The US labor shortage is 'national economic emergency' getting worse by the day, the Chamber of Commerce said. In some states, there are more job vacancies than available workers.
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© Provided by Business Insider A worker at a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, cleans a table at a restaurant after it was allowed to reopen in May. Andy Lyons/Getty Images

The US Chamber of Commerce called the current labor shortage an "emergency."

The Chamber described the shortage, hitting multiple industries, as a threat to US economic recovery.

In South Dakota, Nebraska, and Vermont, there are more job vacancies than available workers, it said.

The current US labor shortage, which is hitting industries from education and healthcare to hospitality and ride-hailing apps, is holding back the nation's economic recovery from the pandemic, the US Chamber of Commerce said Tuesday.

In some states and some industries, there are fewer available workers than there are vacancies, according to a new report by the Chamber.

INCREASE PAY AND BENEFITS INSTEAD OF DRIVING WORKERS TO STARVATION 

BY CUTTING BENEFITS MANY STATES ALREADY HAVE LOW UI THE FED TOP UP MADE THOSE JUST BAREABLE  

"The worker shortage is real - and it's getting worse by the day," Suzanne Clark, president and CEO of the Chamber, said in a statement. "The worker shortage is a national economic emergency, and it poses an imminent threat to our fragile recovery and America's great resurgence," she said.

BULLSHIT

Read more: McDonald's franchisees blame hiring challenges on unemployment benefits and say an 'inflationary time bomb' will force them to hike Big Mac prices

The Chamber said that being unable to hire qualified workers is "the most critical and widespread challenge" businesses currently face. It said that businesses that don't have enough employees are forced to reduce their hours, scale down operations, and, in some cases, permanently close.

There are 1.4 available workers per job opening in the US, according to the Chamber, which used the most recently available data from March. This rate is just half the average of the last 20 years - and the Chamber said it's continuing to fall.

The ratio is much lower in some sectors than others. In professional and business services, private educational services, and private health services, there are less available workers than job openings, according to the report. And for government vacancies, this rate - known as the worker availability ratio (WAR) - falls to just 0.16.

Some states have been worse hit than others. In South Dakota, Nebraska, and Vermont, there is fewer than one available worker per vacancy, per the report.

In comparison, at the peak of the financial crisis in 2009, the WAR across the US was almost eight.

In a May survey of state and local chambers of commerce leaders, 90.5% said that the "lack of available workers" was slowing their local economies. In comparison, half as many - 44.9% - said that COVID-19 was holding the economy back.

And in the Chamber's survey of top trade association economists, 88% said it was at least "somewhat difficult" for businesses in their industry to find workers.

The Chamber is calling on federal policymakers to invest more in employer-led job education and training programs, expand access to childcare for working parents, and reform the legal immigration system to help employers meet demand for high-demand jobs in labor-strapped sectors.

Hiring in the US private sector accelerated through April, aided by the vaccine rollout, but some industries have been hit by huge labor shortages. Uber and Lyft have struggled to find enough drivers, small business owners fear they won't be able to pay rent, and New York City restaurants could take months to find enough staff to function properly.

Insider's Ayelet Sheffey reported that the labor shortage could be down to a mix of unemployment benefits, COVID-19 health concerns, caring responsibilities, and low wages.

Bank of America expects the job market to recover by early 2022.

Hong Kong's Tiananmen museum shut down amid investigation

HONG KONG (AP) — A Hong Kong museum commemorating China's deadly 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests closed Wednesday three days after opening as the ruling Communist Party tries to stamp out the last traces of public discussion of the event.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Hong Kong was the last place on Chinese soil where the party's attack on protests centered on Beijing's Tiananmen Square was commemorated with candlelight vigils and other events. But authorities have banned public ceremonies for the second year amid a campaign by Beijing to crush pro-democracy activism in the territory.

Organizers of the June 4 Museum said it closed after authorities investigated whether it had licenses to conduct public exhibitions. The Hong Kong Alliance of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China said it wanted to protect staff and visitors while the group sought legal advice.

Public memorials have long been banned on the mainland. Relatives of people who were killed in the crackdown often are detained or harassed by authorities ahead of the anniversary.

The group, which has organized candlelight vigils in Hong Kong in past years that attracted thousands of people, said the museum received more than 550 visitors since it opened Sunday.

Beijing is tightening control over Hong Kong, prompting complaints it is eroding the autonomy promised when the former British colony returned to China in 1997 and hurting its status as a financial center. Pro-democracy activists have been sentenced to prison under a national security law imposed following anti-government protests that began in 2019.

In past years, thousands of people gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to light candles and sing in memory of people killed when the military attacked protesters in and around Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds and possibly thousands of people.

Hong Kong authorities have banned the vigil for the second consecutive year, citing social distancing restrictions and public health risks from the coronavirus pandemic.

Critics say authorities use the pandemic as an excuse to silence pro-democracy voices in Hong Kong.

Last year, thousands gathered in Victoria Park despite the ban and police warnings. Weeks later, more than 20 activists who took part in the vigil were arrested. This year, organizers have urged residents to mark June 4 by lighting a candle wherever they are.

Zen Soo, The Associated Press

CRIMINAL  CAPITALI$M
Ex-banker convicted in massive German tax evasion scheme


BERLIN (AP) — A court in Germany convicted a former private banker of five counts of tax evasion Tuesday in a case linked to a far-reaching scheme involving hundreds of suspects.

The regional court in Bonn sentenced the defendant, a former employee of Hamburg-based bank M.M. Warburg, to five years and six months in prison and ordered him to repay 100,000 euros ($122,000). Due to the length of the proceedings, the court credited the banker time months of time served.

A court spokesperson, Saskia Wielpuetz, said the verdict can be appealed.

The defendant, whose name wasn’t released for privacy reasons, allegedly took part in so-called cum-ex transactions in which participants loaned each other shares to collect reimbursement for taxes they hadn’t paid.

Hundreds of bankers allegedly were involved in the scheme and reportedly defrauded taxpayers of billions of euros. Opposition parties have accused the German government of for many years turning a blind eye to legal loopholes that made the cum-ex transactions possible.

Warburg said in a statement that the Bonn court's verdict would have no economic impact on the banking group. The bank has filed legal appeals challenging decisions by German tax authorities' holding it liable for tax repayments.

Warburg is also demanding compensation from the individuals allegedly involved in the scheme and denies wrongdoing.

A related trial in Bonn last year resulted in suspended sentences for two British bankers after they agreed to provide detailed information about the fraud scheme.

Numerous further trials against bankers and lawyers allegedly involved in the scheme are expected.

The Associated Press

Coffee is the latest commodity to hit multi-year highs as Brazil drought sends prices soaring

wdaniel@businessinsider.com (Will Daniel) 

 Juancho Torres/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images 

Coffee prices hit ar high on Friday extending their rise to nearly 70% in the past year.

Dr. Michaela Helbing-Kuhl, an agriculture analyst at Commerzbank, says Brazil's persistently dry weather is to blame.

The drought is expected to continue through August which is "not a good sign for the 2022/23 crop," according to Dr. Helbing-Kuhl.

Prices of arabica coffee moved above $1.60 per pound last Friday for the first time since the fall of 2016.

Coffee prices have risen nearly 70% in the past year and currently trade around $1.66 per pound.

According to Dr. Michaela Helbing-Kuhl, an agricultural analyst at Commerzbank, global coffee production has been hurt by persistently dry weather in Brazil.

Brazil's Paraná Basin, which is home to Minas Gerais, the country's biggest coffee-producing state, has been hit with a drought that forecasters expect to continue through August, according to a recent commodities report from Commerzbank.

2021 was anticipated to be a strong year for Brazilian coffee producers, but many have experienced weak yields as a result of the drought.

Dr. Helbing-Kuhl said the dry weather is "not a good sign for the 2022/23 crop" either, which begins flowering in September. Protests in Columbia have also hampered the transport of Brazil's already weak harvest.

Coffee is the latest commodity to hit multi-year highs as the global economy reopens.

From lumber to copper, commodity prices have been on the rise this past year amid record demand and supply chain disruptions brought about by the current bust to boom cycle.

Lumber futures rose as high as $1,670.50 per thousand board feet in early May, although they've now fallen back to $1,265. Even with the price drop, however, lumber futures are still up roughly 260% in the past year.

Similarly, copper futures are up 88% since this time last year amid surging demand. Bank of America commodity strategist Michael Widmer said copper is "the new oil" in a recent note to clients and claimed it could hit $20,000 per ton due to surging demand.

Oil prices also neared 2-year highs on Tuesday as investors are expecting OPEC+ to confirm it will continue restricting supply at a key meeting.

Despite rising commodities prices in 2021, there are some signs of a let-up for businesses and consumers. New data from Bloomberg shows hedge funds have cut their bullish bets on commodities in recent weeks.

According to data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and ICE, hedge-fund holdings in 20 of the 23 commodities tracked in the Bloomberg Commodity Index fell by the most since November this week.

No longer 'the disappeared': Mourning the 215 children found in a mass grave at Kamloops Indian Residential School

Veldon Coburn, Assistant Professor, Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa 

Content warning: This piece contains distressing details about Indian Residential Schools

A macabre part of Canada’s hidden history made headlines last week after ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 First Nations children in a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Like 150,000 Indigenous children that were taken from their families and nations and placed in residential schools, the 215 bodies of children, some as young as three, located in Tk’emlúps were part of a larger colonial program to liquidate Indigenous nations of their histories, culture and foreclose on any future. To do this, Canada put into motion a system to “kill the Indian in the child.”

This system often killed the child.

While we currently have no evidence to determine the cause of death for each child, we know that they died a political death — these children were the disappeared.
Colonial population management projects

The chilling discovery in Tk’emlúps reminds us of the larger project of aggressive assimilation.

Indian Residential Schools were centres for state-directed violence against Indigenous nations, where the children — the heirs of Indigenous nations — were programmatically stripped of their Indianness.

Indigenous lives were broken down, sterilized of any trace of the gifts inherited from their parents and ancestors and re-packaged into Canadian bodies.

The brute nation-making scheme of the Canadian state looked to the existing infrastructure laid down by the prominent Christian churches. The churches were involved in population management almost from the moment of contact between European Crowns and Indigenous nations. The Catholic Church, which would go on to operate about 60 per cent of these schools, was a hawkish occupier.

Like branch plants in a vast production scheme, the state made good use of the extensive church network to co-ordinate the extraction of raw material—Indigenous children.

But the revelation of a mass disposal site for children — unrecorded and hidden — on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School tells us that the regulation of Indigenous life extended into death

.

© Archdiocese of Vancouver Archives A 1937 photograph of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The politics of death and mourning

A fact many Indigenous people understand is that life’s benefits and burdens are shot through the colonial prism. As we go through life, we quickly learn that the weight of history’s finger is pressing firmly on the scale.

What is often overlooked is how that uneven distribution in life carries on through death.

Just as in life, how Indigenous death is mourned and remembered has been a matter of political control. The Canadian state, in partnership with the churches, has long unilaterally assumed sovereignty over Indigenous mortality and bereavement.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the atrocity at Tk’emlúps which has sharpened this for many Indigenous nations, as we see how the Catholic church not only denied these children the capacity to shape the means of and choose the ends of their life, but also they denied their communities control over their death.

In Tk’emlúps, the Catholic church decided that neither their lives nor their deaths were worthy of being known, remembered and commemorated.

One of the more appalling acts by the Catholic church in Tk’emlúps was how the children were deliberately forgotten; they were omitted from the official records that would verify their passing.

Documentation of death may seem clinical and lacking the human touch, but for some it has become crucial to contemporary remembrance. It is one way, of many culturally divergent methods, of confirming death and allowing the dead to have a social afterlife with the living. The painful void that lingers is what researcher Pauline Boss called ambiguous loss, “a loss that remains unclear because there is no death certificate or official verification of loss; there is no resolution, no closure.”

The memory of the person and their remains may strike us as two separate matters, but they are intimately connected in many cultures.

Not unlike Catholicism, the material body figures centrally amongst many Indigenous rites and ceremonies that cultivate social continuity with the dead. Matthew Engelke, who studies the anthropology of death, tells us that:

“(W)hat commemoration often involves is much more than remembering the dead. It requires a serious engagement with the things that ghosts and ancestors want: a proper burial, a pot of beer, a feast, money, a fitting grave-stone, the blood of a reindeer, the blood of kin.”

The truth about the disappeared

The truth about the atrocity at Tk’emlúps escaped examination during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the weeks before the TRC launched in 2008, the Catholic church was confronted with the allegations of a mass grave. Back then, the church denied any knowledge.

Until their remains were recently located, the Catholic church was content to leave 215 children as ‘disappeared.’

The disappeared — those that have been secretly disposed — produce a unique grieving. They leave families and communities in a state of suspended mourning, never sure whether their loved one is alive or dead, or where their remains have been left.

It is life abandoned to death with no chance of the living to intervene.

Now that they have been located, the surviving families, communities and Nations can begin to think about custodianship of the remains, mourning and memorialization. That much is up to them and every support and resource ought to be provided.

If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419

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

Veldon Coburn receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

 

 ET Canada

Buffy Sainte-Marie On Being An Advocate For Indigenous Community

Duration: 01:40 

June 1 marks the beginning of National Indigenous History Month. Award-winning singer-songwriter and Canadian trailblazer, Buffy Sainte-Marie, discusses being a prominent advocate in the Indigenous community and shares a piece of advice for young women wanting to follow in her footsteps.

 Calls for Canada to recognize and document its racist foundations

Duration: 02:24 

As Canada grapples with the horrific discovery of 215 children at suspected burial sites of a former B.C. residential school, there are calls for the country to do more to address the racist policies and actions of the country’s past. As Eric Sorensen reports, Indigenous leaders say the country needs to stop celebrating historic figures responsible for the residential school system.

 

Turbulence in interstellar gas clouds reveals multi-fractal structures

UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Research News

 

In interstellar dust clouds, turbulence must first dissipate before a star can form through gravity. A German-French research team has now discovered that the kinetic energy of the turbulence comes to rest in a space that is very small on cosmic scales, ranging from one to several light-years in extent. The group also arrived at new results in the mathematical method: Previously, the turbulent structure of the interstellar medium was described as self-similar - or fractal. The researchers found that it is not enough to describe the structure mathematically as a single fractal, a self-similar structure as known from the Mandelbrot set. Instead, they added several different fractals, so-called multifractals. The new methods can thus be used to resolve and represent structural changes in astronomical images in detail. Applications in other scientific fields such as atmospheric research is also possible.

The German-French programme GENESIS (Generation of Structures in the Interstellar Medium) is a cooperation between the University of Cologne's Institute for Astrophysics, LAB at the University of Bordeaux and Geostat/INRIA Institute Bordeaux. In a highlight publication of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the research team presents the new mathematical methods to characterize turbulence using the example of the Musca molecular cloud in the constellation of Musca.

Stars form in huge interstellar clouds composed mainly of molecular hydrogen - the energy reservoir of all stars. This material has a low density, only a few thousand to several tens of thousands of particles per cubic centimetre, but a very complex structure with condensations in the form of 'clumps' and 'filaments', and eventually 'cores' from which stars form by gravitational collapse of the matter.

The spatial structure of the gas in and around clouds is determined by many physical processes, one of the most important of which is interstellar turbulence. This arises when energy is transferred from large scales, such as galactic density waves or supernova explosions, to smaller scales. Turbulence is known from flows in which a liquid or gas is 'stirred', but can also form vortices and exhibit brief periods of chaotic behaviour, called intermittency. However, for a star to form, the gas must come to rest, i.e., the kinetic energy must dissipate. After that, gravity can exert enough force to pull the hydrogen clouds together and form a star. Thus, it is important to understand and mathematically describe the energy cascade and the associated structural change.

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More information about GENESIS: astro.uni-koeln.de/stutzki/research/genesis

 

Researchers explore ways to detect 'deep fakes' in geography

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS COMBINED SATELLITE IMAGES OF TACOMA, WASHINGTON, WITH SEATTLE AND BEIJING TO CREATE A COMPOSITE IMAGE, AND THEN IDENTIFIED DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FALSE AND TRUE IMAGES. view more 

CREDIT: CHENGBIN DENG

Can you trust the map on your smartphone, or the satellite image on your computer screen?

So far, yes, but it may only be a matter of time until the growing problem of "deep fakes" converges with geographical information science (GIS). Researchers such as Associate Professor of Geography Chengbin Deng are doing what they can to get ahead of the problem.

Deng and four colleagues -- Bo Zhao and Yifan Sun at the University of Washington, and Shaozeng Zhang and Chunxue Xu at Oregon State University -- co-authored a recent article in Cartography and Geographic Information Science that explores the problem. In "Deep fake geography? When geospatial data encounter Artificial Intelligence," they explore how false satellite images could potentially be constructed and detected. News of the research has been picked up by countries around the world, including China, Japan, Germany and France.

"Honestly, we probably are the first to recognize this potential issue," Deng said.

Geographic information science (GIS) underlays a whole host of applications, from national defense to autonomous cars, a technology that's currently under development. Artificial intelligence has made a positive impact on the discipline through the development of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI), which uses machine learning -- or artificial intelligence (AI) -- to extract and analyze geospatial data. But these same methods could potentially be used to fabricate GPS signals, fake locational information on social media posts, fabricate photographs of geographic environments and more.

In short, the same technology that can change the face of an individual in a photo or video can also be used to make fake images of all types, including maps and satellite images.

"We need to keep all of this in accordance with ethics. But at the same time, we researchers also need to pay attention and find a way to differentiate or identify those fake images," Deng said. "With a lot of data sets, these images can look real to the human eye."

To figure out how to detect an artificially constructed image, first you need to construct one. To do so, they used a technique common in the creation of deep fakes: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN), an unsupervised deep learning algorithm that can simulate synthetic media.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are a type of artificial intelligence, but they require training samples -- input -- of whatever content they are programmed to produce. A black box on a map could, for example, represent any number of different factories or businesses; the various points of information inputted into the network helps determine the possibilities it can generate.

The researchers altered a satellite image of Tacoma, Washington, interspersing elements of Seattle and Beijing and making it look as real as possible. Researchers are not encouraging anyone to try such a thing themselves -- quite the opposite, in fact.

"It's not about the technique; it's about how human being are using the technology," Deng said. "We want to use technology for the good, not for bad purposes."

After creating the altered composite, they compared 26 different image metrics to determine whether there were statistical differences between the true and false images. Statistical differences were registered on 20 of the 26 indicators, or 80%.

Some of the differences, for example, included the color of roofs; while roof colors in each of the real images were uniform, they were mottled in the composite. The fake satellite image was also dimmer and less colorful, but had sharper edges. Those differences, however, depended on the inputs they used to create the fake, Deng cautioned.

This research is just the beginning. In the future, geographers may track different types of neural networks to see how they generate false images and figure out ways to detect them. Ultimately, researchers will need to discover systematic ways to root out deep fakes and verify trustworthy information before they end up in the public view.

"We all want the truth," Deng said.

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ALS development could be triggered by loss of network connections in the spinal cord

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - THE FACULTY OF HEALTH AND MEDICAL SCIENCES

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE SPINAL CORD OF A MOUSE WITH ALS. THE GREEN CELLS ARE INHIBITORY INTERNEURONS. view more 

CREDIT: ILARY ALLODI, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

ALS is a very severe neurodegenerative disease in which nerve cells in the spinal cord controlling muscles and movement slowly die. There is no effective treatment and the average life expectancy after being diagnosed with ALS is usually short. Because of this, new knowledge about the disease is urgently needed.

Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have gained new insights about ALS, by investigating the early development of the disease in a mouse model.

"We have found that networks of nerve cells in the spinal cord called inhibitory interneurons lose connection to motor neurons, the nerve cells that directly control muscle contraction. We do not yet know if these changes cause the disease. But the loss of the inhibitory signal could explain why the motor neurons end up dying in ALS", says first and co-corresponding author to the new study Ilary Allodi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Neuroscience.

A lot of ALS research have focused on the motor neurons themselves, but the research group at the University of Copenhagen had a different approach.

"It is only natural that motor neurons have received major attention. They control our muscles, which is the challenge for ALS patients. Here, we wanted to investigate the circuit of interneurons in the spinal cord because they determine the activity of motor neurons. Since we found that there is a loss of connections between inhibitory interneurons and motor neurons that happens before the motor neuron death, we think that this loss could be a possible explanation for why the motor neurons ends up dying in ALS patients", says Ole Kiehn, senior, co-corresponding author and Professor at the Department of Neuroscience.

Fast-twitch first

In ALS patients, the degeneration typically starts with what is called the fast-twitch motor neurons and then goes on to other motor neurons. This means that certain muscles and bodily functions are affected before others. Normally, patients lose coordination and speed in movement before more basic functions such as breathing. This is mirrored in the new findings, according to the researchers.

"In our mouse model, we show that the loss of connection happens to fast motor neurons first and then slow motor neurons later on involve a particular type of inhibitory neurons, the so called V1 interneurons", says Roser Montañana-Rosell, who is PhD student and shared first author on the study.

"The V1 interneuron connectivity loss is paralleled by the development of a specific locomotor deficit in the pre-symptomatic phase with lower speed and changes in limb coordination in the ALS mice that is dependent on V1 interneuron connections to motor neuron", says Ole Kiehn.

Expanding the window of opportunity

The researchers underline that the mechanisms should be investigated in human patients as well. However, they do not have any reason to believe that the same or similar biological mechanisms are not at play in humans.

Given the new understanding of the disease, Ilary Allodi hopes further research into the signaling process could reveal how to repair the nerve cell connection loss in ALS.

"We definitely hope that our findings can contribute with a new way of thinking about ALS development. With a distinct focus on interneurons, we might be able, in future experiments, to increase the signaling processes from the interneurons to the motor neurons and prevent or delay the motor neuron degeneration from an early stage," ends Ilary Allodi.

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Read the entire study in Nature Communications: "Locomotor deficits in a mouse model of ALS are paralleled by loss of V1-interneuron connections onto fast motor neurons"