Guatemala's Supreme Court strips anti-corruption judge of immunity


GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala's highest court announced on Wednesday it had revoked immunity from prosecution for Judge Pablo Xitumul, a prominent anti-graft crusader, in the latest setback in the fight against corruption in the Central American nation.

Xitumul is a judge in the country's high-risk courts, which were created after the U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission CICIG pushed reforms to investigate organized crime and corruption.

He has faced a slew of legal challenges that he regards as revenge for some of his high-level rulings, which have involved a former leader and top officials.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court decided by a majority to revoke his immunity, clearing the way for him to be investigated over a traffic-related incident from 2019.

The Supreme Court's move comes after other prominent anti-corruption judges and officials have been removed from their posts, jailed, or pushed into exile.

Xitumul was among a handful of judges on Guatemala's high-risk courts who submitted a formal complaint to the public prosecutor's office last year saying they were being persecuted and harassed by unidentified armed individuals.

In 2013, he handed down an 80-year sentence for genocide to the deceased former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt. The sentence was later overturned.

Five years later, Xitumul also sentenced former Vice President Roxana Baldetti to 15 years in prison for corruption.

Last year, he drew praise from the United States ambassador to Guatemala, William Popp, who congratulated him for "being a fundamental pillar for a democratic state."

(Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Marjorie Taylor Greene's 'gazpacho police' gaffe: 'She clearly banned all books from her house'

aharoun@insider.com (Azmi Haroun)

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene "clearly banned all books from her house years ago."

The comment was in response to Greene mistakenly saying "gazpacho police," instead of "Gestapo."

Gazpacho is a beloved Spanish cold soup, and the Gestapo were the horrific Nazi secret police.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said her Republican colleague Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene "clearly banned all books from her house years ago" after Greene mistakenly said "gazpacho police" instead of "Gestapo" on Wednesday while criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the US House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.

"Not only do we have the DC jail, which is the DC Gulag, but now we have Nancy Pelosi's gazpacho police spying on members of Congress," Greene said on the far-right channel OAN's show "Real America with Dan Ball." "Spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff, and spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives."

Greene surely meant to say "Gestapo," the name of the Nazis' secret police in the 1930s and 1940s. Gazpacho is a Spanish cold soup, popular across the world.

Responding to a request for comment about the gaffe, a representative for Greene told Insider, "No soup for those who illegally spy on Members of Congress, but they will be thrown in the goulash."

During the show segment, Greene was criticizing subpoenas handed out to affiliates of former President Donald Trump by the House January 6 committee. She also lamented the treatment of people jailed in Washington, DC, on charges related to the attack.

There is no evidence the Capitol Police are spying on lawmakers, their staff members, or private citizens.

It wasn't the first time Greene had compared Democratic leadership or the Biden administration to the Nazi regime. In June, Greene eventually apologized after repeatedly comparing COVID-19 measures like vaccine and mask mandates to the Holocaust.

Greene was panned online over her latest comment, with Ocasio-Cortez poking fun at efforts by GOP legislators and some school boards to ban books in schools.



"At least she leads by example. She clearly banned all books from her house years ago," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to the gaffe.

"For real though when you see how the GOP openly embrace and leverage fascist members of their party vs how much some Dems run away and frame their own base mobilizers as 'just as extreme' it's not hard to see how that asymmetry/false equivalence has contributed to where we are," she continued in an additional tweet.

More than 760 people have been arrested and charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol.

Ocasio-Cortez's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Senate candidate who smoked blunt in ad burns Confederate flag in latest spot

Brad Dress - Wednesday

The Hill

Gary Chambers, a U.S. Senate candidate in Louisiana who went viral last month for smoking a blunt in a campaign ad, burned a Confederate flag while decrying restrictive voting laws in his latest video released on Wednesday.

In a one-minute video titled "Scars and Bars," Chambers is seen wearing a camo jacket as he pins a Confederate flag on a clothesline and ignites it with a lighter - right after he cites the famous Declaration of Independence line "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

As the flag burns, the Louisiana Democrat argues that inequality lingers and "remnants of the Confederacy remain" in the South. The candidate mentions gerrymandered districts and restrictive voting laws as "byproducts" of the Confederacy.

"The attacks against Black people, our right to vote and participate in this democracy, are methodical," he said. "Our system isn't broken. It's designed to do exactly what it's doing, which is producing measurable inequity."

According to the Brennan Center, 19 states passed 34 restrictive voting laws in response to a conservative push to tighten up elections following former President Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Earlier this year, Congressional Democrats attempted to push through a voting rights package to address the restrictive voting laws but failed to secure enough votes in the Senate.

Chambers is running to unseat Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) in the upcoming midterm election. He gained national attention last month with the release of a campaign ad in which he puffs on a blunt while arguing for the legalization of cannabis, the criminalization of which disproportionately affects Black people.

The candidate is a co-founder of a media outlet called The Rouge Collection and ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat last year in Louisiana.

In Wednesday's video, Chambers mentioned other issues that affect Black Americans, including access to health care, which has been highlighted during the pandemic, as minorities have had higher rates of severe illness and death from COVID-19.

Chambers said 1 in 9 Black Americans do not have health insurance and 1 in 3 Black children live in poverty.

"It's time to burn what remains of the Confederacy down," he said in the video. "I do believe the South will rise again, but this time it will be on our terms."

Proposed Alabama bills would protect Confederate monuments and raise fines if they're removed

By Maya Brown, CNN - Wednesday

An Alabama legislative committee has advanced two bills designed to further protect Confederate monuments and criminalize people who attempt to remove them.

State Sen. Gerald Allen introduced the bills Tuesday. Under one of the proposed bills, the fine for removing a monument would increase from a flat fee of $25,000 to $5,000 for each day a monument isn't restored.

These bills come at a time when Americans continue to debate whether Confederate monuments should remain or be taken down across the country.

About 73 Confederate monuments were removed or renamed in 2021 and there are now 723 left in the United States, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center report released last week. There are also an additional 741 roadways, 201 schools, 51 buildings, 38 parks and 22 holidays honoring the Confederacy. According to the SPLC, there are about 156 Confederate symbols throughout Alabama.

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's move Tuesday puts the bills in line for a vote by the Senate.

Jerome Dees, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Alabama policy director, told CNN he believes the proposed bills are part of a broader movement across the South to "preserve the Confederacy" and oppression that the monuments represent.

"The legislation that we're seeing are just reiterations of old Jim Crow oppression that works to continue that same psychological and mental pressure," he said.
What the bills would mean

One of the bills would make it a Class C felony to mark or damage a monument or a Class B felony if damage is done during a "riot, aggravated riot or unlawful assembly." The Class C felony carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years and the Class B felony could lead up to 20 years behind bars.

The other bill requires governments that demolish a historic building to make certain that the building or park that replaces it keeps the same name.

Dees said he believes the proposed bills are "wrong" from both a moral standpoint and a good governance standpoint.

"These are oppressive pieces of legislation that work to enshrine the Confederacy further, and also work to strip agency from local citizens and elected officials who just want to have a say in what their cities and their communities truly mean," Dees said.

Alabama is one of the six states that have preservation laws. In an attempt to amend the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, which forbids the "relocation, removal, alteration, renaming, or other disturbance of any monument located on public property" for 40 years or more, the bill would also raise the fine from $25,000 to $5,000 per day. It would additionally empower the attorney general to sue any government found in violation.

Even with the $25,000 fine, several Alabama cities have removed Confederate monuments since the law was passed in 2017.

Last October, the city of Montgomery renamed a street named after Confederate President Jefferson Davis and changed it to Fred D. Gray Avenue to honor the civil rights activist and attorney who represented Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The city must pay the fine or may face a lawsuit. In 2020, the city of Birmingham was fined for placing a plywood barrier around the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Linn Park. That same year the city of Huntsville received a fine for removing a Confederate statue from the outside the Madison County courthouse.

A Confederate statue in Tuskegee has also been a target of community resistance for years and is now at the center of an upcoming lawsuit.

Allen's proposed bill also calls for the Alabama Historical Commission to design, construct and erect a statue of the late civil rights leader John Lewis.

"The statue shall include a protective barrier and pedestal base and shall be placed near the southeastern entrance to the Edmund Pettus Bridge," the bill text says.

Dees told CNN the SPLC's hope is that the Alabama legislature hears the voices of individuals from the local community who have spoken against the Confederacy.


© Jake Crandall/The Montgomery Advertiser via AP

Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, second from left, poses with Fred Gray Jr. and Stanley Gray after the city council voted unanimously to rename Jefferson Davis Avenue after Gray's father, civil rights attorney Fred Gray last year.

USA
500,000 people have signed a petition supporting nurses' demands for safer working conditions. Meet the nurses leading the charge.

insider@insider.com (Allana Akhtar) -

© Provided by Business Inside

rNurses Abby Donley and Blake Lynch launched a petition calling for better working conditions for healthcare workers. Their petition is the fourth most-signed on Change.org in the last 12 months. Abby Donley and Blake Lynch

500,000 people signed a petition demanding better working conditions for nurses.
The petition launched by Nurses Abby Donley and Blake Lynch is Change.org's 4th largest in the last year.
Donley and Lynch said the aim to raise awareness about why nurses need to work with fewer patients.

Abby Donley, an intensive care nurse based in New York, believes she has post-traumatic stress disorder from the first COVID-19 wave in March 2020.

"The whole ICU was full of my patients," said Donley, who left hospital work in 2021 after 13 years as an ICU nurse. "To see all of your patients...paralyzed, sedated on a ventilator, and ultimately expired, it was pretty traumatic for me."

Donley said her hospital was over capacity due to the influx of coronavirus patients, and she felt that she couldn't give her patients the care they needed because she was stretched too thin due to understaffing. If hospital nurses don't have enough time with patients, Donley explained, they cannot adequately preform their job duties.

California is currently the only state that sets nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals, often referred to as "safe-staffing ratios" that limit the number of daily patients a nurse can adequately treat at one time. ICU nurses in California, for example, can care for just two patients at once.

In an effort to make working conditions better for her peers, Donley, cofounder of the non-profit IMPACT in Healthcare, and fellow nurse Blake Lynch, who worked in hospitals for 8 years, launched a petition calling for hospitals to ensure nurses work with a safe level of patients at once.

At more than 500,000 signatures, Donley and Lynch's safe-staffing petition is currently the fourth-most-signed campaign on Change.org over the last 12 months, a company spokesperson told Insider. The petition ranks in the top 10 largest healthcare campaigns of all-time.

"This is one of several petitions started by nurses on Change.org during the pandemic that have seen remarkable signature growth," Change.org campaign director Alex Rapson said in an email to Insider. "Nurses are proving time and again that they are leaders in social change."
Nurses say without immediate change, they will reach a breaking point

Donley and Lynch said short-staffing was worsening before the pandemic. Healthcare worker burnout reached record levels the year before COVID-19 hit.

Keeping the number of patients assigned to a nurse low both saves lives and decreases hospital expenses, according to data from Australia, which began regulating nurse-to-patient ratios in 2016. Since the laws went into effect, researchers found that 145 patients deaths were avoided and hospitals saved anywhere between $54 to $81 million as fewer people needed to be re-admitted.

The pandemic magnified hospital staffing problems, prompting 1 in 5 healthcare workers to quit during the pandemic, with many citing burnout as their reason for leaving.

Lynch worked in a hospital setting until 2019, when he transitioned to making videos about nursing for his roughly 3.5 million followers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Lynch said he wants to help the public and other healthcare workers better understand how nurse-to-patient ratios impact care.

"We want to point out that nurses aren't being treated with respect or dignity when they've gone through the hardest time in their profession the past two years with," he said. "It's just getting worse and worse."

Lynch and Donley are calling for better oversight of hospitals to ensure workplaces enforce safe-staffing policies. The two nurses want the Joint Commission, a non-profit that accredits hospitals and makes sure they are complying with nationwide safety standards, to require hospitals limit the number of patients per nurse. The Joint Commission did not respond to a request for comment.

"I have four patients in the ICU — I should only have two paralyzed, intubated, or sedated COVID patients that need a lot of care — and I come home and I feel like I harmed those patients because the bare minimum is all they got," Donley said. "That's not nursing."

Supreme Court of Canada considers if mandatory listing on sex registry is constitutional

The fallout from a 2011 Edmonton sexual assault case has come before the Supreme Court of Canada.


© Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

The Supreme Court of Canada held a virtual hearing Tuesday morning to consider the sentencing of an Edmonton sex offender.

Janice Johnston - 

cbc.ca

Tuesday

The country's top court has been asked to consider striking down two sections of Canada's sex offender laws as unconstitutional.

In 2011, the Stephen Harper's CONSERVATIVE government altered the Criminal Code so the names of sex offenders would automatically be placed on the sex offender registry.

The changes meant judges no longer had discretion on whether to submit names of sex offenders to the registry. It also mandated that anyone convicted of two sex offences or more would automatically be placed on the registry for life.

On Tuesday morning, appearing virtually in the Supreme Court, Edmonton defence lawyer Elvis Iginla asked the justices to replace mandatory placement with judicial discretion.

Iginla represents Eugen Ndhlovu who pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault in 2015. He admitted that in 2011, when he was 19 years old, he sexually assaulted two women at a house party.

Ndhlovu was sentenced in provincial court to six months in jail followed by probation for three years.

Ndhlovu had no prior criminal record and was deemed a low risk to reoffend but, because he was convicted on more than one count of sex assault, his name was automatically added to the registry for life.

Ndhlovu filed an appeal with the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta, arguing his charter rights had been violated.

The Court of Queen's Bench judge agreed. Justice Andrea Moen struck down the 2011 legislative changes, meaning that sex offenders in Alberta convicted of two or more offences would no longer be automatically placed on the list.

"In my view, the mandatory registration for all sex offenders upon conviction of two or more offences, without regard to the seriousness of the offences or the offender's propensity to reoffend, is overbroad," Moen wrote.

The case advanced to the Alberta Court of Appeal, where there was a split decision. Two of three judges ruled automatically adding the names of sex offenders to a national registry for life does not violate the offender's charter rights.

The third justice dissented, ultimately leading to Tuesday's hearing before the Supreme Court of Canada.

Crown argues for status quo

Alberta Crown prosecutor Jason Russell argued in favour of maintaining the current legislation.

"The objective is to formulate a comprehensive database for law enforcement," Russell said. "We just don't have the tools to say which offender is going to re-offend."

Russell compared automatic listing on the registry to mandatory DNA orders for certain designated offences.

He acknowledged there's a modest impact on the offender's privacy rights, but argued that for most offenders the information remains unused in a highly secured database unless they are suspected of re-offending.

The subject of judicial discretion led to some spirited debate between the judges and lawyers.

"Let's cut to the chase," Justice Malcolm Rowe said to Russell. "The parliament of the day said, 'We don't like judges exercising their discretion. We want to make this an iron rule with no exceptions. It's plain on its face. We don't care what the circumstances are.'

"And you're saying that's perfectly fine."

Russell agreed.

The court also heard from interveners representing attorneys general for Canada and three provinces.

Five additional interveners representing criminal lawyers associations, civil liberties groups and the Ontario HIV Legal Network filed factums in support of Iginla's appeal.

Iginla said he thought that overall the hearing went well.

"They knew what the issues were," Iginla told CBC News following the hearing. "They asked some very tough questions.

"Anytime you appear before an appellate court, all you can really hope for is that they listen to you … and the point you're trying to make.

"So I couldn't have asked for more."

The court has reserved its decision.

NUCLEAR WASTE

CNL seeks support for disposal facility

Pembroke – It is a crucial year for Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) with the pending hearings on the Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) and President and CEO Joe McBrearty is hoping all municipalities in the county will lend a voice of support for this massive clean-up effort.

“It enhances the protection of the river and the environment,” he told Renfrew County council recently. “The material is already there. It is in our 40-year-old buildings. It is in our soils.”

He was at council not only asking for support, but delivering an update on the facility, including informing council of the innovative cancer therapy studies currently underway there. CNL is at a pivotal point now, dealing not only with waste from seven decades of research and work, but also rehabilitation as it looks forward to continuing research.

“Our primary mission is environmental restoration of legacy stuff that was a result of 70 years of incredible effort at the Chalk River campus, which has benefited the entire world,” he said.

CNL plays an important role in the county with around 2,800 employees, mostly in the Chalk River/Deep River and Pembroke and Petawawa areas. He said the economic impact is spread throughout the county.

The priorities for CNL – outlined in Vision 2030 – are to restore and protect the environment, provide clean energy for today and tomorrow and improve the health of Canadians. This is done through conducting the largest and most complex remediation in Canada, spanning three provinces, as well as supporting the CANDU and LWR industry, and additionally being involved in SMR/vSMR (Small Modular Reactors) demonstration, advanced fuels and materials and hydrogen sciences. He pointed out in the last five years 100 structures on site have been taken down with the land being remediated.

“It reduces risk to our public. It reduces risk to our workforce,” he said. “It reduces risk to our precious environment.”

The current nuclear remediation process is the most complex in Canada, he added.

“It takes awhile because we have to do it in a very painstaking manner to protect our workforce and protect our environment,” he said.

The “heart and soul” of CNL has been isotope production and this continues with work on a new isotope which targets cancer tumours with very little impact on other cells, he said. The Ac-225 radioisotope program is a very exciting development in fighting cancer, he said. The Actinium 225 is attached to a targeting molecule and when the isotope decays, it emits high energy alpha particles. Those particles kill the cancer cell, leaving nearby healthy cells unharmed. He said this is being considered as a potential treatment for a number of cancers, including prostrate, pancreatic and bladder cancer, as well as leukemia.

“If we can save even one life through our research here, that is incredibly important,” he said.

The need for this material is expected to increase by 100 to 300 times in the next 10 years.

“We believe we can be at the forefront of this,” he added, noting this is a project for the next two decades and more.

The vision is for a new facility housing a cyclotron particle accelerator co-located with a pharmaceutical grade isotope processing capability. This will not only save lives in Canada but put Canada in the forefront as a global provider of a rare medical isotope. It will also generate high tech employment opportunities.

Meggan Vickerd, the general manager of waste management, spoke about the NSDF, noting CNL is viewing this as a key element.

“The NSDF is key to improving the state of our waste storage,” she said.

The waste has been onsite for decades and this is dealing with that waste, she stressed.

“The proposed NSDF will protect the public and the environment in every stage of the facility,” she said.

Having this facility demonstrates waste is no longer a problem and clears the way for future research, she added. It also enhances the protection of the Ottawa River, she said.

This year is important in the hearings for the facility. She noted any interventions to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission must be submitted by April 11. As a result, CNL will be reaching out to the municipalities in the county looking for support. The preference is for in-person recommendations.

“We are hoping for positive interventions from all our communities,” she said.

The hearing is scheduled for late May and will be held in Renfrew County.

Municipal Support

Warden Debbie Robinson said it is not only important for the county to speak out in favour of the NSDF, but also municipalities.

“We need more than one voice from the county supporting CNL,” she said. “We need 18 voices. The county and the municipalities.”

The warden said the request for support will go to the Development and Property Committee for a recommendation and come back to council.

Laurentian Hills Mayor Jed Reinwald said he has been involved in the nuclear industry for about 35 years. Recently a lot of work has been done at the local site, he added.

“I see the improvements that have been made there in the last 10 to12 years,” he said.

Mayor Reinwald said he will be in support of the NSDF.

“Our council is very much behind it,” he remarked.

Mayor Michael Donohue of Admaston/Bromley said the role of nuclear remains very important.

“I cannot see there is any path addressing climate change moving forward without nuclear energy being a part of that,” he said.

The fact most of the material being disposed of at the NSDF is already on site at Chalk River is not widely known and should be, he said.

“By in large the waste is generally what has been generated on site,” he said.

If this waste is not entombed then it will have to be moved off site through the highway elsewhere, he noted.

Renfrew Reeve Peter Emon pointed out when the Go-Co (Government Owned Contractor Operated) model was first presented to the County of Renfrew a decade ago there was much unknown and there was a desire for more information on how this would work and the impact locally.

“Our asks at the time were engagement and information, which we are getting,” he said.

The importance of CNL (AECL at the time) and the need for a future vision for the facility were key to a desire to see the site flourish, he said. Since then, CNL has kept the county informed and there has been a lot of engagement locally, he said.

“We know we have to give back to Canadian taxpayers,” Mr. McBrearty noted.

Debbi Christinck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Eganville Leader

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPTIALI$M

A sign of ransomware growth: Gangs now arbitrate disputes


RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Cyber criminal gangs are getting increasingly adept at hacking and becoming more professional, even setting up an arbitration system to resolve payment disputes among themselves, according to a new report by the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom that paints a bleak picture of ransomware trends.

Ransomware gangs, which hack targets and hold their data hostage through encryption, caused widespread havoc last year with high-profile attacks on the world’s largest meat-packing company, the biggest U.S. fuel pipeline and other targets. Western governments have pledged to crack down on the cyber criminals, who operate largely in and around Russia, but have little to show in the way of progress.

The new report on 2021 ransomware trends highlights the growing maturity and specialization of the ransomware market, with independent operators filling a lucrative niche market. Specialists now range from the hackers who can break into networks or develop ransomware to the nontechnical operators who negotiate payments with victims. The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre said it's seen some ransomware gangs offer a 24/7 help center to victims to expedite ransom payments and restore encrypted data.

There's even money to be made by arbitrators who can settle payment disputes among the various ransomware criminals, according to the report.

“The criminal marketplace is incredibly, incredibly efficient and constantly evolving," said John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant. "The fact that they can operate like this, it’s evidence of our failure to get a good grip on this problem.”

The report also describes the growing technical skills of ransomware gangs, which have been able to target cloud infrastructure — often touted as a safer alternative to storing data locally — and developed code to stop industrial processes. U.S. authorities said they'd seen ransomware attacks involving 14 out of 16 designated critical infrastructure sectors, including the defense industrial base, agriculture and information technology sectors.

“When critical infrastructure is held at risk by foreign hackers operating from a safe haven in an adversary country, that’s a national security problem,” National Security Agency Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce said in a statement, adding that addressing ransomware is a “significant focus” of the NSA.

The joint report was issued Wednesday by the FBI, the NSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the U.S. as well as the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

The report said that after major highly disruptive hacks on the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S. in May and on Brazilian meat processor JBS SA in June, "ransomware groups suffered disruptions from U.S. authorities in mid-2021" and have targeted midsize victims to reduce scrutiny.

But the UK and Australian authorities said they'd not seen any similar trend in their countries. Kaspersky Labs reported in December that ransomware-related incidents in 2021 accounted for 47% of its global response, up from 38% the previous year. In the U.S., however, targeted ransomware attacks that its intelligence network detected were down 33% in 2021 compared with the previous years. That compares with a 30% rise globally.

In the past month, ransomware victims have included operators of maritime fuel depots in Belgium and Germany and media outlets in Portugal. A cyberattack on the wireless provider Vodafone in Portugal this week had all the hallmarks of ransomware, though the company's CEO for Portugal said it received no ransomware demand.

___

Associated Press writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.

Alan Suderman, The Associated Press

SEC Chair Gary Gensler wants to know more about what hedge funds and private equity are doing

Bob Pisani - Yesterday CNBC

SEC Chair Gary Gensler is pushing forward with key measures focused on hedge funds and private equity.

There are more than 50 proposed rules that Gensler is considering this spring, one of the largest regulatory pushes by the SEC in decades.

The agency also wants more disclosure from companies regarding cybersecurity risks and attacks.


© Provided by CNBC

Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), speaks during a Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, July 30, 2013.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has kicked off an ambitious regulatory agenda — and his agency is pushing forward with key measures focused on hedge funds and private equity.

The federal agency is meeting on Wednesday to consider three new rules: more disclosure from hedge funds and private equity funds, more disclosure regarding cybersecurity risks and attacks, and shortening the date on which stock transactions must be settled, a fallout from the GameStop saga.

There are more than 50 proposed rules that Gensler is considering this spring, one of the largest regulatory pushes by the SEC in decades.
More disclosure from hedge funds and private equity funds

Gensler wants more disclosure from private funds (hedge funds and private equity funds). In a speech in November, he noted that private funds (mainly private equity and hedge funds) had gross assets under management of $17 trillion and that many of the investors were state government pension plans, nonprofits and university endowments. As a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, many private fund advisors were required to register with the SEC and to report information about their holdings through a so-called Form PF filing.

Gensler has said he wants to "freshen up" that Form PF filing and require additional disclosures, saying more information on what private funds are doing was critical to the SEC's role of protecting investors. For example, he wants funds that have had "significant stress" (i.e., big losses) to report what has happened within one business day.

The proposal also would decrease the reporting threshold for large private equity advisors from $2 billion to $1.5 billion in private equity fund assets under management

Gensler also wants more transparency around fees and expenses. He has noted that there has been little change in private fund expenses even as mutual fund and ETF costs have come down significantly, and that the average private equity fees were estimated to be 1.76% in annual management costs and 20.3% in performance fees in 2018 and 2019.

The SEC chair wants a quarterly statement to investors with a detailed accounting of all fees and expenses paid by the private fund during the reporting period; he also wants investors to be provided information regarding the private fund's performance. Such information would not be available to the public.

The gist of this is that the changes would help to shine more light on fund performance and on whether private funds really do outperform public funds when all expenses are considered.

The proposal would also require an audit at least annually to check on private fund advisors' valuation of the fund's assets.

Cybersecurity risk management

The SEC also wants more disclosure from companies regarding cybersecurity risks and attacks. Proposed changes would require advisors and funds to adopt written policies that are "reasonably" designed to address cybersecurity risks. They must also report significant cybersecurity incidents and maintain cybersecurity-related books and records.

The regulatory agency has said for years that significant cybersecurity incidents need to be disclosed, but it is getting more aggressive enforcing that requirement. Separately, the SEC has signaled it will also go after companies that are misleading investors about the extent of cybersecurity breaches.

In 2021, for example, British publishing company Pearson PLC paid a $1 million fine to settle charges that it misled investors after a 2018 breach, in which millions of student records were stolen. Real estate services company First American Financial Corp. also paid a nearly $500,000 penalty for lack of disclosure after a vulnerability in its system exposed Social Security numbers and financial information.
Shortening the settlement-transaction date

Reducing the time between the execution of a trade and its settlement reduces risk. In 2017, the SEC shortened the date on which stock transactions must be settled from three business days after the trade date — known as T+3 — to two business days, or T+2.

The SEC is now considering shortening the settlement cycle further, to one business day, or T+1.

This became an issue during the GameStop saga in January 2021, when wild price swings in that stock caused clearinghouse deposit requirements to skyrocket for Robinhood. The retail broker halted purchases of the stock, causing a huge controversy.

"It's time for T+2 to go," Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev tweeted shortly after that incident almost brought the company down.
The broad theme: more disclosure from everyone

Surveying the more than 50 rules that are currently proposed or being finalized by the SEC, Shane Swanson, senior analyst at Coalition Greenwich, expressed amazement at their breadth.

"This is an aggressive agenda from the SEC," he told me.

Swanson noted a common thread: "The broad theme is more disclosure and more reporting — it's driving across all these issues."

He also noted that part of the aggressive agenda — such as the focus on payment for order flow and shortening the settlement cycle — is a result of the GameStop controversy, and that it is understandable for Gensler to want to move on these issues while they are still fresh in the public mind.

"They have a lot of ideas that have been kicked around for a while, and in particular they want to act while there is focus on some of these issues [because of GameStop], like moving the settlement cycle," Swanson said.

"So there's a bit of 'let's make things happen' while they still have the public's attention," he added.

Despite pandemic, Canada's population grows at fastest rate in G7: census

Despite the pandemic, Canada remains the fastest-growing country in the G7, thanks in large part to immigration, according to 2021 census data released Wednesday.

© Andrew Lee/CBC

More than 27 million of Canada's 37 million people lived in one of 41 large urban centres, according to 2021 census data. Here, pedestrians cross a street in downtown Vancouver on Dec. 30, 2021.

Peter Zimonjic - CBC - Yesterday 

The newly released census numbers put Canada's population at 36,991,981 in the spring of last year, with close to 27.3 million Canadians living in one of Canada's 41 large urban centres.

There are approximately 1.8 million more people living in Canada than there were five years ago, a growth rate of 5.2 per cent between 2016 and 2021.

While Canada's population growth sits on top in the G7, it is ranked seventh in the G20, trailing Saudi Arabia, Australia, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia and Mexico, and is on par with India.

The newly released census population figure is a snapshot of Canada at a specific moment in time — in this case from May 2021. Statistics Canada also provides population estimates which differ from census data because of the way the estimates are calculated.

Other census highlights:

The Maritimes grew at a faster pace than the Prairie provinces for the first time since the 1940s.
For the first time since the 1986 census, more people moved to the Maritimes from other parts of Canada, 134,841, than moved away, 98,086.

The Yukon's population grew at the fastest pace nationally, with a growth rate of 12.1 per cent.
Newfoundland and Labrador was the only province to see its population decline from 2016 to 2021, falling by 1.8 per cent.

The province with the fastest growth rate was Prince Edward Island, which grew at a rate of eight per cent.

Despite the pandemic, Canada's population grew at almost twice the pace of other G7 countries from 2016 to 2021.

Immigration — not birth rate — was the driver in Canada's population growth from 2016 to 2021. It was also the main reason for a slowdown starting in 2020, as border restrictions were imposed to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Pandemic impacts growth rate

While Canada's overall population growth rate from 2016 to 2021 — at 5.2 per cent — was greater than the five per cent growth seen over the previous five-year cycle, the pandemic had a significant impact.

Most of the population growth actually took place before the pandemic kicked off. In 2019, for example, the country's population grew by 583,000, or 1.6 per cent — a record high.

In 2020, however, with the introduction of global border and travel restrictions implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19, population growth from immigration declined to less than one-quarter of what it was the previous year.

Deaths from COVID-19 also had an impact on population growth in 2020, but only marginally.

The number of deaths recorded in 2020 stood at 307,000, which was about 22,000 more than the previous year. That increase, combined with the immigration decline, resulted in 2020 seeing the lowest annual rate of population growth since the First World War.

Immigration driving increases

Four-fifths of Canada's population growth from 2016 to 2021 was attributable to immigration, while only one-fifth of Canada's growth was due to natural increase, or the difference between the number of births and deaths.

That means the natural increase fell from a rate of 0.3 per cent in 2016, to just 0.1 per cent by 2021 — the lowest rate on record. Despite that decline, Statistics Canada said that unlike the G7 nations of Italy and Japan, where the natural increase has gone negative, Canada is expected to maintain a positive natural increase for the next 50 years.

Population counts by province and territory

The immigration story, however, is not the same for all provinces. At the time of the 2016 census, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba had the fastest growth rates, but five years later the story is very different.

While immigration rates in the other provinces increased significantly in the years leading up to the pandemic, they stayed almost the same in the Prairie provinces. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba also saw more people move out of these provinces than move in from other parts of the country.

As a result Alberta, which had led provincial population growth for five consecutive census cycles, has fallen to sixth place, as it marked the first decline in interprovincial migration over a five-year period since the 1991 census.
Urban vs. rural growth rates

The number of Canadians living in rural areas in 2021 was 6,601,982, an increase of 0.4 per cent over 2016, but that growth rate was far below that of Canada's urban centres, which grew at a rate of 6.3 per cent.

The number of large urban areas, or census metropolitan centres (CMAs), with populations greater than 100,000 in 2021 was 41. That compares to just 35 at the time of the last census.

A CMA, according to Statistics Canada, is counted by counting one or more municipalities that are centered on a downtown core. To be considered a CMA, the large urban area must have a population of more than 100,000 with at least 50,000 people living in the downtown core.

Population growth across Canada

Of the six new CMAs, none were in Ontario, Canada's most populous province. Three were in B.C., including Kamloops, Chilliwack and Nanaimo. The others were Fredericton, Drummondville, Que., and Red Deer, Alta.

Resort areas such as Squamish, B.C., Canmore, Alta. and the Ontario towns of Wasaga Beach and Collingwood were among the fastest growing towns in Canada.

Toronto remains Canada's most populous CMA with 6,202,225 residents, with Montreal coming second at 4,291,732, followed by Vancouver with 2,642,825 people.

From 2016 to 2021, the CMAs fo Toronto and Montreal grew at the same pace of 4.6 per cent. Toronto's pace of growth, however, was slower compared to what was seen in the 2016 census, when Toronto grew at a rate of 6.2 per cent. Montreal, by comparison, grew slightly faster than the 4.2 per cent growth rate recorded in the last census.

While the growth of Canada's two largest CMAs was below the national average of 5.2 per cent, they received a record number of permanent or temporary immigrants compared to previous years.

The three other Canadian CMAs with a population over one million in 2021 are: Ottawa–Gatineau at 1,488,307, marking a rise to fourth place again after temporarily losing that title in 2016 to Calgary; Calgary, which now has a population of 1,481,806; and Edmonton, with a population of 1,418,118.