Parks Canada recovers 45 fossils stolen from Burgess Shale, levies $20K fine

LAKE LOUISE, ALBERTA — A Quebec resident has been fined $20,000 for taking 45 fossils from three Rocky Mountain national parks that include an internationally known fossil collection.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Parks Canada said a member of the public tipped wardens in Lake Louise, Alta., in 2020 about fossils being removed from the Burgess Shale.

An investigation that summer and fall led Quebec wardens and police to search a home in the Montreal area.

"The investigation resulted in 45 fossils being recovered, which were identified by an expert from the Royal Ontario Museum as originating from sites within Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper national parks," field unit superintendent Francois Masse said Thursday at a news conference.

He said most of the fossils came from the Burgess Shale Marble Canyon quarry, an area not accessible to the public, in Kootenay National Park in British Columbia.

Removing natural materials from national parks is against the law.

A man, who Parks Canada is not identifying, pleaded guilty to two charges in a Cranbrook, B.C., court last month. He was ordered to return the fossils, pay the fine and serve a five-month conditional sentence that includes a curfew.

"This is the largest fine that has been levied to date for the removal of fossils from the Burgess Shale and it accounts for the seriousness of the offence and the importance of this site," said Masse.

He said Parks Canada's law enforcement branch has the recovered fossils.

There have been other cases in which people have been caught taking fossils from the Burgess Shale, including one in 2016 when an international tourist was fined $4,000 after he loaded his backpack with them.

Paul Friesen, a Parks Canada warden in Radium Hot Springs, B.C., said the latest investigation was complex because it required confirming a tip, finding a suspect and working with other law enforcement agencies.

"The location of the fossils is in Kootenay National Park in British Columbia and the suspect (was) located in the Montreal area," he said.

Friesen said the investigation revealed the man was trying to sell some of the fossils on the black market.

"There's a variety of prices these would be selling for and it would depend on who is buying them," he said. "They can range from several hundred dollars up into tens of thousands of dollars, depending on how rare they are and the quality of those fossils.

"It just goes to show the importance of those fossils to Parks Canada and the importance that we place on protecting those fossils."

The Burgess Shale is widely known as one of the most significant fossil sites in the world. It contains fossil evidence of some of the earliest animals that existed in the oceans more than 505 million years ago and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.

A fossil site near Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park was discovered in 1989 by researchers with the Royal Ontario Museum.

The Marble Canyon quarry was discovered in 2012 and more than 10,000 specimens have been recovered from that site by researchers.

All of the sites are monitored electronically and through other means, Friesen said.

"We also rely on the remoteness of some of these sites as well to keep them protected," he added.

"These locations are very rugged, very remote, experience extreme weather conditions, so we're consistently evaluating what's out there in terms of technology.

"We take the protection of these sites very seriously."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 12, 2022.

— By Colette Derworiz in Calgary

The Canadian Press

Amazon fires 2 union organizers tied to first U.S. labor win

Amazon has fired two employees with ties to the grassroots union that led the first successful U.S. organizing effort in the retail giant’s history.

The company confirmed Tuesday that it fired Michal, or ‘Mat,’ Cusick and Tristan Dutchin of the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, New York. But it claims the “cases are unrelated to each other and unrelated to whether these individuals support any particular cause or group.”

Cusick, who worked at a nearby Amazon warehouse from the one that voted to unionize last month, said he was fired due to COVID-related leave. He said he was informed by an agent from the company’s employee resource center that he was allowed to go on leave until April 29 but was later fired because leave period extended only until April 26.

“They now say after the fact, after they terminated me, that the COVID-leave actually only extended to the 26th,” said Cusick, an organizer who works as the union’s communications lead. “That discrepancy is how they fired me.”

Cusick said he was locked out of Amazon’s internal employee system on May 2 without any notice. The following day, he said he called the employee resource center and was told about his termination.

In a letter sent on May 4, the company told Cusick he was fired for “voluntary resignation due to job abandonment.” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement Tuesday that Cusick had “failed to show up for work since an approved leave ended in late April, despite our team reaching out to him and even extending his leave.”

“While we normally wouldn’t discuss personnel issues, we think it’s important to clear up some misinformation here,” Nantel said.

On Monday, Cusick had told the AP his firing may have been an arbitrary decision by Amazon’s automated human resources system, which has been a subject of scrutiny in the past. “If they do not reverse what is a fairly obvious miscarriage of justice here, my presumption is that they are not doing it because they know that I am an Amazon organizer,” he said.

Nantel said Dutchin, another organizer who worked at the facility that voted to unionize, was fired because he failed to meet productivity goals. She said Dutchin “had been given five warnings since last summer for performance issues and was consistently performing in the bottom 3% compared to his peers, despite being offered additional training.”

“We work hard to accommodate our team’s needs, but like any employer, we ask our employees to meet certain minimum expectations and take appropriate action when they’re unable to do that,” Nantel said.

Dutchin did not respond to a request for comment.

Haleluya Hadero, The Associated Press

US Navy chief defends plan to scrap troubled warships even though some are less than 3 years old

Oren Liebermann -

The chief of the US Navy defended the service’s plans to scrap nine relatively new warships in the coming fiscal year even as the service tries to keep up with China’s growing fleet. Three of the littoral combat ships slated for decommissioning are less than three years old.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that the anti-submarine ships could not perform their primary mission.

“I refuse to put an additional dollar against a system that would not be able to track a high-end submarine in today’s environment,” Gilday told the committee. He said the main reason for the early retirement was that the anti-submarine warfare system on the ships “did not work out technically.” The decommissioning of the ships would save the Navy approximately $391 million, according to the service’s proposed FY23 budget.

But that recoups only a fraction of the cost of the nine littoral combat ships, which totaled about $3.2 billion.

The USS Indianapolis, USS Billings and USS Wichita were all commissioned in 2019, which means the Navy plans on decommissioning ships that are only a fraction of the way into their expected service life. The Navy also plans to retire six other littoral combat ships, all of the single-hull Freedom-variant, as opposed to the trimaran Independence-variant. Both variants can achieve speeds of 40+ knots.

Under a 2016 Navy plan, the Freedom-class variants were all homeported Mayport, Florida, mainly for use in Atlantic Ocean operations. The Independence-class variants were homeported in San Diego, and designated for mainly Pacific operations.

The decision amounts to an embarrassing admission that some of the Navy’s newest ships are not fit for modern warfare.

Despite the Navy’s plans to scrap the warships, Congress has the final say on the military budget and has balked at previous requests to decommission ships. Reducing the number of warships may be even more difficult as lawmakers focus on the growing size of China’s navy and the gap between the US and Chinese fleets.

Last August, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the USS Tulsa, one of the Independence-class ships, while it was operating out of Singapore. She touted the Navy’s mission of “helping to guarantee peace and security, freedom of trade and commerce, freedom of navigation” and the role the ship plays in countering an increasingly assertive China in the western Pacific Ocean.



But the embattled littoral combat ships have faced perennial problems, including repeated breakdowns and questions about their limited armament.

The ships were hailed as part of the US deterrent against China as they they were designed to operate in shallow waters like the South China Sea. But the decommissioning of so many in one year appears to be an acknowledgment that the expensive surface combatants have failed to live up to expectations.
‘We can’t use them’

Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “We can’t use them, number one because they’re not ready to do anything. Number two, when they are, they still break down.”

“They’re incredibly expensive, and they don’t have the capabilities that we expected. So regardless of how old they are, that’s a lot of money to be spent to get pretty close to nothing,” the Washington state Democrat continued.

Republican Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined in criticizing the Navy.

“With the Chinese Navy steadily climbing to 460 ships by 2030, the unforced errors in Navy shipbuilding, like the Littoral Combat Ship, must stop. Programs that can scale up and grow our fleet must be the priority,” Inhofe tweeted Wednesday.

Many of the myriad problems facing the littoral combat ship program stem from the lack of mission focus during the design process, said Emma Salisbury, a researcher at the University of London focusing on the US military weapons manufacturers.

“The LCS was essentially counted to solve every single one of the Navy’s problems all at once and everything will be wonderful,” Salisbury told CNN with a note of irony. The missions for the ships included surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare, based on a modular design that was supposed to allow the Navy to customize the ship for the role.

“It was basically this magical design that would solve everything,” Salisbury said. “So that was the problem – that, because it had all of these options, it never did any of them very well.”

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby defended the program and the ships at a press briefing in mid-April, saying that “they served a purpose.”

Yet even as the Navy plans on scrapping nine of the Freedom-variant ships, the newest ship in the class was just christened this past weekend. The USS Beloit marked the milestone with members of Congress and Navy officials in attendance, as well as the ceremonial breaking of a bottle of wine across the bow.

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in a statement the ship would “be ready to respond to any mission, wherever, and whenever, there is a need.”

The Independence-variant of the LCS has faced its own problems. The Navy has identified structural cracks on six of these ships, requiring updates to inspection procedures and a redesign of the affected areas, according to a statement from Alan Baribreau, a spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command. The cracks, first reported by Navy Times, were initially discovered in late-2019 in high-stress areas on the structure of the ship.

“The issue was identified following routine quality assurance checks and does not pose a risk to the safety of Sailors on board the ships. Similarly, the issue poses no safety risk to the ships affected nor does it hinder the ability to get underway and execute missions,” Baribeau said.

The Navy plans on retiring two of these Independence-class ships in the 2024 fiscal year.

At the same time, the Navy is working on developing a new class of ships more suited to the challenges from China’s rapidly expanding military and the threat Russia poses. These ships would have “more capability than the LCS” for the potential fights of the future, Kirby said.

On Thursday, Gilday said the Navy was not “sized” to handle two wars at once. When Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, asked Gilday about whether the US Navy would be able to “meet its operational requirements” in the US European Command area of responsibility if the US also had to use Navy ships to deter China, Gilday responded: “I think we’d be challenged.”

“Right now, the force is not sized to handle two simultaneous conflicts. It’s sized to fight one and to keep a second adversary in check, but in terms of two all-out conflicts, we are not sized for that,” Gilday added.

The US currently has 298 “battle force” ships, according to its latest budget request, and it will add nine or more ships every year for the next five years. But because of the Navy’s plans to scrap so many ships, the size of the fleet is expected to drop to 280 ships in that time.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY 

 A former Canadian central banker got particularly salty in a recent interview when asked about Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre’s assertion that the Bank of Canada is “financially illiterate.” “That’s bulls—t,” former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge told CTV’s Evan Solomon. Dodge added that “they understand what’s going on.” Poilievre has been a harsh critic of Bank of Canada quantitative easing policies, saying they’ve worsened inflation while incentivizing the Liberals to blow out the debt. In the same comments where he accused the Bank of Canada of financial illiteracy, Poilievre said they “promised we’d have ‘deflation’ right before inflation hit a 30-year high.”

FIRST READING: 

Canadian military suddenly takes notice of UFOs

Tristin Hopper - Tuesday

© Provided by National Post

A screengrab from an official video released by the U.S. Department of Defense showing a U.S. Navy pilot encountering

First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent direct to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 6 p.m. ET (and 9 a.m. on Saturdays), sign up here.

The Canadian Armed Forces appear to be taking UFOs a bit more seriously after the U.S. military admitted publicly last year that its pilots kept seeing “unidentified aerial phenomena” they couldn’t explain.

Last June, the U.S. intelligence community released a long-awaited report confirming there had been 144 incidents of inexplicable phenomena.

Documents obtained for CTV News last week by reported Daniel Otis showed that, in advance of the U.S. release, the top echelons of the Canadian military called in Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s most prominent ufologist, for a briefing .

“Yes, I was asked to provide info on UFOs in Canada for a briefing to the Minister of Defence,” Rutkowski reported on LinkedIn following the broadcast of the CTV story .


© The Canadian Press/John Woods

Chris Rutkowski in 2016.

In May 2021, George Young, chief of staff to then-minister of defence Harjit Sajjan, wrote to the Canadian Armed Forces requesting a briefing for Sajjan on “any and all research that has been done by CAF/DND; any sightings that have been reported in recent years; any historical information that may be on file.” “ It should/could be expected that the imminent US release of information will prompt questions domestically and with Defence-related implications ,” the email says.

Canada has one of the world’s largest proportions of alleged UFO sightings. Roughly 1,000 such sightings are annually phoned in to Ufology Research, the organization operated by Rutkowski since 1989. While the majority of these reports are easily explained as aircraft or astronomical phenomena (such as a passing satellite), there have been a handful of incidents in which credible sightings of unexplained shapes or lights have been recorded by trained pilots .

One of the most notable is a 2016 incident in which the pilots of an Air Canada Jazz flight over British Columbia reported a “steady red light” that could not be explained. The details of the sighting — which can be viewed on CADORS , a federal government database of civil aviation incidents — have the flight crew witnessing what they believe to be “another aircraft with a steady red light” while on a nighttime flight from Prince Rupert to Vancouver . “No other aircraft was known to be in that vicinity or observed on radar,” it reads.


© CADORS

Detail of the CADORS report describing a 2016 incident of unexplained aerial phenomena over B.C.

The CTV briefing note mentions two others.

Just before Christmas, 2018 in Yarmouth, N.S., two witnesses (one on land, the other at sea) saw unexplained lights in the sky . What made the sighting particularly notable was that radar returns from the area showed an unexplained object right around where the two witnesses spotted the lights.

In August 2021, a “ bright green flying object ” was spotted near Gander, N.L. by two separate aircraft: An RCAF supply flight to Europe and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Boston to the Netherlands. “ It flew into a cloud, then disappeared ,” reads the CADORS report.


© CADORS

CADORS report describing an encounter with a “bright green flying object” over Newfoundland and Labrador.

Voices within the Canadian aviation community have previously criticized Ottawa for an apparent lack of curiosity regarding credible UFO reports .

A 2021 investigation by VICE traced the federal response to the 2016 Air Canada Jazz sighting. Despite being called in by Vancouver air traffic controllers as a “vital intelligence sighting,” the federal government’s response seemed to consist of little more than reviewing RCAF radar data and then shelving the report once they couldn’t find anything matching the Air Canada’s pilot’s description. “All I know is I’m not impressed with the level of investigation,” veteran RCAF pilot John Williams told VICE at the time.

Critics of the lacklustre federal response don’t necessarily see UFOs as signs of extraterrestrial activity, but note that they could be sightings of unknown aircraft or drone technology that could pose a risk to national security .

This is certainly the position of U.S. authorities . “UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” reads the June report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although the evidence was slight, the report didn’t rule out the possibility that UFOs were “foreign adversary collection platforms” or signs that “a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology .

Hydro-Québec in U.S. court to save US$1B Maine power line after failed referendum

PORTLAND, Maine — The fate of Hydro-Québec's US$1-billion interconnection line went before Maine's Supreme Court on Tuesday, which will have to decide whether to validate the project even though a majority of voters in the state rejected it.



Fifty-nine per cent of Maine voters last November voted against the project — a 336-kilometre power line that would bring electricity from Quebec to Massachusetts. Voters didn't want the line running through their state.

But Quebec's hydro utility and its partner, New England Clean Energy Connect, allege the referendum results are unconstitutional. They say the project has an acquired right to move ahead, as NECEC has already spent nearly US$450 million on the proposal, which is about 43 per cent of its anticipated costs, according to court filings.

Most of the proposed power transmission line — about 233 kilometres — would be constructed along existing corridors. However, a new 85-kilometre section must be built through the Maine woods to reach the Quebec border.

Critics contend the environmental benefits are overstated and that the project would forever change the forestland. Supporters, meanwhile, argue bold projects are necessary to battle climate change and that the electricity is needed in a region heavily reliant on natural gas.

Work on the electricity export project has been suspended since November's referendum.

Maine's Supreme Court is hearing two appeals on Tuesday involving the hydro project. Firstly, the court has to decide whether the referendum results are unconstitutional. Secondly, the court is being asked to green-light permits for a 1.6-kilometre portion of the line, which were invalidated by a Maine Superior Court judge, even though the permits were first granted by the state government in 2014.

A spokeswoman for the Quebec utility says a ruling on either case isn't expected until later in the year.

NECEC is contractually obligated to complete the line by Aug. 23, 2024, but could extend that deadline by a year for a penalty of US$10.9 million. The project was originally scheduled to be completed by the end of 2022.

Despite the setbacks, Sophie Brochu, Hydro-Québec's president and CEO, told a Quebec parliamentary hearing last week she still believes in the merits of the project.

The contract was expected to bring in nearly $10 billion in revenue over 20 years for Quebec's utility, which has said the project would reduce greenhouse gases by three million tonnes, the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road. If the project doesn't go ahead, Hydro-Québec estimates that it will have to record a loss of $536 million.

In 2019, Hydro-Québec also recorded a loss of $46 million after the Northern Pass project failed to get approval. That transmission line would have carried Quebec's electricity to Massachusetts through New Hampshire. The utility abandoned that export plan because of public opposition.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 10, 2022.

— with files from Stéphane Rolland in Montreal and The Associated Press.

The Canadian Press

Several Mysterious Human-Made Pits Have Been Revealed Near Stonehenge

Stonehenge has been intensively studied for centuries. 

Yet even now, we are still discovering new aspects of the famous site.


© Karl Hendon/Getty Images

Carly Cassella - 
ScienceAlert

An archaeological 'biopsy' of the surrounding landscape has revealed a hidden network of large pits encircling the stone structure.

The study is the first extensive electromagnetic induction survey of the region, and it has helped archaeologists uncover hundreds of large pits, each over 2.4 meters (7.8 ft) wide. Some of these were most certainly made by human hands thousands of years ago.

What these large pits were used for is unknown, but given the lack of "utilitarian functions" associated with the holes, researchers suspect they were somehow related to the "long-term ceremonial structuring" of Stonehenge.

Other ancient pits, discovered near the car park of the old Stonehenge visitor center, date to about 8000 BCE and are associated with totem poles, props for hunting aurochs (a type of extinct cattle), and lunar observation.

Stonehenge itself was only built about 5,000 years ago.

"By combining new geophysical survey techniques with coring, and pin point excavation, the team has revealed some of the earliest evidence of human activity yet unearthed in the Stonehenge landscape," says archaeologist Nick Snashall, who works for the Stonehenge & Avebury World Heritage Site.

"The discovery of the largest known Early Mesolithic pit in northwest Europe shows that this was a special place for hunter-gatherer communities thousands of years before the first stones were erected."

Prehistoric pit deposits are common archaeological structures in the United Kingdom and northwest Europe, but they are usually no wider or deeper than a meter. Oval pits greater than 2.4 meters wide are very rare, but around Stonehenge and the nearby Durrington Walls Henge, they seem to be unusually concentrated.

In the recent survey of Stonehenge, geophysical sensors and direct archaeological investigation detected 415 large pits over a 2.5 km2 area. When the researchers excavated nine such pits, six were found to be human-made a long time ago, two were natural occurrences, and one was a recent agricultural deposit.

The sheer abundance of these structures is a kind of prehistoric activity not previously recognized at Stonehenge or in northwest European more generally.

The round pits range in date from the Early Mesolithic, circa 8000 BCE, to the Middle Bronze Age, circa 1300 BCE, and they are mostly concentrated on higher ground to the east and west of Stonehenge.

The oldest and largest of the pits is more than 3 meters wide and 1.85 meters deep.

The largest pit found around Stonehenge dug into chalk bedrock. (The University of Birmingham)

"What we're seeing is not a snapshot of one moment in time. The traces we see in our data span millennia, as indicated by the seven-thousand-year timeframe between the oldest and most recent prehistoric pits we've excavated," says historian Paul Garwood from the University of Birmingham.

"From early Holocene hunter-gatherers to later Bronze Age inhabitants of farms and field systems, the archaeology we're detecting is the result of complex and ever-changing occupation of the landscape."

The ability for sensor technology to scan a landscape and reveal potential archaeological sites is giving us an unprecedented view of prehistoric landscapes.

Stonehenge is just the start.

The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

A Samsung.com ‘expert’ has been fired after speaking up about working for free

© Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge


Mitchell Clark - 

On April 14th, The Verge published a story about how Samsung’s “Experts,” who answer customer chats at Samsung.com, were being pushed by both Samsung and staffing agency Ibbu to do some customer support for free. While we spoke to a dozen experts during our reporting, only one was willing to be named in the story: Jennifer Larson.

The day after our story was published, Larson received an email saying that she was being temporarily suspended and that she’d get an update in a week. Over four weeks later, Ibbu told her she’d been fired.

The email to Larson read, in part:

After reviewing your activity on the platform, Ibbu has determined that grounds exist to terminate you from the platform. While we value and encourage any feedback from the Ibbu community and constructive communications on the livefeed, using the Ibbu platform for personal communications violates Ibbu policy, and in this case has also led to complaints from other community members. Furthermore, disclosing confidential information about the Ibbu platform on social media, and encouraging visitors, directly into the chat, to look at third party links or content is a material breach of policy and the Agreement, which constitute grounds for termination.

Ibbu didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request to share the policies it’s quoting or for specifics on why it terminated Larson.

But Larson isn’t the only one wondering if they lost her job for speaking out. Two other experts told us that they were terminated from the Samsung Mobile “mission” after speaking to The Verge. Another expert, who we didn’t originally speak to but publicly posted our story on their LinkedIn page, was also terminated. Unlike Larson, however, they weren’t suspended before being fired, and they’re able to work on other Ibbu jobs if they want.

Before they were terminated, the experts’ job was to sell Samsung phones. In theory, that job involved logging into Ibbu’s system when they felt like it and answering questions from people who had clicked the “Chat with an expert” button on Samsung.com. But as we laid out in our previous report, based in part on testimonies and evidence provided by people who’ve now been fired, the system didn’t work as intended. Experts often found themselves dealing with support questions from people having issues with their phones or orders instead of inquiries from customers trying to decide whether to go with the S22 Plus or Ultra.

To make matters worse, the “Experts” are only paid on commission, meaning they are extremely unlikely to see a single cent for answering support chats. Despite that, and despite the fact that their contract says they shouldn’t answer support questions, the experts we talked to felt pressured to by both Ibbu and Samsung. One Samsung employee justified it by suggesting answering support chats was a way to boost the experts’ customer satisfaction numbers.

Ibbu expects its experts to end at least 14 percent of chats with a sale

That number is important to the experts — it, along with the percentage of chats that they turn into sales, determines whether they get to keep their jobs. But as several experts had pointed out to us, it’s hard to keep those numbers up when you’re disappointing customers by telling them they ended up in the wrong chat and that they have to go to a different part of Samsung.com to reach the correct person.

Samsung didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on whether the company had anything to do with Larson or other Ibbu experts being terminated.

Aside from Larson’s case, Ibbu cited poor performance when it terminated the experts we spoke to. Over a week after it had let them go, though, the company acknowledged in an internal post that out-of-scope chats were a growing problem — though its estimate of only 2.81 percent of chats being misrouted by bots is significantly lower than what experts suggested to us. The company also said that it was “continuously working on tracking and improving this to lower this percentage as quickly as possible.”

It’s cold comfort for those who already got termination emails citing low customer satisfaction and sales numbers. One of the former experts told The Verge that this isn’t the outcome they would’ve chosen but that they “have zero desire to get that job back with Samsung Mobile.” Another said that they do want their job back but would want to see major changes from Ibbu. Both mentioned that they continued to have difficulties meeting Ibbu’s goals.

As for Larson, she’s not surprised that she ended up being fired, though she didn't expect Ibbu to keep her in limbo for so long. When it comes to speaking up about the way the company treated her, though, she said she was glad she did it. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

Israeli police beat mourners at journalist's funeral

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police on Friday moved in on a crowd of mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, beating demonstrators with batons and causing pallbearers to briefly drop the casket.

The crackdown came during a rare show of Palestinian nationalism in east Jerusalem — the part of the holy city that Israel captured in 1967 and that the Palestinians claim as their capital.

Israel says east Jerusalem is part of its capital and has annexed the area in a move that is not internationally recognized. Israel routinely clamps down on any displays of support for Palestinian statehood.

Thousands of mourners, some hoisting Palestinian flags and chanting “Palestine, Palestine,” attended the funeral for Abu Akleh, who witnesses say was shot and killed by Israeli forces earlier this week while covering a military raid in the occupied West Bank.

“We die for Palestine to live,” the crowd chanted. “Our beloved home.” Later, they sang the Palestinian national anthem.

Ahead of the service, dozens of mourners tried to march with the casket on foot out of a hospital to a Catholic church in the nearby Old City.

Police said the crowd at the hospital was chanting “nationalist incitement,” ignored calls to stop and threw stones at police. “The policemen were forced to act,” police said.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said its initial investigation into Abu Akleh's death showed that a heavy firefight was underway in the West Bank town of Jenin around 200 meters (yards) from where she was killed, but that it was unable to determine whether she was shot by Israeli forces or Palestinian militants.

Israel announced that an Israeli policeman was killed in new fighting in Jenin on Friday.

Recent days have seen an outpouring of grief from across the Palestinian territories and the wider Arab world. Abu Akleh was a widely respected on-air correspondent who spent a quarter century covering the harsh realities of life under Israeli military rule, which is well into its sixth decade with no end in sight.

After the heated scene outside the hospital, police allowed the family to drive the casket to a Catholic church in the Old City, which was packed with mourners, before sealing off the hospital and firing tear gas at scores of protesters.

After the service, thousands headed to the cemetery, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Palestine, Palestine."

Several hours later, she was buried in a cemetery outside the Old City.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera had earlier said that its managing director, Ahmad Alyafei, would travel to Jerusalem to attend the funeral.

Israel has called for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority and for it to hand over the bullet for forensic analysis to determine who fired the fatal round. The PA has refused, saying it will conduct its own investigation and send the results to the International Criminal Court, which is already investigating possible Israeli war crimes.

In a statement issued Friday, the military said Palestinian gunmen recklessly fired hundreds of rounds at an Israeli military vehicle, some in the direction of where Abu Akleh was standing. It said Israeli forces returned fire, and that without doing ballistic analysis it cannot determine who was responsible for her death.

“The conclusion of the interim investigation is that it is not possible to determine the source of the fire that hit and killed the reporter,” the military said.

Reporters who were with Abu Akleh, including one who was shot and wounded, said there were no clashes or militants in the immediate area when she was killed early Wednesday. All of them were wearing protective equipment that clearly identified them as reporters.

Either side is likely to cast doubt on any conclusions reached by the other, and there did not appear to be any possibility of a third party carrying out an independent probe.

The PA and Al Jazeera accused Israel of deliberately killing Abu Akleh within hours of her death. Israel says a full investigation is needed before any conclusions can be drawn.

Rights groups say Israel rarely follows through on investigations into the killing of Palestinians by its security forces and hands down lenient punishments on the rare occasions when it does. This case, however, is drawing heavy scrutiny because Abu Akleh was a well-known figure and also an American citizen.

Abu Akleh, 51, had joined Al Jazeera's Arabic-language service in 1997 and rose to prominence covering the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule, in the early 2000s.

She was shot in the head early Wednesday while covering an Israeli arrest raid in Jenin. Palestinians from in and around Jenin have carried out a series of deadly attacks inside Israel in recent weeks, and Israel has launched near daily arrest raids in the area, often igniting gunbattles with militants.

Israeli troops pushed into Jenin again early Friday. An Associated Press photographer heard heavy gunfire and explosions, and said Israeli troops had surrounded a home.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said 13 Palestinians were hospitalized after being wounded in the fighting, including one who was shot in the stomach. The Israeli military tweeted that Palestinians opened fire when its forces went in to arrest suspected militants. Police said a 47-year-old member of a special Israeli commando unit was killed.

Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem — including the Old City and its holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims — in the 1967 war. The Palestinians want both territories as part of their future state. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally and views the entire city as its capital.

Police went to Abu Akleh's family home in Jerusalem the day she was killed and have shown up at other mourning events in the city to remove Palestinian flags.

___

Associated Press reporters Majdi Mohammed in Jenin, West Bank, Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

Joseph Krauss, The Associated Press

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/05/they-kill-journalist-then-attack-her.html

Michigan profs push 'pee for peonies' urine diversion plan

The Canadian Press


ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — A pair of University of Michigan researchers are putting the “pee” in peony.

Rather, they're putting pee ON peonies.

Environmental engineering professors Nancy Love and Krista Wigginton are regular visitors to the Ann Arbor school's Nichols Arboretum, where they have been applying urine-based fertilizer to the heirloom peony beds ahead of the flowers' annual spring bloom.

It's all part of an effort to educate the public about their research showing that applying fertilizer derived from nutrient-rich urine could have environmental and economic benefits.

“At first, we thought people might be hesitant. You know, this might be weird. But we've really experienced very little of that attitude,” Wigginton said. “In general, people think it's funny at first, but then they understand why we're doing it and they support it.”

Love is co-author of a study published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal that found urine diversion and recycling led to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and energy.

Urine contains essential nutrients such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus and has been used as a crop fertilizer for thousands of years.

Love said collecting human urine and using it to create renewable fertilizers — as part of what she calls the “circular economy of nutrients” — will lead to greater environmental sustainability.

Think of it not so much as recycling, but “pee-cycling,” Wigginton said.

“We were looking for terms that would catch on but get the idea across, and ‘pee-cycling’ seems to be one that stuck,” she said.

As part of a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation awarded in 2016, Love and Wigginton have not only been testing advanced urine-treatment methods, but also investigating people's attitudes about the use of urine-derived fertilizers.

That is what brought them to the much-loved campus Peony Garden, which contains more than 270 historic cultivated varieties from the 19th and early 20th centuries representing American, Canadian and European peonies of the era. The garden holds nearly 800 peonies when filled and up to 10,000 flowers at peak bloom.

Love and Wigginton plan to spend weekends in May and June chatting up visitors. One important lesson they learned is about the precision of language.

“We have used the term, ‘pee on the peonies.’ And then it grabs people's attention and then we can talk to them about nutrient flows and nutrient efficiency in our communities and how to be more sustainable," Love said. "It turns out some people thought that that was permission to drop their drawers and pee on the peonies.

“So, this year, we're going to use ‘pee for the peonies’ and hope that we don't have that confusion.”

The urine-derived fertilizer the researchers are using these days originated in Vermont. But if all goes according to plan, they'll be doling out some locally sourced fertilizer next year.

A split-bowl toilet in a campus engineering building is designed to send solid waste to a treatment plant while routing urine to a holding tank downstairs. Urine diverted from the toilet and urinal were to be treated and eventually used to create fertilizers, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to shut down the collection efforts.

In the meantime, the facility is undergoing an upgrade to its freeze concentrator and adding a new, more energy-efficient pasteurizer, both developed by the Vermont-based Rich Earth Institute.

“The whole idea is cycling within a community, so moving toward that we want to take urine from this community and apply it within this community," Wigginton said.

Mike Householder, The Associated Press