World Leaders Convene in France for a Summit to Save the Oceans

Shipping, pollution, fisheries, and deep-sea mining are all on the agenda.

JON HENLEY Bio


Major shipping companies will attend the One Ocean summit alongside scientists, NGOs, policymakers, and international bodies. Yuri Smityuk/TASS/ZUMA

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Up to 40 world leaders are due to make “ambitious and concrete commitments” towards combating illegal fishing, decarbonizing shipping and reducing plastic pollution at what is billed as the first high-level summit dedicated to the ocean.

One Ocean summit, which opens on Wednesday in the French port of Brest, aims to mobilize “unprecedented international political engagement” for a wide range of pressing maritime issues, said its chief organizer, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor.

“It is essential,” Poivre d’Arvor said. “The climate has its Cop process but there is no equivalent for the ocean, at a time when man’s relationship with the marine world has become more and more toxic, and global heating is causing extreme change.”

“The climate has its Cop process but there is no equivalent for the ocean”

Convened by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as a highlight of France’s six-month EU presidency, the three-day summit will also focus on efforts to improve governance of the high seas and coordinating international scientific research.

Poivre d’Arvor, France’s ambassador for the north and south poles and marine issues, noted that the ocean covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, is a vital climate regulator, rich in resources, key to trade and an essential link between nations.

“But it’s routinely left aside in major summits, and is now under serious threat from a whole range of different pressures. So this initiative is about raising international ambition and getting concrete, measurable commitments to tangible action,” he said.

Poivre d’Arvor, a keen sailor who recently published Voyage en Mers Françaises (Travels in France’s Seas), said France was the world’s second-biggest sea power after the US, with exclusive economic zones totaling almost 4.3 million square miles. “There aren’t many countries that have legitimacy on this, but France is one of them,” he said. “There is a role for ‘blue diplomacy’ in a host of areas, from piracy to pollution to overfishing and carbon storage. I think that’s what interests the president.”

Poivre d’Arvor said more than 55 countries would be represented in the Brittany port, with 18 or 19 heads of state and government attending in person and about the same number taking part by live video link or sending recorded messages.

The summit will also bring together big shipping companies such as Maersk, CMA CGM, and Hapag-Lloyd, which account for nearly 55 percent of the world’s maritime freight, as well as leading scientists, non-governmental organizations, policymakers, and international bodies.

“The principle is that those that are attending are coming with commitments,” Poivre d’Arvor said. “The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will announce EU-wide commitments. This is not about debating, it’s about doing.”

The first two days of the summit are devoted to 30 public workshops and forums on topics including marine science, the Mediterranean, sustainable shipping, green ports, and cities at risk from rising sea levels, involving about 300 researchers, entrepreneurs and representatives of international organizations including the UN.

The high-level summit on Friday morning will involve heads of state and government from all five continents, Poivre d’Arvor said, including leaders of several major world economies, although he would not be drawn on names.NGOs and campaigners have said the summit must deliver in several key areas if it is not to be seen as an exercise in “blue-washing”.

NGOs and campaigners have said the summit must deliver in several key areas if it is not to be seen as an exercise in “blue-washing.” Many, including Greenpeace, have said the most pressing problem is governance of the high seas—waters outside of national economic exclusion zones, which cover about half the globe.

Here, the main goal is to protect biodiversity and marine ecosystems and make progress on some kind of legal order before a UN international conference in New York in March 2022. Campaigners have said they expect to see the summit produce “ambitious targets and solid progress” towards that meeting.

Deep-sea exploration—below 200 meters—is another controversial topic, with mining companies, in particular, starting to show an interest in rare minerals, including nickel and cobalt, beneath parts of the ocean floor.

France abstained from voting on a call at last September’s IUCN world conservation congress for a moratorium on deep-sea mining and Macron has since said he favors more deep-sea exploration. The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition has said France must formally back the mining moratorium, likening biodiversity at the bottom of the ocean to that in tropical rainforests.

Credible pledges to place 30 percent of the world’s marine habitats in protected zones—compared with the current 7.7 percent—by 2030 is another international target campaigners want reinforced at the summit, as are concrete steps to tackle overfishing, a politically sensitive subject that some fear may not even be raised by the heads of state.

NGOs including the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, Sea Shepherd, Greenpeace, the High Seas Alliance Environmental Justice Foundation wrote to the French newspaper Le Monde on Monday to demand “major political announcements that will allow significant progress for the health of the global ocean”.

They called on delegates to “express their full support for the conclusion of a strong, ambitious and legally binding treaty for international waters in 2022,” as well as for a political decision to relaunch consultations with Russia and China and measurable progress on overfishing.

“Decision-makers at the summit have a real political opportunity to raise the importance of the ocean’s health in international policymaking,” the signatories wrote. “The time is no longer for words and observations; the solutions exist, and all that is missing is the political will to put them in place.”

OPINION
Book Banning Is About the Illusion of Parental Control

Feb. 9, 2022, 6:30 a.m. ET

Credit...Eleanor Davis

By Jessica Grose
Opinion Writer


Last week, the book publisher Lisa Lucas started a conversation on Twitter about all of the potentially disturbing, sometimes naughty books that some kids of our vintage used to read without our parents paying the least bit of attention. “Flowers in the Attic,” a creepy, gothic tale of incest and child abuse by V.C. Andrews was a popular one, and I remember it getting passed around one summer at sleep away camp when I was 11. It scared the daylights out of me.

I was a voracious reader, and some of what I read in my tweens and teens was prurient and had close to zero literary value. (For instance, “Go Ask Alice,” a cautionary tale of drug use masquerading as a teen’s diary, which I thought was a true story until I was 30.) Other books provided tools for identity formation, in ways that in retrospect are hilarious and myopic. Like many dramatic, bookish teenagers, I loved “The Bell Jar,” which I’m pretty sure was on my sophomore English summer reading list.

After that, I read biographies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes on my own, because I love mess and gossip. In college, I told at least one suitor that I wanted a passionate romance like theirs: The first time they met, at a party, Hughes ripped off Plath’s headband and earring, and Plath bit Hughes on the face. In true adolescent fashion, I glossed over the depressing ending of their story. I doubt that was the takeaway my teachers intended when “The Bell Jar” was assigned.

I mention all this because of the recent ongoing public debate, mostly among adults, about which books are “appropriate” for teenagers to read in schools. Book bans, even book burnings, are on the rise, and the latest round of discussion took off with the McMinn County, Tenn., school board’s decision to remove “Maus,” a graphic novel about the Holocaust, from their district’s eighth grade curriculum.

For the record, I think bans are terrible for many reasons, including because they’re frequently about political fights among adults that spill into children’s lives when it’s not really about them. As my Times colleague Margaret Renkl wrote Monday in an Opinion essay, “the vast majority of teenagers in McMinn County already carry the modern world around in their pockets — the cussing and the sex and the violence and all of it.” Many recent bans are part of the general, misguided push against so-called critical race theory. Other bans are against books depicting any kind of non-heterosexual sex or romance. The American Library Association has a list of the top 10 most challenged books from 2001-2020 on its website, and sexual and racial content are popular recent reasons for banning.

More alarming are the threats to criminalize distribution of what politicians deem “pornographic” books. One Texas high school librarian told NBC News she was retiring earlier than planned because of these threats. “I got out because I was afraid to stand up to the attacks. I didn’t want to get caught in somebody’s snare. Who wants to be called a pornographer? Who wants to be accused of being a pedophile or reported to the police for putting a book in a kid’s hand?”

While it is distressing, none of this is new. An article published more than 40 years ago in Time magazine called “The Growing Battle of the Books” discusses a strikingly similar dynamic to the one we’re witnessing today, with books that have sexual, racial and religious content among the most banned.

The entire article is worth a read, but this paragraph stuck out to me as particularly relevant to our current struggle:

Few censors, if any, tend to see that censorship itself runs counter to certain basic American values. But why have so many people with such an outlook begun lurching forth so aggressively in recent years? They quite likely have always suffered the censorial impulse. But they have been recently emboldened by the same resurgent moralistic mood that has enspirited evangelical fundamentalists and given form to the increasingly outspoken constituency of the Moral Majority. At another level, they probably hunger for some power over something, just as everybody supposedly does these days. Thus they are moved, as American Library Association President Peggy Sullivan says, “by a desperation to feel some control over what is close to their lives.”

It’s not surprising to me that after two years of pandemic uncertainty and chaos, we’re in a moment where some parents want to exert control over something, anything for their kids, and I do have some empathy for that feeling, if not for the expression of it. Particularly because the early quarantines, when virtual schooling was happening everywhere, brought curriculum and teachers into our homes in much more intimate ways. In that moment, teenagers were at home instead of starting to grow away from their families, which is what they’re supposed to do. While parents always have some sway over their kids, this period of enforced togetherness possibly gave some parents the illusion that they still had full authority over their adolescents’ intellectual lives.

My mother, who practiced psychiatry for 40 years, used to tell me that you have until your kid is 12 to, if you will, brainwash them with your set of moral values. After that, their peers become as, if not more, influential than their parents. In the ’90s, Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher, promoted the theory that parental influence matters less than we think in terms of child development.

Harris, who died in 2019, once wrote, “If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn’t be shoplifting nail polish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses to spray I LOVE YOU LIƨA on the arch,” and that “If they really aspired to ‘mature status’ they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring out their income taxes. Teenagers aren’t trying to be like adults: they are trying to distinguish themselves from adults!”

And thank goodness they are. In December, NPR ran a segment on book bans, and noted that in North Kansas City, Mo., a parent-led group got “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson and “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel, which are both memoirs by gay writers, removed from school libraries. “The district ended up putting those books back on shelves after students protested. Sixteen-year-old Aurora Nicol spoke at a school board meeting after the books were returned,” Nomin Ujiyediin reported.

Despite parental outbursts, teens are going to continue to find ways to assert themselves publicly and privately, and to get their mitts on whatever their parents don’t want them to read, see or discuss.

I'm so glad I read so many different kinds of books as a teenager, even the supposedly bad ones. Because it was fun, because I bonded with my friends over those books, because they gave me goofy ideas I could explore in my head without acting them out in real life; and some ideas that I had to act out in real life to experience the consequences of my choices. My older daughter is currently reading a book about sinister dolls who are constantly plotting against each other and attempting to avoid something called “permanent doll state.” I have no idea if she’s learning a damn thing from it, but she sure is enjoying herself.

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In The Times, Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote about how books have the power to disturb — and why that can be a good thing. “Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question,” he wrote.

In 1998, Malcolm Gladwell profiled Judith Rich Harris in The New Yorker, and this line is one I will be thinking about for days: “This is the modern-day cult of parenting. It takes as self-evident the idea that the child is oriented, overwhelmingly,” toward the parents. “But why should that be true?”

Beyond the skirmishes over books, parents across the country are still reeling from pandemic changes. Politico has a good summary of the cross-country political currents around schools and parental rage.

Union says Starbucks fired organizing committee at US store
Agence France-Presse
February 09, 2022

Starbucks (AFP)

A union representing Starbucks employees on Tuesday accused the coffee chain of firing workers attempting to organize in the US state of Tennessee.

Starbucks Workers United said employees comprising "almost the entire union organizing committee" at a store in Memphis were fired weeks after two Starbucks stores in New York became the first to formally organize.

"I was fired by Starbucks today for 'policies' that I've never heard of before and that I've never been written-up about before," Nikki Taylor, who worked as a shift supervisor, said in a statement released by the union.

"This is a clear attempt by Starbucks to retaliate against those of us who are leading the union effort at our store and scare other partners."

A Starbucks spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday that seven workers were fired, but said the terminations were over violations of safety and security policies.

"We respect our partners' rights to organize," the spokesperson told AFP, noting that "we also expect our partners to follow the policies we have at our stores."

"We are not engaging in any anti-union activities," he added.

In December, two Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York became the first in the United States to vote to unionize, and workers at more than 50 stores are now trying to do the same.

The coffee chain, which in October announced it was lifting its minimum wage to $15 an hour, has stressed that it is not against organized labor, but argued that the issues raised by workers do not justify a union.

Starbucks Workers United, whose members include the workers in New York, said the company fired employees in Tennessee after they allowed reporters to hold interviews in the store after it had closed for the day.

"Starbucks chose to selectively enforce policies that have not previously been consistently enforced," such as a ban on going behind the counter when no employees are working "as a subterfuge to fire union leaders," the statement said.

The union said it would file charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Canada, US business groups call for end to trucker trade route blockade
Agence France-Presse
February 09, 2022

Freedom Convoy Canada (AFP)

US and Canadian business groups on Tuesday demanded truckers protesting against Covid restrictions end their blockade of a vital trade route between the two countries.

The Ambassador Bridge connecting Ontario province and the US state of Michigan has been partially blocked to vehicle traffic since Monday by supporters of a trucker convoy occupying Ottawa to denounce vaccine mandates and other public health restrictions.

"Business associations on both sides of the border are calling for a swift and immediate clearing of the Windsor-Detroit Ambassador Bridge blockade and a timely re-opening of the bridge," the groups said in a statement.

The suspension bridge is the busiest trade crossing in North America, with typically more than 40,000 commuters, tourists and truck drivers carrying US$323 million worth of goods crossing each day.

Another key trade link between Coutts, Alberta and Sweet Grass, Montana has also been clogged by protestors for several days.

RAWSTORY+
The same far-right influencers behind the effort to overturn the election are pushing for a convoy on DC

"As our economies emerge from the impacts of the pandemic we cannot allow any group to undermine the cross-border trade that supports families on both sides of the border," said the 60 business groups, which include the Detroit and Canadian chambers of commerce.

Earlier, Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra warned that the border blockade, if it continues, "will have serious implications on our economy, on our supply chain."

He said he's heard from automakers and food distributors who are being impacted, telling reporters in Ottawa he hoped the demonstrators would stop the bridge blockade "because this is having a serious impact on people's livelihoods."

Ontario Premier Doug Ford tweeted that "many essential workers, including frontline health care workers, rely on it (the bridge) to get to work," in reference to nurses who live in Canada but commute daily to US hospitals near the border.

WHITE SUPREMACY AND POLICING

What the ‘freedom convoy’ reveals about the ties among politics, police and the law

Temitope Oriola, 

Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Alberta

The Conversation
February 09, 2022

Freedom Convoy Canada (AFP)

The so-called freedom convoy, which began in January 2022 to challenge vaccination requirements for truckers crossing the Canada-United States border, is a fascinating specimen for the sociology of law enforcement. At a time of growing fatigue over social distancing and other COVID-19 measures, the protests quickly escalated.

Some protesters have been observed bearing Nazi symbols. There have been reports of harassment of residents and violence against passersby, Trump 2024 signage and possible hate crimes.

These concerns fit into the criminal activities of right-wing groups identified in a report submitted to Public Safety Canada, and have led to questions about whose freedoms the protesters are fighting for.
Broader social issues

Law enforcement — or lack thereof — has been highlighted as an issue: the comparison has been made between police response to the “freedom convoy” and how protests by Indigenous and Black people have been handled.

Responding to how police handled a related trucker border protest at Coutts, Alta., a statement released by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation noted that:

If the blockade in Coutts consisted of Indigenous people, there would have been arrests and charges laid; instead, the Coutts blockade is being allowed to continue, even though it has at times become violent… It is important to recognize the disparity between how Indigenous and non-Indigenous protests are approached by our government. It is shocking to see this blatant disparity

The differences in intervention tactics are glaring. However, it is a mistake to consider this primarily or exclusively a law enforcement problem — the superficial law enforcement paralysis speaks to broader issues in our society.
More than a policing matter

The response to the “freedom convoy” offers a glimpse into the underbelly of the criminal justice system. The enforcement of law and order involves significant degrees of discretion. The favourable or unfavourable discretionary use of power goes beyond policing — it exists throughout the judicial system.

The prosecution of participants in the U.S. Capitol attack has been fraught with professional lenience that questions the notion of equality before the law.

Beryl Howell, chief judge of the federal court in Washington, was unsparing in her critique of the “disconnect” between the gravity of the actions of the offenders and the tepid charges filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. She described the situation as “muddled” and “almost schizophrenic,” asking “Is it the government’s view that the members of the mob that engaged in the Capitol attack on January 6 were simply trespassers?”

Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner discusses Beryl Howell’s comments on the handling of the cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Political capital

The “freedom convoy” protesters have been able to draw on a level of political capital that most people who take to the streets to fight for their rights rarely have.

Former Conservative party leader Erin O'Toole met with some of the protesting truckers before being ousted. CTV reported that his interim successor, Candice Bergen, ‘pushed’ O'Toole to show support for the “freedom convoy” protest, arguing there were “good people on both sides.” It was an unoriginal statement, but emblematic of the thinking at the highest echelons of the Conservative Party.

Bergen also told MPs that she thought the “issue should be turned into a problem for the prime minister,” a polarizing statement in advance of an election.

The truckers and their anger may be used as a catalyst for electoral mobilization, and their protest is being approached with greater circumspection. Bergen and other MPs and MLAs who have voiced their support are aware of the social and political value of the protesters.

Funding sources

The “freedom convoy” is well resourced. Organizers raised approximately $10 million within days on the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe before their account was frozen. Despite being blocked by GoFundMe, the “freedom convoy” was still raising “thousands of dollars per minute” on GiveSendGo, another fundraising site.

The continuing influx of cash suggests the “freedom convoy” goes beyond some fringe elements of society. For perspective, consider that in 2021, the NDP in Alberta raised $6.2 million in 2021, its highest fundraising ever, while the United Conservatives generated $3.8 million.


Supporters of the ‘freedom convoy’ block access to the U.S.-bound portion of the Blue Water Bridge border crossing in Sarnia, Ont.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Geoff Robins

The “freedom convoy” is a money-generating machinery that rivals several established political parties. Such serious cash means organizers can mobilize effectively and provide supplies to prolong the protest. This wears out law enforcement capacity.
Ideological symmetry

On Oct. 21, 2021, a group of RCMP officers known as the “Mounties for Freedom” wrote an open letter to RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki on their opposition to vaccination mandates. The officers noted that they were “not against vaccinations, but as law enforcement officers, we cannot in good conscience willingly participate in enforcing mandates that we believe go against the best interests of the people we protect.”

They also noted being concerned about “the science,” and argued that their “constitutionally-protected freedoms precede the government.”

In other words, some officers would presumably participate in the “freedom convoy.”

The U.S. Capitol attack involved almost 30 off-duty police officers from 12 police departments. Some defendants charged in the attacks claimed that “they thought they were free to enter the Capitol because law enforcement authorities either didn’t stop them from coming in or never told them they were not allowed to be there.”

This has added to broader concerns over right-wing extremist infiltration of law enforcement and the military in the U.S. and Canada. A declassified 2020 report by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre notes that far-right groups such as the Proud Boys are “actively recruiting” serving and retired members of the police and military.

Political choices

Research shows that how police respond to protesters reflects a combination of subjective and objective risk calculations.

The “freedom convoy” provides a lesson in the politics of law enforcement. Right-wing groups increasingly pose serious threats to society and need to be recognized and treated as such.

The police — although they may not take direction from elected officials — take cues from political leaders. The reach and disruption of the “freedom convoy” represents a political choice of inaction by elected leaders and chiefs of police. The officers on the streets likely would have acted swiftly and decisively if they had been properly directed long before the trucks arrived.

It matters who is protesting and the social and political position they occupy. Although the “freedom convoy” has been treated lightly to date, other groups contemplating street demonstrations in the near future should be warned: Don’t try this at home.

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

NO PILOTS? NO PROBLEM. DARPA BLACK HAWK MAKES 1ST UNMANNED FLIGHT

An unmanned Black Hawk developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency took its first pilotless flight Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022. 

Photo courtesy of Clandestine Media Group.

By Hannah Ray Lambert | February 09, 2022

Researchers flew a pilotless Black Hawk helicopter around Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Saturday, Feb. 5, in the first unmanned flight recorded for an experimental Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program.

The modified Black Hawk had previously made a series of flights with safety pilots on board, Stuart Young, program manager of DARPA’s tactical technology office, said. But on Saturday, the pilots stayed on the ground while the helicopter executed its first fully “uninhabited” flight, Young said in a press conference Tuesday.

“We’re really excited about the capabilities that we’ve demonstrated,” Young said.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System program completed a first-ever unmanned flight of a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter Saturday, Feb. 5, 2022, over Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency photo.

The first test flight lasted only about 10 minutes and included takeoff, simple forward flight, pedal turns, and a landing. Crews launched a second test flight later in the day, which Igor Cherepinsky, director of Sikorsky Innovations, described as a simulated mission. For 30 minutes, the modified UH-60A Black Hawk flew over Fort Campbell, but the computer controlling the helicopter thought it was flying through downtown Manhattan.

“The aircraft was avoiding, essentially, buildings in real time,” Cherepinsky said.

The Black Hawk climbed to about 4,000 feet and flew faster than 100 knots, he added. Crews conducted a third uninhabited flight Monday.

The Black Hawk was outfitted with a Sikorsky system, dubbed Matrix, that forms the backbone of the unmanned system, which DARPA calls the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program.

The UH-60A is an original Black Hawk, having entered service in 1978. The Army now has a fleet of nearly 2,200 Black Hawks.

ALIAS is meant to allow the aircraft to fly autonomously from takeoff to landing, even if confronted with emergencies such as aircraft system failures.

A UH-60M Black Hawk assists with hoist operations with 82nd Airborne’s IVAS Enabled Air Assault teams during Project Convergence 21, Oct. 26, 2021, in Yuma, Arizona. US Army photo by Scott C. Childress.

DARPA has conducted several tests of what it calls the optionally piloted vehicle (OPV) since the craft first took flight in 2019. In fall 2021, in southern Arizona, the Army used the ALIAS program during its Project Convergence exercises at Yuma Proving Grounds. In those flights, pilots were always in the cockpit to supervise the autonomous flight, while the Black Hawk was controlled from a tablet, similarly to the way drones are controlled. In March 2021, Lockheed Martin released a video showing the system in action.

But the Fort Campbell tests were the first time Army officials completely removed the pilots from the cockpit.

The goal is not to have empty helicopters flying around, according to DARPA. Rather, the technology could act as a co-pilot, decreasing both the workload of and risk to human aviators.

The Army imagines several uses for an autonomous helicopter. Since the Black Hawk can lift much heavier cargo than a drone can, the autonomous Black Hawks could be used to resupply troops in combat. The service is also exploring how technologies such as ALIAS might fit into the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program, according to DARPA.

Cherepinsky said he envisioned potential uses in combating nuclear disasters similar to the 2011 Fukushima incident, or even helping firefighters battle wildfires around the clock or in low-visibility conditions.

The ALIAS program is in its final phases. DARPA personnel are now “actively working with the Army to transition the capabilities to the services to engage in them,” Young said. “We’re really focusing on getting the transition agreements in place with the Army to let them take it in the direction that they want to go.”

Read Next: WATCH: Leaked Video of Fiery F-35 Crash on Carl Vinson




HANNAH RAY LAMBERT
SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Hannah Ray Lambert is a staff writer who has previously covered everything from murder trials to high school trap shooting teams. Most recently, she spent several months getting tear gassed during the 2020 (and now 2021) civil unrest in Portland, Oregon. When she’s not working, Hannah enjoys hiking, reading, and talking about authors and books on her podcast Between Lewis and Lovecraft.

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A strong majority of Slovaks are against the new defense treaty with the United States, with conflict over the agreement turning into outright brawling in parliament

February 09, 2022

editor: REMIX NEWS

author: PMA, CZECH NEWS AGENCY

via: IDNES.CZ

Slovakia's Foreign Minister Ivan Korcok speaks with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken

 during a signing ceremony at the State Department, in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022. 

(Ken Cedeno/Pool via AP)

The beginning of Tuesday’s negotiating of the National Council on the military agreement with the United States was hindered by the opposition, with members of the People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) blocking the lectern and scuffling with other politicians at one point.

The Slovak parliament began negotiations on a contentious defense cooperation agreement with the United States on Tuesday afternoon. Shortly after negotiations began, two opposition deputies holding a Slovak flag first occupied the lectern, while others from the opposition began fighting with colleagues from the governing coalition.

Politicians from the governing coalition then unrolled the Ukrainian flag in the National Council, probably to express support to Ukraine due to its possible military conflict with Russia. LSNS deputies responded by pouring water on the Ukrainian flag, and grabbing it from the deputies.

Opposition deputies began whistling at the beginning of Defense Minister Jaroslav Naď’s speech. Afterwards, the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) leader, Marián Kotleba, approached the minister, Parliament Speaker Boris Kollár, and interrupted the meeting. Just before that, Kollár expelled several LSNS deputies from the chamber.

The Ukrainian embassy in Slovakia criticized the incident, while the head of Slovak diplomacy, who was visiting Ukraine at the time of the incident, has already announced that Slovakia will apologize through diplomacy.

Slovakia’s recent defense treaty with the United States has provoked political conflict in the country, with those opposed to the treaty saying that it costs Slovakia too much of its sovereignty, while others view it in a positive light.

“The agreement brings more security for citizens. The agreement expresses our foreign policy orientation. The USA is undoubtedly our strongest ally,” stated Naď during his speech.

After Naď’s speech, LSNS deputies continued to obstruct, and due to their whistling, the chairman repeatedly interrupted the meeting to bring order. Later, two opposition deputies spoke in the debate.

The National Council rejected the request of Attorney General Maroš Žilinka to speak in the debate. According to the Slovak media, Žilinka wanted to tell the deputies that the agreement allowing Soviet troops to remain in what was then Czechoslovakia after the military invasion in 1968 was more advantageous for the country at the time than the current agreement with Slovakia and the U.S.

Since he was restricted from speaking, one of the deputies of the parliament then read Žilinka’s speech in the chamber.

The parliament closed the debate with a vote, and deputies will decide on the agreement on Wednesday.

Slovaks opposed to the defense treaty

According to an earlier survey, the majority of Slovaks do not support the agreement. The Median SK agency stated that 54 percent of Slovaks spoke out against the treaty with the U.S., while only 32 percent of respondents supported the treaty.

The Direction–Slovak Social Democracy party convened a protest over the agreement, with the party’s leader, Robert Fico, claiming that the police had forbidden him to demonstrate.

“The agreement is approved only to bring the U.S. military closer to the Russian border,” the former Slovak PM said.

The agreement, which was signed by the representatives of both countries last week, will allow American soldiers to use the infrastructure of two Slovak military airports. Slovakia could then receive a financial gift from the U.S. for its modernization.

According to government politicians, not all members of the four-member government coalition, which has a majority in the National Council, will support the agreement with the U.S. during the vote. According to its decision, the debate on the treaty will continue uninterrupted. The deputies will then vote on the document at the regular meeting of the Council.

Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová, who will complete the ratification process on behalf of the Slovak side, has previously supported the conclusion of the agreement. She enforced the interpretation clause to the text that the treaty does not establish military bases in Slovakia, nor does it place nuclear weapons, for example, on its territory. The Slovak government or parliament will continue to decide on the activities of American soldiers in the country. The United States has added a similar clause to the treaty.

Forced Labor Claims at Malaysian Firms Spur Spate of US Import Bans

February 09, 2022 
Zsombor Peter

A worker inspects gloves at a Top Glove factory in Klang 

outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Jan. 11, 2010.

BANGKOK — Malaysia’s government and business leaders say they are taking steps to stamp out forced labor amid a flurry of U.S. import bans over the rampant abuse of migrant workers making much of the world’s rubber gloves and palm oil.

Labor advocates and analysts, though, say their efforts still don’t go far enough.

Malaysia is the world’s leading supplier of medical rubber gloves and the second largest producer of palm oil, after Indonesia. Both industries draw overwhelmingly on workers from overseas to fill jobs most Malaysians shun because of the low pay, long hours and physical strain.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has slapped import bans on eight of Malaysia’s leading glove makers and palm oil producers — four of them since October — for alleged labor abuses ranging from excessive overtime and withheld wages to debt bondage and physical violence. Six of the so-called Withhold Release Orders are still active, more than for any other country except China.

The Malaysian companies have either promised to investigate the allegations or announced plans to upgrade their employees’ cramped and dingy dormitories, reimburse them for the crippling fees they had to pay job recruiters and other reforms.

FILE - Exterior of workers' hostel for Top Glove, the world's largest glove maker, is seen through barricade amid the COVID-19 outbreak in Meru, Selangor state, Malaysia, Nov. 24, 2020.

The government has taken heed as well. It proposed amendments to the Employment Act in October that would add fines and jail time for those guilty of forced labor abuses, and launched the country’s first National Action Plan on Forced Labor in November aimed at wiping out the practice by 2030. On Jan. 30, Human Resources Minister Saravanan Murugan said he would meet with all the companies facing WROs to discuss what they could learn from the companies that managed to get orders imposed on them lifted.

“I think they’re seeing their stance in the past, of some degree of denialism or dismissing these as just being some kind of foreign intervention that was trying to undermine Malaysia, is not tenable,” said Lee Hwok Aun, who runs the Malaysia Studies Program at Singapore’s Institute for Southeast Asian Studies and follows the country’s migrant labor issue.

But he and others say the government is still taking only half measures.

In an opinion piece for local news outlet Malaysiakini shortly after the government tabled its proposed amendments to the Employment Act in parliament, opposition lawmaker Charles Santiago slammed the bill for going too easy on forced labor. Penalties would max out at about $24,000 and two years in jail.

“To me it is still consistent with a government that cannot resist any more these kinds of legislative and policy changes … but [is] still being very reserved, being very partial in the way that it’s grappling with it,” said Lee.

During the launch of the National Action Plan on Forced Labor in November, the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, which helped develop it, called the plan “a major step towards eliminating forced labor” in the country.

The document lays out a number of ideas and goals for raising awareness of the problem, improving law enforcement and adding or enhancing related laws.

But none of it is binding, and labor activists say it addresses few, if any, of the main problems with Malaysia’s labor laws and policies, including work permits that tie migrants to a specific employer.

“The fact that workers cannot change employers, the fact that there’s systemic corruption, the fact that most of the workers in the country, like millions of workers, are employed by bogus employers who don’t have any legal status, all of these kind of issues that really contribute to forced labor in practice, as opposed to in theory I mean, they’re not even addressed in the action plan,” said independent labor rights advocate Andy Hall, who helped bring many of the alleged abuses against the Malaysian companies facing WROs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s attention.

“It’s a pretty document, but … we don’t see any signs of these changes being implemented on the ground,” he added.

The action plan suggests the government “consider” making work permits more flexible but makes no commitments.

FILE - Workers rest at a construction site in Kuala Lumpur on July 3, 2020.

Real change, said Hall, will come only when the companies and the government start to hurt from the fallout financially.

“You have media, you have activists, you have unions and civil society. They can all make noise. But … at the end of the day it’s money, it’s brands, it’s investors, it’s buyers that really matter,” he said.

In November, Saravanan, the human resources minister, conceded to parliament that Malaysia’s forced labor woes were starting to hurt foreign investors’ confidence in the country as a reputable supply hub.

Harrison Cheng, Malaysia analyst for international consulting firm Control Risks, agreed. He said U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s sustained focus on Malaysia.

for the past two-and-a-half years was posing “considerable” risk to the country as a draw for foreign investors.

Cheng said some of the firms facing WROs counted on the United States for as much as one-fifth of their exports, and that Britain and Canada have put a hold on imports from some of the same companies while they investigate the forced labor allegations for themselves, adding to their pain.

Whether the pressure leads to meaningful reform, he said, will hinge on not only continued attention from the United States but sustained, and increased, enforcement by Malaysia.

But he warned that Malaysia’s recent run of wobbly governments made the long-range focus something like the national action plan would need to bear fruit look like “a distant prospect.”

The country has seen political defections bring down two governments in as many years. Cheng said another change in government could derail what momentum there is for labor reform.

“There is increasingly a push towards snap federal elections, and a change of administration could result in a change in priorities away from these labor reforms, or at the very least some delays in implementing them,” he said.

What a bottle of ivermectin reveals about the shadowy world of COVID telemedicine

February 09, 2022
Geoff Brumfiel

Ben Bergquam was hospitalized with COVID in January. He says he brought his own prescription for ivermectin — an unproven COVID therapy.

 (Screenshot by NPR/Facebook)

Just before Christmas, a right-wing journalist named Ben Bergquam became seriously ill with COVID-19.

"My Christmas gift was losing my [sense of] taste and smell and having a 105-degree fever, and just feeling like garbage," Bergquam said in a Facebook video that he shot as he lay in a California hospital.

WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading right now, give today.

"It's scary. When you can't breathe, it's not a fun place to be," he said.

Bergquam told his audience he wasn't vaccinated, despite having had childhood asthma, a potentially dangerous underlying condition. Instead, he held up a bottle of the drug ivermectin. Almost all doctors do not recommend taking ivermectin for COVID, but many individuals on the political right believe that it works.

The details revealed in Bergquam's video provide a rare view into the prescription of an unproven COVID-19 therapy. Data shows that prescriptions for drugs like ivermectin have surged in the pandemic, but patient-doctor confidentiality often obscures exactly who is handing out the drugs.

Bergquam's testimonial provides new and troubling details about a small group of physicians who are willing to eschew the best COVID-19 treatments and provide alternative therapies made popular by disinformation — for a price.

Ivermectin is usually prescribed to treat parasitic worms, and best medical evidence to date shows that it doesn't work against COVID-19. The Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, American Medical Association and two pharmaceutical societies all discourage prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19, and many doctors and hospitals will not give it to patients who are seeking treatment.

But fueled by conspiracy theories about vaccine safety and alternative treatments, many on the political right incorrectly believe ivermectin is a secret cure-all for COVID. As millions of Americans fell ill with COVID last summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported ivermectin prescriptions were at 24 times pre-pandemic levels. The agency says prescriptions again rose during the latest omicron surge.

A significant number of these prescriptions come from a small minority of doctors who are willing to write them, often using telemedicine to do so, according to Kolina Koltai, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington. The same doctors frequently promote anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

"They're profiting off misinformation, using their medical expertise as currency," she says.

A look into the world of unproven COVID treatments

Bergquam told his audience he got his ivermectin from a group known as America's Frontline Doctors. Their leader, Dr. Simone Gold, is currently facing multiple charges related to her role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She is well known for spreading anti-vaccine propaganda, and she also tells audiences across the country to give her a call for prescriptions of unproven drugs like ivermectin. Her group charges $90 for the call, and Koltai believes the prescriptions are among its primary sources of income.

"I would reckon that telehealth and telemedicine is one of the major income-generating streams for America's Frontline Doctors," she says.

Last year, online publication The Intercept published a story based on hacked documents, which showed that the group was potentially making millions by selling thousands of prescriptions (Gold denies that story in public speeches, saying that the hack did not occur).

In his video, Bergquam thanked the doctors repeatedly for prescribing him ivermectin. In doing so, he revealed the name of the licensed doctor writing the prescription: Kathleen Ann Cullen.

Cullen, 54, is based out of Florida and has a troubling professional history. She spent most of last year under investigation by the State of Alabama, which eventually revoked her medical license in November, two months before Berquam entered the hospital. The cause was her involvement in a separate telemedicine company, according to E. Wilson Hunter, general counsel at the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners.

Alabama's order revoking Cullen's license - Document Viewer : NPR

"She was working with a telemedicine company and was utilizing her medical license to further their ability to generate billable events, without actually providing health care to the patients," he says.

In other words, Cullen was ordering a battery of expensive genetic tests remotely, without ever seeing or speaking to the patients she was testing. It was so bad, Hunter says, that she was ordering prostate cancer screenings for female patients, who do not have prostates.

The company Cullen was working for at the time was called Bronson Medical LLC. It no longer has a functioning website, and its owner pleaded guilty in 2020 to federal health care fraud charges.

When the Alabama board confronted Cullen, she failed to produce patient records.

"At the hearing, she knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, understood nothing and did not take responsibility for her actions," Hunter says.

These are not the only blemishes on her record. Cullen's medical license in Kansas was suspended for failure to pay fees. And her American Board of Internal Medicine certification has lapsed (the board declined to say when the lapse occurred).
In pandemic, dubious prescriptions continue

Despite these problems, Cullen still has active medical licenses in North Carolina and Florida. It appears she is now using those medical licenses to prescribe ivermectin on behalf of America's Frontline Doctors.

In January, thousands of protesters gathered in Washington for a rally against vaccine mandates. Many believe in alternative therapies like ivermectin.

 (Patrick Semansky/AP)

"Where's the accountability in all of that?" says Ashley Bartholomew, a nurse with No License For Disinformation, a group of medical professionals who are trying to force medical boards to take action in cases like these.

Bartholomew was the first to notice Cullen's name on the bottle. She said the entire video made her nervous because Ben Bergquam appeared to be bringing in his own outside medication to a hospital setting:.

"Is the nurse aware he's also taking these prescribed medications from this doctor in Florida while he's a hospitalized patient? And is his team of doctors aware? And is the pharmacy aware?" she asks.

Even if they were, she worries the video — which has 23,000 views on Facebook — will encourage others to bring in outside meds, increasing their risk for complications.

NPR contacted Bergquam, Cullen and America's Frontline Doctors, and none provided comment for this article.

As for the states where Cullen still holds a license, public records show the Florida Department of Health has filed two administrative complaints, but her license is listed as clear and active on their website. The department did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The North Carolina Medical Board meanwhile would not confirm whether an investigation was underway, but Brian Blankenship, the board's deputy general counsel, says that investigations take time: "State Agencies have to give people due process rights based on evidence," he says.

"How many patients have to suffer?"

Cullen's case is somewhat unusual. The Federation of State Medical Boards says its data show that 94% of doctors have licenses in just one or two states. The federation runs a database that helps notify states when disciplinary action is taken.

"Within a day after cataloging and categorizing the disciplinary order, we'll share with other states and territories," says Humayun Chaudhry, the federation's president.

But often states must conduct their own, sometimes lengthy investigations. To streamline that process, Chaudhry says his organization is encouraging states to adopt a new Interstate Medical Licensure Compact that, when signed into law, would allow states to see when investigations are started against a physician. Although it would apply only for physicians who seek licensure through the compact.

For Ashley Bartholomew, the nurse fighting disinformation, this case shows just how broken America's medical licensing apparatus is. Cullen has already lost her license for poor telehealth practices, and yet a tangle of state medical boards, laws and procedures continues to allow her to write prescriptions for questionable treatments.

"How many patients have to suffer from disinformation," Bartholomew asks, "until we actually have action?"

Copyright NPR 2022.

Why Texas’s Power Grid Still Hasn’t Been Fixed

After last winter’s deadly failures, regulators promised solutions. 

But who would profit?


By Rachel Monroe

NEW YORKER

February 9, 2022

Last February, a storm knocked out power to nearly five million Texans,

 and, according to the state, two hundred and forty-six people died.

Photograph by Ron Jenkins / Getty

On Wednesday, I woke up, in Marfa, to steely skies and tension in the back of my skull, a sign that the pressure was dropping and a cold front was moving in. Not that I needed to be reminded: the winter storm was all that anyone could talk about at the bank, at the post office, at the unusually busy liquor store. It would be the most significant statewide cold snap since Winter Storm Uri, last February, which overwhelmed the electrical grid and left millions of Texans without power for days. “I can guarantee the lights will stay on,” Governor Greg Abbott had told an Austin television station in November; now he was backpedalling, saying that “no one can guarantee” that rolling blackouts wouldn’t be necessary. On Twitter, where “PTSD” was trending in Texas, people tweeted images of long lines and empty shelves at HEB grocery stores. This time, thankfully, the grid held up—not, however, because of any substantive change taken by state lawmakers.

Last year’s disaster stemmed from a confluence of extreme weather and systemic weaknesses. On February 10th, a severe and prolonged cold front moved into Texas. Within days, temperatures had plummeted thirty to forty degrees below normal, and stayed below freezing in parts of the state for nearly a week. Many natural-gas facilities—the largest source of electricity in Texas—were inadequately winterized and began to fail as wells froze and equipment seized up. On the night of February 14th, as temperatures dipped and Texans cranked up their electric heaters, demand surged beyond the worst-case expectation of sixty-seven gigawatts, as estimated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s grid. The grid can typically generate around ninety gigawatts of power, but nearly half that capacity was inaccessible, owing in large part to the natural-gas failures. The disparity between supply and demand was extreme; to restore equilibrium, ercot ordered “load shed,” or intentional blackouts, for large swaths of the state.

In the end, nearly five million Texans lost power, many for several days. The state reported that two hundred and forty-six people died as a result of the storm. (Other sources say that this is drastically underreported.) Some died of hypothermia, and others died trying to keep warm—from running a gasoline-powered generator indoors; from setting a fire that seems to have escaped the fireplace and burned the house down. In the storm’s aftermath, we learned that, as bad as things got, they could have been far worse. The system was so thoroughly overwhelmed that we were minutes away from an automatic shutdown of the entire grid, which would have taken months to get back online.

In the aftermath, Governor Abbott blamed the grid failure on renewable energy. (He later walked this claim back.) But iced-over wind turbines weren’t the villain. Wind turbines supply a fraction of the grid’s winter power supply, much less than the similarly icebound natural-gas processors. Instead, blame rested with Texas’s unique energy structure, and its lax approach to regulation.

In 1935, as the federal government moved to regulate electricity sales across state lines, Texas opted to fend for itself and avoid regulation. Uri also plunged Oklahoma into frigid conditions, and that state similarly struggled with frozen turbines and disrupted natural-gas processing. There were rolling blackouts there, too, but for a fraction of the population, and only for an hour or two at a time; Oklahoma, part of a multistate grid, could pull power from elsewhere. A decade ago, when a similar storm caused similar problems, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission called on Texas to winterize its natural-gas facilities. But Texas’s grid, since it is independent, is not subject to federal oversight.

Sufficient winterization didn’t happen then, and not much substantively changed after Uri. Abbott called for legislative hearings about the grid failure, but, when it came to actually passing laws, the state legislature seemed largely focussed on issues that animated its Republican base: tightening the state’s restrictive voting laws; allowing unlicensed handgun carry in public, despite significant opposition from law-enforcement leaders and a majority of Texas voters; and enacting a ban on abortion after roughly six weeks, along with a trigger law that would completely prohibit abortion in the state if Roe v. Wade were overturned. I had the sense, watching the legislative session, of an enormous amount of energy being expended in exactly the wrong direction.

The legislature did pass a bill setting new weatherization standards, with regulations applying mainly to electrical plants. But natural-gas facilities, whose failure was a driving factor in last year’s crisis and in previous blackouts, were treated with much more deference. In Texas, the oil-and-gas industry is overseen primarily by the Railroad Commission. The state has no effective conflict-of-interest rules against regulators’ maintaining a financial interest in the industries that they oversee, and the elected members of the Commission regularly have business ties to the energy industry. Unsurprisingly, the Railroad Commission has been persistently reluctant to impose anything like fines or rules on one of Texas’s most powerful industries. It’s unclear what weatherization requirements natural-gas plants will have to meet by what deadline, and what, if any, enforcement there will be if they don’t comply. As Russell Gold pointed out, in Texas Monthly, winterizing all the wells in Texas would cost up to two hundred million dollars annually according to some estimates, equivalent to one or two days of revenue for the gas industry, which profited enormously from Uri-related price surges. Abbott claimed that necessary actions had been taken to shore up the grid. But, when temperatures fell below freezing in January, gas supply dropped by nearly twenty per cent in the Permian Basin, a key region for the state’s oil production. Last week, with even colder weather forecast, residents began to panic; it was clear that winterization efforts are far from complete.

Abbott has seized on a different strategy for shoring up the grid: cryptocurrency. After China banned the mining of cryptocurrency, last June, a number of crypto-mining companies established or expanded their presence in Texas. The state’s deregulated electricity market means that Texans pay some of the lowest prices for electricity in the country (at least, when extreme weather doesn’t distort the market), making the state a natural choice for cryptocurrency mining, which essentially converts electricity to money. Crypto-mining facilities in Texas already consume enough electricity to power several cities. By 2023, it is estimated that ercot will account for twenty per cent of the global bitcoin network, and, by the end of that year, the state’s crypto-mining facilities’ power demands may have increased by as much as fivefold. This would seem to be a questionable move for a place with a demonstrably fragile grid. But Abbott has aggressively courted crypto companies, arguing that the energy-hungry industry will make Texas’s grid more resilient by encouraging energy providers to build more capacity. That capacity hasn’t yet arrived. In the meantime, some crypto-mining companies have arrangements with ercot that allow them to benefit from the fragility of the system: when heightened demand sends electricity prices soaring, the miners agree to shut off their servers and get paid for funnelling power back into the grid. Last fall, Abbott met with Texas’s major cryptocurrency companies and asked them to help him get through the winter, according to reporting from Bloomberg.

Texans have good reason for internalizing the idea that state officials aren’t going to look out for our interests. The wait for a home generator is months long. A recent ad for the Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the best-selling pickup, showed a house’s lights ominously flickering during a storm. But the menace doesn’t last long: a family uses the truck as a kind of battery on wheels, plugging it in to re-illuminate the house. The commercial struck me as an invocation of a distinctively Texan dream, or nightmare: a public utility that can’t be trusted; a gleaming forty-thousand-dollar pickup that can. Unfortunately, there’s a multiyear waiting list for those trucks. In the meantime, Texans can hope that the worst of the winter is over. If not, we can always huddle next to the crypto facilities, seeking whatever warmth can be spared.