann said.

A European friend of Kottmann’s known as "donk_enby," a reference to being non-binary in gender, is another major figure in the hacktivism revival. Donk grew angry about conspiracy theories spread by QAnon followers on the social media app Parler that drove protests against COVID-19 health measures.

Following a Cottle post about a leak from Parler in November, Donk dissected the iOS version of Parler’s app and found a poor design choice. Each post bore an assigned number, and she could use a program to keep adding 1 to that number and download every single post in sequence.

After the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots, Donk shared links to the web addresses of a million Parler video posts and asked her Twitter followers to download them before rioters who recorded themselves inside the building deleted the evidence. The trove included not just footage but exact locations and timestamps, allowing members of Congress to catalogue the violence and the FBI to identify more suspects.

Popular with far-right figures, Parler has struggled to stay online after being dropped by Google and Amazon. Donk's actions alarmed users who thought some videos would remain private, hindering the its attempt at a comeback.

In the meantime, protesters in Myanmar asked Donk for help, leading to file dumps that prompted Google to pull its blogging platform and email accounts https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2B20WD from leaders of the Feb. 1 coup. Donk's identification of numerous other military contractors helped fuel sanctions that continue to pile up.

One big change from the earlier era of hacktivisim is that hackers can now make money legally by reporting the security weaknesses they find to the companies involved, or taking jobs with cybersecurity firms.

But some view so-called bug bounty programs, and the hiring of hackers to break into systems to find weaknesses, as mechanisms for protecting companies who should be exposed.

"We're not going to hack and help secure anyone we think is doing something extremely unethical," said John Jackson, an American researcher who works with Cottle on above-ground projects. "We're not going to hack surveillance companies and help them secure their infrastructure." (This story corrects spelling to Kottmann from Hottmann, paragraphs 3, 16, 18-25)

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Franciso; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Grant McCool)

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Paid Leave After Miscarriage: New Zealand Sets a Precedent

Dragana Kovacevic

3/26/2021

 

 Unsplash Closeup of woman's tear-filled eyes


In a measure believed to be the first of its kind, New Zealand is granting paid leave to couples who lose a pregnancy at any point.

The country’s Parliament approved the legislation unanimously, giving couples who suffer loss either through miscarriage or a stillbirth three days of paid leave.

See also: Meghan Markle reveals ‘unbearable grief’ after suffering miscarriage in July.

Some employers in New Zealand and in other countries already have to provide paid leave in the event of a stillbirth, if a fetus is lost at 20 weeks or more. But the new legislation builds on this, allowing anyone who loses a pregnancy at any point some time to grieve and recover.


Grief is not a sickness, it is a loss. And loss takes time.

The legislation is expected to become law in the coming weeks. Ginny Andersen, the Labour member of Parliament who proposed the bill explained why she felt the legislation was necessary: “I felt that it would give women the confidence to be able to request that leave if it was required, as opposed to just being stoic and getting on with life, when they knew that they needed time, physically or psychologically, to get over the grief.”

She expanded, “The bill will give women and their partners time to come to terms with their loss without having to tap into sick leave. Because their grief is not a sickness, it is a loss. And loss takes time.”



Related: Chrissy Teigen shares devastating pregnancy loss, following complications.

© Unsplash Unsplash

The new law does not apply to abortions, but it does include provisions for would-be parents who were planning to have a child through adoption or surrogacy.

The legislation has been in the works for several years, rising out of the recognition of the unique pressures women face over the course of their careers; women have had to balance work responsibilities with issues such as pregnancies, often leading to stunted advancement in their career trajectories.
How do other countries stack up?
The United States does not require employers to provide leave for anyone who suffers a miscarriage (despite the fact that up to 1 in five pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to the Mayo Clinic).
In Britain, those who experience a stillbirth after 24 weeks are eligible for paid leave.
In Australia, people who miscarry can apply for unpaid leave if they lose a fetus after 12 weeks.
India allows for six weeks of leave following a miscarriage.
In Canada, parental leave does not apply after miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth, “since the employee must have actual care and custody of a newborn child.” Regarding other benefits, the laws are less clear: if the pregnancy ends before week 20, you could receive sickness benefits while after this point, you could receive maternity benefits.

In its move, New Zealand is setting a bold precedent for other countries to follow. The pioneer has been a leader in women’s rights issues, and it’s little surprise when its centre-left Labour government is led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – a longtime champion of issues around women’s’ rights.

Related: Celebs who have been real about their struggles with infertility.



The post Paid Leave After Miscarriage: New Zealand Sets a Precedent appeared first on Slice.

UK

Experts cited in No 10's race report claim they were not properly consulted

Aamna Mohdin Community affairs correspondent 

THE GUARDIAN

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA A Black Lives Matter protest in London. Historian, Stephen Bourne, was one of the leading experts on black history who said he was ‘angry and upset’ to see his name listed as a stakeholder on the race disparities report.


Leading academics cited in the government’s controversial racial disparity report say they were not properly consulted, and claim that they were never tasked to produce new research specifically for the commission.

The commission’s report, released on Wednesday, notes that while racism and racial injustice do still exist; geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion all have a greater impact on life chances.


The commission notes it requested new research from a number of researchers, including Veena Raleigh and Shilpa Ross from The King’s Fund. But a spokesperson for the independent thinktank said this was not “strictly true”.

Raleigh and Ross present some existing work from The King’s Fund, but this research was not produced or delivered especially for the commission, they said. The King’s Fund said it shared its epidemiological findings on ethnic differences in health, which was part of the preparatory work under way for an explainer published in February. The Kings Fund also presented research on the experience of NHS staff from minority ethnic backgrounds, from a report that was published last July.

Richard Murray, chief executive of The King’s Fund, said: “While it is important to not generalise about the cause of health inequalities among black and ethnic minority people, the importance of structural racism must not be downplayed.”

It comes as two leading experts on black British history spoke out against the listing of their name as stakeholders.

Historian Stephen Bourne said he was horrified to see his name listed as a stakeholder on the report. He said he was contacted by an adviser in No 10 to attend a roundtable discussion with other historians of black British history.

“So I turned up and was sort of disappointed to find I was the only historian there, apart from another guy from Cambridge University,” he said. “On a big screen these black and Asian faces suddenly appeared including Tony Sewell, but apart from him I didn’t really recognise anyone else. I didn’t know who they were honestly. I was asked to give my presentation and I said, ‘What presentation? I wasn’t asked to give the presentation.’”

Bourne said he ended up speaking for 10 minutes on the difficulties in raising the profile of his work. “I think they were as baffled as I was as to why I was there. I didn’t know who they were so I wrote down their names and when I came home I Googled them and then the penny dropped they were all part of this government commission and I was so angry and upset.”

© ASSOCIATED PRESS People attend a protest outside the US Embassy in London, Saturday, July 11, 2020, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, USA last month. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

He said he let his feelings known to the special adviser who had initially contacted him. “I said in the future, you need to be very clear and concise about when you invite people to these things and what they’re going into. It’s disrespectful and it’s unprofessional.

“I didn’t even know they were writing a report until it was published yesterday and I was sort of watching the media and then I downloaded it and discovered to my horror that I was cited as a stakeholder.”

Author SI Martin, a black history specialist who was also cited as a stakeholder, said initially he thought the situation was hilarious, but ultimately there are “concerns that my name would be attached to such a shameful document and used in such a way as veneer to give some sort of respectability to the report”. He claims he did not have any contact with the commission.

Concerns have also been raised by the interpretation of some of the research in the report. Kamaldeep Bhui, professor of psychiatry at University of Oxford​ and editor in chief of the British Journal of Psychiatry, had his research cited in the report, though he is not listed as a stakeholder.

“My view is that it’s really poor scholarship and really poor chairmanship and interpretation,” he said. “There are nuances, that’s no question. This is a difficult topic, but to be so ignorant of what institutional racism means is quite extraordinary.”

He added: “You can’t explain it other than people are just working backwards from their prior ideologies and assumptions and retrofit the data, which is why everyone’s upset because it’s obvious that the data says something else.”

He argued that across different intersectional influences, the right to race is not the only factor, “but it is an important contribution, particularly for those who are racialised, and to deny it is essentially disenfranchising the lived experience of whole sections of the population who already are marginalised, and they wonder why there’s this vaccine hesitancy and people don’t trust government”.

When approached for comment, the government confirmed Bourne participated in a 10 Downing Street event for Black History Month and said S.I. Martin was added to the report in error based on the invitation list to the event at Number 10, which he did not attend.

A spokesperson for the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities said: “The commission received 2,329 responses to the call for evidence. Of these, nearly 90% were received from individuals and academics, with 325 received from public and private organisations.

“These organisations – ranging from local community groups and charities, through to national professional bodies and unions – collectively represent a large and varied cross-section of the UK of millions.”

In response to the comments from The King’s Fund, the spokesperson added: “The commission engaged both directly and indirectly with thousands of researchers, analysts, stakeholders and members of the public to inform this comprehensive report. We have thanked them as a courtesy.”

Big winter snows in the North could be fueled by Arctic sea ice loss

In mid-February 2018, a strong high-pressure weather system slid over Scandinavia, bringing cold easterly winds that plunged Europe into a historic deep freeze. Arctic temperatures gripped the continent for weeks; snow fell as far south as Rome. In the British Isles, early March blizzards produced 25-foot snow drifts.

© Photograph by Daniel Leal-Olivas, AFP/Getty Pedestrians cross the millennium bridge as heavy snowfall hits London on February 27, 2018. - A blast of Siberian weather sent temperatures plunging across much of Europe on Tuesday, causing headaches for travellers and leading to several deaths from exposure as snow carpeted palm-lined Mediterranean beaches.

New research suggests that this astonishing cold wave, dubbed the Beast from the East, was supercharged with snow thanks in part to a dearth of sea ice in the Barents Sea, off the Arctic coasts of Norway and Russia. It points to a different and poorly studied way in which declining Arctic sea ice can impact the weather further south—distinct from the meandering jet stream phenomenon that has gotten

 so much press

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© Photograph by NASA/MODIS The Beast from the East on March 15, 2018, captured by Aqua MODIS satellite imagery. The parallel cloud bands (cloud streets) streaking south across the Barents Sea indicate convection rolls of warm, moist air rising from the ice-free surface.

The study, published Thursday in Nature Geoscience, used isotopic matching, satellite data, and models to trace the origins of the snow that fell during the Beast from the East. The authors found that up to 88 percent of it, or 140 billion tons of snow, might have originated from evaporation at the surface of the Barents Sea, where levels of sea ice were unusually low that year.

Over the long term, the researchers say, dwindling Barents Sea ice in the winter could pack the atmosphere with moisture, fueling more extreme snowfall events in northern Europe—even if average yearly snowfall declines because of climate change.

“Given that winter temperatures are warming, increased snowfall might sound counterintuitive,” says lead author Hannah Bailey of the University of Oulu in Finland. “But nature is complex and what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”
More evaporation, more precipitation

The idea that declining winter ice cover can drive additional snowfall isn’t new. Ice acts like a lid over lakes and oceans, preventing the water underneath from evaporating into the atmosphere. Previous studies have tied decreased winter ice cover across the Great Lakes of North America to an uptick in “lake effect” snowfall, while other researchers have used models to explore the link between declining sea ice, increased evaporation, and snowfall, particularly off the coast of Siberia.

But few studies have attempted to directly connect Arctic sea ice losses, enhanced evaporation, and a specific extreme weather event, due to the logistical challenges of collecting samples in the Arctic. The Barents Sea, in particular, is a hotspot of winter sea ice loss, with maximum winter ice cover in March declining by about 50 percent since 1979. That makes it the ideal place to explore such linkages.

And the Beast from the East, which delivered historic snow totals across northern and western Europe between February and March of 2018, made a good test case for the hypothesis that ice losses in the Barents Sea might drive snowfall farther south.

As bitter cold air from Siberia surged eastward that year, a high-pressure ridge settled over northern Scandinavia and the Barents Sea, warming the ocean’s surface as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) above average. With the Barents Sea 60 percent ice-free at the time, any cold, dry air passing over that relatively warm water would have soaked up lots of moisture, says Judah Cohen, an Arctic weather expert at the weather consultancy Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

That appears to be exactly what happened. Thanks to a weather station they had installed in northern Finland a year earlier, the researchers were able to collect real-time data on isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen present in water vapor during the Beast from the East. These isotopes contained information about the conditions in which the water first evaporated, which allowed the researchers to directly trace the moisture back to its source: in this case, the Barents Sea.

Atmospheric modeling further supported the idea that winds associated with the cold air outbreak sucked up moisture from the sea before dumping it across Europe as snow, in a series of three pulses from mid-February to the end of March.

Historically, Bailey says, the Barents Sea has averaged about 65,000 square miles more lice cover in late winter than it had in 2018. Without so much exposed ocean surface supplying moisture to the atmosphere, the Beast from the East might have been a very different event—with much less snow. Using a tool called reanalysis, which let the authors model weather patterns in the past, they found that 140 billion tons of moisture evaporated from the Barents Sea during that cold spell. In the same timeframe, 159 billion tons of snow fell across Europe, suggesting that up to 88 percent of it might have come from the Barents Sea.

Cohen, who wasn’t involved in the new paper, says that it “went much further in solidifying the relationship” between less sea ice and more snowfall compared with earlier research. “What’s especially novel was the use of [isotope] tracers to actually link the snowfall back to that region,” he says. “I hadn’t seen anything like that before.”
A sea ice-driven snow trend

While the study focused on one especially snow-filled winter, it also points to a longer-term trend.

Using atmospheric models and satellite observations of sea ice cover as far back as 1979, the authors found strong correlations between less Barents Sea ice, more sea surface evaporation, and higher maximum March snowfall totals across northern Europe. Looking forward, climate models suggest that the Barents Sea could become ice-free in the winter by the early 2060s, potentially creating a major new source of wintertime moisture for the region.

The link between sea ice and snowfall described in the study is “very much the next logical step” in thinking about the impacts of a more exposed Arctic Ocean, says Andrea Lang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Albany who wasn’t involved in the paper.

Lang points out that other researchers are now investigating potential links between declining sea ice and an increase in summertime Arctic cyclone activity. While the processes involved are somewhat different, the notion that changes in sea ice can directly affect the weather is “currently a hot topic,” she says.

Biden plan would spend $16B to clean up old mines, oil wells

PART OF A JUST TRANSITION TO A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden's $2.3 trillion plan to transform America’s infrastructure includes $16 billion to plug old oil and gas wells and clean up abandoned mines, a longtime priority for Western and rural lawmakers from both parties.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Hundreds of thousands of “orphaned” oil and gas wells and abandoned coal and hardrock mines pose serious safety hazards, while causing ongoing environmental damage. The administration sees the longstanding problem as an opportunity to create jobs and remediate pollution, including greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Biden said last week he wants to put pipefitters and miners to work capping the wells “at the same price that they would charge to dig those wells.''

Many of the old wells and mines are located in rural communities that have been hard-hit by the pandemic. Biden's plan would not only create jobs, but help reduce methane and brine leaks that pollute the air and groundwater. Methane is a powerful contributor to global warming.

The Interior Department has long led efforts to cap orphaned wells — so named because no owner can be found — but does not assess user fees to cover reclamation costs. Bond requirements for well operators, when known, are often inadequate to cover full clean-up costs.

Biden's plan, which needs approval by Congress, would jump-start the well-capping effort and expand it dramatically.

Similarly, the White House plan would exponentially boost an Abandoned Mine Land program run by Interior that uses fees paid by coal mining companies to reclaim coal mines abandoned before 1977. About $8 billion has been disbursed to states for mine-reclamation projects in the past four decades, but Biden's plan would ramp up spending sharply.

Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has long pushed to expand the mine-lands program, which he calls crucial to his state.

“It cannot be forgotten that West Virginia coal miners powered our country to greatness,'' Manchin said. While many mine lands in coal communities have been reclaimed, “there is still much more work to be done to clean up damage to the land and water in those communities,'' he said.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate energy panel, ridiculed Biden's overall plan as “an out-of-control socialist spending spree.”

The proposal “starts with the punishing policies of the Green New Deal and builds back worse from there,'' Barrasso said in statement. The plan would hike taxes and “spend trillions of dollars on the left’s radical agenda,'' he added.

A spokeswoman said Barrasso has “has been very active in trying to re-evaluate and improve" the Abandoned Mine Land program. Barrasso is working with Manchin and other committee members to “responsibly reauthorize AML fee collection and facilitate reclamation (of mine sites) across the country,'' spokeswoman Sarah Durdaller said.

Environmental groups hailed the announcement, saying unplugged wells and abandoned mines pose a significant environmental threat. Some former drilling or mining sites have sat unattended for decades.

“From launching a visionary Civilian Climate Corps and reclaiming abandoned mines and orphaned wells to restoring America’s lands, waters, wetlands, grasslands and coasts, the president’s plan proposes strategic investments that will make communities more resilient and healthier,'' said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation.

An oil industry group said it shares the administration’s goals of safety and environmental stewardship.

“Our industry is fully committed to complying with existing state and federal requirements for abandoned wells" and “will continue to support efforts to plug these wells and further reduce methane emissions,” said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice-president of the American Petroleum Institute.

The National Mining Association said it supports the renewed focus on abandoned mine lands, but wanted to see more details. “We’re eager to work with Congress on legislation around the president’s initiative, while bringing reform to the coal AML program and standing up durable, bipartisan solutions on hard-rock'' mining sites, spokesman Conor Bernstein said.

Environmental groups and Democrats have called for stronger bonding requirements for oil and gas companies that drill on public lands, as well as changes to bankruptcy law that make it harder for companies to evade responsibility for cleaning up old sites.

“Investing in orphan well clean-up would create good-paying jobs while helping reduce pollution, restore habitat and protect our climate,'' said Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who has introduced legislation to clean up federal sites and strengthen bond requirements for drilling on public lands.

Matthew Daly, The Associated Press

MINING IS  NEITHER CLEAN NOT GREEN

BHP moves nickel and copper HQ to Toronto as Canada emerges as new clean-tech mining hotspot

Both metals expected to see increased future demand due to electric vehicle industry growth

Author of the article: Gabriel Friedman

Publishing date:Mar 10, 2021 

A nickel mine in Australia. BHP expects nickel and copper demand to surge over increasing demand for electric vehicles. PHOTO BY RON D'RAINE/BLOOMBERG FILES

Australia’s BHP Group Ltd. is moving its exploration headquarters for nickel and copper — two metals expected to see increased future demand because of electric vehicle industry growth — to Toronto.

The company’s announcement Wednesday comes after a BHP subsidiary Rio Algom Ltd. struck a partnership in August with Canadian junior Midland Exploration Inc. to fund nickel exploration in northern Quebec.

The company has also been exploring for copper in Canada, on and off for years, Laura Tyler, BHP’s chief technical officer, told the Financial Post. But as climate change alters global commodity consumption patterns, she said nickel and copper demand are set to surge, leading the company to reevaluate where to put its people and resources.

“We looked at Toronto, and we said, ‘you know what? That still remains one of the hotspots for (mineral) exploration, for juniors, for the innovation that we see in exploration,’” said Tyler.

Tyler was speaking to the Financial Post from Perth, Australia, and made a virtual presentation on Wednesday at this year’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference, which is taking place online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

BHP, considered one of, if not the largest mining company in the world, produces iron ore, copper, coal and petroleum with US$42.9 billion in revenue in 2020. Copper accounted US$10.6 billion of that, the second largest revenue-generator in its portfolio, with mines in Chile and Peru; it also produces nickel in western Australia, though it remains a small part of its business.

We looked at Toronto, and we said, 'you know what? That still remains one of the hotspots for (mineral) exploration, for juniors, for the innovation that we see in exploration

LAURA TYLER, BHP’S CHIEF TECHNICAL OFFICER

Its head office for copper and nickel exploration was previously located in Santiago, Chile, and BHP intends to keep personnel there, as well as in Arizona, where it also has operations.

Tyler said the company is planning to put about 25 people in its exploration team in Toronto, and a separate business development team to make deals with junior exploration companies, though she did not disclose budgets.

“We’re not looking to just go out and buy everybody,” Tyler said, explaining the company is looking for collaborations.

Under its deal with Rosemere, Que.-based Midland Exploration announced this past summer, its subsidiary Rio Algom will fund about $1.4 million of exploration in Nunavik, which comprises roughly the northern third of Quebec, which has traditionally been inhabited by Indigenous communities.

Both copper and nickel are essential components of lithium-ion batteries found in electric vehicles, as well as various other devices such as smartphones and computers. But the sheer size of an electric vehicle battery means that as the industry grows, demand for both metals will undergo a steep change.

Vanessa Davidson, director of base metals research at the market information firm CRU Group, gave a presentation at the PDAC conference on Monday, in which she estimated copper demand used in electric vehicles could roughly triple by 2030.

In one chart, Davidson estimated that global copper consumption could increase from about 22.4 megatonnes in 2020 to 27.3 megatonnes by 2030 — with electric vehicles and renewables energy expansion driving 80 per cent of the growth.

She also wrote that, “decelerating mine growth leads to large supply gap longer term.”

A worker holds nickel ore in Indonesia.

 PHOTO BY YUSUF AHMAD/REUTERS FILES

Nickel exploration, meanwhile, has risen after a decade of rangebound pricing, in which Indonesia accounted for most of the new global supply through construction of a series of mines that produce nickel pig iron, derived from different ore than traditional Western nickel.

Today, nickel pig iron has grown from an essentially insignificant percentage of global nickel supply in 2006 to 45 per cent of total supply, according to a presentation by Jim Lennon, an analyst at Macquarie Capital Ltd.

While batteries account for just seven per cent of nickel usage today, compared to stainless steel which accounts for 70 per cent, Lennon’s presentation estimates that batteries will be “the largest growth driver over the decades.” The amount of nickel per car could grow from 20 kilograms to 50 kilograms, as automakers produce bigger batteries to increase range, he wrote.

Mark Selby, chief executive of Canada Nickel Co., which is developing a nickel resource outside Timmins, Ont., said the market conditions and mood around nickel have completely transformed in the past 18 months, as the price per pound shot up to about US$7.

Since last September, his company has raised roughly $25 million and struck a deal to potentially use facilities currently owned by Glencore Canada Corp. as it seeks to demonstrate the viability of its project and eventually raise money to build a mine.

“Western automakers are going to be looking for alternative sources for nickel,” said Selby, “and that’s really spurred on a wave of new projects.”50, having been stuck between US$4 and US$6 per pound for years.

In moving its nickel and copper exploration head office to Toronto, BHP joins two other large global mining firms, Switzerland’s Glencore AG and Brazil’s Vale SA, which already have large copper and nickel operations in Canada.

Tyler said the nickel exploration in Canada really only started six months ago following a board decision to reinvest in the metal based on the expected increased demand as the world transitions to a low-carbon economy and uses more batteries in electric vehicles and other technology.

“It’s been a quantum shift,” she said, about the growing battery demand, “and we see it as a long term shift.”

Financial Post

MINING IS  NEITHER CLEAN NOT GREEN

U.S. looking to Canada for minerals to build electric vehicles, documents show

Washington is increasingly viewing Canada as a kind of '51st State' for mineral supply purposes, one source says

Author of the article:
Reuters
Ernest Scheyder and Jeff Lewis
Publishing date: Mar 18, 2021 • 

Rocky Smith, plant manager of Molycorp Inc. Mountain Pass rare earths mining and processing facility, holds a handful of rocks containing rare earth elements during a media tour in Mountain Pass, California. PHOTO BY JACOB KELPER/BLOOMBERG FILES

The U.S. government is working to help American miners and battery makers expand into Canada, part of a strategy to boost regional production of minerals used to make electric vehicles and counter Chinese dominance.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Commerce is hosting a closed-door virtual meeting with miners and battery manufacturers to discuss ways to boost Canadian production of EV materials, according to documents seen by Reuters.

The move comes as demand for electrified transportation is set to surge over the next decade.

Conservationists have strongly opposed several large U.S. mining projects, leading officials to look north of the border to Canada and its supply of 13 of the 35 minerals deemed critical for national defence by Washington.

Tesla Inc., Albemarle Corp., Talon Metals Corp. and Livent Corp. are among the more-than 30 attendees at Thursday’s meeting who will discuss ways Washington can assist U.S. companies expand in Canada and overcome logistical challenges, according to the documents.

Demand for  electrified transportation is set to surge over the next decade. 

PHOTO BY MOHAMMAD KHURSHEED/REUTERS FILES

The U.S. Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The event comes after U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed last month to building an EV supply chain between the two countries.

Since Biden’s election, three U.S. mining companies have invested in Canada, where mining accounts for 5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, versus roughly 0.9 per cent in the United States.

Canada’s Fortune Minerals Ltd., which is developing a cobalt mine in the Northwest Territories, has also held funding talks with the U.S. Export/Import Bank, its chief executive told Reuters.

“The United States is really taking this seriously,” CEO Robin Goad said.

Lithium-ion batteries are dangerous to transport over long distances, so automakers prefer to have them built near assembly plants. That should aid efforts by Ontario and Quebec to develop their own battery cell plants with both provinces close to U.S. automakers in Michigan and Ohio, industry executives said.

The United States is really taking this seriously

ROBIN GOAD, CEO, FORTUNE MINERALS LTD.

“The border between Canada and the U.S. is inconsequential with respect to EVs and EV minerals,” said Arne Frandsen, CEO of mining investment group Pallinghurst, which is the largest shareholder in Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc., which is building a graphite mine and anode plant in Quebec.

Pallinghurst joined Livent last November to buy the Nemaska lithium project in Quebec, in what will be North America’s largest lithium mine. Both projects are slated to open by 2024 just as automakers launch dozens of new EV models.

“We do see Canada as a natural fit for expansion as the whole battery supply chain is going through a huge self-reckoning about sourcing,” said Livent CEO Paul Graves.

Livent has supply deals with BMW and Tesla.

’51st state’

To be sure, the United States is also trying to boost domestic production of EV metals, which the Biden administration has said is critical.

But Washington is increasingly viewing Canada as a kind of “51st State” for mineral supply purposes and plans to deepen financial and logistical partnerships with the country’s mining sector over time, according to a U.S. government source.

Both countries are members of the Energy Resource Governance Initiative, a pact to share mining experience and resources.

Canadian firms are also able to apply for U.S. government grants under the U.S. Defense Production Act and other U.S. funding programs. There are no U.S. tariffs on Canadian EV battery metals or EV parts.

You're beginning to see Canada become an important part of the North American EV supply chain

KEITH PHILLIPS, CEO, PIEDMONT LITHIUM LTD.

“You’re beginning to see Canada become an important part of the North American EV supply chain,” said Keith Phillips, CEO of Piedmont Lithium Ltd., which in January bought 20 per cent of Sayona Mining Ltd, a developer of a Quebec lithium project.

Canada’s First Cobalt Corp. is building the continent’s only cobalt refinery, part of an effort to wean the EV industry off supplies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labor has been used. Cobalt is used to make battery cathodes.

Adding to the appeal of Canada, some of the country’s mines bill themselves as environmentally friendly and promise to use hydroelectric power to reduce their carbon emissions.

The United States knows “that we are the most-secure and most-resilient source of metal imports for them,” Canadian Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan told Reuters.

Last week, privately-held USA Rare Earth invested in Search Minerals Inc.’s rare earths project in Newfoundland in eastern Canada.

While USA Rare Earth already controls a rare earths deposit in Texas, executives said they wanted access to more of the minerals used to make electronics and weapons.

“You can’t just rely on projects in the U.S. for supply,” said Pini Althaus, USA Rare Earth’s CEO. “You have to collaborate with Canada.”

Astronomers discover an elusive 'Goldilocks' black hole

Ryan Morrison For Mailonline 3/30/2021

© Provided by Daily Mail MailOnline 

A 'Goldilocks' black hole that is about 55,000 times the mass of the sun has been discovered by astronomers, who say it is 'not too big, and not too small'.

The stellar phenomenon, discovered by University of Melbourne astronomers, was found about three billion light years way thanks to a technique involving the detection of the light from a gamma-ray burst bending on its way to the Earth.

Astronomers say the size of the 'intermediate black hole' is between a small 'supernova' black hole and a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy.

It could be an 'ancient relic' dating to the early universe before the first stars and galaxies formed, suggests co-author Professor Eric Thrane from Monash University.

These 'intermediate black holes' may have been the seeds that over time led to the supermassive black holes that live at the heart of every known galaxy today.

While this one is three billion light years away, researchers estimate that there are some 46,000 intermediate-mass black holes in the vicinity of the Milky Way galaxy.

© Provided by Daily Mail The new black hole was found through the detection of a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst

The discovery, through gravitational lensing, of this new long predicted type of black hole fills in a 'missing link' in our understanding of the universe, the team explained.

It has been dubbed the 'Goldilocks' black hole as it sits right in the middle of all known black hole types, not too big and not too small.

A typical black hole, created from the explosion of a massive star at the end of its life, will be up to 10 times the mass of the sun.

In contrast, a supermassive black hole that sites at the centre of a galaxy, including the recently photographed one in M87, can be billions of times the mass of the sun.

The new type of 'Goldilocks' black hole is about 55,000 times the mass of our own star, filling in a gap that has left astronomers baffled for years.

Lead author and University of Melbourne PhD student, James Paynter, said the latest discovery sheds new light on how supermassive black holes form.

"While we know that these supermassive black holes lurk in the cores of most, if not all galaxies, we don't understand how these behemoths are able to grow so large within the age of the Universe," he said.

 

© Provided by Daily Mail Astronomers say the size of the 'intermediate black hole' is between a small 'supernova' black hole and a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy

The new black hole was found through the detection of a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst, a half-second flash of high-energy light.

This light was emitted by a pair of merging stars, and was observed to have a tell-tale 'echo', caused by the intervening intermediate-mass black hole.

The black hole bends the path of the light from the gamma-ray burst on its way to Earth, so that astronomers see the same flash twice.

Powerful software developed to detect black holes from gravitational waves was adapted to establish that the two flashes are images of the same object.

© Provided by Daily Mail The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole released in 2019, has today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarised light



INTERMEDIATE MASS BLACK HOLES: THE MISSING LINK IN UNIVERSE EVOLUTION


Intermediate mass black holes are the 'missing link' in universe evolution.

They sit between those created from an exploding star and supermassive black holes at the heart of a galaxy.

One recently detected using gravitational lensing was 55,000 times more massive than the sun.

They are thought to have been the 'seeds' that led to the creation of supermassive black holes.

Researchers estimate that there are some 46,000 intermediate-mass black holes in the vicinity of the Milky Way.

They are thought to sit at the heart of globular clusters, collections of stars within a galaxy bound by gravity.

"This newly discovered black hole could be an ancient relic - a primordial black hole - created in the early Universe before the first stars and galaxies formed," said Thrane.

"These early black holes may be the seeds of the supermassive black holes that live in the hearts of galaxies today."

Paper co-author, gravitational lensing pioneer, Professor Rachel Webster from the University of Melbourne, said the findings have the potential to help scientists make even greater strides in the understanding of the evolution of the universe.

"Using this new black hole candidate, we can estimate the total number of these objects in the universe,' Webster explained.

'We predicted that this might be possible 30 years ago, and it is exciting to have discovered a strong example.'

The researchers estimate that some 46,000 intermediate mass black holes are in the vicinity of our Milky Way galaxy.

These groupings of intermediate-mass black holes have long been thought to sit within the cores of globular clusters.

A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that are tightly bound by gravity, found in disc and spiral galaxies.

There are 150 known to exist in the Milky Way with many more likely still to be found.

Galaxy M87, up to 1,000 times older than the Milky Way, is thought to have as many as 13,000 globular clusters.

the details of the discovery have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

A 'starter kit' for supermassive black holes?

Scientists have reported the discovery of a rare, medium-sized black hole that may help answer one of the more tantalising questions in astronomy: how do their supermassive counterparts come into being?

© Valentina BRESCHI Illustration showing the different parts of a black hole

There are two well-known sizes of black hole -- at one end, so-called stellar-class ones which are typically three to ten times the mass of our Sun -- and at the other, supermassive ones, found at the centre of most galaxies, including the Milky Way, which are millions to billions times heavier.

© Handout Astronomers have yet to figure out the origin story of matter-eating monsters called supermassive black holes

The newly detected 'goldilocks' black hole -- about 55,000 solar masses -- could be a missing link between these two extremes, scientists suggested Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Up to now, only a handful of intermediate-mass black holes -- between 100 and 100,000 solar masses -- have been detected, and none have been squarely in the middle of that range.

A black hole is a celestial object that compresses a huge mass into an extremely small space. Their gravitational pull is so strong nothing can escape them, not even light.

Stellar-class black holes form when a dying star collapses, but astronomers have yet to figure out the origin story of the larger, matter-eating monsters.

"How do we get so many supermassive black holes in the Universe?" asked co-author Rachel Webster, a professor at the University of Melbourne.

Senior author Eric Thrane, a professor at Monash University, said the newly discovered black hole "could be an ancient relic, a primordial black hole created before the first stars and galaxies formed."

"These early black holes may be the seeds of the supermassive black holes that live in the hearts of galaxies today."

- Born that way? -

The new specimen was observed indirectly thanks to a slight deviation in light from a stellar explosion in the early Universe, some eight billion light years distant.

Using a technique pioneered by Webster, astronomers analysed thousands of these gamma-ray bursts -- caused either by the violent collapse of a star or the merger of two stars -- looking for signs of gravitational lensing.

This occurs when an object -— in this case, the intermediate black hole -- acts as a lens and fleetingly bends the path of the light as it travels toward Earth, such that astronomers see the same flash twice.

While Thrane, Webster and lead author James Paynter, a PhD candidate, were able to measure the mass of their intermediate black hole with precision, they could only speculate on how it was formed.

"Broadly, there are three possibilities," Webster told AFP.

It could have been forged from the merger between two lesser black holes, as was true for another, much smaller intermediate black hole discovered in May 2019.

Alternatively, it might have been born as a stellar-class black hole and slowly accumulated mass as it sucked matter into its maw.

"But this is a slow process," said Webster. "It is hard to grow supermassive black holes from a solar mass seed over the age of the Universe."

A more likely scenario is that their discovery "was born that way," she said. "This could provide the answer."

The authors think that there are about 40,000 intermediate black holes in our own galaxy alone.

The gravitational waves that can bend light -- allowing for the detection of black holes -- were first measured in September 2015, earning the lead scientists a physics Nobel two years later.

Albert Einstein anticipated gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity, which theorised that they spread through the Universe at the speed of light.

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