European politicians call for Facebook investigation after whistleblower revelation


BRUSSELS/STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two members of the European parliament have called for an investigation into allegations by a whistleblower that Facebook prioritised profits above the public good

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© Reuters/Dado Ruvic FILE PHOTO: Facebook logo in front of the EU flag

The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, who had worked as a product manager on the civic misinformation team at Facebook, shared internal documents with newspapers and attorneys general from several U.S. states.

A statement from European Parliament lawmakers said they were requesting further investigations into the revelations.

"The Facebook Files – and the revelations that the whistleblower has presented to us – underscores just how important it is that we do not let the large tech companies regulate themselves," said Danish lawmaker Christel Schaldemose.

Schaldemose is the lead rapporteur for the Digital Services Act, announced by the European Commission in December last year that requires tech companies to do more to tackle illegal content.

"The documents finally put all the facts on the table to allow us to adopt a stronger Digital Services Act," Alexandra Geese, a German lawmaker at the European parliament, said.

"We need to regulate the whole system and the business model that favours disinformation and violence over factual content – and enables its rapid dissemination," she said.

Both Geese and Schaldemose said they are in touch with Haugen.

A Facebook spokesperson said: "Every day, we make difficult decisions on where to draw lines between free expression and harmful speech, privacy, security, and other issues."

"But we should not be making these decisions on our own ... we've been advocating for updated regulations where democratic governments set industry standards to which we can all adhere."

European Union regulators have been considering whether all online platforms, or only larger ones or those at particular risk of exposure to illegal activities by their users, should be subjected to take-down notices, and how prescriptive these should be.

"Our position is clear: the power of major platforms over public debate and social life must be subject to democratically validated rules, in particular on transparency and accountability," an European Commission spokesperson said when asked about the allegations against Facebook.

Tech companies have said https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tech-regulations-idUSKBN22W2Q7 it was unfair and not technically feasible for them to police the internet. The current EU e-commerce directive says intermediary service providers play a technical, automatic and passive role.

Haugen will testify before an U.S. Senate subcommittee on Tuesday, and is expected to speak at the Web Summit conference in Portugal in early November.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee in Bussels, Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm and Catarina Demony in Lisbon. Editing by Jane Merriman)

UPDATE
Blue Origin whistleblower says she lost faith in Jeff Bezos fixing the company's toxic culture
insider@insider.com (Isobel Asher Hamilton) 

 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin's "Blue Moon" lunar lander in 2019. Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images

A former Blue Origin employee told Quartz the company wanted to put arbitration clauses in staff contracts.

She pushed back on these clauses, which preclude employees from taking companies to court, she said.

The company's general counsel told her arbitration was important to founder Jeff Bezos, she said.


The former Blue Origin employee who cosigned an open letter about the space firm's "toxic" work culture says she lost hope that billionaire founder Jeff Bezos could fix the problems at the company.

Alexandra Abrams was head of employee communications at Blue Origin, and put her name on an open letter - cosigned by 20 anonymous current and former employees - that said the company sacrificed safety and fostered a sexist work environment.

Speaking to Quartz, Abrams recalled that senior management at the company wanted to add binding arbitration agreements to employee contracts. These agreements preclude employees from taking companies to court, instead forcing them to resolve complaints privately.

Blue Origin's general counsel told her the arbitration clause was important to Bezos, Abrams said in the interview with Quartz.

"The fact that I knew Jeff Bezos did this personally broke any hope I had of Jeff being the solution," Abrams said.

Abrams told Quartz she pushed back against these clauses, and that she was able to carve out an exception for sexual harassment cases.

Other companies including Uber, Google, and Airbnb have dropped some binding arbitration clauses from employee and customer contracts.

Abrams also told Quartz she signed off on contract language that included a non-disparagement clause. These clauses are designed to stop employees saying negative things about a company. The clause said that employees would have to pay for Blue Origin's legal fees if it ever chose to enforce it, Abrams said.

Blue Origin did not immediately responded when contacted by Insider for comment on Abrams' comments to Quartz. Blue Origin declined to comment on Abrams' specific allegations when contacted by Quartz.

In response to Abrams' open letter, which also said that leadership at Blue Origin ignored multiple reports of sexual harassment, Blue Origin said: "Ms. Abrams was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations. Blue Origin has no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct."

Abrams denied to Quartz that she had received warnings, saying she was fired following a dispute over the use of binding arbitration for cases including sexual harassment.

Abrams said the "issues involving federal export control regulations" Blue Origin mentioned could relate to an app the company tried to build that inadvertently left data on foreign servers. Abrams said she helped report and resolve the problem.

Blue Origin has lost at least 17 top staffers this year, and multiple sources told CNBC on Friday this was the result of CEO Bob Smith's management style - in particular his insistence on employees returning to the office.

Read the original article on Business Insider

AUSTERITY IS ALL TORIES KNOW

Ontario nurses wage cap ‘a real slap in the face’ amid COVID-19 pandemic says Waterloo Region RN

Health-care workers on the front lines have been bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic for the past 18 months, but despite being lauded as heroes, nurses are still fighting for increased compensation. In August, nurses and other health-care workers gathered at Cambridge Memorial Hospital to rally for wage negotiation and to protest the province's Bill 124.

Bill 124 limits wage increases for nurses to a maximum of one per cent of compensation for three years, something that Kathy Moreland, a registered nurse from Kitchener, called demoralizing.

“This is one of the many factors that affect the morale and mental health of nurses,” said Moreland. “Out of one side of the government’s mouth they’re saying that we’re the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that they appreciate what we’re doing, but there’s no monetary compensation for that so it’s insulting.”

Ontario nurses also warn that Bill 124 could lead to a large-scale health-care crisis. Sara Clemens, a professor, health services researcher and registered nurse in Cambridge, says that before the pandemic started, the average career timeline of a nurse — 14 years — was already going down, and that with wage suppression, it could go down even further.

“I don’t think it’s cost-effective to reduce wages because the public will lose on their return on investment,” said Clemens. “We spend a lot of money on highly trained staff who are leaving the workforce, and Bill 124 will simply move that along faster.”

Clemens also notes that the cost of implementing technology such as robotics to alleviate nurse shortages around recruiting and training new nurse graduates will cost the public a lot more. Not having a high enough nurse to patient ratio will also end up costing the public in ways that are unaffordable, Clemens added.

Although applications to nursing school have increased 17.5 per cent during the pandemic, according to the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre, a limited number of spots in nursing school and a shortage of clinical placements available is still contributing to a shortage, said Moreland.

She cited the lack of PhD trained educator nurses as a factor, especially when there’s a limited difference in monetary compensation between a nurse with a bachelor’s degree and a nurse with a PhD. Nearly one in three nurses have considered quitting during the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario. SEIU Healthcare Union is currently reporting a 18% to 20% vacancy rates for nursing positions in Ontario hospitals.

Christina Hughes, a registered nurse from Kitchener, said nurses were already struggling before the pandemic.

“What I’m seeing now is because nurses aren’t able to participate in collective bargaining, and they are not getting a wage increase while working more hours with less staff available, they’re feeling really frustrated and left behind,” said Hughes. “They’re deciding it’s just not worth the stress when they can’t provide the level of care and competency expected of themselves.”

The government show no signs of addressing Bill 124, as Doug Ford remains steadfast in this bill that he proposed at the provincial level. At the federal level, the Liberals have proposed giving $10 billion to provinces to help clear their pandemic backlogs and wait-lists as well as hire 7,500 nurses, nurse practitioners and doctors. The party has not mentioned whether they will consult with Premier Doug Ford on negotiating Bill 124.

“I think that there’s this expectation of nurses to be rather altruistic and incredibly nurturing in the work that we do,” said Hughes. “And, of course, we would like to be all of those things. But to have that expectation and then to not be fiscally rewarded for the work that’s being done, and the work that’s being asked of us in this pandemic, is a real slap in the face, quite honestly.”

Genelle Levy, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Cambridge Times

Federal judge rejects comparisons between Capitol insurrection and racial justice unrest

By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN 

A federal judge rejected comparisons between the January 6 Capitol insurrection and civil unrest that at times accompanied racial-equity protests during a sentencing for a Capitol rioter on Monday, just days after a judge in the same court had questioned the difference.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

"To compare the actions of people around the country protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and downplays the very real danger that the crowd on January 6 posed to our democracy," DC District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan said.

Chutkan added that the rioters "soiled and defaced the halls of the Capitol and showed their contempt for the rule of law." She said: "The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the country before."

Her comments came during a sentencing hearing for Matthew Mazzocco of Texas, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of illegally demonstrating in the Capitol building -- a typical plea deal that the Justice Department has offered to nonviolent rioters charged with a number of lower-level offenses.

On Friday, Judge Trevor McFadden, also of the DC District Court, said during another Capitol rioter's sentencing that he believes the Justice Department should have been more "even-handed" in their prosecution of the Capitol rioters, suggesting that they've been treated more harshly than the rioters in last year's racial unrest.

The Justice Department has argued the violent breach of the Capitol -- in which members of Congress and the vice president had to be evacuated for their safety, halting the vote confirming the presidential election -- was far worse than other riots, in both the scale of the attack on the federal building and its disruption of the congressional session.

Some riot defendants have argued in court that they shouldn't face felony-level charges for obstructing the congressional proceeding, but judges have not yet ruled on those arguments.

Chutkan, without directly commenting on the case McFadden handled, said that the riot was "no mere protest" and that defendants, including Mazzocco, were facing lenient treatment "despite his deliberate, premediated decision to come to the District and try to disrupt the peaceful transition of power."

"Mr. Mazzocco did not go to the United States Capitol out of any love for our country," Chutkan said. "He went for one man."

So far, more than 90 Capitol riot defendants have pleaded guilty to federal charges. Twelve have been sentenced. Mazzocco is the sixth Capitol riot defendant who has received jail time.

World's longest under-sea electricity cable begins operation

Britain's National Grid dubs the 1.6 billion euro North Sea Link "the world's longest subsea electricity interconnector."

The idea behind the NSL is for it to harness Norway's hydropower and the U.K's wind energy resources.

© Provided by CNBC Wind turbines in waters off the coast of the U.K.


Anmar Frangoul CNBC

A 450-mile subsea cable which connects the U.K. and Norway, enabling them to share renewable energy, has started operations.

In a statement at the end of last week, Britain's National Grid dubbed the 1.6 billion euro ($1.86 billion) North Sea Link "the world's longest subsea electricity interconnector." The North Sea Link is a joint venture with Norway's Statnett, the owner and operator of the country's power transmission network.

The idea behind the NSL is for it to harness Norway's hydropower and the U.K's wind energy resources. According to National Grid, when Britain's wind production is high and demand for electricity is low, the system will facilitate exports to Norway. This will in turn help to conserve water in the latter's reservoirs.

"When demand is high in Britain and there is low wind generation, hydro power can be imported from Norway," it added.

While Norway has a long history of oil and gas production, authorities there say 98% of its electricity production stems from renewables, with hydropower accounting for the vast majority.

National Grid has previously described interconnectors as "high voltage cables that are used to connect the electricity systems of neighbouring countries," facilitating the trade of surplus power.

The project links the English town of Blyth to Kvilldal in Norway and will have an initial maximum capacity of 700 megawatts. This will increase to a "full capacity" of 1,400 MW across a three-month timeframe.

In its own announcement, Statnett referred to the three months as a "trial period." In comments published by National Grid, Statnett's CEO Hilde Tonne said: "As North Sea Link goes into trial operations, I am proud of the engineering feat produced by our joint team."

The North Sea Link is National Grid's fifth interconnector — others link to the Netherlands, France and Belgium. Looking ahead, National Grid said 90% of the electricity imported through its interconnectors would come from zero-carbon sources by the year 2030.

Last November, plans were announced for a multi-billion pound "underwater energy superhighway" which would allow electricity produced in Scotland to be sent to the northeast of England.

The Eastern Link project, as it's known, is to focus on the development of a pair of high-voltage direct current cables that will have a total capacity of up to 4 gigawatts.

If fully realized the project, which is currently in the early stages of development, would connect two points in Scotland — Peterhead and Torness — to Selby and Hawthorn Point in England.

'The river is hungry:' When North America's largest inland delta withers

On a wet day in August, Gary Carriere sets out on the waters that Cumberland House Cree speakers call Kitaskīnaw.

The Saskatchewan River Delta, its English name, is the largest freshwater river delta in North America. It stretches from the area around Cumberland House Cree Nation to Cedar Lake in Manitoba and is home to generations of Cree and Métis families.

As his son pilots the airboat down its banks, Carriere sees decay.

Walls of phragmites — an invasive tall grass — choke native species on the banks. The river cuts narrower and deeper than it did when he was a child 50 years ago. Its small tributaries are starving. Fewer animals dart along the wetland.

He was a boy during the construction of the E.B. Campbell and Gardiner dams along the South Saskatchewan River in the 1960s. Now 62, he sees how water flows in the Delta have changed amid a transformation that may threaten its ecological and cultural significance.

The dams reduce water flow to the Delta and block silt, transforming it from an expansive wetland to a potentially deep, unproductive channel. And the Saskatchewan government’s $4-billion irrigation project at Lake Diefenbaker announced last year might further affect its health.

The need for a solution is mounting as the Saskatchewan River Delta undergoes a decades-long deterioration impacting local culture and language and vital species of wildlife ranging from moose and black bears to millions of waterfowl and migratory birds. The 10,000 square kilometre Delta's peatland and boreal forests similarly store billions of tonnes of carbon.

Image: stockaerialphotos.com

The South Saskatchewan River is a major river in Canada that flows through the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. For the first half of the 20th century, the South Saskatchewan would completely freeze over during winter, creating spectacular ice breaks and dangerous conditions in Saskatoon, Medicine Hat and elsewhere.

Basin size: 146,100 km² (56,400 sq mi)

It's all concerning for Carriere, who was in Saskatoon for cancer treatment earlier this past summer. When he looked at the South Saskatchewan River winding its way north from a hospital parking lot, he saw a warning for his home. He wondered if the Delta would lose its vitality, coming to resemble Saskatoon's river.

"The province and the country definitely don't know what's going on. The local people have a better idea. We see it every day. As the water shrinks, everything else will shrink with it," Carriere said.

Carriere grew up on the trapline. He received a dozen traps when he turned 12 and became a commercial fisherman shortly after he finished school by Grade 9. But childhood memories of muskrat and other animals teeming the banks are growing more distant.

In one case, the average moose population in the Delta from 1985 to 2015 was 3,678. That number was as low as 2,553 in 2015, according to a 2019 study published in the scientific journal Alces. Researchers attributed this to "hydroelectric development altering delta ecology and allowing increased human and predator access, and vegetation succession."

Each year since the dams went up, Carriere has seen fewer animals and fish.

When power demand in Saskatchewan is high during the winter, the dams release unnaturally high amounts of water to generate it. Water flow is much lower in the spring and summer, explains University of Saskatchewan Professor Tim Jardine.

With less water in the summer, less goes into wetlands. Those pulsing releases lead fish into shallows where they are trapped when the water falls back, he said.

Dams also trap sediment-like silt. Without the sediment, "the river is hungry," University of Saskatchewan socio-hydrologist Graham Strickert said. It pulls sediment from the banks and the riverbed to replace what's trapped. As it does, the river gets deeper and can't flow into the channels branching off it. The wetlands bordering the water stagnate.

If nothing changes, Strickert predicts the Delta will eventually look like the South Saskatchewan River cutting through Saskatoon: a long, deep single unproductive channel that rarely floods. Whether that comes to pass is vital because the health of the culture and language dialect referred to as Swampy Cree is entwined with the Delta.

“It’s saddening, of course. There’s a lot of wildlife that depends on this place and until two years ago, nobody on the government level seemed to care,” Strickert said, referring to when SaskPower began communicating directly and regularly with downstream stakeholders.

He also pointed to a recent Delta visit by cabinet ministers and agency heads and collaborative efforts to understand the situation to pursue active stewardship and restoration activities.

Joel Cherry, a spokesman for SaskPower, wrote in a prepared statement that the Crown corporation “recognizes that issues, concerns and challenges in the Saskatchewan River Delta are complex and that E.B. Campbell is only one aspect among many that influence environmental conditions in the Delta region.”

The Crown service’s overall vision is to proactively manage environmental risk, limit the impact and push for a net-neutral impact, backed by transparency and collaboration and both traditional knowledge use and scientific data collection, he said.

Water Security Agency spokesman Patrick Boyle said work on the provincial irrigation project at Lake Diefenbaker has involved consultation with Friends of the Delta and Cumberland House leadership.

Flows are consistently monitored from Gardiner Dam and adjustments are made to maintain minimum flows, he said.

"We know that there's water available for irrigation, and that was the original intent of Lake Diefenbaker, more work will be done as the project is still in the very early stages,” he said.

Gary Carriere hopes bridging traditional knowledge and western science can educate the government of the Delta's peril and slow its demise.

A recent push for Indigenous-led conservation of the Delta may be a step toward this. In June, Cumberland House Cree Nation Chief Rene Chaboyer affirmed its sovereignty over the Delta, pushing for greater environmental and economic controls of the region.

Solomon Carrière was born and raised in that territory. He and his partner Renée have lived about 50 kilometres north of Cumberland House for the 40 years of their marriage. Their camp is filled with mementos of Solomon's time as a champion paddler, dotted with guest cabins and running dogs.

Renée worries as she watches the water ebb to reveal several yards of sandy beach that was never there before.

“Yes, (the river's) hungry. But not naturally. The dam is making it hungry,” said Solomon.

“There’s other ways of seeing the world,” Renée said, adding that Indigenous knowledge must become accommodated on a policy level.

"We need it put into action with the creation and implementation of a downstream plan."

Both Indigenous knowledge systems and western science are confident the Delta has changed, noted Razak Abu, a researcher who published a 2019 study about bridging Indigenous knowledge and western science in the Delta.

But science fails to document the processes of social change Cumberland House Cree land users experience, he said.

That's particularly concerning for access to traditional food sources. He thinks governance of the region has to include equally balancing Indigenous and western knowledge.

Abu adds there is no scientific instrument or measurement to determine if the fish or meat in the area is different from previous generations.

"What it shows is that no one knowledge system is able to tell us everything about an event. ... So, then the question is what can one knowledge system tell us that the other knowledge system couldn't tell us."





Despite changes at the E.B. Campbell Dam in 2018, low water releases in spring and summer continue, and scientists like Strickert point out that the river remains starved of sediment.

With substantial spending on the way for the Lake Diefenbaker irrigation project, it is possible to restore some sediment to the river, so that it ceases to eat into its bed and banks, he said.

Despite an unclear cost, he thinks that needs to be part of the conservation.

But it may very well be prohibitively expensive to move massive amounts of silt and sediment to the Delta, according to Norman Smith, a University of Nebraska geologist who's made the Delta his life's work and is a longtime friend of Gary Carriere.

He doubts saving the landmark is possible and adds the impacts of the Diefenbaker Lake irrigation project are difficult to measure.

Smith is clear: any water pulled from the system is a one-way process. Any drop taken from Lake Diefenbaker won't go to the Delta. That drying of his life's subject will continue; there's nothing more he can say.

"At what point can we say it will only have so many years of life? It'll be very gradual. It'll affect different parts of the Delta at different rates," he said, noting the lower parts may have a longer lifespan.

"It's painful seeing it dry up. It's only going to get worse and worse."

There are some solutions worth investigating to reduce water loss at Lake Diefenbaker, noted Jared Suchan, a Ph.D. candidate for environmental systems engineering at the University of Regina.

Estimates show evaporation is one of the biggest consumers of water at Lake Diefenbaker.

With optimized water application and climate-crop modelling, reduced water use is possible, he said.

Alternatively, pipes and enclosed canals could cut back on evaporating water.

SaskPower participates in Delta Dialogue, a forum coordinated by the University of Saskatchewan that shares information and water and environmental concerns.

Those ties extend to local land users. SaskPower provides annual funding to local fishermen to enable lake sturgeon index fishing, which currently shows a positive trend in the fish population, a spokesman said.

It also funds research projects and recently spent $40,000 and $70,000 in 2020 and 2021, respectively, to clear wood debris in the Delta and open boat and fish passage through side channels.

Those funds have found their way to a small camp in the River Delta, where in late August, a handful of local fishermen armed with overalls and chainsaws hacked at the wood jamming Delta channels and trapping local fish.

Gary Carriere's son, Gary Jr., works with them for days at a time. It's a difficult task. The water can be as high as his chest when he cuts logs, and the soaked wood quickly dulls any saw.

The men he works with have known his father for decades and when the senior Carriere visits, the buzz of the camp rests and the fishermen crack jokes, speaking in Cree and sharing a laugh on the front line of a battle for the Delta's future.

One of those men cracking jokes is Durwin McKenzie.

There was a time when McKenzie would be out moose hunting in the late summer. Now clearing the channel has taken centre stage.

The willows framing the channel were never there when he fished with his father and uncle there 25 years ago, he said. Now, waterways like it are jammed.

“It's impacting our culture because the water levels and log jams are plugging up everything. You can't do what we used to do,” he said.

Cumberland House Cree Nation band councillor Angus McKenzie, who is a trapper and fisherman, thinks the thousands of dollars going toward channel clearing may be too little too late.

“Sure, come down, meet with us. Help us. But like I said, it will never be the same."

"How do you replenish a Delta this big? Where do you start?"

These challenges aren't new — McKenzie thinks farmers suffering from drought could easily relate to what he’s experiencing on the Delta.

“Our (environment) is being destroyed. And if it ever happened to you, you would feel it,” he said. “If this Delta was further south, would they have protected it right away?”

Another band councillor, Julius Crane, is optimistic, despite the challenges. He's hopeful that restoration can happen, and he thinks partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups can help secure it.

Crane pictures future generations of band members living among flourishing wildlife and fish.

“That’s still possible. It’s never too late,” he said. “This has been our home for time immemorial. It’s going to continue to be our home.”

Chasing revitalization is not just for the Delta, but for an entire province bound together by the thread of water flowing through cities, farmers' fields and First Nations.

That sentiment is written on a sign welcoming visitors to Treaty 5 at E.B. Campbell Dam — reflecting a document that intended to last as long as the rivers flow.

That's not lost on Chief Rene Chaboyer, as he sets his sights on the Delta's survival and the hope of its revitalization.

"We have to find a way, a better flow of water to our Delta," he recently told reporters.

Downstream, Gary Carriere's son pilots the Everglades-style airboat that draws the eyes of visiting tourists and scientists who befriend Carriere when they visit. Those relationships are a case of study of Indigenous knowledge bridging itself with scientific study.

Today, Gary Carriere is spending many of his days in a Saskatoon hospital room battling cancer. Among his health woes, he still presses for the future of the Delta’s drying banks while remaining hopeful.

It's natural to wonder if future generations will share his memories of flocks of birds singing overhead or schools of fish splashing out of the Delta's waters.

The decline is clear to the eye; there are fewer members of those species each year, but Carriere never grows tired of watching the animals that burst with life from the Delta's banks.

"It's probably on its way to die," Carriere says. "My hope would be to prolong the life of it."

Nick Pearce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The StarPhoenix

Bizarre mangrove forest far from the coast offers clues to future sea level rise
Alejandra Borunda 

NAT GEO

The research team was more than 100 miles inland from the coast, skimming along the San Pedro Martír River near the Mexico-Guatemala border, when the unexpected appeared: a forest of mangroves lining the edge of a wide, shining lagoon along the river.

© Photograph by Octavio Aburto The lagoon El Cacahuate is the area with more mangroves along the San Pedro Martir river, Tabasco, Mexico. Scientists visited the area several times in the last four years to obtain samples, gather graphical materials and to speak with the local communities

This wasn’t where the trees were supposed to be. They’re usually tethered to narrow zones on coasts, where they thrive in punishing salty water and storm surge.

Somehow here they were, dozens of feet above current sea level and above a set of waterfalls. After careful analysis, the team discovered something even more remarkable: These mangroves are a living relict of a former world. Their ancestors arrived at this spot about 100,000 years ago, when the planet was about as warm as it is today, but sea levels were many feet higher. As the seas receded, this population managed to survive.

© Photograph by Octavio Aburto A tall red mangrove stands in the waterfalls of La Reforma, close to Balankan town. Several of these trees are found embedded with the jungle and highlight the river’s unique and natural beauty.

“We put together a picture of a lost world,” says Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the lead author of the new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This ancient seacoast, far from the modern shore, could help researchers around the world understand exactly how much higher sea levels were during that last warm period, a topic of much debate and extreme importance to those hoping to understand how far today’s oceans could rise as the world warms.

© Photograph by Octavio Aburto 

A painted turtle finds refuge in the submerged roots of the red mangrove forests.

‘A living relict of an ancient world’

© Photograph by Octavio Aburto A stand of red mangroves sits in the calm, calcium-rich, fresh waters of the San Pedro Mártir River.

While it’s possible for mangroves to survive outside the usual narrow coastal strip, they can’t compete well with other plants, says Véronique Helfer, a mangrove specialist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research. “Normally, they are limited to the intertidal.”

The newly found inland mangroves have been able to survive miles from any coast thanks to surrounding soils that leach massive amounts of calcium into the lagoon and river waters, creating a liquid environment similar enough to seawater that the trees can persist.

And the mangroves aren’t alone. There are also elegant orchids, delicate ferns, sea grapes—plants that commonly live with mangroves today. Ancient oyster shells are lodged in sediments below the mangroves’ woody roots. Old sand dunes and beachy pebbles stretch away from the lagoon’s edges.

The bigger question, Aburto-Oropeza and his colleagues asked, was how and when did the mangroves get to this spot. Mangroves don’t usually spread very far or fast; they stay local. Seeds—which sprout while still on the tree—fall into tidal waters and most often float a short distance before putting down roots nearby, says Neil Saintilan, a mangrove expert at Australia’s Macquarie University.

Water wouldn’t have been able to carry baby mangroves upstream and over tall waterfalls, so the ancestors of these trees must have arrived when this place was a coast, Aburto-Oropeza and his colleagues theorized.

To test that hypothesis, they compared the genetic makeup of the mangroves to others that dot the distant Yucatan coastline. “The history of any organism on earth is written in their DNA,” says Felipe Zapata, a biologist at UCLA who performed the genetic analyses.

If the inland mangroves grew during that past warm stage and became stranded when sea levels dropped, they should be genetically distinct from the modern trees—and that’s what the genome analysis showed is clearly the case.

But the team went a step farther. Cells make insignificant accidents as they copy genetic material, and those tiny changes accumulate at a surprisingly regular rate, like a molecular clock that ticks off genetic time. That clock suggested that the lagoon mangroves had been isolated from their closest relatives for about 100,000 years, making them “a living relict of an ancient world,” says Aburto-Oropeza.

The timing lines up closely with a period in Earth’s past when sea levels were much higher than they are today. But exactly how much higher is still an open question.

Past sea levels

Throughout its history, Earth has gone through huge climate shifts driven by changes in its wobbly orbit. At times the planet has tilted nearer the sun and absorbed heat more effectively. At other times its orbit has stretched along one axis, farther from the warmth of the sun. Global temperatures have swung up and down in response.

Those temperature changes have dramatic effects on sea levels. During the great ice ages, such as the one that gripped the planet about 20,000 years ago, giant ice sheets covered North America as far south as the Great Lakes and Long Island. Antarctica’s ice spread wider than its current limits. Vast amounts of water were locked up in ice, causing sea levels to drop. Colder oceans were also smaller, extending coastlines sometimes miles from their current locations. During warm phases, by contrast, the ice melted and the ocean water expanded, raising sea levels.

Earth’s most recent warm phase peaked about 120,000 years ago, when global temperatures were about 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 to 2.7 Fahrenheit) higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. That’s within the range of the roughly 1°C (1.8°F) above the preindustrial average that the planet has warmed to now. Most countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords agreed to limit total warming to less than 2°C (3.6°F), and ideally to less than 1.5°C (2.7°F).

“The world wasn’t all that different in terms of its climate state,” says Alex Simms, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has studied the sea level history of the Gulf of Mexico. “So, does that mean we should expect to see sea levels five meters higher, or even more, in the next 1,000 years or so?”

The differences matter a lot. Even one meter (3.2 feet) of rise would inundate huge swaths of coast that host major cities, economic centers, and cultural resources. Some 770 million people live at elevations less than five meters (16.4 feet) above today’s mean sea level. A rise of nine or 10 meters (29.5 to 32.8 feet) would be catastrophic. So any data that can help pin down what happened in the past can help researchers make firmer predictions of future risks.

How high did seas go?

But establishing where sea levels stood more than 100,000 years ago, when the mangrove forest’s ancestors put down roots, is tricky. Often, researchers look for evidence of ancient coastlines, such as corals or sand dunes. They then measure the distance between those and today’s coastlines to determine the difference in sea levels, but myriad issues complicate that measurement, such as tidal changes and local geology. The source of the melting ice—Greenland versus Antarctica, for example—can also complicate sea level records at faraway sites.

The lagoon mangroves were found higher than nine meters (28.5 feet) above today’s sea level. The team also found some geologic evidence: A family nearby was digging a well, and a few meters down they found a thick layer of seashells and sand, which the researchers confirmed was part of an ancient beach about 10 meters (32.8 feet) above sea level.

This number is at the very highest end of the estimated sea level rise many scientists think was possible during the Last Interglacial period. But it’s likely that the elevation the team found doesn’t represent a full nine meters of past sea level rise, explains Nicole Khan, a sea level expert at Hong Kong University. The number might be artificially high because of geological changes deep in Earth’s mantle.

The Yucatan site is likely affected by a process called glacial isostatic adjustment. When big ice sheets form, like the one that covered North America during the last glacial period, they’re so heavy that they push the crust below them down, like a body sinking into a mattress. The crust in turn pushes the mantle down. The mantle, in response, bulges outside the area being squished, creating a lump or ridge—a “forebulge”—that’s higher than it would be otherwise.

The Yucatan is probably in the range of the forebulge from that enormous ice sheet, meaning the region is still probably higher than it used to be, levered up by the now-gone ice sheet. A recent study suggests that in the nearby Caribbean, that effect may be as big as a few meters. If the same were true at this site, the nine or 10-meter-high beach they found could actually represent a lower sea level.

There are still big questions to answer about the sea level part of the story, says Khan. But the important part is that this research adds to the reams of data showing that major sea level changes are possible in conditions not very different from current ones.

“From the sea level standpoint, this and other work makes it clear that they have been much higher than today, even without us messing with the climate, so we should really be prepared for much higher sea levels,” says Simms.

Hidden mangrove forest in the Yucatan Peninsula reveals ancient sea levels

by University of California - San Diego

The aquatic life of the San Pedro Mártir River in Tabasco, Mexico, finds refuge in the 

submerged roots of the red mangrove forests. Credit: Octavio Aburto

Deep in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, an ancient mangrove ecosystem flourishes more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the nearest ocean. This is unusual because mangroves—salt-tolerant trees, shrubs, and palms—are typically found along tropical and subtropical coastlines.

A new study led by researchers across the University of California system in the United States and researchers in Mexico focuses on this luxuriant red mangrove forest. This "lost world" is located far from the coast along the banks of the San Pedro Martir River, which runs from the El Petén rainforests in Guatemala to the Balancán region in Tabasco, Mexico.

Because the red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle) and other species present in this unique ecosystem are only known to grow in salt water or somewhat salty water, the binational team set out to discover how the coastal mangroves were established so deep inland in fresh water completely isolated from the ocean. Their findings were published Oct. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Integrating genetic, geologic, and vegetation data with sea-level modeling, the study provides a first glimpse of an ancient coastal ecosystem. The researchers found that the San Pedro mangrove forests reached their current location during the last interglacial period, some 125,000 years ago, and have persisted there in isolation as the oceans receded during the last glaciation.

The study provides a snapshot of the global environment during the last interglacial period, when the Earth became very warm and polar ice caps melted entirely, making global sea levels much higher than they are today.

"The most amazing part of this study is that we were able to examine a mangrove ecosystem that has been trapped in time for more than 100,000 years," said study co-author Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, a marine ecologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and a PEW Marine Fellow. "There is certainly more to discover about how the many species in this ecosystem adapted throughout different environmental conditions over the past 100,000 years. Studying these past adaptations will be very important for us to better understand future conditions in a changing climate."

Combining multiple lines of evidence, the study demonstrates that the rare and unique mangrove ecosystem of the San Pedro River is a relict—that is, organisms that have survived from an earlier period—from a past warmer world when relative sea levels were six to nine meters (20 to 30 feet) higher than at present, high enough to flood the Tabasco lowlands of Mexico and reach what today are tropical rainforests on the banks of the San Pedro River.

The study highlights the extensive landscape impacts of past climate change on the world's coastlines and shows that during the last interglacial, much of the Gulf of Mexico coastal lowlands were under water. Aside from providing an important glimpse of the past and revealing the changes suffered by the Mexican tropics during the ice ages, these findings also open opportunities to better understand future scenarios of relative sea-level rise as climate change progresses in a human-dominated world.

Carlos Burelo, a botanist at the Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco and a native of the region, drew the attention of the rest of the team towards the existence of this relict ecosystem in 2016. "I used to fish here and play on these mangroves as a kid, but we never knew precisely how they got there," said Burelo. "That was the driving question that brought the team together."

Burelo's field work and biodiversity surveys in the region established the solid foundation of the study. His remarkable discovery of the ancient ecosystem is documented in "Memories of the Future: the modern discovery of a relict ecosystem," an award-winning short film produced by Scripps alumnus Ben Fiscella Meissner (MAS MBC '17).

Felipe Zapata and Claudia Henriquez of UCLA led the genetic work to estimate the origin and age of the relict forest. Sequencing segments of the genomes of the red mangrove trees, they were able to establish that this ecosystem migrated from the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico into the San Pedro River over 100,000 years ago and stayed there in isolation after the ocean receded when temperatures dropped. While mangroves are the most notable species in the forest, they found nearly 100 other smaller species that also have a lineage from the ocean.

"This discovery is extraordinary," said Zapata. "Not only are the red mangroves here with their origins printed in their DNA, but the whole coastal lagoon ecosystem of the last interglacial has found refuge here."

Paula Ezcurra, science program manager at the Climate Science Alliance, carried out the sea-level modeling, noting that the coastal plains of the southern Gulf of Mexico lie so low that a relatively small change in sea level can produce dramatic effects inland. She said a fascinating piece of this study is how it highlights the benefits of working collaboratively among scientists from different disciplines.

"Each piece of the story alone is not sufficient, but when taken together, the genetics, geology, botany, and field observations tell an incredible story. Each researcher involved lent their expertise that allowed us to uncover the mystery of a 100,000+ year-old forest," said Ezcurra, an alumna of Scripps Oceanography (MAS CSP '17).

The field work was led by the ecologists on the team—Octavio Aburto-Oropeza, Paula Ezcurra, Exequiel Ezcurra of UC Riverside, and Sula Vanderplank of Pronatura Noroeste. Visiting the study sites several times starting in 2016, they collected rocks, sediments and fossils to analyze in the lab, helping them pinpoint evidence from the past that is consistent with a marine environment.

The authors note that the region surrounding the study sites was systematically deforested in the 1970s by a misguided development plan; the banks of the San Pedro River were only spared because the bulldozers could not reach it. The area is still threatened by human activities, so the researchers stressed the need to protect this biologically important area in the future.

"We hope our results convince the government of Tabasco and Mexico's environmental administration of the need to protect this ecosystem," they said. "The story of Pleistocene glacial cycles is written in the DNA of its plants waiting for scientists to decipher it but, more importantly, the San Pedro mangroves are warning us about the dramatic impact that climate change could have on the coastal plains of the Gulf of Mexico if we do not take urgent action to stop the emission of greenhouse gases."New study shows desert mangroves are major source of carbon storage

More information: Relict inland mangrove ecosystem reveals Last Interglacial sea levels, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2024518118

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Provided by University of California - San Diego 

DO IT!
Federal government could push provinces on vaccine mandate for workers, document says


OTTAWA — Senior federal officials were told in the spring that the government could make it mandatory for all workers countrywide to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Trudeau Liberals have promised to bring in mandatory vaccination requirements for federally regulated workers, such as those employed by transportation, banks and telecommunication companies.

Those workers account for less than one-tenth of all workers in Canada, with the remainder falling under provincial labour laws.

Although the Constitution puts public health under the purview of provinces and territories, internal documents say the federal government could consider making the COVID-19 vaccines "a national interest item."

The next step after that would be to either work with provinces and territories on a set of guidelines, or develop their own.

The documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the access-to-information law say that such a move wasn't contemplated heading toward the summer.

It wasn't until June that the federal Liberals began hinting at a vaccine mandate for federally regulated workers, and then outlined the pledge days before the federal election campaign.

When asked recently about the pledge, which carried an implementation date of Oct. 30, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn't provide an updated timeline or details of what was coming.

The sequence of events has left stakeholders frustrated, and believing the Liberals only made the announcement to use as a wedge issue against the Conservatives.

The Liberals have been asked for months to co-ordinate vaccine mandates with provinces to avoid a hodgepodge of policies across jurisdictions and between businesses themselves, fuelled by differing ideas and legal opinions.

"It's very clear that you can talk to your employees about their vaccination status, encourage them to be vaccinated, but it's not clear at all that you're able to require it or terminate them if they're not," said Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.

When the Liberals made their pre-election vaccine mandate announcement in mid-August, the Business Council of Canada, which represents the largest employers in the country, backed the decision, but pressed provincial and federal policy-makers to work together.

Constitutionally, the federal government can impose on provincial jurisdiction during an emergency and courts would likely be deferential to such action during the pandemic, said Martha Jackman, a constitutional law expert from the University of Ottawa.

"It would be fair to say that an exercise of federal power in relation to the pandemic or vaccines would likely also pass muster," she said. "It's not a question of scope across constitutional authority with COVID-19, it is a question of political will."

The head of the largest private-sector union in the country said the federal government should step in and set the rules on vaccinations for provinces and businesses to follow because some provinces have been slow to act.

Unifor president Jerry Dias said his members who work at warehouses, airports, casinos and other locations want to get back to work, but that can only happen if there are mandatory vaccination policies for employees and patrons.

"There has been a scattergun approach from province to province and that hasn't helped the situation," he said. "The main reason that they need some sort of national guidance, some harmonized standards, is really to avoid all of this, to avoid the patchwork implementation."

In the spring, federal labour officials were telling employers that they wouldn't "seek compliance" on any recommendations from public health officials related to vaccinations, with the documents noting the Canada Labour Code is silent on vaccine requirements.

"This position would only change should these vaccines be made mandatory under the law," part of the documents say. The documents also suggest that challenges by workers to such a policy would be fraught because of how safe the vaccines are.

The Canadian Press sought documents prepared between March and late June for the deputy minister of labour as well as Labour Minister Filomena Tassi on the topic of vaccination rules for workers.

As part of the package were several pages of questions-and-answers, including one about whether government should set regulations to make vaccines mandatory.

"No," the answer begins, "at this time, there are few to no arguments in favour of governments making vaccines in workplaces mandatory."

Officials wrote that any consideration of making legislative or regulatory changes related to vaccines needed to keep in mind the constitutionally protected rights, including freedom of religion, that "protect anyone from having to be vaccinated against their will."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 4, 2021.

Jordan Press, The Canadian Press

MIT Cancels Geophysicist's Lecture After Activists' Outrage Over His Views on Diversity

Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot amid criticism of his views on campus diversity efforts.

© Maddie Meyer/Getty Images 

Geophysicist Dorian Abbot, who has received backlash for his views on campus diversity efforts, said an address he was set to give at MIT was cancelled. Here MIT is seen in March 2020.

Abbot, who is an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, received criticism from MIT academics over his views following a Newsweek opinion piece published in August.

In the opinion piece, Abbot and professor Ivan Marinovic criticized diversity, equity and inclusion standards as "treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century."

"It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being," they wrote in the opinion piece.

His position over college diversity efforts sparked pushback from many academics on social media who said his rhetoric harms people of color in colleges and academia, some criticizing him for saying Nazi Germany also "drove scholars out" as "an ideological regime obsessed with race."

"By the way, many of us from the same privileged groups that Dorian Abbot imagines he is defending are disgusted by his comments," wrote @henrifdrake. "We do not live in a meritocracy– DEI efforts are justified, necessary, and long overdue."

"Imagine being a student/employee of color in an environment where someone like this is rewarded w/ one of the most prestigious platforms to speak," wrote @jeeminhrhim.

He was set to speak at the Carlson Lecture, which "communicates exciting new results in climate science to the general public," according to the MIT Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences website.

On Sunday, he tweeted the lecture had been canceled.

"EAPS at MIT is a great department full of excellent scientists who I admire and respect. The department chair ultimately made the decision to cancel my Carlson Lecture, not them. The chair is a good person, but made a bad decision under pressure in this case," he wrote in a tweet."

He added, "I forgive the activists who led the campaign against me. Please do not attack them personally. They are fish swimming in a sea of moral confusion. Some of the responsibility for their behavior rests on their elders, who have not helped them form properly."

EAPS at MIT is a great department full of excellent scientists who I admire and respect. The department chair ultimately made the decision to cancel my Carlson Lecture, not them. The chair is a good person, but made a bad decision under pressure in this case.— Dorian Schuyler Abbot (@DorianAbbot) October 2, 2021

In a statement to Newsweek, MIT confirmed that the address would not be held this year at the discretion of EAPS, but that the university is later planning to allow Abbot to share his work with colleagues.

"Prof. Abbot was invited by the department to present his scientific work on MIT's campus to students and faculty, and has been working with colleagues at MIT to plan a date," the statement said.

Abbot wrote in a statement to Newsweek, "I want to continue my scientific relationships with the excellent scientists at EAPS at MIT. Hopefully, we can all learn from this experience how important it is to protect academic freedom and to keep science free of politics and ideology. This starts with making admission and appointment decisions solely on the basis of academic merit and extends to refusing to allow small groups of activists to censor viewpoints they disagree with."

Racist Calgary mayoral candidate gets 18 months jail time for violating Ontario judge's hate speech order

Shanifa Nasser 4 hrs ago

© Derek Storie/Facebook Kevin J. Johnston was not being sentenced for his political views but for six separate acts of contempt against court, an Ontario judge said Monday.

Kevin J. Johnston has been sentenced to18 monthsbehind bars for publicly branding Mohamad Fakih a "terrorist" and a "baby killer" after being ordered to stop defaming the Paramount Fine Foods owner in 2019.

The sentence comes after Johnston was charged earlier this year with contempt for continuing to make racist, defamatory statements about Fakih, a Toronto restaurateur and philanthropist, despite an Ontario judge having ordered him to stop, finding he exhibited "hate speech at its worst, targeting people solely because of their religion."

Justice Fred Myers said Monday that Johnston was not being sentenced for his political views but for six separate acts of contempt against court. Myers sentenced Johnston to three consecutive months per act, to begin after he is legally allowed back in Ontario, starting Jan. 4, 2022.

In July, Johnston was convicted of two counts of contempt for inciting his followers to defy public health measures meant to slow the spread of COVID-19. He was sentenced to 40 days in jail to be served on weekends with an Alberta judge proposing a start date of Oct. 22, four days after Calgary's municipal election.

Johnston 'undermines the rule of law,' judge says

At the end of the first 15 months of his most recent sentence, Myers ordered that Johnston is to return to court so a judge can consider varying the sentence based on possible acts of contempt between now and then.

"He actively undermines the rule of law and to some degree at least seems to be calling for or supporting the overthrow of our democratic institutions," Myers said.

"He says that he's been painted as a bad person by the liberal media … If Mr. Johnston's portrait has been painted, he supplied the paint."

As part of his decision, Myers said he considered whether jail time might portray Johnston as a "martyr to the cause" in the eyes of his followers or play into Johnston's claims that he is being silenced for his views.

He said he also considered the impact of Johnston's actions on vulnerable and racialized people who might not have the resources available to Fakih.

"If the court is powerless to stop unrelenting, awful, racist attacks against a man like Mr. Fakih, how are the powerless to feel welcome or safe in Canada?" Myers asked during the online sentencing hearing.

"There is a need in this case for a sentence that makes the public sit up and take notice."

The sentence comes just weeks after Johnston, a Calgary mayoral candidate, also pleaded guilty to a hate crime in connection with anti-Muslim posts online.

© Michael Wilson/CBC The sentence comes after Johnston was charged with contempt earlier this year for continuing to make racist, defamatory statements about Toronto restaurateur and philanthropist Mohamad Fakih, seen here in January 2020, despite an Ontario judge ordering him to stop.

Fakih 'relieved' by sentence

In a statement to CBC News, one of Fakih's lawyers, Niklas Holmberg, called Myers's decision "an important affirmation of the rule of law in this country."

"It confirms that all Canadians can expect to be protected by the courts and that nobody is above the law."

Fakih told CBC News he felt "relieved" by the sentence.

"It gives me optimism that our judicial system is taking hate in Canada seriously — 18 months is a significant punishment that proves the rule of law matters in Canada and is meant to protect us all," he said.

"My own kids, like so many others, will wake up tomorrow knowing that they can expect justice to prevail in our country, no matter the colour of their skin or a different sounding name. So it's a good day for Canada."