‘The Nanny’ Star Fran Drescher Elected President Of SAG-AFTRA Labour Union

© Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images



After a hard-fought and contentious campaign, Fran Drescher was elected Thursday to become the new president of the acting union SAG-AFTRA.

According to Variety, the former star of "The Nanny" won election against rival Matthew Modine, beating the actor by a vote of 52.5 per cent to 47.5.

The two candidates ran on opposing slates, with Modine's running mate, actress Joely Fisher, winning her race for secretary-treasurer against Anthony Rapp.

SAG-AFTRA was previously led by Gabrielle Carteris, who was aligned with Drescher on the union's moderate Unite for Strength slate, which has controlled the union since 2009.

In a statement Thursday night upon her victory, Drescher said, “Together we will navigate through these troubled times of global health crisis and together we will rise up out of the melee to do what we do best, entertain and inform,” she said. “Only as a united front will we have strength against the real opposition in order to achieve what we all want: more benefits, stronger contracts and better protections. Let us lock elbows and together show up with strength at the negotiating table!”

Fisher, who had criticized Drescher during the campaign, said in her own victory statement, “I will hold Fran Drescher to her promise to us to protect the members and put more money in our pockets through stronger contract negotiations."

Fix broken Access to Information law, public tells federal review



© Provided by The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Civil society groups, journalists and members of the public are telling the federal government it is time to fix Canada's broken transparency law.

Written and oral submissions to a federal review call for expansion of the Access to Information Act, removal of numerous loopholes in the law, strict timelines for responding to requests and more resources to make the system work.

The issue has received scant attention on the election campaign trail, but whichever party forms government will get a clear message: the 38-year-old access law, drafted in the pre-internet era of metal filing cabinets, is in desperate need of reform.

The law allows people who pay $5 to ask for a range of federal documents — from internal emails to policy memos — but it has long been criticized as antiquated and poorly implemented.

The federal review is focusing on the legislative framework, opportunities to improve proactive publication, and assessing processes to improve service and reduce delays.

The Centre for Free Expression at Toronto's Ryerson University says in its submission that the review launched in June last year is an opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to transparency and accountability.

"Today we have an Act with exceptions and exemptions that have been stretched beyond recognition to prevent disclosures, a critically under-resourced access system not equipped to keep up with requests, and a culture of secrecy within government that views access as a threat rather than a right of all Canadians," says the brief.

The centre is the co-ordinator of the Right to Information Alliance Canada, composed of 17 organizations including News Media Canada, the Centre for Law and Democracy, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Greenpeace Canada.

In its submission to the review, the group World Press Freedom Canada says that during the COVID-19 pandemic — a moment when Canadians required access to a stream of government information for their safety — the pipelines were rusted and clogged from years of deliberate neglect.

"The numerous flaws in Canada’s access-to-information regime can be reduced to just two: the law provides far too many reasons to keep information secret, and releasing information takes far too long."

A shift in culture is also needed, says Vincent Gogolek, former executive director of the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.

"When estimated time to complete an ATIA request is measured in years, when records either disappear or are never created, and when officials seek to prevent requesters from exercising their rights on the flimsiest of pretexts, these are signs that the problem is not just with laws and regulations, but with policies and with the basic culture of the institutions subject to the Act," says his submission.

"That has to change."

During a series of public consultation sessions this year as part of the review, attended by a total of about 200 people, participants advocated:

— Expanding the right of access under the Canadian law to anyone in the world;

— narrowing exceptions in the law with the guiding principle of releasing as much information as possible; and

— a requirement that government information be disclosed in all cases unless there are valid reasons not to publish it.

A report from the government review is to be submitted to the Treasury Board president by Jan. 31 next year — perhaps a reason the Liberals are not binding themselves to any Access to Information promises in their platform.

The NDP platform is also silent on the access law, though leader Jagmeet Singh expressed a need for more openness when asked about it this week.

"I think transparency is incredibly important and we've seen for a while that it's been difficult to obtain information, and it's something we absolutely believe in," he said in Montreal.

The Conservatives promise to review the access law and to give the information commissioner, an ombudsman for users, the power to order departments to "release information promptly" to end "the current government’s practice of endless delays that makes a mockery of the law."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 3, 2021.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press

Climate science teaches us to love insects. Horror films tell us to hate them. Who will win?

Dominique, the giant housefly in Mandibles, a French-Belgian comedy film written and directed by Quentin Dupieux. Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy


Creepy-crawlies usually signify death, decay and evil in films – there’s a vast canon going back decades. But has the ‘When Insects Attack’ sub-genre had its day?


Anne Billson
Fri 3 Sep 2021

In Quentin Dupieux’s Mandibles, a pair of chuckleheads called Manu and Jean-Gab (think Dumb and Dumber, but French) steal a Mercedes and find, in the boot, a housefly the size of a pitbull. They name it Dominique and train it to rob banks. At no point do they find it scary, even after it eats a dog. It’s so endearing, you will share their feelings.

This is a turn up for the books, since flies in cinema are more usually signifiers of death, decay and evil. Sometimes, as when Annie Graham goes up to the attic in Hereditary, their presence presages the discovery of a cadaver. They buzz symbolically around the grubby cheesecloth-wrapped bundle in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, while Father Delaney’s attempts to bless the cursed house in The Amityville Horror are thwarted by demonic bluebottles. In Phenomena, Jennifer Connelly plays a schoolgirl insect-whisperer who can summon flies for protection, but that doesn’t save her from getting submerged up to her neck in maggots. In the bonkers Indian action-fantasy Eega, a man murdered by his love rival is reincarnated as a vengeful housefly, but fusing your molecules with those of a Musca domestica is more likely to end in loss of vital anatomical parts, as happens in both the 1958 and 1986 versions of The Fly. (Help meeee!)

At best, insects in films are pesky. At worst, they can be downright malevolent, reflecting western society’s attitude to creepy-crawlies in general. It’s estimated that 6% of humans suffer from some form of entomophobia – and for the purposes of this article I am grouping arthropods (spiders, centipedes), gastropods (slugs, snails) and non-arthropod invertebrates (worms) under the broader entomological banner. In the immortal words of the tagline on Shaun Hutson’s novel Slugs: “They ooze. They slime. They kill.” Depending on number of legs or wings, they also creep, hop, scuttle and dive bomb. They can be trained to kill, like the lethal lepidopterans in Tsui Hark’s directing debut, The Butterfly Murders, which behave more like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds than the colourful flitterers we know and love, while The Abominable Dr Phibes manoeuvres a biblical mini-plague of locusts into gnawing the flesh off one of his victims by dripping mashed-up Brussels sprouts over her as she sleeps.

The Xenomorph in Alien (1979) exhibits insect characteristics: egg-laying queen, parasitic behaviour and metamorphic lifecycles. 

Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Allstar

Why do insects make our skin crawl? Perhaps because they are hard to anthropomorphise. They are not furry and you don’t want them sleeping on your bed, though I daresay there are plenty of phasmid fanciers who have formed close relationships with their pets. With their bug eyes and exoskeletons, insects already look semi-alien, so it’s little wonder that film-makers regularly depict our planet attacked by creepy-crawlies from outer space or alternative dimensions, in films such as The Mist or the horror-comedy Infestation (which featured alien insectoids using sound to home in on their prey a decade before A Quiet Place). The Xenomorph in the Alien franchise exhibits insect characteristics (an egg-laying queen, parasitic behaviour, metamorphic life cycles), and the Martians in Quatermass and the Pit, at first mistaken for the devil, are glimpsed in atavistic memory clips hopping around like giant locusts, which ought to be funny – but somehow isn’t, especially once you learn they are engaged in a form of ethnic cleansing. As Seth Brundle says in The Fly: “Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I.”

Creature features are usually constructed around the premise that hey, if people are freaked out by woodlice and earwigs, imagine how scared they’ll be if those critters are mutated by radiation or pollution into colossal versions that can decapitate you with one swipe of a mandible (Starship Troopers) or use brutish giant cockroach strength to fold you in half, like Ivan the luckless waiter in Men in Black. And, of course, you wouldn’t want to run into Shelob, the giant spider from Lord of the Rings, or The Deadly Mantis, Tarantula, the giant bees from Mysterious Island or the enormous parasites from Cloverfield that can make your head explode with just one bite.

But I would contend that giant insects aren’t nearly as scary as normal-sized ones. The ants from Them! are too big to crawl into your ear, the way an ant once crawled into mine as I was gardening. (I sluiced it out with a wet cotton bud, but worried it might have laid eggs in my brain.) The gigantic Eight Legged Freaks in the film of the same name are nowhere near as creepy as the normal-sized spiders in Arachnophobia and the slow-but-deadly tarantulas that interrupt William Shatner’s attempts to chat up a comely arachnologist in Kingdom of the Spiders. Giant worms such as the ones in Dune, Beetlejuice and Tremors, and the bloodworm that slurps up Andy Serkis in King Kong are obviously best avoided, but for that extra-creepy skin-crawling factor they can’t hold a candle to the regular-sized annelids in Squirm, which ooze from showerheads and burrow into people’s faces.

William Shatner succumbs to a tarantula in Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). 

Photograph: Dimension/Allstar

Insect eco-horror peaked in the 1970s with exploitation entrepreneurs such as William Castle, whose final production, Bugs (1975), features mutant cockroaches that set fire to people’s hair and spell out “WE LIVE” on the wall, and Irwin Allen, whose The Swarm proclaims patriotically: “The African killer bee portrayed in this film bears absolutely no resemblance to the industrious, hardworking American honey bee.” Damn migrant bees; coming over here and killing off beloved Hollywood veterans such as Olivia de Havilland and Henry Fonda!

But the insect threat is treated more seriously in the 1971 faux-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle, which intersperses fascinating real footage of insect life with “Dr Nils Hellstrom” (played by an actor) predicting the rise of species such as the African driver ant, “a mindless unstoppable killing machine dedicated to the destruction of everything that stands in its way”. More alarming, albeit more obviously fictional, is the only feature directed by legendary credits designer Saul Bass: in his film Phase IV (1974), two scientists investigating unusual ant activity in the Arizona desert find themselves under siege when the colony’s hive mind fights back. Ants clearly appeal to the mindset of surrealistically inclined auteurs, pouring out of a hole in the palm of a hand in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, crawling over a severed ear in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and – in Bass’s original ending to Phase IV, rejected by the studio for being too weird – taking over the world. Bow down to your insect overlords!

Olivia de Havilland as a schoolteacher attacked by killer bees in The Swarm (1977). Photograph: Warner Bros./Allstar

It’s possible that the “When Insects Attack” sub-genre has had its day, given recent developments on the ecological front. As Dr Hellstrom says: “In fighting the insect we have killed ourselves, polluted our water, poisoned our wildlife, permeated our own flesh with deadly toxins. The insect becomes immune, and we are poisoned. In fighting with superior intellect, we have outsmarted ourselves.” Even more troubling than the thought of being overrun by creepy-crawlies is the emerging information that, in the last two decades, three-quarters of the world’s insects have simply disappeared. This might be encouraging news for entomophobes, but it’s a terrible portent for the future of humanity, which has not only failed to acknowledge the importance of insects to the eco-system, but looks set to carry on trashing their natural habitats and spritzing them with ecologically unsound insecticides until every last one is gone.


The 20 greatest smackdown movies – ranked!

While recent eco-horror cinema has focused on climate change, film-makers still seem squeamish about insects; see Wounds, for example, or Mosquito State, or the 2020 French film The Swarm. Perhaps a few more adorable giant critters like Dominique wouldn’t go amiss, so we could start swapping our entomophobia for entomophilia, or we could put Godzilla on pause and start celebrating Mothra, a gentler, kinder sort of kaiju.

And perhaps we should emulate the 80% of the world’s population that regularly eats insects. Crickets, for example, are a rich source of protein and emit less than 0.1% of the greenhouse gases produced by cows. So let’s hope we’ve seen the last of dinner scenes like the one in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in which the heroine turns up her nose at the crunchy beetles. It’s time now to adopt as a gourmet role model Renfield from Dracula (1931) who has no compunction about tucking into spiders and flies.

Mandibles is released in the UK on 17 September.

#AppleToo: employees organize and allege harassment and discrimination

Group of workers launched campaign to gather and share experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse at company

‘For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny,’ the workers said in a public statement. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Dani Anguiano
@dani_anguiano
Fri 3 Sep 2021 

A group of Apple workers is organizing to fight against what it says are patterns of discrimination, racism and sexism within the company and management’s failure to address them, in a rare public display of dissent within the notoriously secretive company.

Last week, a group of employees launched #AppleToo, a campaign to gather and share current and past employees’ experiences of inequity, intimidation and abuse. The group hopes to mobilize workers at a time when workers across the tech industry are calling for greater accountability from their employers, and to push Apple to more effectively address such complaints.

“For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny,” the workers said in a public statement. “When we press for accountability and redress to the persistent injustices we witness or experience in our workplace, we are faced with a pattern of isolation, degradation, and gaslighting,” they added.

The initiative on Monday released five accounts from employees who say they were subjected to discrimination and sexual harassment at work, allegations they say they shared with management but were left unaddressed. The accounts were anonymous, and did not share what department or city the employees worked in.

“There was [an] employee, who was actually someone in an elevated position, who was constantly predatory. Constantly sexually harassing our team members, and nothing was done about it until it became impossible to ignore,” one of the five employees wrote.

“There were several instances where leadership would not let certain employees of color interview for positions that they were very deserving of,” they added.

The initiative comes after workers tried to address complaints with Apple leadership internally, organizers say, to little avail. Apple reportedly has put a stop to surveys from employees that sought to gather data related to pay. Earlier this week, it barred workers from creating a channel on the communication platform Slack to discuss pay equity, the Verge reported, claiming the topic didn’t meet Slack’s terms of use, though it allows channels dedicated to dogs, cats and gaming.

Since launching, organizers say, the initiative has received hundreds of stories from workers across the company. Seventy-five per cent of them involved discrimination of some sort, and almost half involved sexism, retaliation and dismissed HR reports.



The effort has also prompted an outpouring of response on social media from former Apple employees detailing their experiences with discrimination and retaliation.

Cher Scarlett, an Apple security engineer and #AppleToo organizer, said hundreds of people have come to her looking for support. “I can’t even keep track anymore of the number of people who’ve shared their stories with me. These are people’s lives. They are human beings,” Scarlett told Protocol. “What else do you do when hundreds of people you don’t know are coming to you with all of these different issues?”

Scarlett said she had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging the company stopped her effort to conduct pay transparency surveys. She said she had been doxxed by a colleague for pushing for pay transparency, and had been told she was “ruining the company”.

The initiative marks a new phase of employee organizing at Apple. Until recently, the company had largely escaped some of the increased scrutiny faced by other major tech companies. Employees of Activision Blizzard, the video game company behind Call of Duty, staged a walkout in July to call for better working conditions amid allegations of a “frat boy” culture at the company and severe harassment and discrimination against female workers.

Google in 2018 faced global protests from workers over claims of sexual harassment, gender inequality and systemic racism.

Timnit Gebru, a former Apple employee and AI scientist at Google who was fired from Google after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts, has offered her support to those sharing their stories.

“Apple HR and lawyers have the sickest retaliatory tactics I have seen so far,” she said on Twitter. “[Apple] how long do you think you can keep doing these horrible things to people under the radar?”

In response to the workers’ claims, Apple said: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”

SOYLENT GREEN & MAD DAD
'Illuminati is real': Lin Wood goes on eye-popping rant about Walmart selling 'fetal tissue parts' food

Bob Brigham
September 02, 2021

(Screenshot via YouTube.com)

Notorious right-wing lawyer L. Lin Wood has greatly expanded his conspiracy theories beyond QAnon and Trump's "Big Lie" of election fraud.

In a bizarre new video, Wood rattles off multiple conspiracy theories in less than 40 seconds.

Reuters legal affairs correspondent Jan Wolfe described it as "like conspiracy theory Mad Libs."

"Stop going to Walmart, stop going to Target," Wood instructed. "Stop buying the food that they have been producing for years with fetal tissue parts to kill you!"

"John D. Rockefeller was a devil worshipper, part of the Illuminati," he alleged.

"Do the research, connect the dots, Illuminati is real," Wood claimed.

Anti-mask Florida father tells school board the 'deep state medical establishment wants all of us to be depopulated'

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 03, 2021

Jeff James (Screen Grab)

The Seminole County, Florida school board has been holding a marathon meeting on masks, which started Thursday at 8:30 AM, and is still going on after nearly nine hours. While there were many anti-science extremists, one parent's speech stood out.

A man who identified himself as Jeff James declared "there are more variants planned," the vaccine is "not a vaccine it's an experimental drug," called mask mandates "charades," and falsely claimed that "masks don't work."

"Masks are pretty much a device to enslave children, make them obedient, so they just learn to obey and not think for themselves. We need critical thinking. We don't need children that are going to be little puppets that don't say anything to speak out for themselves. We need leaders not followers."

But James did not stop there.

"The deep state medical establishment wants all of us to be depopulated," he declared, before announcing his support for far right wing doctors whose anti-vaxx and science denialism have been repeatedly debunked. "I know you guys think that's a conspiracy theory but it's not. It's a conspiracy fact, they're all in cahoots with each other, to depopulate us, they want us divided. They want all of us to fight each other so they can win," he said, without actually explaining who "they" are.

"This is good versus evil, evil is not going to prevail. All you've done is awaken the sleeping giant here, every parent here wants freedom except maybe some of them that are brainwashed by the deep state media. I used to watch Fox News deliberately I'm a conservative I won't even watch that now," he said, adding what sounded through the applause like, "Hannity, all the rest of them are compromised."

He went on to say the people he does "listen to" include Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, and Dr. Scott Atlas.

Dr. Tenpenny, who falsely claims the coronavirus vaccine magnetizes people, and has suggested that vaccines “interface" with 5G cellular towers, according to The Washington Post. Scott Atlas was Donald Trump's discredited coronavirus advisor.

His speech won applause from many in the audience.

Watch:

The stomach-churning hypocrisy of the so-called ‘pro-life’ movement has revealed their true face

Susan J. Demas, Michigan Advance
September 03, 2021


Judge Amy Coney Barrett (Screen Grab)

This week, my almost 19-year-old daughter stepped foot on her college campus to take classes for the first time (a year late thanks to the loud, selfish minority's continual refusal to take COVID seriously).

This article was originally published at Michigan Advance

As I hugged her goodbye, it occurred to me that she now has fewer rights as a woman than I did when I left the nest for college 23 years ago.

Thanks to five far-right Supreme Court justices cowardly dropping an opinion in the dead of night Thursday essentially gutting Roe v. Wade, millions of people in Texas just lost their right to safe, legal abortion. (Of course, abortion has been around thousands of years and will always continue — it's just more people will desperately seek out risky methods). Other red states will giddily follow.

When it comes to women's rights in America, we have undisputedly gone backward.

Think your birth control is safe? Same-sex marriage? Please. The extremist Supreme Court will have the final say over what you do with your body and in your bedroom. Basic health care and civil rights will be overturned — perhaps without even giving citizens the courtesy of arguing their case in court.

This is the end point of a far-right Republican Party that considers the American experiment of democracy to be a failure because it's no longer conducive for them to fairly win elections on its unpopular platform of tax cuts for billionaires and basic rights for straight white men only.

Progress is never inevitable and permanency for hard-fought rights isn't guaranteed — that's a lesson we need to heed as we're being attacked on every front, from racial justice to the safety net. But after years of listening to Republicans shamelessly lie about abortion methods and statistics — even in legislation — and male pundits and editors smugly dismiss women who warned Roe would be overturned as “hysterical," I think we're all allowed to be angry right now.

As a journalist, I've been trained to question everything (the old adage is, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.") So it's been wild to see how the so-called pro-life movement has long been treated gingerly by the media.

Their talking points are repeatedly and egregiously false, from claiming that abortion leads to breast cancer to claiming that late-term abortions are casually prescribed to former President Donald Trump's favorite bizarre lie that doctors and women are teaming up for post-birth abortions (which would be straight-up infanticide and of course it isn't happening).

Since Trump came on the scene, many reporters have struggled with how to cover Republicans, whose press releases, tweets and public comments are a gordian knot of falsehoods that take paragraphs to debunk (they're of course counting on us not to bother and just reprint their propaganda).

But the anti-abortion movement wrote the playbook they're following.

Working the refs and loudly complaining about coverage you don't like — complete with threatening reporters' jobs, which some might call “cancel culture" — is a staple of right-wing political training. But there's more at work than that. Many journalists give anti-abortion activists enormous deference, rarely questioning if their moral or religious objection to basic health care is sincere — or if it's just rooted in deep misogyny. After all, pro-lifers are often vocally against the Equal Rights Amendment or even equal pay. It's not like they're hiding their sexist agenda.

But we do our readers and viewers dirty to unquestioningly include anti-abortion lies for the sake of balance — and it's irreconcilable with our core mission of informing the public.

We've also set the stage for how much of the COVID-19 pandemic has been covered, with lies and conspiracy theories spewed by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers often juxtaposed with doctors detailing scientific research and giving sound medical advice.

 Gotta tell both sides.

We've now been living through a horrific pandemic for almost two years that's killed over 640,000 Americans — equivalent to wiping out the entire state of Vermont — and sickened 39 million, roughly the population of California, our biggest state.

It's been fascinating to see the radio silence from the so-called pro-life movement to stop a mass death event. This should have been their moment — if this was really about sincerely held beliefs.

Yet they're not on the forefront of the public health fight for masks in schools — especially to protect vulnerable children — and even lobbied in Michigan for vaccines to come with a warning if aborted fetal cells were used in developing them, which amped up vaccine hesitancy. Oh, and when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued stay-home orders in spring 2020, Right to Life of Michigan stayed mum on the life-saving measure, except to complain that she didn't shut down women's health clinics, sniffing that “her most important audience is Joe Biden's vice presidential selection committee."

It was always about raw political power for the right. It was never about the preservation of human life.

That's why your friendly neighborhood conservative who told you Trump wasn't that bad has been cheering over the Supreme Court's “pro-life" decision in Texas, but he's fine with your babies going to school and getting murdered by an active shooter or getting life-threatening COVID because “freedom."

But after watching anti-abortion activists' flagrant and stomach-churning hypocrisy during the pandemic — which is typically considered the greatest political sin imaginable — it's amazing that most reporters didn't cover groups with any more skepticism.

Last fall, Republicans installed anti-abortion warrior Amy Coney Barrett to replace women's rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the high court just days before badly losing the 2020 election. Barrett was mawkishly lauded by some women as “a new feminist icon" while others defended her against attacks on her large family (which Democrats never made).

Well, here's the truth about living in Amy Barrett's America, ladies. She got to have the family she wanted and on her own terms. You don't.


Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on Facebook and Twitter.

Modern indulgences: Does carbon offsetting really make up for flying?
2021/9/3 
©Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH

It seems like a straightforward transaction: Every time you fly somewhere, you compensate your emissions by donating to an organization that supports projects working to reduce carbon dioxide. However, taking responsibility for your carbon footprint isn't as easy as just throwing money at something. Andreas Arnold/dpa

It seems like a straightforward transaction: Every time you fly somewhere, you compensate your emissions by donating to an organization that supports projects working to reduce carbon dioxide.

However, taking responsibility for your carbon footprint isn't as easy as just throwing money at something. And there are many companies eager to soothe a guilty conscience by taking that cash.

Antje Monshausen from Tourism Watch at the German aid organization Bread for the World makes it clear: "First comes reducing, then comes offsetting." That means flying less would be the better option.

Experts estimate that the annual climate-compatible CO2 budget at a maximum of two tons per person. "That would get me to New York, but not back," says Monshausen.

Which trip is really necessary?

That's why carbon offsetting is mostly just for frequent flyers to feel less guilty, says Monshausen. "It should not be used to legitimize carrying on as we have. That impression would be fatal."

The situation is different if the flight is unavoidable. But what journey is actually unavoidable tends to be a matter of opinion.

In Monshausen's view, flying is avoidable if there is a less climate-damaging means of transport available.

In Europe, for example, most cities are reachable by train. "However, that often means arranging the journey differently," she says. While it's possible to take a night train from Berlin to Rome, for example, the time it takes to travel there isn't worth it if you want to go for just a weekend. It's better then to go for at least a week.

And that's a good thing for travellers, in Monshausen's opinion. "If you fly less often and stay longer, you often have a better quality trip," she says. You can get a deeper sense of the people and place.

Lots of greenwashing

If you decide to fly, you should at the very least spring for carbon offsetting. But it's important to be aware that offsetting doesn't mean that you're undoing the carbon dioxide produced; it merely means that projects that reduce emissions will be promoted elsewhere.

And there's a lot of greenwashing out there, warns Monshausen. One example: "Offers that involve planting trees are unsuitable for offsetting air travel," she says. Look for reputable organizations.

Stay home or offset?

Dietrich Brockhagen is the managing director of Atmosfair, a group that focuses on the fight against climate change, especially in the travel industry. Its website allows vacationers to compensate for the greenhouse gases they have caused during their trip. The money is then used, for example, to promote solar energy through photovoltaic systems in villages that are not connected to the electricity grid.

The money does have an effect on reducing emissions, says Brockhagen. "Some call it selling indulgences because they want to avoid paying. For me, the question is rather: Does this buy me freedom?"

There are two options, according to Brockhagen: Either you can stay at home, where there's no issue, or, if you've flown, you can offset emissions, which is "the best thing you can do for the climate."

However, he also confirms what Monshausen says: "Flying less would be better."

JUST IN TIME FOR LABOUR DAY

'Catastrophe' feared as 35 million people are set to lose jobless aid in 3 days
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
September 03, 2021

Volunteers from City Harvest food bank distribute food in Harlem, New York City 

Kena Betancur AFP

Millions of jobless workers are set to lose critical unemployment benefits in roughly 72 hours—and neither Congress nor the Biden administration seem prepared to do anything about it.

"Around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income."

—Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project

Despite the ongoing threat posed by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the White House and Democratic lawmakers have provided no indication that they plan to prevent several pandemic-related unemployment programs from expiring on September 6, which—in a cruel irony—happens to be Labor Day.

The consequences of government inaction in the face of what one analyst recently described as "the largest cutoff of unemployment benefits in history" could be massive, both for those directly impacted by the cuts and the still-ailing U.S. economy.

As Matt Bruenig of the People's Policy Project noted Thursday, the Labor Department's latest weekly unemployment insurance (UI) report shows that "9.2 million people are currently receiving benefits from either the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program or the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program," which were implemented last year to extend the duration of jobless aid and provide assistance to those who are typically ineligible for UI, such as gig workers.

"According to the Census Household Pulse Survey, the average household that is receiving UI benefits has 3.8 members in it," Bruenig observed. "This means that around 35 million people (10% of the U.S. population) live in households that are scheduled to lose unemployment income."

"These are not small cuts either," he continued. "Based on what happened in the states that already cut these benefits, we know that around half of those on UI will see their benefits drop to $0 while the remaining half will see their benefits cut by $300 per week, which is equivalent to $15,200 per year. Those formerly on UI will also cut their spending by about $145 per week ($7,540 annually), which will have negative effects on the revenue and employment of the businesses they patronize."

But even amid such dire warnings, the possibility of a UI extension has been virtually absent from discussions on Capitol Hill as Democratic lawmakers work to assemble a $3.5 trillion spending package aimed at achieving a range of longstanding policy goals, from major climate investments to Medicare expansion.

"The Biden administration has not made it a priority, and outside of Ron Wyden, you haven't heard too many people in the Senate be willing to push on that," Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told Vox, referring to the Democratic senator from Oregon, a key architect of the soon-to-expire UI programs.

"The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we've become to plight of the unemployed."

—Andrew Stettner, Century Foundation

"It doesn't seem like right now there would even be 50 votes in the Senate" for an extension, Stettner observed.

Last week, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that President Joe Biden believes it is "appropriate" for the $300-per-week federal UI boost to expire as scheduled. Twenty-six states—each led by a Republican governor except Louisiana—have already ended the emergency UI aid, and the Biden administration did not try to stop them.

Subsequent research has vindicated economists who warned that—contrary to the claims and predictions of Republican leaders—ending the benefits prematurely would do little to boost hiring. A Wall Street Journal analysis released Wednesday found that "states that ended enhanced federal unemployment benefits early have so far seen about the same job growth as states that continued offering the pandemic-related extra aid."

While Republicans have insisted that the emergency UI programs are dissuading people from returning to the workforce, analysts have pointed to the myriad other factors at play, including lack of child care and pandemic-related health concerns.

Dr. Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, warned in a statement earlier this week that "amid increasing uncertainty in the trajectory of the pandemic, Monday's unemployment cliff could not come at a worse time."

"Millions will suffer as they lose this critical source of income and the loss of spending will suppress job growth, setting us back yet again in our efforts for an inclusive and equitable recovery," Mabud said.

Painful enough in itself, the benefit cut-off will come just days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration's nationwide eviction moratorium, putting millions of people at imminent risk of losing their homes amid a deadly pandemic. The U.S. is currently averaging around 164,000 new coronavirus infections and 1,500 deaths per day.

"It's going to be a perfect storm for a lot of folks," Jordan Dewbre, a staff attorney for the New York-based community organization BronxWorks, said of the confluence of UI expirations and the end of the eviction moratorium. "We are still in the middle of a pandemic."

In a series of tweets on Thursday, Stettner of the Century Foundation warned that "this cliff dwarfs anything we have seen before." If the federal programs expire, jobless workers will be left with often-paltry state-level UI benefits or—if they've exhausted their eligibility for such assistance—nothing at all.

"The unwillingness to extend emergency benefits—or even debate it—shows how inured we've become to plight of the unemployed," Stettner wrote. "With eviction protections ending at the same time, long-term unemployed workers are now vulnerable to lasting economic damage. Black and Latino workers have the least in savings built up to navigate this transitional period."

"Congress should have the courage to reinstate benefits, especially in high unemployment states, if the Delta surge slows the recovery," Stettner added, "and make permanent changes to UI benefits so that we won't have to rely on emergency programs during the next economic crisis."

'Virgin birth:' How does a shark reproduce without a mate?

The news that a female shark at an Italian aquarium gave birth without having mated with a male first was widely reported. But how rare is a "virgin birth" in sharks?



A lack of mate could be one reason why a shark might reproduce asexually

Scientists at the Cala Gonone Aquarium on the Italian island of Sardinia say a female smooth-hound shark that's been living in an all-female shark tank for 10 years recently gave birth to a baby shark.

The aquarium's press team told DW that they are currently waiting for a DNA analysis to confirm that what happened is a case of parthenogenesis.

To procreate, most species require an egg to be fertilized by a sperm. That's the case with sharks, too. But some animals can produce offspring all by themselves. This is called parthenogenesis.

The term comes from the Greek words parthenos, meaning "virgin," and genesis, meaning "origin."

The case in Italy could be the first time this "immaculate conception" has occurred in smooth-hound sharks, at least in captivity.

It isn't the first time parthenogenesis has been seen in sharks , and the process has been observed in a number of other shark species.

But scientists still don't know how often it happens, says Kevin Feldheim, a researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago, who researches the mating habits of sharks.

"We don't know how common it is and the handful of cases we have seen have mostly taken place in an aquarium setting," Feldheim told DW.

One study from the Field Museum discovered parthenogenesis in a wild population of smalltooth sawfish, a type of ray. This was the first time a vertebrate (animals with backbones inside their body), which usually reproduces the conventional way with a mate, was found to reproduce asexually in the wild, Feldheim said.
Where do the babies come from?

In sharks, asexual reproduction usually happens via a process called "automictic parthenogenesis," explained Feldheim. During egg development, one egg is produced along with three other products called polar bodies.

Usually these polar bodies are simply reabsorbed by the female. Parthenogenesis occurs when one of the polar bodies has the same amount of genetic material as the egg and fertilizes it.

Lack of males could be a trigger

In 2017, Australian scientists published a study in the journal Nature that found two female zebra sharks produced pups on their own ― no men involved.

The year after being separated from her male mate, the older female shark didn't lay any eggs. The following year her daughter from her previous mate was added to the tank. Two years later, the mother had three pups on her own, while her daughter had one.

Scientists think the lack of a mate could be a cause for asexual reproduction.

"We think that being without a male certainly triggers parthenogenesis," said Feldheim, "but beyond that, we don't know the mechanism."

US hospitals hit with nurse staffing crisis amid COVID

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

 In this July 16, 2021, file photo, a nurse sticks her head out of a room of a COVID-19 patient in the CoxHealth Emergency Department in Springfield, Mo. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer. 

(Nathan Papes/The Springfield News-Leader via AP)


The COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer.

The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week.

It’s gotten to the point where doctors are saying, “Maybe I should quit being a doctor and go be a nurse,” said Dr. Phillip Coule, chief medical officer at Georgia’s Augusta University Medical Center, which has on occasion seen 20 to 30 resignations in a week from nurses taking traveling jobs.

“And then we have to pay premium rates to get staff from another state to come to our state,” Coule said.

The average pay for a traveling nurse has soared from roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per week before the pandemic to $3,000 to $5,000 now, said Sophia Morris, a vice president at San Diego-based health care staffing firm Aya Healthcare. She said Aya has 48,000 openings for traveling nurses to fill

At competitor SimpliFi, President James Quick said the hospitals his company works with are seeing unprecedented levels of vacancies.

“Small to medium-sized hospitals generally have dozens of full-time openings, and the large health systems have hundreds of full-time openings,” he said.

The explosion in pay has made it hard on hospitals without deep enough pockets.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly lamented recently that the state’s hospitals risk being outbid for nurses by other states that pay a “fortune.” She said Wednesday that several hospitals, including one in Topeka, had open beds but no nurses to staff them.

   

In this Aug. 18, 2021, file photo, a poster honoring medical and frontline workers, hangs on a nursing station of an intensive care unit, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In Kansas City, Missouri, Truman Medical Centers has lost about 10 nurses to travel jobs in recent days and is looking for travelers to replace them, said CEO Charlie Shields.

He said it is hard to compete with the travel agencies, which are charging hospitals $165 to $170 an hour per nurse. He said the agencies take a big cut of that, but he estimated that nurses are still clearing $70 to $90 an hour, which is two to three times what the hospital pays its staff nurses.

“I think clearly people are taking advantage of the demand that is out there,” Shields said. “I hate to use `gouged’ as a description, but we are clearly paying a premium and allowing people to have fairly high profit margins.”

In Texas, more than 6,000 travel nurses have flooded the state to help with the surge through a state-supported program. But on the same day that 19 of them went to work at a hospital in the northern part of the state, 20 other nurses at the same place gave notice that they would be leaving for a traveling contract, said Carrie Kroll, a vice president at the Texas Hospital Association.

“The nurses who haven’t left, who have stayed with their facilities, they are seeing these other people come in now who are making more money. It provides a tense working environment,” Kroll said.

The pandemic was in its early stages when Kim Davis, 36, decided to quit her job at an Arkansas hospital and become a travel nurse. She said she has roughly doubled her income in the 14 months that she has been treating patients in intensive care units in Phoenix; San Bernardino, California; and Tampa, Florida.

“Since I’ve been traveling, I’ve paid off all my debt. I paid off about $50,000 in student loans,” she said.

Davis said many of her colleagues are following the same path.

“They’re leaving to go travel because why would you do the same job for half the pay?” she said. “If they’re going to risk their lives, they should be compensated.”

Health leaders say nurses are bone-tired and frustrated from being asked to work overtime, from getting screamed at and second-guessed by members of the community, and from dealing with people who chose not to get vaccinated or wear a mask.

“Imagine going to work every day and working the hardest that you have worked and stepping out of work and what you see every day is denied in the public,” said Julie Hoff, chief nurse executive at OU Health in Oklahoma. “The death that you see every day is not honored or recognized.”

Meanwhile, hospitals are getting squeezed by the revolving door of departures and new hires from traveling agencies.

Coule cited a recent example in which his hospital in Georgia hired a respiratory therapist through an agency to replace a staff member who had decided to accept a traveling gig. The replacement came from the same hospital where his respiratory therapist had just gone to work.

“Essentially we swapped personnel but at double the cost,” he said.

Patricia Pittman, director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity at George Washington University, said many nurses still harbor resentment toward their employers from the early stages of the pandemic, in part from being forced to work without adequate protective gear.

“The nurses say, ’Hey, if I am not going to be treated with respect, I might as well go be a travel nurse,’” she said. “‘That way I can go work in a hellhole for 13 weeks, but then I can take off a couple months or three months and go do whatever.’”

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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas, and Kunzelman from College Park, Maryland.