HOLI A FIRE FESTIVAL OF SPRING

Indians gather for Holi celebrations as virus cases surge

NEW DELHI — Hindus threw colored powder and sprayed water in massive Holi celebrations Monday despite many Indian states restricting gatherings to try to contain a coronavirus resurgence rippling across the country.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Holi marks the advent of spring and is widely celebrated throughout Hindu-majority India. Most years, millions of people throw colored powder at each other in outdoor celebrations. But for the second consecutive year, people were encouraged to stay at home to avoid turning the festivities into superspreader events amid the latest virus surge.

India’s confirmed infections have exceeded 60,000 daily over the past week from a low of about 10,000 in February. On Monday, the health ministry reported 68,020 new cases, the sharpest daily rise since October last year. It took the nationwide tally to more than 12 million.

Daily deaths rose by 291 and the virus has so far killed 161,843 people in the country.

The latest surge is centred in the western state of Maharashtra where authorities have tightened travel restrictions and imposed night curfews. It is considering a strict lockdown.

Cases are also rising in the capital New Delhi and states of Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh.

The surge coincides with multi-stage state elections marked by large gatherings and roadshows, and the Kumbh Mela, or pitcher festival, celebrated in northern Haridwar city, where tens of thousands of Hindu devotees daily take a holy dip into the Ganges river.

Health experts worry that unchecked gatherings can lead to clusters, adding the situation can be controlled if vaccination is opened up for more people and COVID-19 protocols are strictly followed.

India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion, has vaccinated around 60 million people, of which only 9 million have received both doses of vaccine so far.

However, more than 60 million doses manufactured in India have been exported abroad, prompting widespread criticism that domestic needs should be catered to first.

The government said last week that there would be no immediate increase in exports. It said vaccines will be given to everyone over 45 starting April 1.

Sheikh Saaliq, The Associated Press


TOPICS FOR YOU

LUCY, ANOTHER LONELY ELEPHANT
Cher Fighting To Free Elephant From Edmonton Zoo

In addition to being an Oscar-winning actress, music icon and international superstar, Cher is also co-founder of Free the Wild, an organization devoted to freeing animals held in captivity in zoos and repatriating them in their natural habitats.

© Ethan Miller/Getty Images

In that role, notes the organization's website, the "Moonstruck" star wrote a letter to Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson and Gary Dewar, director of the Edmonton Valley Zoo, calling for the release of an elephant named Lucy after 45 years of captivity.

In Cher's letter, the organization offers to send an independent elephant expert vet to examine Lucy in order to "determine the genuine status of her health."

RELATED: Cher And Lily Tomlin Urge Los Angeles Zoo To Release Billy The Elephant: ‘He Is In Pain’

Cher's letter follows a previous letter, sent in February, to Free the Wild co-founder Gina Nelthorpe Cowne, from Dr. Rick Quinn, a veterinarian and director of the Jane Goodall Institute.

In Quinn's letter, Lucy is described as "an Asian elephant who has lived in the sub-artic conditions of Canada for over 40 years. She has never been with another Asian elephant and her only companion was taken away in 2006. Edmonton Valley Zoo’s limited operating times means even the company of humans is few and far between.”

Lucy is also suffering significant health issues due to captivity. "She is 1,000 lbs overweight and suffers from significant arthritis and foot disease. She has difficulty bearing weight on her back legs and, due to an inappropriate diet, suffers dental issues and painful colic issues which have caused her to collapse – seen lying down, slapping her stomach with her trunk. With no place to swim, no mud in which to wallow or trees to scratch against, Free The Wild aims to work with Edmonton Valley Zoo to find an amicable solution in securing her release. Despite being 45 years old, Lucy has another 15-20 years left of her life,” the letter continues.

RELATED: Cher Greets The ‘World’s Loneliest Elephant’ Upon Its Arrival In Cambodia

Cher has used her celebrity in recent years to to assist in freeing elephants from zoos.

In November 2020, Cher travelled to Cambodia to watch as Kavaan — dubbed by the media as "the world's loneliest elephant — was released into an elephant sanctuary after being freed from a Pakistani zoo after more than three decades of captivity.

CULTURE WARS

How women in India reclaimed the protest power of ripped jeans

Deepali Dewan, Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture, Royal Ontario Museum / Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Toronto 2021-03-25

A recently-elected Indian chief minister associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government sparked a swift and impassioned social media storm after he made a negative comment about a woman wearing ripped jeans on March 17.

© (Twitter/@prag65043538, @sherryshroff, @ruchikokcha) After an Indian politician recently tried to shame a woman for wearing ripped jeans, women's responses were swift and sharp.

While speaking at a workshop organized by the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat said he was shocked and outraged after he encountered a woman on his flight wearing ripped jeans. The minister took issue with her exposed knees. Rawat also pointed out that the woman was with her children and a leader of an NGO. He said these two facts combined with the ripped jeans put her moral values even further into question. The clip was circulated widely in the Indian press.

Maybe it was the creepy way Chief Minister Rawat described himself scanning the woman’s body with his gaze or the shaming tone he used when he asked her where her husband was. Or perhaps it was the judgemental way he expressed his opinion that ripped jeans were incommensurate with running an NGO and being a mother, and not in line with his version of Indian values. Or it could even have been the casual way he felt he had the right to interrogate her clothing choice at all.

But women across India responded in protest with alacrity and speed as they posted photos of themselves in ripped jeans on social media. Some even cut holes into their jeans before posting the defiant images. At one point, #RippedJeans was top trending on Twitter in India.

As an art historian of South Asian visual culture, I am interested in the ways images convey meaning. Why did ripped jeans cause such a stir? What are the codes contained in this seemingly simple but ubiquitous fashion trend?

Historians and writers such as Ramchandra Guha have acknowledged how serious affronts to civil rights occurring in India today have been steadily eroding India’s democracy. Within these deep and structural challenges, the recent ripped-jeans demonstrations offer a glimmer of hope. The online storm is a sign that India’s democracy is resilient and that protest can emerge in unexpected ways.

Read more: In India, Modi’s nationalism quashes dissent with help from the media
The meaning of clothing

India has a history of using clothing to convey political meaning and even as a strategy to incite change. As anthropologist Emma Tarlo explains in Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, what one chooses to wear has long been understood as a maker of meaning, a way of both expressing and shaping personal identity.

For example, in 1903 (as I’ve written about elsewhere) the wealthiest man in India at the time, the Nizam of Hyderabad, chose to wear a simple western suit to the 1903 Delhi Durbar, a ceremony marking the coronation of the British monarch. In so doing, he instigated the displeasure of a British colonial administration who liked to see their native rulers dressed as spectacles of South Asian finery.

Later, Mohandas K. Gandhi wore a dhoti to have tea at Buckingham Palace in 1931. The dhoti, made out of hand-spun cotton, was part of the larger khadi movement to protest the import of cheaper-than-local machine-made British products that led to the decline of the Indian textile industry.

© (James Mills Collection/AP) Mohandas K. Gandhi in England, 1931.

Jeans go global

In Global Denim, scholars explore the different contexts of jean wearing around the world. Jeans in India have a specific history and context — and the meaning of a pair of jeans has evolved since the 1970s when they were first popularly introduced.

Jeans have humble beginnings. They were developed as a durable attire for mine workers in the United States in the 1930s, but grew in popularity through association with cowboy films. In 1955, Marlon Brando secured the jean’s association with youth culture, rebellion and counterculture when he wore them in Rebel Without A Cause to arousing effect. By the 1970s, this popularity had expanded. Punk and grunge bands put gaping holes in jeans to convey anger toward convention and society’s obsession with material things.

© (Sippy Films) A movie still from ‘Sholay,’ 1975.

As a kid, whose family had migrated from India to the U.S. in the mid 1970s, I recall being a wide-eyed ‘80s teenager in a New York City store. The shop carried two floors of nothing but ripped jeans. I was shocked that the store had been able to source so many second-hand jeans. Only later, did I understand that clothing manufacturers had started producing new jeans with holes in them as part of their product line. In this way, they had turned dissent into a marketable fashion statement.

In India, the jean was popularized in the post-independence period with exposure to western films. The clamour for jeans received a huge boost when irresistible bad boy film star Amitabh Bachchan wore jeans in the 1975 mega-blockbuster, Sholay. The jeans were a reflection of the youthful and rebellious nature of his character.

But jeans were still inaccessible to the majority of India’s youth. India’s self-sufficient economic policies made access to foreign brands difficult or very expensive. Indians eventually turned to tailors to stitch their jeans. Finally, by the '90s there were domestic brands of jeans to be had, although foreign brands still had cachet, especially in urban areas.

After India’s economic liberalization in the 1990s, foreign brands became more available, albeit still expensive. Ripped jeans came soon after with the increased exposure to international trends.

So in India, jeans were associated with the West, modernity and youth culture. That is to an extent still true. But jeans with holes have the added association with protest and dissent.

Protest power

Chief Minister Rawat has since apologized. But the backlash to his comments seems to be as much about his and his party’s policing of women’s bodies as about their policing of free speech, which ripped jeans have come to symbolize in general.

Today, shopping for my 14-year-old daughter in Toronto, it is hard to find anything but ripped jeans. In fact, ripped jeans are so mainstream that in some sense their association with rebellion and dissent has been muted by the process of commodification.

This is a market that even BJP allies have invested in. One company, owned by a yoga guru that sells ripped jeans tweeted: “Our jeans are ripped, but we haven’t ripped them so much also so as to lose our Indian-ness and our values.”

Ironically, Chief Minister Rawat’s comments, which sound out of touch not only for their arcane notions of modesty but also the agency they ascribe to ripped jeans, have infused new vigour into an old symbol. At least for a moment in India, it seems, ripped jeans have reclaimed their protest power.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Deepali Dewan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

THE REAL CULTURE WARS

Are suit jackets oppression? Lawmakers fight own dress codes THAT AREN'T THEIRS

ALL DRESS  CODES ARE OPPRESSIVE

BOSTON — A sneaker-clad Latino state senator in Rhode Island is objecting to his chamber’s jacket and dress shirt edict as a form of white oppression. Female lawmakers in Montana complain proposed rules dealing with s kirt lengths and necklines are overly sexist.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

And an Iowa state representative wore jeans on the floor last month to highlight the irony of Republican leaders refusing to mandate face masks in the chamber as the coronavirus pandemic rages while still banning jeans and other casual clothes.

With women and people of colour elected in larger numbers in many states, legislatures are being forced to confront longstanding dress codes that are increasingly viewed as sexist and racist.

“These rules make it OK for us to judge people based on the way they dress or how they look, and I just feel that’s super problematic,” said Jonathon Acosta, the 31-year-old Democratic state senator from Rhode Island. “I assure you that what I wear does not influence the quality of the work I produce.”

The National Conference of State Legislatures hasn’t tallied how many legislatures are considering or have adopted rules addressing attire this year. But the Denver-based organization said roughly half of all state legislatures had some sort of formalized dress code in 2019.

Debates over dress have also come up in Congress. Objections from female lawmakers to a longstanding ban on sleeveless tops and open-toed shoes in the House prompted former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan in 2017 to promise a review, though it's unclear whether the rule was updated to reflect contemporary standards. Spokespersons for Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't respond to phone and email messages seeking comment Wednesday.

On the other side of the globe, a Maori lawmaker won his battle against wearing a tie in the New Zealand Parliament last month. He derided the tie as a “colonial noose" and wore a traditional hei tiki pendant instead.

Wearing unconventional clothing can be an effective “statement of resistance” or solidarity in the political arena, but dress codes also play an important role in preserving decorum, said Rhonda Garelick, a dean at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

“That is where the pushback comes from: We dress differently for a funeral from the way we do at a barbecue,” she said. “Are there other ways to convey difference or resistance while still conveying respect or formality?”

The strife over dress codes also reflect a general movement towards more casual, informal dress in modern society, said Richard Thompson Ford, a Stanford Law School professor and author of “Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History.”

“When I look at the senator from Rhode Island, he looks more like a ‘tech bro’ to me than anything else,” Ford said, referencing the sometimes derisive nickname for certain workers in Silicon Valley.

The Democrat-controlled Rhode Island Senate approved its new dress code Tuesday, over objections from Acosta and other lawmakers.

The provision, a revision of a policy the chamber has had for decades, requires Senate members and staff dress in “proper and appropriate attire, such as blouses, dress slacks and collared shirts with accompanying jacket.”

Democratic Sen. Louis DiPalma, who chairs the rules committee that vetted the revised mandates, argued that the dress provision is broader than those in other state legislatures.

“It’s not about judging how anyone looks,” he said. “A dress code and decorum are about respecting an institution that is 200-plus years old.”

Sen. Gordon Rogers, a Republican from rural Foster, said he supported the attire rules even as he admitted it was difficult to trade in his beloved Chippewa boots for dress shoes and secondhand suits to enter the chamber.

“It’s not about disenfranchising anybody,” the businessman and farmer said to some applause. “Sometimes you have to force respect.”

But Sen. Cynthia Mendes, an East Providence Democrat, countered that this year’s dress code is more specific than the chamber’s previous one, which simply required all persons on the Senate floor “be properly dressed.”

She also questioned the timing of the new edict, following an election in which more women and people of colour were voted into the 38-member chamber in its history.

“This is colonization language. The need to remind everyone who is in power. It has always started with what you tell them to do with their bodies,” Mendes said. “That’s not lost on me.”

Acosta, who was elected in November to represent the strongly Latino city of Central Falls, argued that the Senate’s dress code isn’t even widely enforced. He’s been wearing cardigans, joggers and Air Jordan sneakers for weeks without any apparent objection.

“Whose sensibilities are being insulted?” Acosta asked, purposefully donning a black guayabera, a traditional Caribbean dress shirt, that didn’t have a collar for Tuesday's debate.

After the vote, the Brown University sociology graduate student acknowledged that Senate leaders at least removed language imposing the dress code on chamber guests, a concern he and others raised earlier.

But he said the strong opposition to ending the dress code outright only underscores the uphill battle younger, progressive lawmakers face in trying to advance more pressing priorities.

“It speaks to how conservative the institution is,” Acosta said. “It’s very difficult to change anything."

Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press

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

.

© 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

\

© 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)

FIRST FREE PERIOD PRODUCTS NOW

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

.

© 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.