Crafty cockatoos master dumpster diving and teach each other

By CHRISTINA LARSON

In this 2019 photo provided by researcher Barbara Klump, a sulphur-crested cockatoo lifts the lid of a trash can while several others watch in Sydney, Australia. At the beginning of 2018, researchers received reports from a survey of residents that birds in three Sydney suburbs had mastered the novel foraging technique. By the end of 2019, birds were lifting bins in 44 suburbs. (Barbara Klump/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A few years ago, a Sydney scientist noticed a sulfur-crested cockatoo opening his trash bin. Not every resident would be thrilled, but ornithologist Richard Major was impressed by the ingenuity.

It’s quite a feat for a bird to grasp a bin lid with its beak, pry it open, then shuffle far enough along the bin’s edge that the lid falls backward — revealing edible trash treasures inside.

Intrigued, Major teamed up with researchers in Germany to study how many cockatoos learned this trick. In early 2018, they found from a survey of residents that birds in three Sydney suburbs had mastered the novel foraging technique. By the end of 2019, birds were lifting bins in 44 suburbs.

“From three suburbs to 44 in two years is a pretty rapid spread,” said Major, who is based at the Australian Museum.

The researchers’ next question was whether the cockatoos had each figured out how to do this alone — or whether they copied the strategy from experienced birds. And their research published Thursday in the journal Science concluded the birds mostly learned by watching their peers.

“That spread wasn’t just popping up randomly. It started in southern suburbs and radiated outwards,” said Major. Basically, it caught on like a hot dance move.

Scientists have documented other examples of social learning in birds. One classic case involves small birds called blue tits that learned to puncture foil lids of milk bottles in the United Kingdom starting in the 1920s — a crafty move, though less complex and physically demanding than opening trash bins.

But observing a new “cultural trend” spreading in the wild — or suburbs — in real time afforded the cockatoo researchers a special opportunity, said Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavioral in Germany and co-author of the study. “This is a scientist’s dream,” she said.

During summer of 2019, trash-collection day in suburban Sydney was the team’s research day. As garbage trucks rolled down their routes and people shoved bins to the curb, Max Planck Institute behavioral ecologist Barbara Klump drove around and stopped to record cockatoos landing on bins. Not all cockatoos succeeded in opening them, but she took around 160 videos of victorious efforts.

Analyzing the footage, Klump realized the vast majority of birds opening bins were males, which tend to be larger than females. The birds that mastered the trick also tended to be dominant in social hierarchies.

“This suggests that if you’re more socially connected, you have more opportunities to observe and acquire new behavior — and also to spread it,” she said.

Cockatoos are extremely gregarious birds that forage in small groups, roost in large ones, and are rarely seen alone in Sydney. While many animals have declined with the expansion of Australian cities, these bold and flamboyant birds generally have thrived.

“In an unpredictable, rapidly changing environment with unpredictable food sources, opportunistic animals thrive,” said Isabelle Laumer, a behavioral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research.



Over the past decade, research has shown that “urban adaptability is correlated with traits like innovativeness, behavioral flexibility and exploration,” said Max Planck Institute’s Aplin. What the new research adds to that understanding is that critters that easily transmit knowledge and new skills socially also have an advantage.

Parrots — which include cockatoos — are known for being among the most clever birds. They have a brain just the size of a walnut, but the density of neurons packed into their forebrains gives many species cognitive abilities similar to great apes, said Irene Pepperberg, an animal cognition researcher at Harvard, who has studied African grey parrots and was not involved in the new paper.

While African grey parrots are known for their ability to mimic and sometimes comprehend human speech, cockatoos are famously adept at using and manipulating new tools, such as puzzle boxes in the lab or trash bin lids in the wild, she said.

“Everyone in Sydney has an opinion about cockatoos,” said the Australian Museum’s Major. ”Whether you to love to watch these big flamboyant social birds, or think they’re a pest, you have to respect them. They’ve adapted so brilliantly to living with humans, to human domination of the environment.”

___

Follow Christina Larson on Twitter: @larsonchristina

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Volunteers hunting for Mexico’s ‘disappeared’ become targets

By MARK STEVENSON

FILE - In this March 11, 2019 file photo, Lidia Lara Tobon, center, whose brother Angel Gabriel Tobon went missing, works with other relatives of the disappeared from the Solecito Collective, as they search for clandestine graves inside a municipal dump after an anonymous source sent the group a map suggesting hundreds of bodies were buried in the area, in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico. The mainly female volunteer searchers who fan out across Mexico to dig for the bodies of their murdered relatives are themselves increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez, File)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The mainly female volunteers who fan out across Mexico to hunt for the bodies of murdered relatives are themselves increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn.

Those who carry on the effort tell tales of long getting threats and being watched — presumably by the same people who murdered their sons, brothers and husbands.

But now threats have given way to bullets in the heads of searchers who have proved far better than the authorities at ferreting out the clandestine burial and burning pits that number in the thousands. Two searchers have been slain the past two months.

Aranza Ramos had spent over a year searching for her husband, Bryan Celaya Alvarado, after he vanished Dec. 6, 2020. That day he became one of Mexico’s 87,855 “disappeared” people. Most are thought to have been killed by drug cartels, their bodies dumped into shallow graves or burned.

Searchers have learned over the last decade, since the height of Mexico’s 2006-2012 drug war, that the gangs often use the same locations over and over again, creating grisly killing fields.

It was at one such field, known as Ejido Ortiz, in the northern border state of Sonora, where Aranza Ramos had been helping search on July 15 — the day she herself was killed.

“In Ejido Ortiz several clandestine crematoriums have been found, some still smoking and burning when they were found,” Ramos’ search group said in a statement. “This ejido (collective farm plot) is an active extermination site.”

So active that searchers say they get nervous when the burials they happen on are too fresh. It means the killers may still be around and using the site.

After a day of searching — the volunteers plunge metal rods into the soil to release the tell-tale odor of death — Ramos returned to her home near the city of Guaymas. Just before midnight, she was abducted from her home. The killers drove her a short distance and dumped her bullet-ridden body on the roadside.

Cecilia Duarte, who has spent three years working with the search group “Buscadoras por la Paz” (Searchers for Peace), attended meetings with Ramos in the week before she was killed. Duarte, who found the body of her own missing son and is now searching for a missing nephew, said Ramos always tried to play it safe.

“She tried not to stand out, she wasn’t a spokeswoman,” said Duarte. Indeed, Ramos avoided attention. The Associated Press had tried to contact her two months before she was killed, but she did not answer messages.

“Aranza posted a message the week before she died, saying she was searching for her husband, not for the suspects,” Duarte recalled.

There are three golden rules that Mexico’s volunteer search groups follow:

—Human remains aren’t referred to as corpses or bodies. The searchers call them “treasures,” because to grieving families they are precious.

—Searchers usually call law enforcement when they think they’ve found a burial, mostly because authorities often refuse to conduct the slow but critical DNA testing unless the remains are professionally exhumed.

—Searches are not conducted to find perpetrators, only to find loved ones.

It is the latter rule that volunteers hoped would keep them safe from retaliation.

“As searchers, we are not seeking to find out who is guilty. We are searching for treasures,” said Patricia “Ceci” Flores, founder of Madres Buscadores de Sonora (Searching Mothers of Sonora).

For a long time, it has meant that searchers, and the police who often accompany them, focus on finding graves and identifying remains — not collecting evidence of how they died or who killed them. Search groups sometimes even get anonymous tips about where bodies are buried, knowledge probably available only to the killers or their accomplices.

But that longstanding arrangement appears to have broken down.

The day after Ramos was killed, Flores received a phone threat. “I got a call saying, ‘You’re going to be next,’” Flores said. Since then, police have assigned a patrol car to stand guard outside her home in Hermosillo.

Sonora state officials have agreed to provide security for searchers deemed to be in danger. The state also agreed to assign excavation teams to potential burial sites found by searchers within three to five days. But officials seem more interested in damage control. They got the searchers to agree not to take photos of burial sites.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gave a vague and self-assured statement when asked about the killing of Ramos. “We are going to continue to protect all women. We condemn these crimes.”

But Ramos was not the first. On May 30, a volunteer search activist, Javier Barajas Piña, was gunned down in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico’s most violent.

And two journalists have been killed in Sonora in the space of about two months; on Thursday, reporter Ricardo López was shot to death in a parking lot in Guaymas, the same township where Ramos was killed.

Altogether, 68 human rights and environmental activists have been killed since López Obrador took office.

Fear has always accompanied the searchers. They go to wild, remote, abandoned places where terrible crimes have been committed. But up to now, they mostly shrugged it off.

Cecilia Duarte, the volunteer with Ramos, recalled of those days: “They sent us a message from a false Facebook account saying they were going to flay the skin from us. But I always thought that if they are really going to do something to you, they are not going to warn you.”


FILE - In this March 11, 2019 file photo, members of the Solecito Collective, who are seeking their missing loved ones, look for signs of clandestine graves at a municipal dump after an anonymous source sent the group a map suggesting hundreds of bodies were buried in the area, in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico. The mainly female volunteer searchers who fan out across Mexico to dig for the bodies of their murdered relatives are themselves increasingly being killed, putting to the test the government’s promise to help them in their quest for a final shred of justice: a chance to mourn. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez, File)

At another search site, Duarte said, she once felt the sense of being watched — and she spotted somebody observing her group from a nearby hillside. Still, the searchers kept on.

But Ramos’ killing changed things, she said. “That did hit us hard. Some people stopped the searches.”

Multiple cartels, including one run by Rafael Caro Quintero — improperly released from prison while serving a sentence for the 1985 murder of a DEA agent — have been fighting for control of Sonora and its valuable trafficking routes to the U.S. They include the two main factions of the Sinaloa cartel, operating through local gangs.

“The authorities should do more, it’s not enough,” said Flores of Madres Buscadores de Sonora. “They should do more investigation, provide more security, they should be investigating so that the mothers aren’t the ones who have to go out in the fields searching.”

The U.N. human rights office in Mexico made the same point: “When a government does not fulfill its duty (to carry out searches), it puts the families of the disappeared at risk.”

US Justice Department recovers 17 Jewish artifacts stolen during the Holocaust



Visitors look at an exhibition in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, on January 16, 2020. The Justice Department on Thursday said it recovered 17 Jewish funeral scrolls, Pinkas manuscripts and community records stolen from Jewish communities during the Holocaust. File Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI | License Photo

July 22 (UPI) -- U.S. law enforcement officials recovered funeral scrolls, manuscripts and records taken from Jewish communities during World War II, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

The Justice Department said in a statement that the 17 Jewish funeral scrolls, Pinkas manuscripts and community records were taken from Jewish communities in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and Slovakia during the war and disappeared during the Holocaust.

In February, law enforcement learned that an auction house in Brooklyn was selling 21 manuscripts and scrolls.

They contained prayers for the dead, memorial pages and the names of deceased members of Jewish communities, as well as various records and rules including members of the community who were taken to concentration camps.

"The scrolls and manuscripts that were illegally confiscated during the Holocaust contain priceless historical information that belongs to the descendants of families that lived and flourished in Jewish communities before the Holocaust," said Jacquelyn Kasulis, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Members of the Jewish communities who returned after World War II found their homes ransacked with belongings, including the scrolls and manuscripts, stolen.

Through the auction house, as well as a consigner and a buyer, law enforcement were able to track down 17 of the artifacts.


Three additional artifacts are believed to be in Israel, with one more in upstate New York.

"This office hopes that today's seizure will contribute to the restoration of pre-Holocaust history in Eastern Europe," Kauslis said.

Study: Farming 21% less productive since 1960s because of climate change


Climate change, including increases in drought, heat waves and extreme weather, have slowed gains in farming productivity, according to new research. Photo by Washington State University

(UPI) -- Farming productivity has increased significantly over the last half-century. New research suggests those productivity boosts would have been even greater if it wasn't for climate change.

According to the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Climate Change, global warming has cut farming productivity 21% since 1960s.

"We find that climate change has basically wiped out about seven years of improvements in agricultural productivity over the past 60 years," lead author Ariel Ortiz-Bobea said in a press release.

"It is equivalent to pressing the pause button on productivity growth back in 2013 and experiencing no improvements since then. Anthropogenic climate change is already slowing us down," said Ortiz-Bobea, an associate professor of applied economics at Cornell University.

While many studies have developed models to predict the impacts of climate change on future crop yields, few have looked at the impacts of climate change on past productivity.

For the study, scientists developed an econometric model to simulate the impacts of year-to-year weather changes on agricultural outputs.

The model considered more than 200 systematic variations and the impacts on crop yields. Researchers then ran the model under several different climate scenarios.

The simulations showed the "total factor productivity" of the agricultural sector has been significantly hampered by human-caused climate change over the last 60 years.

Climate change-related slowdowns in agricultural productivity were most pronounced in Africa, Latin America and Asia, especially in warmer, semi-tropical regions.

Numerous studies have focused on the effects of climate change on coastal populations and human migration and displacement, as well as economic productivity.

But the latest findings are a reminder that climate change could have a significant -- and harmful -- effect on global food systems and the ability of the agricultural sector to feed the planet's growing populace, researchers said.

"Most people perceive climate change as a distant problem," Ortiz-Bobea said. "But this is something that is already having an effect. We have to address climate change now so that we can avoid further damage for future generations."

ALMA images moon-forming disk around alien world


Scientists used the powerful ALMA telescope to identify and measure a circumplanetary disk surrounding an exoplanet located 400 light-years from Earth. Photo by ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO/Benisty, et al./The Astrophysical Journal

July 22 (UPI) -- Astronomers have for the first time imaged a moon-forming disk around an exoplanet.

Scientists expect the discovery -- made using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array and detailed Thursday in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters -- to aid the study of planet and moon formation in young solar systems.

"Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming," co-author Myriam Benisty, astronomer at the University of Grenoble in France, said in a press release.

"Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time," Benisty said.

A few years ago, astronomers spotted what they thought to be a circumplanetary disc surrounding the exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two Jupiter-like planets orbiting a young star located 400 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus.

At the time, the moon-forming disk was too faint to distinguish from the surrounding gas and dust, but the latest observations by ALMA revealed the disk's dimensions and mass.

Scientists determined the disk is as wide as the distance between Earth and the sun, and also boasts enough material to form three satellites the size of Earth's moon.

"These new observations are also extremely important to prove theories of planet formation that could not be tested until now," said lead study author Jaehan Bae, a researcher from the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Scientists knew that a circumplanetary disk can help budding planets capture surrounding planet-forming material and regulate its growth, but until now, they couldn't be certain exactly what this process looked like.

"More than 4,000 exoplanets have been found until now, but all of them were detected in mature systems," said co-author Miriam Keppler, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

"PDS 70b and PDS 70c, which form a system reminiscent of the Jupiter-Saturn pair, are the only two exoplanets detected so far that are still in the process of being formed," Keppler said.

PDS 70b and PDS 70c were first located using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and later rendered in greater detail using ALMA.

The astronomers hope to gain further insights into planet and satellite formation using ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently under construction in Chile's Atacama desert.

"The ELT will be key for this research since, with its much higher resolution, we will be able to map the system in great detail," said co-author Richard Teague, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and the Smithsonian.

RNA breakthrough inspires high-yield, drought-tolerant rice, potatoes


Researchers say that a breakthrough in RNA gene manipulation in some crops -- including potatoes -- could lead to an increase in yield by as much as 50%. Photo by Couleur/Pixabay

July 22 (UPI) -- Thanks to a breakthrough in RNA manipulation, crop scientists have developed new potato and rice varieties with higher yields and increased drought tolerance.

By inserting a gene responsible for production of a protein called FTO, scientists produced bigger rice and potato plants with more expansive root systems.

In experiments, the plants' longer roots improved their drought resistance.

Test results -- detailed Thursday in the journal Nature Biotechnology -- showed the RNA-manipulated plants also improved their rate of photosynthesis, boost yields by as much as 50 percent.

"The change really is dramatic," study co-author Chuan He, professor of chemical biology at the University of Chicago, said in a press release.

"What's more, it worked with almost every type of plant we tried it with so far, and it's a very simple modification to make," He said.

With climate change predicted to expose many agricultural regions to higher temperatures and more frequent droughts, scientists hope their breakthrough will help buffer vulnerable agriculture systems -- and the communities that rely on them -- against climate stress.

According to the study's authors, yield increases can help prevent forest from being cleared for food production.

"This really provides the possibility of engineering plants to potentially improve the ecosystem as global warming proceeds," said He. "We rely on plants for many, many things -- everything from wood, food and medicine, to flowers and oil -- and this potentially offers a way to increase the stock material we can get from most plants."

Gene manipulation in plants and animals typically involves DNA, the primary blueprint for an organisms' many biological processes. RNA works like a messenger, translating and delivering instructions inside a cell.

But RNA don't blindly transcribe DNA. Research has shown these messengers have agency -- by depositing chemical markers on transcribed genetic code, RNA can manipulate which genes get expressed and which get silenced.

For the new study, He and Guifang Jia, a former University of Chicago postdoctoral researcher who is now an associate professor at Peking University, turned their attention to FTO, a protein that can remove chemical tags from RNA.

In previous tests involving FTO, researchers found the protein influences human cell growth.

When researchers spliced the gene for FTO into rice plants, the plants almost immediately started growing at an accelerated rate.

"I think right then was when all of us realized we were doing something special," He said.

In the lab, the manipulated rice plants grew at three times their normal rate. In the field, the rice plants increased their mass by 50 percent. They also sprouted longer roots, increased their photosynthesis rate and produced larger yields.

When they repeated the experiments with potato plants, the researchers got similar results, suggesting the new gene manipulation method could be used to bolster a variety of crops.

Scientists suspect FTO augments an RNA modification pathway called m6A, effectively deleting chemical markers that would otherwise direct a plant to slow its growth. The breakthrough effectively takes the governor off of crop growth.

Researchers estimate there may be other ways to manipulate the plant's growth regulation system without the help of RNA.

"It seems that plants already have this layer of regulation, and all we did is tap into it," He said. "So the next step would be to discover how to do it using the plant's existing genetics.

ANCIENT FOSSIL FISH

Massive sturgeon jumps out of water in British Columbia river

July 22 (UPI) -- The crew of a British Columbia fishing tour boat captured video of the moment a massive, 9-foot sturgeon leaped out of a river and nearly landed on a boat.

Yves Bisson, the fishing tour operator who posted the video to TikTok, said the crew was on the Fraser River in Chilliwack when the substantial sturgeon took a flying leap into the air.

"It almost landed in the boat, and the guy holding the rod couldn't believe what he just saw," Bisson told WABC-TV.

Bisson estimated the fish weighed about 350 pounds and most likely was 50 years old or more.

He said the fish was tagged for research purposes and released back into the river.

"It was the fish of a lifetime," Bisson said.

VIDEO Watch: Massive sturgeon jumps out of water in British Columbia river - UPI.com

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/05/fossil-fish-hold-on-240-pound-fish-age.html

BEN & JERRY'S #BDS

NO DAIRY & POLITICS

Will Ben & Jerry’s lose its kosher stamp of approval?


An individual at Kof-K said existing contracts make the matter difficult while others expressed concern that food certifications not be political

AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGE
Ben & Jerry's ice cream pictured on sale in Jerusalem on July 20, 2021.

By Gabby Deutch
July 23, 2021


Following Ben & Jerry’s announcement that it plans to stop selling its ice cream in what it referred to as the “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the kashrut agency Kof-K has not yet decided whether to cease its kosher certification of Ben & Jerry’s products, an employee told Jewish Insider on Thursday.

“We do have a contract that cannot just be arbitrarily broken, so it’s not so simple,” said a person who picked up the phone at the Kof-K but declined to give his name.

“We are definitely doing stuff to address it,” the Kof-K employee said. “We have reached out to the Yesha Council” — the organization representing Jewish settlers in the West Bank — “we’ve spoken to them. We’re trying to speak to the Prime Minister’s Office, which we will probably get through today. We’ve got calls and emails back and forth with the president of Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s.”

As many members of the American pro-Israel community have looked for a way to register their disapproval of Ben & Jerry’s announcement, some have called on the Teaneck, N.J.-based Kof-K, one of the largest kosher certification agencies in the country, to rescind its certification of the company’s products.

One person with knowledge of kashrut certifications told JI that they expect the Kof-K to find a way out of the contract. “While likely contractually complicated, Kof-K will probably find a way to drop them as a client for their kosher certification,” this source said. “If that were to happen, the company will probably scramble to find some third-rate kosher certifier as a fig leaf — showing that, despite their anti-Jewish boycott, they somehow care about Jews.”

The campaign to decertify Ben & Jerry’s follows other actions taken this week. (Some Jewish organizations on the left including J Street and Americans for Peace Now have spoken in favor of the company’s policy and encouraged supporters to purchase the company’s ice cream; J Street launched a petition to “protect Ben & Jerry’s right to protest the occupation.”)

Several kosher supermarket chains have announced that they will no longer stock Ben & Jerry’s. The Vaad Harabonim of Queens, the Orthodox religious authority in Queens, N.Y., sent an email to the local community urging people “not to purchase any Ben & Jerry’s product” and praising “those stores who make the courageous decision to not stock any Ben & Jerry’s product.”

“Were I a Ben & Jerry’s customer,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, executive vice president of American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), who noted that he has not tried the ice cream because its American products do not have the more stringent Cholov Yisroel certification, “I would stop buying it, because Ben & Jerry’s mission in life should be to bring pleasure to people through their products. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve now inserted salt or emotional poison into their product.”

But Shemtov expressed concern that removing the hechsher, or kosher certification, from Ben & Jerry’s products that meet kashrut guidelines brings politics into a realm where it does not belong.

“A kashrut authority or a hechsher determines whether whatever’s in the container is kosher to eat, because kashrut authorities shouldn’t do politics, nor should they do issues beyond the kosher certification of the contents,” Shemtov explained. “So I understand the Kof-K choosing to maintain the hechsher despite Ben & Jerry’s politics.”

Politics have been mixed up with kosher certification in the past, even if not at the international scale of one of the world’s most well-known and beloved ice cream brands.

In 2018, the rabbinic authority in Flatbush, Brooklyn, threatened to remove the kosher certification of two restaurants unless they canceled a New Year’s Eve comedy show with an Orthodox lesbian comic. The restaurants, fearing the loss of certification, complied. In 2013, a kosher restaurant called Jezebel in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood changed its name to JSoho when seeking certification from the Orthodox Union, which found the name Jezebel inappropriate.

In 2017, the OU certified ice cream from Big Gay Ice Cream, a popular New York City ice cream shop that also sells its products online and in grocery stores. The move received criticism from some members of the Orthodox Jewish community, and by last year, the OU had removed its hechsher from Big Gay Ice Cream.

Dani Klein, a writer who runs the website YeahThatsKosher, published an op-ed earlier this week calling the removal of kashrut certification for political reasons “dangerous.” But he told JI he understands where the desire to remove the kosher certification from Ben & Jerry’s is coming from: For supporters of rescinding Ben & Jerry’s hechsher, the issue goes beyond politics. “I have been reading a lot of the commentary saying, ‘Well, you know, this goes against the core values of our people, and so we should take an action against it, even though it has nothing to do with food,’” Klein noted.

A related debate about whether kashrut extends beyond the way food is prepared took place more than a decade ago. National outrage ensued following allegations of abuse of both workers and animals at the kosher slaughterhouse Agriprocessors, in Postville, Iowa, leading to the arrest of several employees, including CEO Sholom Rubashkin.

Efforts from the Reform and Conservative movements that sought to advance an “ethical kashrut” certification, which would denote that animals were slaughtered humanely and that workers would earn a living wage and be treated fairly, largely failed. The Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox group, put forth ethical guidelines for Orthodox kashrut certifications, but the guidelines were never enacted as policy or incorporated into the certification process.

Still, some argue that the Ben & Jerry’s situation is unique. “We haven’t seen this type of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel] move on this level from a food company,” said Klein. “We haven’t seen a need for a kashrut organization to pull its hashgacha. Having said that, no hashgachas have been pulled yet.”

The idea is already having an impact, even if Kof-K has not yet reached a decision. The Australian Kashrut Authority decided not to include Ben & Jerry’s on its list of kosher products, although Ben & Jerry’s sold in Australia is still kosher — it has a Kof-K certification.

Bethany Mandel, a conservative journalist, argued that removing the kashrut certification would set a dangerous precedent. “There are BDS people who keep kosher, and we should not be putting anybody in a position where they’re sort of having to be their own mashgiach,” she said, referring to the person who observes food production and certifies its kashrut.

“I think that we should be expressing our feelings with our money,” said Mandel. “I think kosher certifiers should stick to what is kosher and what is not.”

BEN & JERRY'S #BDS

American States look at options for enforcing anti-BDS laws in wake of Ben & Jerry’s pullout


Officials in at least four states are evaluating recently adopted legislation to see if it's applicable to the decision by the ice cream company to cease sales in what it called the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory’

EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
A view of the entrance of the ice-cream shop inside the Ben & Jerry's factory in Be'er Tuvia in southern Israel, on July 21, 2021.

By
Melissa Weiss

July 23, 2021


At least four states with laws targeting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are assessing whether the recent decision by Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company, Unilever, to cease selling the ice cream company’s products in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory” runs afoul of anti-BDS legislation enacted in recent years.

Officials in New York, Florida, Illinois and Texas are looking into whether Monday’s announcement forbids them from including the companies in their pension portfolios.

In Florida, New York and Texas, officials are also looking into whether the legislation forbids the states from signing contracts with Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever, the latter of which provides a broad range of food and cleaning products to state-run properties, including prisons, government offices and state universities.

The assessments come as American Jewish organizations mount a united effort to push states to implement the anti-BDS laws that have been adopted by 33 states since 2015. On Thursday, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations sent a letter cosigned by a number of national groups to the 11 governors whose states have passed laws addressing pension portfolios. Jewish Community Relations Councils, local federations, Christians United for Israel, American Jewish Committee, StandWithUs, B’nai B’rith and Hadassah were all part of the effort, Conference of Presidents CEO William Daroff told JI.

Jake Adler, director of Jewish affairs for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, told Jewish Insider that “New York State is currently doing a legal review” to assess what, if any, measures need to be taken in response to the 2016 executive order signed by the governor that called on the state to divest public funds that support the BDS movement.

“The governor takes all of this very seriously, which is why he signed that executive order back in 2016,” an individual with knowledge of the review said. “He takes the whole thing seriously.”

On Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called on the State Board of Administration to “immediately place Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever on the Continued Examination Companies that Boycott Israel List and initiate the process to place both companies on the Scrutinized Companies that Boycott Israel List.”

In Illinois, an individual familiar with state boycott efforts confirmed to JI that “Illinois’ board has begun its process to investigate Unilever,” referring to the independent state body, the Illinois Investment Policy Board, that determines whether companies run afoul of its boycott laws.

In Texas, Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced Thursday that his office will review state law to determine if Ben & Jerry’s or Unilever had taken “specific action” that would violate Chapter 808 of the Texas Government Code, which was enacted in 2017 to address companies that boycott Israel. The law defines a boycott as “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations specifically with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel or in an Israeli-controlled territory.”

Each state has its own process by which to determine whether a company has violated state laws regarding BDS. Some states, like Illinois, have an independent board to determine which companies are in violation of the state’s laws regarding boycotts of Israel, as well as other state laws involving Sudan and Iran. The board lists more than three dozen companies that are prohibited from state investment, though a handful are, according to the board, in talks with the IIPB on the issue.

Daroff noted that he spoke to corporate executives at Unilever on Wednesday about the potential fallout from the decision to pull Ben & Jerry’s products. “It was very positive,” he said of the meeting. “They were very much trying to assure us that it wasn’t Unilever [that made the decision], that it was this board at Ben & Jerry’s, and they were sort of apologetic but also mostly in listening mode.”

Unilever may be able to override the decision by the Ben & Jerry’s board, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time of the corporation’s acquisition of the ice cream company in 2000.

Citing the license agreement, the statement said that “Unilever has agreed to undertake activities related to the ‘social mission’ of the Company in connection with the Unilever Affiliates’ activities under the Ben & Jerry’s trademark” and lists a number of activities, including commitments to purchasing fair-trade products and using unbleached paper products, that could fall under that agreement.

If Unilever is in breach of the agreement, according to the filing it must pay an 8% royalty to Ben & Jerry’s, a 3% increase from the percentage agreed upon by both parties.

That clause, Daroff said, provides an out for the parent company. “This seems to me to be a way for Unilever to pull off the Band-aid, and do away with this obviously, radically extreme Ben & Jerry’s board,” he said.

A number of anti-BDS laws have faced court challenges, with some found to be constitutional, but to date no piece of legislation focused on pensions has been successfully challenged.

About 100 US Olympians at Tokyo Games unvaccinated, official says

Tokyo Games were pushed back a year due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

By Ryan Gaydos | Fox News


The Tokyo Olympics opened Friday under a cloud of uncertainty as the coronavirus pandemic still hangs over the entire world with some athletes contracting the illness even before the Games got underway.

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) said about 100 of the 613 U.S. athletes in Tokyo for the Olympics remain unvaccinated. USOPC medical director Dr. Jonathan Finnoff said 567 athletes have filled out their health histories and a resounding majority replied they were vaccinated.

"Eighty-three percent is actually a substantial number and we're quite happy with it," Finnoff said.

The International Olympic Committee estimated that about 85% of residents in the Olympic Village were vaccinated. The number is based on the reports from each country’s Olympic committee but is not an independently verified number.

Finnoff said the U.S. wasn’t differentiating its treatment of athletes based on vaccination status.

"The best thing to do is to assume everyone's at risk, and reduce risk by introducing COVID mitigation measures that we know work," he said.

So far, only two American athletes are known to have tested positive for the coronavirus while in Japan – beach volleyball player Taylor Crabb and alternate gymnast Kara Eaker.

The coronavirus pandemic pushed the start of the Tokyo Games back a year. Organizers determined at the last minute that domestic fans were to be banned from attending the Games.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.