Twenty years of mining in Faro, means billions of tax dollars for care and clean-up

Messy mining practices make for much work

Faro mine site showing water-filled pit, waste rock and tailings.

 (screen shot from Parsons Inc. website)

LAWRIE CRAWFORD, LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER
Feb. 19, 2022 

Over a quarter of a century after the last rock truck wound its way out of the Faro mine pit, it appears a long-sought route to remediation is underway. On February 15, Canada signed a $108 million contract with Parsons Inc. for construction management and two years of care and maintenance on the Faro mine site.

Parsons, one of the largest players in remediation in the world, boasts that their “contract could span over 20 years and exceed $2 billion.”

The numbers boggle the mind, says Lewis Rifkind of the Yukon Conservation Society. Afterall, $2.2 billion is the total 15-year federal allocation for the northern abandoned mines program designed for eight mines in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Faro is just one, and the federal contract does not include the Vangorda plateau portion of the Faro site, which was sold separately for future and concurrent, development and reclamation.

But still, the numbers keep going up, and the timeline keeps getting extended. Five years ago, the costs were anticipated at $500 million for 10-15 years, and now estimates are for $2 billion over twenty years.

In addition to the contract awarded to Parsons this week, another contract for $5.8 million was awarded to another company, CH2M Hill Canada Ltd., to design a water treatment plant for the site. According to Treasury Board data, these two contracts are in addition to the total federal spend on the Faro mine site between 2006 to 2021, which amounts to over $600 million.

Geology drove the creation of the mine, and drives the clean-up. The tailings, which cover an area equivalent to over 26,000 football fields, creates acid-rock drainage, which, if not mitigated, grows worse over time. There are an estimated 70 million tonnes of tailings and 320 million tonnes of waste rocks on the Faro site.

Once billed as the largest open pit lead-zinc mine in the world, the story of Faro is not a straight, nor smooth line. Faro is a story of zealot prospectors, ambitious and visionary collaborators, and an assortment of wheelers and dealers, aided and abetted by eager politicians.

They waived a mine and a town into existence essentially in the middle of nowhere, and convinced authorities to build a new hydro dam and improve highways; and for banks and governments to open their wallets with an assortment of loans, loan guarantees and grants — sometimes referred to as “other people’s money”. A book of the same name documents the rise and fall of one of the Faro mine owners, Dome Petroleum.

Faro’s height of prosperity in the late 1970’s was under Dome’s tenure and boasted the highest standard of living for the community’s 2,500 people. Labourers were paid $25 per hour and the cafeteria served steak and lobster. Those were the heady days of Dome Petroleum.

But Dome’s dealings paled compared to those during the tenure of Curragh Resources under Clifford Frame with his cut-throat, anything-to-save-a-buck approach to mining, that ended with the death of 26 miners at his Westray mine, that also ended his Faro venture.

Between closures and shut downs, Faro produced ore for around 22 of the 28 years between 1970 and 1998. Community comfort rose and fell with the price of ore. The townsite was carefully planned but burned to the ground in a forest fire in 1968, one year after completion. The town was rebuilt with tiers of stratified housing according to rank (executives on the upper bank) and bunkhouses on the lower bench. It was carefully located distant from Ross River, and kept most of its First Nation employees working in the coal mine adjacent to Carmacks.

Faro’s legacy is Yukon-wide. It created the demand for the Aishihik hydro dam which left the territory with excess hydro capacity for decades, opened the south Klondike highway year-round, left a viable townsite with affordable housing supported by a municipal grant which has left structures in place to house care and maintenance workers into the future.

But the colonial arrogance of the day is much more apparent now than then. The federal government asserts that remediation and restoration of the land is part of reconciliation efforts with First Nations. Submissions from the Liard First Nation to Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Board show that they are not fully convinced that the standards set for remediation are high enough.

Parsons is now managing two of the world’s largest mine closure and reclamation projects, the Giant Mine in Northwest Territories, and now the Faro Mine Remediation Project, both of which rank in the top five on Canada’s most contaminated sites list.

Rifkind says that without mining there would be no reclamation industry, likening it to an altered form of Naomi Klien’s concept of disaster capitalism — companies that specialize in doing massive environmental cleanup after massive mining operations leave a mess.

That said, and apart from the enormous amount of greenhouse gas emissions that will be released as part of this project, and ignoring the amount of lime that will be required, Rifkind says that Parsons would be his choice of company to undertake the project as well.

“We’re thankful that something is actually happening. At least they are doing something” he says.

And for First Nations, the reclamation pill is harder to swallow. Never settled and never ceded, the Liard First Nation and the Ross River Dene Council have witnessed the slow and cumulative destruction of animal habitat, and the erosion of their wilderness of clean rivers and lakes.

“The legacy of harm is both physical and emotional,” said Chief Jack Caesar of the Ross River Dena Council. In a statement he said that “Canada’s sincere efforts to support a remediation process that includes our community is a major step towards improving both the land and our peoples’ experience around the Faro Mine.”

Rifkind calls it a “big environmental boondoggle.” All this, stemming from the dreams of a couple of persistent prospectors in the 1960s and 1970s: both died tragically in 1977.

Contact Lawrie Crawford at lawrie.crawford@yukon-news.com

SMART DOGS
African wild dogs cope with human development using skills they rely on to compete with other carnivores

The Conversation
February 18, 2022

African wild dogs (Screen Grab)

Large carnivores in Africa are important from ecological, economic and cultural perspectives, but human activities put them at risk. Increasingly, lions, hyenas and African wild dogs are restricted to protected areas like national parks. Within these limited areas, they must compete for the same food sources.

Competition is, of course, nothing new. For several million years, African wild dogs have evolved within a set of large carnivores that all prey on the same large herbivore species, like wildebeest and warthogs. Wild dogs are lanky, long-distance hunters that always live in groups, usually of eight to 10 adults. Cooperation with pack mates allows them to hunt prey much larger than themselves. Weighing in at about 40-62 pounds (18-28 kilograms), wild dogs have been shaped by the necessity to compete with larger species like the lion and spotted hyena.

There may be a silver lining to being the bottom dog in the competitive hierarchy. Research that my colleagues with the Zambian Carnivore Programme and I have conducted in Zambia and Tanzania suggests why smaller, subordinate species like wild dogs are better able to move through human-modified landscapes. Understanding how is essential for their conservation.


A pack of African wild dogs makes a formidable hunting team.
slowmotiongli/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Meeting the African wild dog

In the late 1980s, I was studying dwarf mongooses in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park when an extraordinary thing happened. While I sat on the roof of an ancient Land Rover watching mongooses on a nearby termite mound, a wild dog trotted past. And then another, and another. Wild dogs had been missing from most (perhaps all) of the Serengeti for years due to a combination of intense competition from larger carnivores and outbreaks of rabies. But here they were, back again.

Over the next year, I occasionally followed the dogs to watch them hunt on the shortgrass plains, where they were constantly shadowed by spotted hyenas. Several hyenas often trailed the dogs even as they set out to hunt, and hyenas quickly aggregated when the dogs killed a gazelle or wildebeest – often alerted by the unmistakable sound of vultures plummeting through the air in their own race to the fresh carcass.

Although they are half the size, wild dogs do not easily give up a kill to hyenas. A pack of wild dogs making a coordinated attack on one or two hyenas can easily drive them off. But hyenas are also social animals, and researchers found that the dogs generally lost their kills to hyenas when their numbers were equal. Given the large population of hyenas in Serengeti, they took nine out of 10 kills that the dogs made. And lions are simply too dangerous to fight, so the big cats could always take over a kill from the dogs, and kill them surprisingly often.

At that time, very little was known about wild dogs in places other than Serengeti and South Africa’s Kruger National Park, a more wooded ecosystem where researchers had found a flourishing population that often hunted impala. Biologists started to rethink the prevailing view that wild dogs were specialized to live and hunt in open grasslands.

My colleagues and I spent six years in the 1990s observing wild dogs in the Selous Game Reserve, confirming the Tanzania Wildlife Department’s belief that this large ecosystem was a major stronghold for the species. We found that the density of wild dogs in Selous was very good, at least partly because wild dogs were better able to avoid problems with lions and spotted hyenas in the miombo woodland of Selous than in plains of the Serengeti. It was more evidence that not only could they survive outside of grasslands like in the Serengeti, but African wild dogs found advantages to other kinds of environments.

By the mid-1990s, a scientific consensus was emerging that the persistence of wild dogs in an area depends at least partly on their ability to avoid losing food to hyenas or being killed by lions.


African wild dogs have been less separated by human development, like roads, than some other large carnivores.
Simoneemanphotography/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Being bottom dog can pay off

Many studies, including our current research in Zambia, have confirmed that wild dogs are adapted to “live in the cracks” of a landscape where they are outnumbered and outsized by spotted hyenas and lions.

In the short term, wild dogs move quickly away from an encounter with lions – or an experimental playback of their roars over a loudspeaker – in a straight line that would be unusual under other circumstances. Over the long term, wild dogs avoid areas that are heavily used by larger competitors, even though this requires them to hunt in areas with fewer prey.

But there may be a benefit to being at the bottom of the competitive hierarchy. Compared to most species, all of the large African carnivores live in small and isolated populations that must remain connected to maintain genetic diversity. But humans have now modified more than half of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, cutting lines of movement and increasing the isolation of protected areas. Despite this general pattern, some species are better adapted than others to maintain connections between ecosystems.

Our research has used advances in genetic sequencing to test how well connected wild dogs and lions are in several ecosystems across Zambia and Tanzania. The basic idea is that well-connected populations remain genetically similar, but poorly connected populations become genetically distinct from one another over time.

We wondered whether the adaptations of wild dogs that allow them to move through a landscape dominated by lions and hyenas might also help them move through a landscape altered by humans. For example, wild dogs could move more quickly and in a straighter line after an encounter with people, just as they do after an encounter with lions. We hypothesized that genetic data would show that wild dogs have stronger connections between ecosystems than lions, and that their connections are less affected by humans.

And this is just what the data showed when we compared the genotypes of 96 wild dogs and, separately, 208 lions.



Each dot represents an individual wild dog, and similarity in their color represents genetic similarity.


Scott Creel, CC BY-ND

Wild dogs in eastern, central and western Zambia were genetically quite similar, showing that these populations remain well connected. In contrast, lions were much less genetically similar, with distinct populations that were not well connected.




Each dot represents an individual lion, and similarity in their color represents genetic similarity.
Scott Creel, CC BY-ND

We also mapped the degree to which human effects such as land conversion, agriculture and roads hinder animal movement, differentiating between areas with relatively little resistance to animal movement and areas with strong human effects. The genetic differences between lion populations were strongly correlated with human resistance, but there was no such correlation for wild dogs. That is, places that were less hospitable to animal movement had more genetically isolated populations of lions, but didn’t affect the genetic diversity of the wild dogs in the area.

While it is still too early to know if this pattern will apply to other species, it suggests that eons of dealing with lions and hyenas have provided the wild dog with tools that help them maneuver through the unforgiving landscapes that humans create outside of national parks.

Scott Creel, Professor of Conservation Biology & Ecology, Montana State University

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

PATRIARCHY IS FEMICIDE

Rape victims are damned if they do, damned if they don’t

Mia Brett
February 19, 2022


The Times reported this week a story about a woman’s DNA, stored in a rape kit, being used to catch her for an unrelated property crime.

While there isn’t evidence of rape kit DNA being used to prosecute any other cases, it has been confirmed that it is standard practice in San Francisco to use a database of rape kit DNA in other investigations.

This could be a statewide or even nationwide problem.

The charges in this case are not being pursued. The San Francisco DA cited Fourth Amendment issues. But that doesn’t mean such standard practice is technically illegal or isn’t indicative of larger problems in how the legal system treats rape and gender-based violence victims.

The truth is our society just doesn’t really care about abuse victims. I wish I was surprised by this latest story but really, I’m just exhausted.

First, you might be wondering how this could possibly happen.

When a victim is raped, they might undergo a forensic examination to collect evidence of the assault. This is commonly called a rape kit.

The examination can take between four to six hours. It involves a detailed medical history, head-to-toe photographs while undressed, biological evidence collected through swabs and a vaginal exam.

While important to ensure full medical treatment and evidence collection if one wants to press charges, the rape kit exam can also be emotionally and physically invasive and traumatizing.

If a victim chooses to pursue charges, they release the rape kit evidence to law enforcement in order to investigate their crime. They expect the perpetrator’s DNA to be entered into a criminal database to identify the rapist or other crimes the rapist has committed.

It’s highly doubtful, however, that any rape victim expects their DNA to be in a criminal database to be used against them in the future.

Victims puts themselves through this traumatizing and invasive exam because they have hope police will use it to investigate their rape.

In reality, there is a huge rape kit backlog of untested rape kits.

Rape kits aren’t tracked. Experts and the public have no idea how many untested rape kits there are. End The Backlog estimates, however, that there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits.

Consider what that means, practically.

Hundreds of thousands of crimes that have been reported but evidence is being ignored. Hundreds of thousands of rapists likely facing no criminal punishment or criminal investigation.

There has recently been a spike in crime rates around the country and many rightwingers are trying to blame this spike on police reform efforts and “defund the police” activists with little evidence.


Just this week US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas blamed judicial nominee Nina Morrison for elevated crime rates because she worked for the Innocence Project. It works to get innocent people out of jail.

Morrison’s efforts had nothing to do with police reform but because the Innocence Project exposes the flaws in the system, it’s easy to apply a bad faith accusation, that it contributes to crime spikes.

There is some evidence that increased policing can provide a short-term solution to rising crime, but how much help can police provide if they don’t even investigate reported crimes?

It is estimated that in the US one in six women will experience a rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. One in 33 men will, too.

Even though every 68 seconds an American is sexually assaulted, only 310 out of every 1,000 rapes are reported to police. Only 50 of those reports will lead to an arrest. Only 28 will lead to a felony conviction.


Rape is clearly an underreported crime and the rates of conviction are abysmal. The rape kit backlog and traumatizing treatment of victims who do report are huge reasons why the conviction rate is so low.

In 2019, the Times reported that women brought unrelated civil suits in seven cities to force police to investigate their rapes.

Officials claimed that half of the reported rapes in their precincts were false. (It’s believed that false rape accusations account for 5 percent of rapes, though that number is likely much higher than the reality.)


In 2016, Heather Marlowe filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against San Francisco for not investigating her 2010 rape. The Supreme Court declined her case but a Texas class action suit was settled last year.

Additionally, the US Justice Department can put pressure on local governments to better investigate sexual assault. This practice, however, lessened when Donald Trump was president.

In 2021, Milaukee settled a lawsuit brought by a rape victim who said police mishandled her rape case. She moreover alleged that police likely comitted ethics violations in their investigation.

These are just a few examples of rape investigations that were so badly bungled women turned to civil lawsuits to try to get some justice.

Our society blames women if they don’t come forward. We expect them to put themselves through the traumatizing experience of reporting and examination. Then our justice system fails them.

Worse than not investigating rapes, however, is the case in San Francisco. A rape kit could ultimately serve to criminalize rape victims.

Why would anyone come forward and report their rape if they knew the evidence could be used against them at a later date?

Why should we as a society support police if they can’t be bothered to investigate crimes brought to them? How can anyone say with a straight face that they’re concerned about getting criminals off the streets if they don’t care about prosecuting an entire class of criminal?


Mia Brett, PhD, is a legal historian. She lives with her gorgeous dog, Tchotchke. You can find her @queenmab87.

N.L. man faces 140 weapons-related charges after police seize 3D-printed firearms

Thursday, February 6th,2022

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Police say a Newfoundland man is facing 140 weapons-related charges following the seizure of a large number of illegally acquired and produced firearms, including 3D-printed guns.

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary said in a news release today they conducted searches at two homes on the Avalon Peninsula on Feb. 11 and found three 3D printers allegedly used to manufacture firearms and found an array of partially 3D-printed guns.

Police say they also found various weapons allegedly manufactured with 3D printing technology, such as silencers and firearm barrels.

They say they also found four non-restricted firearms, two restricted firearms, nine prohibited firearms, assorted magazines, a bulletproof vest and ammunition.

Police say 40-year-old Scott Waterman of Torbay, N.L., faces 140 charges related to the possession of firearms and the manufacturing and trafficking of weapons.

They say one other person was arrested in connection with the two searches.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 17, 2022.

The Canadian Press

ABOLISH THE SECOND AMENDMENT
US gunmaker unveils semi-automatic rifle marketed to kids
Agence France-Presse
February 19, 2022

An AR-15 rifle on sale at a gun fair in Costa Mesa, California on June 5, 2021(AFP)

A US gun manufacturer has unveiled a semi-automatic rifle for kids modeled on the AR-15, which has been used in a number of deadly mass shootings, sparking condemnation from gun safety groups.

The gun dubbed the JR-15 is being marketed by maker WEE1 Tactical as "the first in a line of shooting platforms that will safely help adults introduce children to the shooting sports."

The company's website says the rifle "also looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad's gun."

The JR-15 is only 31 inches (80 centimeters) long, weighs less than 2.5 pounds (one kilogram) and comes with magazines of five or 10 rounds of 22 caliber bullets. It was released in mid-January with a price tag of $389.

The adult model, the AR-15, is the civilian version of a military-style weapon and has been used in multiple mass killings in the United States, including in schools.

Mass shootings are a recurrent scourge of the United States, where the right to own weapons is guaranteed by the Constitution.

Attempts to regulate their sale is often blocked in Congress, where the powerful gun lobby -- in particular the National Rifle Association -- wields great influence.

On December 14, 2012, a young man used an AR-15 to kill 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

An AR-15 was also used in a Las Vegas attack in 2017 that left 58 people dead, making it the deadliest shooting in recent US history, and in the Parkland High School shooting in Florida that killed 17 in 2018.

"At first glance this comes across as a grotesque joke. On second look, it's just grotesque," said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, which seeks to curb gun violence.

Newtown Action Alliance, a group also pushing for limits on firearms, condemned the gun lobby and weapons manufacturers who, it said, "will do anything in pursuit of continued profits."

Sugarmann slammed the imagery used by the manufacturer to attract young customers: a pirate skull with a Mohawk haircut for boys and for girls, a skull with blond bunches and a pink pacifier in its mouth.

In his 2016 report on the methods that US arms manufacturers use to attract young people, Sugarmann denounced weapons that are lighter to handle and often painted in bright colors -- pink, red, orange or metallic purple -- with the aim of drawing in young audiences.

In 2021, firearms killed nearly 45,000 people in the United States, including more than 1,500 minors, according to the organization Gun Violence Archive.

The Covid treatment pill is here – and big pharma will ultimately decide who gets it

Experts are predicting demand for life-saving antiviral drugs will rapidly outpace supply. Like the vaccine, the poorest countries will be left until last

Paxlovid is manufactured in Freiburg, Germany, December 2021. 

Photograph: Pfizer Inc. Handout/EPA

Othoman Mellouk

THE GUARDIAN 
Sun 20 Feb 2022 

Covid-19 has quietly become the gift that keeps on giving for big pharma. The past two years has seen it reap huge profits from Covid vaccines, while simultaneously opposing wider sharing of the technology required to make them. And now there’s a new money-spinner on the rise: Covid antiviral treatment pills. Once again, we’re poised to fall into the same inequality traps we’re caught in with the global vaccine rollout.

Both Pfizer and Merck have new antiviral pills rapidly arriving on the market – Paxlovid and molnupiravir respectively. As with the vaccines that came before them, both corporations have made it their business to ultimately decide who gets to make generic versions through the medical patent system – a crucial, life-saving question for millions around the world.


And business certainly looks promising. Pfizer alone, freshly cemented as the global Covid-19 vaccine kingpin, expects to make as much as $22bn from its new pill this year, on top of $37bn it made in 2021 from the vaccine.

The new medication isn’t coming cheap. Pfizer’s Paxlovid currently costs about $530 for a five-day course of the treatment. Merck’s molnupiravir, now approved for use in the UK, costs about $700. Reportedly, the cost of production for molnupiravir stands at about $17.74.

Familiar alarm bells should be ringing. Experts across the board are predicting demand for antiviral drugs will rapidly outpace supply. A World Health Organization report produced in January warned of a “high risk of shortages” of Paxlovid for low- and lower-middle-income countries until generic versions became more widely available, which isn’t likely to be until the second half of 2022 at the earliest. Separate analysis from the data and analytics firm Airfinity suggests that could be as late as early 2023. After an uneven global vaccine rollout, lower-income nations are faced with the prospect of a “wild west” scenario for life-saving pills, too.

The Guardian view on vaccine justice: the developing world won’t wait

Pfizer and Merck have chosen to designate a select few generic manufacturers able to produce cheaper versions of their drugs, through the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). But even with these deals in place, they remain firmly in control, and access to generic versions are within reach of only half the world’s population.

A number of countries including Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Russia, Colombia, Peru, Turkey and Mexico have again been excluded from such licences and are left to try to cut deals for the most expensive products. With so many priced out of the market, global supply will again be prioritised to rich countries, while the companies refuse to make affordable generic antivirals available to everyone wherever they are needed.

This is a grim mirror of the dramatically uneven vaccine supply earlier in the pandemic, when rich nations bought up many more doses than they could use. The US, where almost two-thirds (65%) of the population is already fully vaccinated, has reportedly put up more than $10bn for Pfizer’s Paxlovid – more than twice the entire GDP of Sierra Leone, where just 9% of people have the same protections. For less wealthy nations, competition isn’t even a possibility.

Meanwhile, Merck continues its “evergreening” patent strategy to extend its monopoly on molnupiravir beyond the standard 20-year protection. Since developing the pill, it has sought at least 53 patent applications to tie it up in legal red tape and stay firmly in control of who gets to make it and where. It has already received emergency approval in the US and Japan, and has been given the green light in the UK.

Even in nations within the MPP, where the pills are allowed to be made by select manufacturers, a low cost is not guaranteed. Dr Reddy’s Laboratories in India has made a generic version of Merck’s pill that costs $18 for a course of treatment. However, these costs won’t necessarily be reflected everywhere. Across the border in Bangladesh, the generic version of Pfizer’s pill will cost more than $170 for a course of treatment – prohibitively expensive for a huge number of the population. By restricting which manufacturers may produce a generic version, firms maintain considerable control over the final price. In the past, Gilead’s treatment for hepatitis C, sofosbuvir, only dropped in price consistently when the number of manufacturers was increased without these limits.

There is an uncomfortable assumption those in the global north have tacitly begun to accept. When the demand is higher than supply, there is a pecking order: rich nations first, buying up more than they realistically need, while the poorest are forced to scramble to outbid each other over what is left, dramatically overpay, or just wait until they’re affordable and watch death tolls rise. But this supply crisis is entirely artificial. We could produce more – Pfizer and Merck’s drugs are not complex, and could be easily manufactured in a wide range of developing countries if they had access to the knowhow and could avoid the threat of legal action. We need patents and other intellectual property barriers on life-saving medicines to be waived – either voluntarily by companies, or by government decree – so we can quickly supply all countries of the world.

We’re doubling down on a two-tier world when it comes to Covid-19 – rich, highly vaccinated nations with easy access to both preventive measures and treatments, and poorer nations trying to get by without either. It’s vital that we don’t sleepwalk into giving corporations so much control over who gets to live and who gets to die, all balanced on what they deem an acceptable bottom line.


Othoman Mellouk is a medicine access advocate with the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition

DOUBLE IT
Purdue Pharma owners up opioid settlement offer to $6 billion
Agence France-Presse
February 19, 2022

Opiods (npr.org)

The owners of Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, have offered to pay up to $6 billion to victims of the US opioid crisis to settle an avalanche of litigation, according to a report filed Friday by a federal mediator.

The Sackler family's new offer would raise by at least a billion dollars a $4.5 billion bankruptcy settlement thrown out by a US judge in December over language that would have shielded the family from further lawsuits involving the highly addictive prescription painkiller.

Under the new proposal, the Sacklers "would be paying, in total, not less than $5.5 billion and up to $6 billion", according to Friday's filing to the US Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.

But while a "supermajority" of involved parties have agreed to the deal, all eight US states involved along with the District of Columbia would need to sign off for it to move forward, the report filed by US Bankruptcy Court Judge Shelley Chapman states.


The additional funds would be used "exclusively for abatement of the opioid crisis, including support and services for survivors, victims, and their families", according to the report.

The opioid addiction crisis has caused more than 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States over the past 20 years.

Facing thousands of lawsuits, Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019, and it pled guilty to three criminal charges over its aggressive marketing of OxyContin in 2020.

In December, US Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the federal judge who approved the original bankruptcy plan three months earlier had no authority to prevent future lawsuits against the Sacklers, except in cases of intentional misconduct.


While more than 40 states had signed off on the rejected deal, a group of eight, along with the District of Columbia, refused to accept it.

William Tong, the Connecticut attorney general who led the appeal against the earlier ruling, called its overturning a "seismic victory for justice and accountability".

© 2022 AFP

Trump donor John Malone could soon be calling the shots at CNN

Karl Grossman, Fair
February 19, 2022

What will CNN become under John Malone?

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” the media billionaire Malone told CNBC ( 11/18/21) in November.

“I do believe good journalism could have a role in the future portfolio that Discovery/TimeWarner’s going to represent,” he went on.

In the interview with CNBC‘s David Faber, Malone also said:

Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.

Brian Flood of right-wing Fox News ( 11/19/21) said of Malone’s CNBC declaration:

Liberty Media chairman John Malone, who sits on the Discovery, Inc. board of directors, wants to see left-wing CNN revert back to nonpartisan journalism following the completion of a merger that would put the liberal network under the Discovery channel.

More than a board member

Malone, in fact, is more than a Discovery board member; he’s its chair and largest shareholder. CNN, started by Ted Turner and now owned by AT&T, is part of an $85 billion acquisition by Discovery, expected to be finalized this year.

Malone’s links to politics include being an active supporter—he’s currently a board member—of the Cato Institute, the Washington-based libertarian think tank that espouses the privatization of numerous US government agencies and programs, including Social Security and the Postal Service.

His Liberty Media empire was among the big contributors to Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration festivities in Washington, DC, with personal and corporate contributions adding up to $1 million.

However, in 2019, in another interview with Faber on CNBC ( 11/21/19), Malone said:
Look, I think a lot of things Trump has tried to do—identifying problems and trying to solve them—has been great…. I just don’t think he’s the right guy to do it. Half the people that he’s hired and thrown under the bus are now trying to kill him. I mean, what kind of thing is that?

Malone then said he would vote for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020.

No ‘coward’s way out’



Newsmax
Brian Freeman of right-wing Newsmax ( 11/21/21) said:
CNN will be the key news property in the merged company, one that will be dominated by entertainment programming. There had been rumors that CNN might be spun off or sold, but Malone indicated [in the CNBC interview] that’s not likely.

Malone, Freeman said, described such a move as a “coward’s way out.”

Freeman asserted that “Malone has cause to worry about the left-wing network,” because
CNN’s ratings have collapsed over 50% in the past year and may be suffering from a credibility gap with viewers…. Last March, a Hill/HarrisX poll found that 47% of registered voters believe CNN holds a liberal bias in reporting.


(In the same poll, 48% of respondents said they believed Fox had a conservative bias—but who’s counting?)

Steve Straub of the right-wing website the Federalist Papers ( 11/22/21) said of Malone’s CNBC comments:
CNN’s soon-to-be new owner just made a startling admission, one that has been obviously apparent to us and many others for some time, that the so-called news network has no actual journalists.

‘The most powerful man you’ve never heard of’



Gentleman’s Journal called Malone “one of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America.”


“John Malone… Meet the Most Powerful Man That You’ve Never Heard Of,” was a heading of a 2018 piece on the website of the British-based Gentleman’s Journal. Malone owns
services and TV channels you’ve most likely used or watched…yet the name John Malone still draws a sea of blank faces…. One of the most powerful, yet unknown, individuals in America…as Liberty Media’s chairman and largest stakeholder, John Malone is one of the world’s most influential media magnates.

In addition to being part-owner of the Atlanta Braves, the website noted,
he currently owns more land in America than anyone else: 2.2 million acres to be precise…. Malone has a net worth of around $9.22 billion, and thanks to his buccaneering role in media deals and land ownership, he’s been nicknamed the “Cable Cowboy.”

The article related how Malone, born in Connecticut, has a Ph.D. in operations research from Johns Hopkins University, and
joined the worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 1968. However, fatigued from the constant traveling his job required, he left after five years to join General Instrument; while at GI, he ran Jerrold—a subsidiary which produces minicomputers for the cable TV industry—and was eventually offered the role of CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc… [which] only had 400,000 subscribers and owed creditors $132 million…. Malone was only 29 at the time.
Within 17 years of snapping up smaller operators and acquiring minority stakes in other channels, TCI, under the management of Malone, had accumulated 8.5 million subscribers and grew into the second largest cable company after Time Warner. Because of his business deals in the byzantine world of cable TV, Malone was compared to “Darth Vader” by former US Vice President Al Gore….
At the helm of Liberty Media, the young American changed the organization from just providing cable services to actually owning the networks broadcast on its infrastructure, including the Discovery Channel, QVC and Virgin Media.
‘CNN could face a reset’



Variety (2/8/22) says former CNN president Jeff Zucker (left) “pushed CNN to be blunt and unstinting in its efforts to hold feet to the fire,” while Discovery‘s David Zaslav (right) is “behind the scenes a relentless operator.”

The headline last week in Variety ( 2/8/22): “CNN Could Face a Reset Under Discovery Control.” The article by Brian Steinberg spoke of how under its recently resigned president, Jeff Zucker, “CNN became more swashbuckling, more colorful…”

But Discovery is “a media company that tries to maintain a quieter corporate demeanor.” Zucker
changed the culture of the news outlet, shoving it into more direct competition with Fox News Channel and MSNBC…. Will Discovery change the recipe? There are signs that executives at the company see Zucker’s departure as an opportunity for a reset at CNN.

The piece spoke of those who “argue Zucker’s strategies have been good for CNN—and for people who have been helped by its aggressive accountability journalism in Washington.” The article concluded:
Executives charged with leading CNN in the wake of Zucker’s exit have vowed to staffers in internal meetings that his vision for the network will remain intact, but chances are Discovery will dim Zucker’s flash.

That would not be good news.

The future of democracy in the United States is at stake amid the polarization and deadlock of the political process in Washington. Media are increasingly under the control of right-wing zealots like Rupert Murdoch and those behind Newsmax, etc., who are poisoning communications.

Critically needed now is an independent, honest, credible press providing, yes, aggressive accountability journalism—a light to enable people to find their way out of this mess. Instead, the nation’s oldest cable news channel will soon be under the control of someone who appears to want it to follow the “interesting trajectory” of Fox News.

NEW ZEALAND

The Trumpism spilling out onto Parliament's lawn is the new virus

Jacinda Ardern said what was happening "is illegal, we're all clear on that".

Andrea Vance, Feb 20 2022
Andrea Vance is a senior Stuff journalist and a regular opinion writer.

OPINION: Please don’t let this be our 2016.

New Zealand always lags behind global political trends. Nearly six years ago, thanks to the populism of former US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the very laws and conventions that underpinned liberal democracy were shaken.

They fought (and won) elections on a people vs the establishment ticket. Now their people are picking up the pieces. Trump is gone, and Johnson is hanging by a thread.

 Their societies are fractured and divided.

Over the past fortnight, it has felt like New Zealand is stumbling blindly down the same path.

Did we escape the political turmoil wreaked by Trump, Brexit, and the march of the far right across Europe? Only to have it creep up on us as we stumble, exhausted, stressed and miserable to the tail end of the pandemic?

The small but vocal minority currently tearing up Parliament’s lawn are the unwelcome arrival of Trumpism in New Zealand.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Police have been impotent to deal with protesters, despite destruction of property, intimidation of locals and threats of violence.

It was an extreme far-right ideology that attacked democracy and normalised violence against progressive agendas, liberal cultures and the media. But, beyond destroying the institutions of the state from within, it was aimless.

The Wellington protesters are creating mayhem for a pointless demand. Most reasonable people accept mandates have an end-point. It is impossible to give a calendar date, but they were never forever. It’s simply that we aren’t yet out of the Covid woods.

The protest shares all of Trump’s worst characteristics: childish behaviour, wild lies, insult-spewing, ignorance, extravagant promises and unreasonable demands. There is a disrespect for elite norms and predilection for conspiracy theories.

Trumpism was “what the president believes on any particular moment on any particular day about any particular subject”, Ron Christie, a Republican analyst and former White House staffer, once said.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
The confusing scrawl of messages chalked on the Beehive walls.

The freedom convoy has the same maundering messaging. Is it anti-mandate, anti-vax, anti-science, anti-5G, anti-Semitic, anti-the people who “killed” Jeffrey Epstein? It is all these things and more.

There are swastikas, QAnon references and a cartoon frog that is a global symbol of hate. Their iconography and rhetoric runs the full gamut of lunatic to downright evil, with notes of Nazism, white supremacy. These were all features of Trump rallies.

Chant hare krishna, grow herbs, practice yoga and smoke the peace pipe all you like. The minute you pitch your tent next to a swastika, a noose swinging for politicians and journalists, and extremist Kelvyn Alp, you are aligned.

Worse still, you are being exploited to cloak the fact this protest is being manipulated by extremists. Anyone claiming there is no dark edge to this sinister sit-in is blind or lying to you.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
The “freedom” camp throwing a tantrum on Parliament’s lawn.

Trump didn’t need a grassroots organisation. He harnessed his celebrity to garner relentless media attention. The former US president was popularised and legitimised in naive and breathless coverage that normalised and whitewashed a fascistic politics.

The “freedom” protest has attracted its fair share of has-been and wannabes, desperate to raise their profile. They wilfully ignore the true nature of what is unfolding in the shadow of the Beehive, and give a megaphone to disinformation to build a social media following, boost fringe online platforms, or desperately recover their relevance. It is at once pathetic and dangerous.

We have all made sacrifices for the greater good. The freedom convoy is not the dispossessed and disenfranchised of America’s Rust Belt. It is frustrating in the extreme to see these people portrayed as the innocent or misguided victims of a cruel state, or economic disparity.

They exercised their freedom of choice and rejected the vaccine. Now they are throwing a tantrum on the lawn because they don’t like the consequences.

‘Good Kiwis’ do not intimidate schoolkids, make death threats, terrorise neighbourhoods, damage public property and bring small businesses to their knees. This is not our Springbok tour moment, and these people are not noble freedom fighters. This is Trumpism.

Omicron is about to overwhelm us, just as we are burnt out. The social responsibility and cohesion that helped us beat back Covid-19 and saved countless lives is starting to fray. These agents of chaos are agitating to exploit that. It will likely end in violence, just as Trump’s presidency did.

This Trump spillover is a new virus. But we can guard against that too.

MORE FROM
ANDREA VANCE • SENIOR JOURNALIST
andrea.vance@stuff.co.nz

NEW ZEALAND

Holocaust distortion and anti-Semitism rife within anti-mandate protests

André Chumko

 Feb 21 2022
STUFF

Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors are condemning the use of anti-Semitic material at anti-mandate protests and encouraging those present to be mindful of their language.

Comparison of vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, where 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime during World War II, was not only disrespectful, it was wrong, said Holocaust Centre of New Zealand board chairwoman Deborah Hart.

In addition to Holocaust comparisons, a swastika was painted by protesters on the Seddon statue outside Parliament; staff at the Backbencher Gastropub had been called Nazis in a verbal tirade; and references have been made by protesters towards Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, calling her “Jewcinda”. Ardern is not Jewish.

At the Christchurch equivalent protest one main sign brandished by protesters referred to public hangings in Nuremberg, implying that journalists, politicians or those who worked in public health would have to stand trial as Nazis did. Anti-mandate protesters had also been misappropriating yellow stars, and were spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Hart said.


ROBERT KITCHIN/STUFF
A swastika was painted on the Seddon statue at Parliament but was later removed.

READ MORE:
* Anti-vax protesters heckle Holocaust remembrance speech

* 'Very disturbing': People dressed in Nazi uniforms confront shoppers at Australian supermarket

“These kinds of comparisons really belittle what the Holocaust was,” she said, adding the anti-Semitic rhetoric was both concerning and disturbing.

Using the word Nazi to describe evil was also a “sloppy” comparison, which trivialised the Holocaust.

“The intent of the Nazis was to single out people on the basis of race and exterminate them. Vaccine mandates safeguard and ensure the health of everyone,” she said.

The use of the Holocaust for political ends did nothing to educate people about what the Holocaust was, and did not serve protesters’ motivations. The centre was calling on protesters to stop using Holocaust-related terminology immediately and “focus on what they’re concerned about”.

SIMON WOOLF
Holocaust survivor Inge Woolf, left, and her daughter Deborah Hart, who is the board chairwoman of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand.

Earlier this year anti-vaccine protesters disrupted and hijacked International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations in Christchurch.

Hart said the worrying rhetoric stoked rising global anti-Semitism and extremism.

Many Holocaust survivors and their families called Aotearoa home, and the distortion of symbols and trivialisation of their experiences put them in danger.

“We worry that when people are feeling stressed and aggrieved, what often happens to Jewish people is they’re ... the first to be targeted,” she said.

Hart said it was time for people to be thoughtful about the words and symbols they used, so individuals could talk to one another about their differences in a measured, calm way.

The delivery of anti-Semitic pamphlets around Auckland's Remuera in the 1970s led to New Zealand's first conviction for hate speech.

“Words matter. What we say matters. It’s time for people of all political persuasions to take real care.”

An underlying anti-Jewishness “just comes out” when New Zealand society is under stress, said chairman of the Wellington Jewish Council David Zwartz.

While the majority of protesters were probably not anti-Jewish, some protesters were using the opportunity to push their hatred of Jews.

Seeing threatening anti-Semitic material would be enough to re-traumatise and hurt those who survived the Holocaust and their families who lived in Aotearoa, Zwartz said. “They started a new life, and yet they can’t get away from this old hatred.”

SUPPLIED
David Zwartz with former governor-general Dame Patsy Reddy. (File photo)

It also made local Jewish communities feel unwelcome and isolated; heightened their personal security concerns; and made them more fearful of going to their places of worship, including synagogues.

“This is not a country where that sort of thing should be happening.”

Last month the United Nations’ General Assembly approved a resolution condemning Holocaust distortion and denial.