Some Canadians want to answer Ukraine's call for foreign fighters

Tyler Dawson 

As Canada responds to Russia’s war on Ukraine with condemnation, sanctions and munitions, some Canadians are preparing to respond more directly, hoping to answer the call of Ukraine’s president to come take up arms in a newly formed “international brigade.”

© Provided by National Post People take part in a basic military training session on February 28, 2022 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

And, so far, Canada’s government has stopped short of urging its citizens not to do so. Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said Sunday the choices to go fight were “individual decisions,” and on Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged some Canadians would choose direct action, beyond making donations or assisting refugees.

“Some Canadians may choose to take more active steps,” Trudeau said. “We will of course look at ways to make sure that we’re keeping Canadians safe. That remains our priority every step of the way and we encourage Canadians as we have been for many, many months — many weeks, anyway — to leave Ukraine if they’re in Ukraine right now.”

On Sunday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, posted a request for foreigners to come assist in the fighting, a call that has been repeated on embassy social media pages around the world — including in Canada.

“All foreigners wishing to join the resistance against the Russian occupiers and protect global security are invited by the Ukrainian leadership to come to our state and join the ranks of the territorial defense forces,” Zelenskyy said, according to multiple news reports.

Bryson Woolsey told the National Post Monday that he has been looking at flights from Vancouver to Warsaw, Poland, and plans to travel across the border into Ukraine. The 33-year-old cook is seeking to go, even though he has no combat experience or personal ties to the country.

“I just felt like I wanted to be over there, I wanted to help,” Woolsey said. “What’s happening over there is pretty awful and I feel it’s our responsibility to help them.”

Just outside of Halifax, a 34-year-old social worker, who asked that his name not be used, said he is preparing to fly to Poland on Thursday. He said he finds Zelenskyy “extremely inspiring.” He also has no combat or military experience, but said he knows his way around firearms.

“Ukraine seems to be fighting for democracy and for their freedom from authoritarianism,” he said. “I think people are just feeling super inspired. I also think people are kind of bored, you know what I mean?… They just want to find some meaning in their lives.”

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Woolsey said he’s been packing some equipment at home, such as a sleeping bag, but the understanding of those who are seeking to join is that once they get to Ukraine, they’ll be kitted out for combat.

“I’m not totally blind to the realities of what’s going on, right, and that I might never come back,” Woolsey said. “But I just don’t feel comfortable just sitting and while this stuff’s going on, right?”

The request for foreign fighters is reminiscent of historical instances of foreign legions going off to fight on foreign shores in distant wars. Perhaps most famously, during the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of foreigners — including roughly 1,500 Canadians in the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion — travelled to Spain to fight.

Ukraine, which has been fighting with Russian-backed separatists for years, has also long been a destination for foreign fighters. While there are conflicting reports, perhaps as many as 17,000 foreign fighters have picked up weapons on both sides of the conflict since 2014.

On Monday, Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence, said in a statement posted to social media that “thousands” of requests from foreigners had come in.

Responses from foreign governments to Ukraine’s plea for volunteer assistance have been mixed.

On Sunday, Joly, said the Canadian government is “very supportive of any form of support to Ukrainians right now.”

“We understand that people of Ukrainian descent want to support their fellow Ukrainians and also that there’s a desire to defend the motherland. In that sense, it’s their own individual decisions,” Joly said.

The National Post sought further comment from Global Affairs Canada about whether or not the government’s official position supports Canadians travelling abroad to fight for a foreign government against Russia. A spokesperson for Joly referred the Post to the foreign minister’s comments on Sunday.

Anita Anand, the defence minister, said Sunday: “We understand the desire to go, but our responsibility as a government is to indicate the security risk with undertaking travel to Ukraine.”

Michael Chong, the Conservative party’s foreign affairs critic, declined a request for an interview about Joly’s response to the request for foreign fighters, with his office citing a “busy parliamentary schedule.”

Joly’s comments echo those of Liz Truss, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, who said Sunday morning on the BBC that she “absolutely” would support Britons who went to Ukraine to fight Russian aggression.

“I do support that, and of course, that is something that people can make their own decisions about. They are fighting, the people of Ukraine, are fighting for freedom and democracy, not just for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe,” Truss said.

Downing Street distanced itself from Truss’s comments, with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson noting to the Guardian newspaper that going to Ukraine to fight would contradict the government’s official travel advice. Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative parliamentarian and soldier, said on Twitter that those without combat experience should not go fight in Ukraine.

“You may get yourself and others who have to look after you, killed,” he wrote.

The Norwegian government said it’s not illegal for nationals to go fight for Ukraine, and Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, said, “there is nothing at first sight that would legally prevent someone from going to Ukraine to participate in the conflict, on the Ukrainian side.”

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against it.

“I can understand, absolutely, the strong feelings and motivations for people to go,” Morrison said. “But I would say at this time, the legality of such actions are uncertain.”

On Monday, Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s finance minister, called the struggle for Ukraine a fight between “freedom and tyranny” and compared it to the Battle of Gettysburg, a major battle in the U.S. Civil War, and the battles against Naziism in the Second World War.

“This is one of those times and one of those places where freedom confronts tyranny. We are determined that freedom will triumph,” Freeland said.

Trudeau described Ukraine’s actions as a “heroic defence.”

“The whole world is inspired by the strength and intensity of their resistance,” he said.

• Email: tdawson@postmedia.com | Twitter:

Where are the Russian oligarchs? This Twitter feeds follows their private jets

David K. Li 

Jets and helicopters belonging to Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich were on the move Monday in such far flung locales like Moscow and Codrington, a town in Antigua and Barbuda.

© Provided by NBC News

And at around the same time, a jet owned by steel magnate and fellow Russian oligarch Alexander Abramov touched down in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The comings and goings of powerful Russian elites have come under intense scrutiny since Vladimir Putin's forces invaded Ukraine last week, an attack that's drawn international condemnation.

And that's why 19-year-old Jack Sweeney, a University of Central Florida student, started tracking them on the Twitter feed Russian Oligarch Jets, which he launched this past weekend and already has more than 52,000 followers as of Monday afternoon.

"People have been asking me about Putin for a while, they wanted to know if they could track him," said Sweeney, an information technology major.

While the isolated Russian president isn't much of a jet-setter, Sweeney realized Putin's wealthy fellow countrymen are — and their movements by air are easily accessible public information. So the student did the next best thing to following Putin, which is to shadow the Russian elites.

The instant popularity of his bot, which automatically posts public data on movements of these crafts, took Sweeney by surprise.

“It’s just been crazy,” he said. "I just figured some people would be interested in it. I just didn't think all kinds of people would be."

As of Monday afternoon, Sweeney was tracking 39 planes and helicopters belonging to 19 oligarchs.

Coming into this weekend, Sweeney admitted he had little knowledge of the Russian power structure, or even what it means to be an oligarch.

“Before this, I didn’t even know there were these (influential) oligarchs like this,” he said. “They probably do have a decent amount of power from what I can understand.”

These individuals who comprise Russia’s new money class have come under intense scrutiny following the invasion of Ukraine.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, oligarchs used personal connections to take over previously state-owned industry and profit from new Russian capitalism.

"These are the glitterati of Russia," said Howard Stoffer, a Russia expert who teaches international affairs at the University of New Haven.

U.S. and other world leaders who want to pressure Putin into withdrawing his armies from Ukraine have taken to economic fight to these rich Russian businessmen.

While Western forces have been ratcheting up sanctions against the Russian economy as a whole, they've also been taking the highly unusual step of attacking the pocketbooks of Putin and the oligarchs.

Stoffer said he welcomed any sunlight shined on powerful Russians, even if it's just the travel habits of these affluent men.

"They should be exposed and they should be paying whatever price a country can extract from them," he said Monday.

"Get these (airplane) tail numbers out. Tell the governments these are the people, this is where they're located and let them take whatever action they feel is appropriate."

AND THEIR YACHTS

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/02/ukrainian-sailor-partially-sinks.html

After decades of flat pay, some Japan firms boost salaries to retain skilled staff

By Tetsushi Kajimoto 

© Reuters/THOMAS PETER 

People cross a street a street ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games that have been postponed due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Tokyo

TOKYO (Reuters) - Over the last five years Yokohama-based Lasertec Corp has delivered what much of Japan Inc hasn't in decades: big pay rises.

The maker of chip-measuring equipment has boosted salaries by about a third overall since 2016. Employees at its main unit, many of them engineers, make on average just under 14 million yen ($121,000) - more than three times the national average of 4.3 million yen.

Lasertec is among a subset of Japanese firms, often in specialised areas such as technology, where pay is increasingly tied to employee performance and not determined by seniority or the base pay set in annual labour talks.

While "shunto" spring wage talks between big manufacturers and unions still have immense significance for the economy - especially this year - more firms are opting for performance-based pay, experts say, a change that speaks to a wider shift slowly taking hold in Japan. 

© Reuters/Kim Kyung Hoon Outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Tokyo, Japan

"For companies like us, employees are valuable assets, not costs," said Yutaro Misawa, a senior executive at Lasertec, whose profit has soared nearly five-fold and shares have surged more than 2,800% over the past five years.

Attractive pay makes it easier to retain talented engineers who specialise in research and development, especially given the labour crunch as Japan's population shrinks, Misawa said.

But for much of the rest of the world's no.3 economy, wages remain lacklustre. Thanks to decades of deflation, companies, like households, tend to hoard cash instead of spending. Japanese companies now sit on a record $2.8 trillion in cash and deposits.

In dollar terms, average annual pay totalled $38,515 in Japan in 2020, well below the OECD average of $49,165 and little changed from the early 1990s.

Higher wages are critical for the government's target of stable 2% inflation. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has called on companies to boost salaries and kick-start a virtuous cycle of spending, as part of his platform of "new capitalism" to push for greater wealth distribution.

LAGGARD?

Renewable energy start-up Abalance Corporation has actively hired mid-career executives over the past three years, lifting the average salary in Japan by more than 30%. Its roughly 100 employees in Japan - both locals and non-Japanese - are paid on average more than 7 million yen.

"Acquiring talented people from all over the world is vital for a company's growth," said Yuichi Kawauchi, a senior executive. "If we leave things as they are and fail to show Japan as an attractive place to work, Japan will fall further behind the rest of the world."

To be sure, performance-linked pay means bonuses can get cut in a downturn - an unattractive prospect for the many Japanese workers who prize stability. Unions typically seek incremental increases to base pay, which is permanent.

Most firms don't plan to raise base pay at spring labour talks this year, the latest Reuters Corporate Survey showed. A slim majority expect to raise total pay, which includes one-off bonuses, the survey showed.

That won't be enough to keep up with recent spikes in commodity costs, analysts say, eroding household spending power.

RAISING CHILDREN

For Yamada Consulting Group, which helps midsize companies restructure, attractive pay and perks are necessary to keep staff from being poached, President Keisaku Masuda said.

The consulting firm allows staff to work shorter hours to encourage them to raise children.

"We face stiff competition for high-performance workers. We have substantially raised pay and improved working conditions to prevent head-hunting," Masuda said.

It raised pay by an average of 19% in 2020 and by 5% last year and now its average employee earns 9.2 million yen.

Japan's labour talks will eventually shift from uniform hikes in base pay towards more flexible wages that reflect the market value of workers, said Yuya Takada, a researcher at recruitment and staffing firm Recruit Holdings Co.

Even Toyota Motor Corp, itself the long-time pace-setter of the spring labour talks, has stopped disclosing details of base pay, highlighting the gradual decline in importance of the labour talks.

Seniority-based pay will become a thing of the past, Recruit's Takada said.

"That'll lower the significance of the way management and unions struggle for base pay hikes at annual rituals."

($1 = 115.4800 yen)

(The story has been refiled to fix typo in currency conversion in the second paragraph)

(Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto; Editing by David Dolan and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

US House passes bill making lynching a federal hate crime

The House passed legislation on Monday that would classify lynching as a federal hate crime.

Lawmakers easily passed the bill, which is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was lynched in 1955, on a 422-3 vote.

While the bill sailed through with bipartisan support, three Republicans - Reps. Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Chip Roy (Texas) - voted against it.

The legislation's passage comes more than 120 years after the first federal anti-lynching legislation was introduced by then-Rep. George Henry White, who was the only Black member of Congress at that time.

"Our nation endured a shameful period during which thousands of African Americans were lynched as a means of racial subordination and enforcing white supremacy. These violent incidents were largely tolerated by state and federal officials, and they represent a stain on our nation's legacy," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.).

"Today, we acknowledge this disgraceful chapter in American history, and we send a clear message that such violent actions - motivated by hatred and bigotry - will not be tolerated in this country," Nadler said.

The bill, authored by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), would designate lynching as a hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

More than 4,700 lynchings occurred in the U.S. between 1882 to 1968, according to an estimate from the NAACP. Black people made up most of the victims of lynching, since typically white perpetrators would use the attacks to terrorize them.

The highest number of lynchings were in Mississippi, where Till was beaten and shot in the head by two white men for allegedly flirting with a white woman.

An all-white jury found the two men not guilty of Till's murder. But the men later admitted in a magazine interview a year later that they had in fact killed Till.

The House previously passed the bill in 2020, but Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) objected to clearing it by unanimous consent in the upper chamber.

Paul's objection came even though the Senate had previously passed a version of the bill in 2018 by unanimous consent.

Paul said that he was concerned it might "conflate lesser crimes" like minor assaults as lynching.

"There has to be justice. People are chanting justice. [But] justice has to have a brain and has to have vision and can't be hamstrung into something that could give someone ten years in prison for a minor crime," Paul said at the time.

Paul is now indicating that he supports the latest iteration of the bill after working with senators leading the effort in the upper chamber.

"I'm pleased to have worked with Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott to strengthen the final product and ensure the language of this bill defines lynching as the absolutely heinous crime that it is, and I'm glad to cosponsor this bipartisan effort," Paul said in a statement on Monday.

Jet fuel is bad for the environment. 

Contrails are even worse.

Jason Markusoff 

MACLEANS

FEB. 28,2022

The fact that airplanes are climate-­damaging fuel hogs—aviation accounts for two per cent of human-caused climate change—has been obvious to the travelling public for some time. What’s becoming increasingly clear, though, is that spending even more jet fuel may be necessary to deal with the sector’s bigger contributor to the heating climate: contrails. As the airline industry puzzles over how to decarbonize, researchers are rapidly gathering an understanding of how these anthropogenic cloud formations add to global warming, and how they might be avoided.

© Used with permission of / © St. Joseph Communications.

 (Jostein Nilsen/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Planes constantly emit a trail of substances, including carbon dioxide, water vapour and black carbon (soot). When aircraft pass through patches of cold, humid air, the water vapour and large soot particulates combine to form a long stream of ice particles. The ones that disappear quickly aren’t a problem, explains Sebastian Eastham, research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. But the formations that persist for hours can form human-made cirrus clouds, which trap huge amounts of thermal radiation that would otherwise escape into space. With contrails, Eastham says, “you have this large, sudden contribution to global warming, where you have caused the Earth’s atmosphere system to retain a significant amount of additional energy.” Carbon dioxide, by comparison, has a less acute but more prolonged energy-trapping effect.

Much of aviation’s challenge, then, is figuring out how flights can avoid the patches of cool, humid air that are ripe for creating contrails. Their locations are hard to predict—varying hour to hour—so it’s an air traffic control and modelling problem. There is a theory that temporarily flying higher (or lower) for brief stretches of some flights can create huge savings in contrails at the cost of a relatively small amount of extra fuel burn and carbon emissions—emitting a bit more to save the planet, as it were. It’s the “low-hanging fruit” for slashing aviation’s climate impact, the Royal Aeronautical Society’s John Green said at a conference last May. The industry has begun turning simulations into real-world examples: last fall, United Arab Emirates’ Etihad Airways teamed with a U.K. flight analytic firm to adjust the path of a Boeing 787 travelling from Heathrow to Abu Dhabi and says it avoided producing the equivalent of 64 tonnes of CO₂ by emitting only 0.48 extra tonnes.

Another contrail avoidance option—well, besides, flight avoidance altogether—is flying with alternative fuels. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has experimented with jets burning crop-based biofuels, which are less carbon-intensive over their life cycle than jet fossil fuels. They don’t necessarily produce lower in-flight carbon emissions than jet fossil fuels, says Anthony Brown, research pilot engineer with the NRC, but they substantially reduce the large soot particles that help create contrails. Given the unpredictability of when flights will hit contrail-prone skies, using different fuels is a more definitive way to tackle this problem than changing flight paths, Brown says.

But it will be years before either solution scales up to industry-wide usage. So while the conspiracy fanatics who baselessly fear “chemtrails” remain as wrong as ever, there is reason to look up, see lingering jet exhaust clouds and get a bit anxious.

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Menace in the mist.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

Center of California's San Andreas Fault Could Cause Even Bigger Earthquakes, Says Study

Orlando Jenkinson 

© Richard Par/Getty Images Stock image view of San Andreas fault. The central section of the fault has a greater potential or larger earthquakes than previously thought.

Larger earthquakes at the center of California's huge San Andreas fault line are more likely than previously thought, according to a study published in the journal Geology.

The research challenged earlier assumptions that the central section of the San Andreas Fault did not create severe earthquakes, compared to other parts of the fault. The authors suggested instead that serious earthquakes of large magnitudes have happened there in the past and could happen again.

The San Andreas Fault is the border section between two massive tectonic plates under the surface of the Earth—the Pacific and North American plates.

It stretches almost 800 miles through California, reaching past San Francisco in the north and almost as far south as San Diego. At the two extremities in the north and south, the plates are relatively static and can see large pressures built up over time that produce big earthquakes when they move.

This happened with devastating consequences in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude quake in the northern section of the fault that claimed the lives of over 3,000 people. In the south at least 57 people died in 1994 when a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck at Northridge near Los Angeles.

In contrast to these two volatile sections of the San Andreas fault, the parts of the plates at the central section are not static but move past each other in slow motion at around one inch per year. Scientists thought this "creeping" section of the fault tended to avert any large pressure build-ups and negate chances of big earthquakes there. The research found otherwise.

Scientists examined the degree of heating in rocks almost two miles below the surface in the central section. Material down there can offer clues to previous earthquake activity because rocks heat up with friction when earthquakes occur. The scientists found no evidence of large quakes in the central section in the last 2,000 years but said larger earthquakes had happened there further back in time.

"This means we can get larger earthquakes on the central section than we thought," lead author Genevieve Coffey, from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told Columbia Climate School news. "We should be aware that there is this potential, that it is not always just continuous creep," she said.

Their analysis of rocks in the central section of the fault showed evidence of earthquakes displacing rocks by more than five feet, which would equate to an earthquake of around 6.9 in magnitude (larger than the fatal 1994 Northridge earthquake). Even larger earthquakes than that could also be possible in the central section, the authors said.

"Ultimately, our work points to the potential for higher magnitude earthquakes in central California and highlights the importance of including the central [San Andreas Fault] and other creeping faults in seismic hazard analysis," the study said.

Black women have been hit 'especially hard' by pandemic job losses–and they're still behind in recovery

Morgan Smith 

The U.S. economy has bounced back at a stunning pace since 2020's coronavirus recession – yet this recovery has largely left behind Black women.

© Provided by CNBC

Throughout much of the pandemic and consistently since December, Black women's unemployment (5.8%) has been significantly higher than that of Latinas, Asian women and white women, according to research from the National Women's Law Center.

Experts point to several possible factors widening the recovery gap, with hiring discrimination, burnout and a lack of substantial benefits in lower-paid industries at the top of the list.

"If you look at the experiences of Black women in corporate America, the pattern is really clear: the workplace is worse for women of color than white women, and Black women consistently stand out as having the worst experience of all," Rachel Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Leanin.org, tells CNBC Make It. "So Black women have been hit especially hard by the pandemic's economic downturn."

CNBC Make It spoke with Thomas and other experts about the main issues driving this economic gap and how employers can better support Black women in the workplace.
Burning out in front-line jobs

Black women have shouldered a disproportionate share of front-line jobs throughout the coronavirus crisis that have put them at a higher risk of contracting the virus. More than 1 in 3 Black women have worked in front-line jobs, the NWLC reports, including roles as personal care aides, nursing assistants, cashiers and retail salespeople.

These industries have been the hardest hit by the pandemic and continue to be vulnerable to coronavirus restrictions and shutdowns. The recovery of these jobs remains sluggish and uneven: in January, women only gained 52,000 jobs in leisure and hospitality, or about 34%, despite making up about 53% of the industry's workforce.

Most of these jobs have required employees to show up in person, even at the height of the pandemic. Such conditions have put Black women in a compromised position as they tend to live in regions with higher transmission rates and are more likely to fall ill, Jasmine Tucker, the NWLC's director of research, says. "A lot of these jobs don't offer fair paid leave or even sick leave policies, so every time you get sick, you risk losing your job," she explains.

According to research from Lean In, 47% of Black women have gone to work during the pandemic when they had a good reason to stay home, whether that was being sick or not having child care. These high-risk, low-reward jobs have led Black women to a difficult choice: quit, or show up to work at the expense of their — and often their family's — well-being.

Lack of child care

The ongoing child-care crisis has hit Black mothers especially hard during the pandemic, pushing a lot of women out of the workforce.

Black mothers tend to shoulder more child-care responsibilities than their white counterparts, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and are also more likely to be the primary wage earners in their families. Without access to affordable child care, many have had to quit their jobs.

More than two thirds of working Black mothers are also single. "Large numbers of Black women have left the workforce because they are mothers, or single mothers, and had to make a difficult choice to leave their jobs to take care of their children during the pandemic," Thomas says. "The lack of affordable child-care and flexibility within their jobs has just created a very untenable, unstable situation for mothers, especially mothers of color."

These barriers have not only made it difficult for Black women to find meaningful full-time employment, but also to re-enter the labor force. The NWLC reports that nearly 30% of Black women who are unemployed have been out of work for six months or longer.

Hiring discrimination

Although the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the pandemic brought a renewed focus on diversity, equity and inclusion practices at companies, Black women – and other people of color – continue to experience racism and microaggressions in the workforce.

"Black women are still facing hiring discrimination, and if they've been unemployed for long periods of time, they could feel even more discouraged from applying to jobs," Tucker notes.

The barriers for securing a job are higher for Black women because "as a Black woman, you're facing all of the biases that go with being a woman, along with the biases that go with being a woman of color," Thomas explains.

Black women also experience more – and more acute – microaggressions than other groups of women.

In its annual "Women in the Workplace" report, Lean In and McKinsey & Company found that Black women are more likely than white women to be on the receiving end of disrespectful and "othering" behavior. About 17% of Black have been confused with someone else of the same race/ethnicity, compared to 4% of white women.

What companies can do to help

Employers can help mitigate this economic gap by reviewing their benefits, hiring and promotional practices and updating them to be more equitable for women of color.

Such meaningful changes could include including more women of color in the workplace planning and hiring process and broadening paid leave policies, as well as designing clearer, structured promotion and mentorship opportunities for Black women.

"A lot of companies don't truly know how many women of color they're hiring or promoting," Thomas says. "To make sure your hiring and promotion processes are fair, you need to track how women of color are moving through your organization."

While the past two years have spurred some leaders to pay closer attention to the challenges Black women face in the workforce, it's important to recognize that Black women have been dealing with these issues long before the pandemic – and it could take a long time to see sustainable progress.

"We like to find the silver lining, but the reality is, things have been really bad for Black women," Nikki Tucker, the head of social at Leanin.org, says. "The pandemic has just finally opened a lot of people's eyes to the things Black women have been going through all of our lives."

Racism in Youth Leaves Black Women With Lasting Risk of Depression

© Provided by HealthDay

MONDAY, Feb. 28, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Black women who often encountered racism before age 20 have an increased risk of depression, new research shows.

Of the 1,600 Black women in Detroit, aged 25 to 35, who took part in the study, nearly two-thirds said they'd been subjected to some form of racism during adolescence, and more than one-third had symptoms of depression.

"Looking across the life course from adolescence through the 20s, Black women with persistently high frequency and high stress related to racism had the highest risk for depressive symptoms in adulthood than those with persistently low frequency," said study co-author Anissa Vines. She is assistant professor of epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Vines said the findings — recently published in the Journal of Urban Health — show how damaging racism is to the mental health of young people, and "echo what other researchers have been reporting on the implications of adverse childhood experiences on health in later life."

Her team also examined whether the amount of social support that the study participants received in childhood and adulthood affected the link between racism and depression.

"Though we hypothesized the social support would buffer the effects of racism, we did not find evidence to support this," Vines said in a university news release.

The data used in the study were collected between 2010 and 2012 — before more recent events that have brought overt acts of racism to the forefront of national attention in the United States.

The researchers also pointed out that the women faced a number of challenges, from Detroit's eroding economy to high poverty rates and low educational attainment.

"The health of women living in Detroit cannot be separated from the erosion of their physical, emotional, social, economic and political environments," the study authors explained.

Even so, they added, "the importance of early-life racism seen in this single geographic area may be broadly generalizable to young Black women in other geographical settings."

The findings further highlight that racism is a public health crisis that requires urgent intervention, because it can cause lasting damage to the well-being of people of color, the study team concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about racism and health.

SOURCE: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, news release, Feb. 25, 2022

EU member state heads back fast-track for Ukraine joining bloc

By AARON REICH AND REUTERS 

© (photo credit: REUTERS/YVES HERMAN) 

A European Union flag flies outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, December 19, 2019.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky officially applied on Monday to join the European Union, with the application being on its way to Brussels for processing, Ukrainian President's Office deputy head Andrij Sybiha wrote on Facebook.

In response, the heads of state for eight different EU member states – Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic – pushed for vastly expediting Ukraine's admission into the bloc.

"We call on EU member states to consolidate highest political support to Ukraine and enable the EU institutions to conduct steps to immediately grant Ukraine an EU candidate country status and open the process of negotiations," the leaders wrote, as noted on the official website of the Lithuanian president.

This follows Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger telling Politico that Ukraine should have a "special track" towards EU membership.

“They fight for themselves, they fight for us — they fight for freedom,” Heger said told Politico. “We have to realize that they are protecting our system, our values and we have to be together with them. So there is no time to hesitate on this.”

© Provided by The Jerusalem Post Josep Borrell speaks at a news conference on the Russian military operation against Ukraine, at EU headquarters in Brussels on Sunday (credit: STEPHANIE LECOCQ/REUTERS)

Overall, support for Ukraine is strong in the EU, as noted in a recent op-ed in The Jerusalem Post by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell.

"This is a matter of life and death," Borrell noted. "I am preparing an emergency package to support the Ukrainian armed forces in their fight."

European Commission President Ursula von der Leye told Euronews Sunday that Ukraine is "one of us and we want them in the European Union."

Several European nations have already sent considerable funds and munitions towards Ukraine, as well as levying sanctions against Moscow, as have their allies abroad such as the US.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Tuesday morning that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had offered his country, which is under attack from its neighbor Russia, more support in the form of sanctions and weapons.

"In our call, Secretary Blinken affirmed that the US support for Ukraine remains unfaltering," Kuleba said on Twitter. "I underscored that Ukraine craves for peace, but as long as we are under Russia's assault we need more sanctions and weapons. Secretary assured me of both. We coordinated further steps."

Power grid

Another way the EU is helping Ukraine is through energy.

On Monday, energy ministers from EU countries agreed to urgently link a European power system to Ukraine's grid, a move that would increase its independence from Russia following Moscow's invasion of the country.

The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Europe's top gas supplier, has sharpened concerns of disruption to energy supplies and increased scrutiny of European Union countries' reliance on imported fossil fuels.

It has also raised concerns about Ukraine's own energy system, and EU ministers on Monday backed a long-planned link of Ukraine's electricity grid with Europe's.

"There was a broad agreement around the table. Based on this, we will move forward... to connect Ukraine's electricity system as quickly as possible," EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson said after the meeting.

Ukraine disconnected its grid from a Russian system last week and has asked for emergency synchronization with a European system. That would mean Russia would no longer control technical aspects of Ukraine’s network such as grid frequency. EU officials said the link could be completed within weeks.

This is a developing story.

'A new Europe' united against Russia — even neutral Switzerland

Alex Seitz-Wald 


WASHINGTON — A continent that has spent most of the past millennium at war with itself has united against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Germany reversing its historic policy against sending weapons to conflict zones and even famously neutral Switzerland joining the rest of Europe against Moscow

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“It’s the rebirth of a new Europe,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. “I’m absolutely shocked, I want to tell you honestly. It’s a historic shift. I think this will have major consequences moving forward for the future of Europe, for the future of the transatlantic alliance, for the future of NATO — just when all of those things were fraying.”


The European Union, for the first time ever, agreed Sunday to directly finance the purchase and delivery of arms, with plans to send more than half a billion dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine as it battles Russian forces in what the president of the European Commission called a “watershed moment.”

Virtually all of European airspace is now closed to Russian aircraft, including private jets. The E.U. also banned Kremlin-backed media outlets and took steps to freeze Russian assets and cut off the country’s access to the global financial system.

French Ambassador to the U.S. Philippe Etienne said on MSNBC Monday that the united front was nothing less than “a turning point in the history of our continent.”

Sweden, which is not part of NATO and has maintained a policy of neutrality through both World Wars and the Cold War, announced Monday it will send 5,000 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.

The Swedish government said it is the first time the Scandinavian country has sent arms to a country at war since 1939, when it aided its neighbor Finland against a Soviet invasion.

Even Switzerland joined the fray.

Neutrality has been a survival tactic for Switzerland that kept the alpine nation independent since Napoleon. It is not part of the European Union nor NATO.

But bowing to public pressure from its citizens and every party in its parliament but the far-right, the Swiss government announced Monday it will join the EU’s sanction against Russia, bar entry to some high-level Russians with Swiss connections and close Swiss airspace to Russian flights.

The move is significant not only symbolically, but because Switzerland’s infamously secretive banks are a favorite of Russian oligarchs.

“We are in an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures could be decided,” Swiss President Ignazio Cassis said at a press conference Monday, though he noted that Swiss neutrality remains intact since the country is not sending military aid or getting involved in the fight itself.

Experts say the most significant action, though, may be Germany’s.

The most powerful country in continental Europe has for years pursued friendlier relations with Moscow and refused to sell weapons to countries involved in armed conflicts as part of a post-World War II doctrine of pacifism.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a turning point,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a statement. “It threatens our entire post-war order. In this situation, it is our duty to do our utmost to support Ukraine in defending itself against Vladimir Putin’s invading army.”

Thanks to economic necessity and a sense of historic obligation to atone for the crimes committed by the Nazis, Berlin sought engagement instead of confrontation with Russia.

“There’s an exaggerated perception in German public opinion, I would say a misperception, that engaging with Russia during the Cold War led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Germany did more business with the USSR than other European countries,” said Charles Lichfield, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. “That has informed German behavior.”

As recently as last week, Germany not only refused to send its weapons to Ukraine, but it blocked other countries like the Netherlands from sending their own German-made weapons to Kyiv.

But Berlin dramatically reversed course over the weekend, announcing plans to send at least 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft defense systems to Ukraine, paving the way for virtually the entire continent to join the fight.

“There was a drive towards unity and Germany was an obstacle,” said Lichfield. “It is striking that once the German obstacle was lifted, the EU got in.”

Tobias Vestner, head of the security and law program at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, said the Swiss have long prided themselves on being a safe space for international organizations and dialog, like the summit it hosted last year between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But Swiss citizens are beginning to rethink their role in an increasingly globalized world, Vestner said, especially after a pandemic that did not respect international borders.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” he said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a change in the way neutrality is interpreted and applied.”

Kyiv Independent Site Surges From 20,000 Followers to 1.4 Million Since Russian Invasion

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The Kyiv Independent, a Ukrainian English media outlet, gained 1 million followers in the wake of Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

Anastasia Lapatina, a journalist with the Independent, tweeted the news Sunday.

The startup outlet, with a Twitter following now passing 1.4 million, came to be after a group of more than 30 ex-Kyiv Post journalists joined forces with the aim of regaining editorial independence and carrying on their values after the owner shut down the publication on Nov. 8, 2021.

The staff unanimously chose Olga Rudenko, former deputy chief editor at the Kyiv Post, who worked there for 10 years, to helm the new publication as editor-in-chief.

The Kyiv Independent says it was founded on principles that reflect the transition from the Post and that it will always be partially owned by its journalists and won't "serve a rich owner or oligarch." Its revenue will be derived from readers, donors and commercial activities.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine Feb. 24, 2022, after tension built up at their borders as a result of Russian troops being stationed there. Many well-known political figures and celebrities of Ukrainian heritage have issued statements about these events. President Biden aims to impose economic sanctions in order to get President Vladimir Putin's attention.

To support the Independent's fight to publish accurate coverage and counter misinformation, you can donate to their Patreon link or their gofundme.