Wednesday, June 01, 2022

Police Chief Behind ‘Wrong Decision’ in Uvalde Is Now on the City Council

The mayor says the police chief was sworn in secretly “out of respect for the families.”

By Paul Blest

VICE
June 1, 2022,

A CAMPAIGN SIGN FOR PETE ARREDONDO, THE CHIEF OF POLICE FOR THE UVALDE CONSOLIDATED INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT, IS SEEN IN UVALDE, TEXAS MONDAY, MAY 30, 2022. (AP PHOTO / JAE C. HONG)

Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo was sworn in to a seat on the Uvalde City Council on Tuesday, as the Texas Department of Public Safety accused him of not cooperating with their investigation into the tragic mass shooting at Robb Elementary School last week.

Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District since 2020, was decisively elected to a city council seat on May 7 and was set to be sworn in during a public ceremony Tuesday along with the other members who won their seats. But after Mayor Don McLaughlin said the ceremony wouldn’t happen, Arredondo and other newly elected city council members were sworn in at various times “at their convenience” on Tuesday, McLaughlin told CBS News in a statement.

“Uvalde City Council members were sworn in today as per the city charter,” McLaughlin said in a statement Tuesday night. “Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held.”

Echoing McLaughlin, Arredondo said Wednesday that the swearing-in was done as a “private thing” out of respect for the families, in brief comments to a CNN reporter outside of his home.

Arredondo, 50, is facing accusations that he botched the handling of the May 24 shooting, when an 18-year-old murdered 19 elementary school children, a teacher, and his grandmother in the third-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said last week that Arredondo made the “wrong decision” by choosing not to engage with the shooter as the massacre was unfolding, in favor of waiting for backup to arrive.

Arredondo has not held or appeared at a press conference since last Tuesday, the day the shooting took place. He has not resigned as the Uvalde schools chief, even after taking office as a city council member.

Though Arredondo provided an initial interview to the Texas DPS, the agency told CBS News on Tuesday that Arredondo “has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago.”

Arredondo, however, told CNN Wednesday: "I am in contact with DPS every day."

Much of what happened on the day of the shooting continues to be unclear. McCraw acknowledged during the press conference last week that police waited outside for more than 40 minutes, as children inside the school repeatedly called 911 and begged for help and their parents and other onlookers demanded police go in and help.

And though McCraw initially accused a teacher of propping open a door that the shooter used to access the building, a spokesperson told the Washington Post Tuesday—after a lawyer for the unidentified teacher publicly denied that she propped the door open—that the teacher closed the door but that it “did not lock [automatically] as it should.”

“Now investigators are looking into why that was,” the spokesperson told the Washington Post.

The Department of Justice said over the weekend that it would review law enforcement’s handling of the shooting at McLaughlin’s request, in order to “provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events.”

COMMENTARY

The right desperately tries to blame women for the 21 murders in the Uvalde school shooting

Reminder: Most mass shooters are male and it was a mostly male police force who failed to save the victims

By AMANDA MARCOTTE

SALON
PUBLISHED JUNE 1, 2022

Law enforcement and other officials attend a press conference on May 26, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. (Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

The self-exonerating stories from police after the mass shooting in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas keep falling apart. The already long list of corrections to initial police reports now has another addition: exoneration for the teacher who police falsely implicated in the shooting by claiming she propped open a back door that the shooter used to get into the school. The Texas Department of Safety has since revealed that the teacher actually did shut the door, but that it simply didn't lock as it should.

The Uvalde police's story has changed so often that the journalists who keep track of the shifting narrative deserve hazard pay. It's gotten so bad that the Uvalde police have stopped cooperating with the state investigation into the failures that led to cops standing outside the classroom while children locked in with an active shooter kept calling 911 and begging for help. The false story of the careless teacher looks now like yet another attempt to deflect blame from the cops. Scapegoating a school teacher is a particularly low move considering that it appears that the two teachers who died that day were among the few adults who had the courage to attempt to protect the children.
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Male cops blaming a female teacher for their own failures fits right into a larger pattern on the right: Pinning the blame for this massacre, and all others like it, on women.

RELATED: Uvalde shooting timeline exposes an ugly truth: The police have no legal duty to protect you

Before the bodies were even cold, in their effort to talk about anything but guns, Republican pundits and politicians zeroed right in on victim-blaming school staff for mass shootings. Most teachers are women, giving the Republican propaganda machine an opportunity to characterize schools as weak and feminine places supposedly in need of even more male protection. On Fox News, there was lots of chatter about schools being "soft" targets in need of "armed security agents" and other manly man figures to shield the women and children inside.

The underlying theory is that the "problem" is letting those college-educated women who teach school have too much control over what happens in classrooms.

It swiftly became clear, however, that the problem in Uvalde was not a lack of well-armed men who like to pose dramatically with guns. On the contrary, there was a robust police presence at the school, but those big tough manly cops were afraid to engage the gunman. Instead, they stood out of the classroom for an hour while kids begged for help. This did not deter right-wing media or Republican politicians from peddling a gendered narrative extolling masculinity and demonizing women, however. On the contrary, the misogynist narratives exploded rapidly.

On Fox News, Lara Trump blamed "fatherless children" for mass shootings. Jesse Watters echoed this claim, arguing that divorce "rates have skyrocketed." (In reality, divorce rates have been in decline since 1980.)Watters also said that "shooters didn't have a dad in their life." Fox News commentator Dan Bongino worked the same nonsense, claiming kids don't have fathers to teach "physicality doesn't always mean violence." It's probably not true, but definitely not in this case, as the father of the shooter has already publicly apologized. Despite the heavy use of the word "father," anyone who has even a cursory understanding of right-wing media knows this is a standard-issue woman-blaming narrative on the right. The idea is that feminism "ruined" women by making them too independent and giving them too-high standards, which supposedly runs off the men.
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RELATED: Another Uvalde shooting claim falls apart — now police chief refuses to cooperate with investigation

Alongside single mothers, teachers themselves, the majority of whom are women, were also blamed. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin argued that "we stopped teaching values in so many of our schools" and "we're teaching wokeness." It's a narrative of racist paranoia, but also gendered paranoia. The underlying theory is that the "problem" is letting those college-educated women who teach school have too much control over what happens in classrooms. Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder claimed "public schools are a breeding ground for evil," because of those majority-female teachers supposedly "browbeating young white boys." Glenn Beck rolled out the same talking points about "wokeness" in schools, taking a shot at trans students and staff by decrying "bathrooms that anybody can use."

Male cops blaming a female teacher for their own failures fits right into a larger pattern on the right.

It got even more explicit with Fox News guest Jason Whitlock arguing that school shootings happen because "masculinity, traditional male values, are under attack." On One America News, Oliver North blamed women for having abortions. (Note that the same conservatives who blame single mothers want to force more women to be single mothers.) And no matter how often it's debunked, Candace Owens of Daily Wire is determined to blame trans women for a cis man shooting up a school.

Needless to say, women are not the cause of either mass murder or widespread law enforcement failures.

The percentage of mass shooters who are female is vanishingly small. It is very much a crime of toxic masculinity, no matter how whiny conservatives get when this obvious fact is pointed out. And the law enforcement failures in Uvalde underscore how much the masculinist fantasy of the "good guy with a gun" is a flat-out lie.
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What we have here is a classic example of the right's tendency to psychological projection. Mass shootings expose the deep problem of mindless cheerleading for "traditional" masculinity. The masculinist power fantasies that undergird our lax gun laws are fueling the violence. The same fantasies turn even uglier and more violent in the minds of the men who commit these crimes. Domestic or sexual violence is a common theme with shooters prior to their mass shootings. The Uvalde shooter is no exception. Our overpaid and ineffective police force is also the result of these silly masculinist power fantasies.

But rather than admit their conceptions of manhood are fueling this mass shooting problem, conservatives are projecting their own failures onto women. Many are even literally accusing a woman, falsely, for the shooting. Owens and other right-wing conspiracy theorists continued to pass around photos of a trans woman they falsely claim is the shooter. Conservatives would rather blame innocent women — a random trans woman, a teacher at the school, teachers in general — than admit that there's a problem with "traditional" conceptions of manhood.

AMANDA MARCOTTE
Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

Experts: Monkeypox highlights animal-human interface threats

Stephanie Soucheray | News Reporter | CIDRAP News

Jun 01, 2022

As monkeypox cases continue to surge in countries once unfamiliar with the pox virus, Mike Ryan, MD, MPH, executive director for health emergencies at the World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that the ecological pressures of climate stress, drought stress, and animal food-seeking behavior will lead to more and more spillover events and new transmission chains of diseases that were once endemic in only small pockets of the world.

"We are dealing with an animal-human interface that is quite unstable," Ryan said today during a WHO press briefing. "What we are seeing is hyper-endemicity becoming more persistent, more frequent, and more outbreaks."

Ryan and Rosamund Lewis, MSc, WHO technical lead on monkeypox, also addressed the issue the world not taking much notice of monkeypox until it became a significant threat to European countries.

"I didn't hear the same level of concern over the last 5 to 10 years, when the disease was predominate in Africa," Ryan said.

Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, publisher of CIDRAP News, agrees. "We can't do much about this [monkeypox] without addressing Central Africa," he said. Osterholm described a situation of hyper-endemicity in African nations, where so many people under the age of 40 have never had the smallpox vaccine, and are thus susceptible to other pox viruses.

"This is going to get more complicated," he said.

WHO details monkeypox cases in Africa

So far this year seven African nations have reported a total of 1,400 monkeypox cases to the WHO, slightly fewer than in 2021. The reporting countries are Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone.

While no new non-endemic African countries have reported outbreaks this year, cases are spreading in countries in which the virus is endemic.

"We must avoid having two different responses to monkeypox—one for Western countries which are only now experiencing significant transmission, and another for Africa," said Matshidiso Moeti, MD, WHO regional director for Africa.

"We must work together and have joined-up global actions which include Africa's experience, expertise, and needs. This is the only way to ensure we reinforce surveillance and better understand the evolution of the disease, while scaling up readiness and response to curb any further spread."

Global cases top 600

In non-endemic countries outside of Africa, the outbreak has reached 606 confirmed cases in at least 30 countries.

The WHO said the sudden detection of monkeypox in so many countries in the past 4 weeks suggests that ongoing, undetected transmission has been taking place.

"The fact this virus has appeared in Europe, it does suggest there may have been undetected transmission for a while. We don't know how long this may have been: weeks, months, a couple of years," Lewis said at the WHO press conference.

More UK infections

The United Kingdom continues to report the most cases outside of Africa. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said today that 5 additional cases have been detected in England, raising the country's total to 188. Eight additional cases in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland raise the UK total to 196.

Only two cases in the UK have been in women, as the disease is predominantly being detected in men who have sex with men. Eighty-six percent of cases have come from London, and 87% are in young adults aged 20 to 49 years.

"Recent foreign travel to a number of different countries in Europe within 21 days of symptom onset has been reported by 34 confirmed cases (18%)," the UKHSA said in an update. "Investigations to date have identified links to gay bars, saunas and the use of dating apps in the UK and abroad."

"We are working to break chains of transmission, including by contact tracing and vaccination," said the agency's Meera Chand, MRCP, director of clinical and emerging infections. "We are grateful to everyone who has come forward for testing, and it is extremely important that everyone continues to be aware of the symptoms and to seek advice if they have concerns."

"We are reminding people to look out for new spots, ulcers, or blisters on any part of their body. If anyone suspects they might have monkeypox, particularly if they have recently had a new sexual partner, they should limit their contact with others" and contact health authorities, she added.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now confirms 18 cases from nine states.

More dogs seized from Va. facility; settlement talks ongoing

LYNCHBURG, Va. (AP) — Federal officials and a company that runs a central Virginia research dog-breeding facility are working toward a potential settlement in a civil case accusing the company of animal welfare violations, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The government and Envigo RMS filed a joint motion asking a judge to extend by two weeks the terms of a temporary restraining order issued against the company in late May. The restraining order had been set to expire June 4, but both parties are asking for more time to “work out the details of their settlement,” the motion said.

The motion also disclosed that Envigo has relinquished 446 beagles seized pursuant to a search warrant and determined to be in “acute distress.” That’s an increase from the 145 dogs officials said had been seized at the time they filed their complaint.

Indianapolis-based Envigo breeds beagles for medical research at the Cumberland facility, which has been under increasing scrutiny for months, drawing concerns from animal rights groups, members of Congress and Virginia lawmakers. It has housed up to 5,000 beagles in the past year, according to court documents.

The government and Envigo are also asking the judge for two extra weeks to comply with certain terms of the restraining order.

Sheryl Sandberg was complicit

Moments ago, Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Meta, announced that she would be stepping down. In response, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, released the following statement:

During Sheryl Sandberg’s 14-year tenure at Meta, the company’s social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – devolved into cesspools of disinformation, racism, misogyny, violent conspiracy theories, and alt-right organizing.
Sheryl Sandberg knew this was a problem, and – like CEO Mark Zuckerberg – she failed to act. Sandberg leaves Meta, and the social media environment that Facebook helped create, in a far worse place than she found it. Hers is a legacy of enabling trolling, harassment, and abuse.
But beyond Sandberg’s legacy at Meta, a note from CEO Mark Zuckerberg about her departure should alarm everyone: it boasts about building a new content team that would "train our AI recommendation systems to help you discover the most interesting, relevant, and personalized content." This is a complete change of course from Facebook’s public claims that it would reduce disinformation and extreme content from newsfeeds by prioritizing ‘organic content’ from friends.
Additionally, Sandberg’s departure will further empower Facebook’s policy boss and longtime Republican party operative, Joel Kaplan. More than just a mere enabler, Kaplan actively uses the levers of Facebook to advance his ideological and partisan interests.
The keys to Facebook are now being handed over to bots that will further foment extremism and a partisan ideologue with a history of misusing his position to tip the scales in favor of his ideology. Hard to imagine, but Facebook is about to get even worse and much more dangerous.

After last year’s Capitol insurrection, Sandberg dismissed the company’s role in enabling the attack and falsely claimed that “these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate.” We found, however, that “Stop the Steal” organizers had used Facebook and Instagram to promote events, including the rally that led to a mob breaching the Capitol.

Facebook sees 82 pc jump in hate speech; violent content rises 86 pc on Instagram in April

Anish Mondal

The Financial Express

There has been a rise of around 82 per cent in hate speech on social media platform Facebook and 86 per cent jump in violent and inciting content on Instagram, according to a monthly report released by Meta.

The majority of the content in the report is based on detection by social media platforms before users reporting to them.

The majority of the content in the report is based on detection by social media platforms before users reporting to them.

According to the report released on May 31, Facebook detected 53,200 hate speech in April, which is 82 per cent higher compared to 38,600 detected in March, on which the platform took action.

The report showed that Instagram acted on 77,000 violence and incitement related content in April compared to 41,300 in March.

“We measure the number of pieces of content (such as posts, photos, videos or comments) we take action on for going against our standards. This metric shows the scale of our enforcement activity. Taking action could include removing a piece of content from Facebook or Instagram or covering photos or videos that may be disturbing to some audiences with a warning,” the report said.

Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg to step down after joining Facebook 14 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg's second-in-command will leave the company this fall, with Meta VP Javier Olivan taking her place

Written by Stephanie Condon, Senior Staff Writer on June 1, 2022

ZDNET

COO Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook Communities Summit 2019Meta

Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg plans to step down from her role and leave the company this fall, she wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday. Javier Olivan, currently Meta's Chief Growth Officer and VP of Cross-Meta Products and Infrastructure, will become the company's next COO, CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in his own post.

As COO, Olivan will lead Meta's integrated ads and business products, in addition to continuing to lead its infrastructure, integrity, analytics, markeling, corporale development and growth teams. Olivan will have "a more traditional COO role" than Sandberg, Zuckerberg said, which will be focused internally and operationally.

"I think Meta has reached the point where it makes sense for our product and business groups to be more closely integrated, rather than having all the business and operations functions organized separately from our products," Zuckerberg wrote.

Sandberg joined Facebook as Zuckerberg's second-in-command in 2008.

"The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days," Sandberg wrote Wednesday.

Her departure comes at a pivotal point for Meta, as it transitions from a collection of social networking platforms into a "metaverse company." The social media behemoth is also under pressure from global leaders to improve its content moderation policies -- the company faces the daunting task of reining in malicious or harmful content without inappropriately censoring speech.

After leaving the company, Sandberg said she plans to focus more on her foundation and philanthropic work.

"I still believe as strongly as ever in our mission, and I am honored that I will continue to serve on Meta's board of directors," she added.

In his post, Zuckerberg acknowledged Sandberg's huge impact on the company, noting that in 2008, he "barely knew anything about running a company."

"We'd built a great product-- the Facebook website -- but we didn't yet have a profitable business and we were struggling to transition from a small startup to a real organization," he wrote. "Sheryl architected our ads business, hired great people, forged our management culture, and taught me how to run a company."
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Sheryl Sandberg quits Facebook owner Meta after 14 years

Mark Zuckerberg described the departure of one of his closest lieutenants as "the end of an era"

ByGiulia Bottaro1 June 2022 •

CREDIT: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Sheryl Sandberg, the woman dubbed Mark Zuckerberg’s most valuable friend, has quit her second-in-command role at Facebook owner Meta after 14 years.

In a post on Facebook, Ms Sandberg said she was stepping down as chief operating officer of the company which she has been credited with transforming from a startup into a multibillion-dollar technology titan.

Meta’s shares slumped by almost 4pc following the announcement.

Ms Sandberg, who did not provide a reason for quitting, will remain on the board of the company and will be replaced by Javier Olivan, Meta’s chief growth officer, in the autumn.

In a separate post on Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive and founder, called Ms Sandberg’s departure “the end of an era”.

Mr Zuckerberg hired Ms Sandberg as the social media giant’s first chief operating officer in 2008. She has been key to turning Facebook into an advertising powerhouse that generated almost $120bn (£96bn) in revenue last year.

She also answered for Facebook’s privacy and policy missteps over the years, attempting to improve its relationship with the public and regulators.

Along the way, she became an influential author, publishing “Lean In” in 2013, and served as the highest-profile face of the company next to Mr Zuckerberg.

She has also been the public policy face of Meta, meeting with lawmakers, holding focus groups and speaking out on issues such as women in the workplace and most recently, abortion.

The pair met in 2008 when Mr Zuckerberg was 23-years-old. She left a senior role at Google to lead operations at the then fledgling online platform.

Ms Sandberg was brought in to oversee its business functions, including advertising, partnerships, business development and operations, so that Mr Zuckerberg could focus on products.

Meta now has four products with more than 1bn users, and its advertising business generated $27bn in sales in the first quarter.

Ms Sandberg said on Wednesday night: “When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life.

“I am not entirely sure what the future will bring – I have learned no one ever is. But I know it will include focusing more on my foundation and philanthropic work, which is more important to me than ever given how critical this moment is for women.”

Mr Zuckerberg said Mr Olivan would not replace Ms Sandberg’s role as chief operating officer in Meta’s existing structure.

He added: “I’m not sure that would be possible since she’s a superstar who defined the COO role in her own unique way.

“Javi will become our next Chief Operating Officer... But this role will be different from what Sheryl has done.”

It is thought that Sir Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister turned Meta’s president of global affairs, will now report to Mr Zuckerberg alone.

Ms Sandberg’s departure comes as Mr Zuckerberg attempts to recentre his company around the “metaverse”, a series of online worlds accessed through virtual reality.

He rebranded the company as Meta last year and is spending billions to get ahead of rivals such as Apple and Microsoft in the new field.

Meta posted a rocky performance for the first quarter of 2022 as daily active users on Facebook beat expectations, but sales growth was the slowest ever.

Its core social networking business is suffering from the competition of video-sharing giant TikTok, while the advertising arm has been hampered by changes Apple has made to the iPhone, which in turn are making it more difficult to target adverts.

In February, the stock slumped by 26.4pc, knocking $230bn off its market capitalisation, which broke the records as the biggest ever one-day fall in a company’s value.

It came after the daily user numbers fell for the first time since the inception of Facebook in 2004, dropping by 1m at the end of last year.

Climate change could spell the end for Midwestern corn, study finds

Ben Adler
·Senior Editor
Wed, June 1, 2022

The midwestern Corn Belt — which roughly covers parts of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas — will be “unsuitable” for cultivating corn by 2100 if climate change continues on its current trajectory, a new study finds.

“The future climate conditions … will significantly reshape biophysical suitability across the Central and Eastern U.S., causing a near collapse of corn cultivation in the Midwestern U.S. by 2100,” the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, concludes.

Using climate and soil data, Emory University environmental studies professor Emily Burchfield modeled where crops would be successfully grown in a warmer future. Burchfield found that under scenarios with high or moderate greenhouse gas emissions, the climatic conditions necessary to grow corn, soy, alfalfa and wheat will all shift notably northward, “with the Corn Belt becoming unsuitable to the cultivation of corn by 2100.”

Cornstalk residue in a strip-tilled Nebraska farm field in 2021. (Lukas Fricke/Handout via Reuters)

Burchfield’s paper suggests that changes to the way crops are grown will be necessary to continue corn farming in the United States.

“These projections may be pessimistic because they don’t account for all of the ways that technology may help farmers adapt and rise to the challenge,” Burchfield said in a press release from Emory.

In fact, Midwestern farmers have already been successfully adapting to climate change. Due to a variety of technological advances, U.S. farmers today harvest more than five times as much corn per acre as farmers did 100 years ago. Some of these changes, according to a 2018 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have been helpful to combating rising temperatures. For example, because plants have a cooling effect on their local environment, planting closer together has reduced the effects of global warming on corn crops. Farmers also have adjusted to higher temperatures by planting crops earlier in the season and cross-breeding more with more heat-tolerant Mexican varieties of corn.

As a result, and in part because of the usual annual variation in weather, many in the Midwestern corn industry haven’t necessarily experienced any harmful impacts from climate change yet, although some note that rainfall patterns have been fairly extreme in recent years. Some U.S. farmers stopped planting corn after punishing droughts in 2007 and 2012.

Corn crop toward end of season, with brown, dead leaves. (Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images)

“It’s hard to gauge what actually is the trend,” Taylor Moreland, owner of Moreland Seed & Soil in Centralia, Mo., told Yahoo News. “In 2012, that was a horrible drought, Midwest-wide, that was a terrible drought and there were massive losses across most farms. 2013 was kind of a drought as well. And then ’14 was awesome, ’15 was extremely wet, to the point where a lot of corn couldn’t get planted at all because if the ground is wet you can’t plant ... ’16 was another great year, ’17 was a great year, ’18 was a great year. And then, really, the past three years have been all so wet, where you typically want to plant corn in April and most farmers around here haven’t been able to plant all their corn yet this year at all, because it’s been so wet.”

But Moreland, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, pointed out that the Midwest has always seen wide fluctuations in weather.

“The weather patterns do tend to change,” he said. “If you track back before I was doing this, we had droughts, we had wet years, we had hot years. I remember my grandpa talking about this, how there were a couple years in a row where they’d have crops burn up and the family would be broke.”

To the extent that farming is given up altogether in some areas, that could actually help mitigate climate change, as former farms could, in theory, become valuable sinks for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — but only if the land is allowed to lie fallow without being redeveloped for half a century or more, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances.

A field of pistachios on a California farm. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

While the current Corn Belt could lose its titular crop, places like northern Minnesota and parts of Canada could become well suited to growing corn for the first time.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that droughts, temperature extremes and more prevalent pests will decrease agricultural yields. The IPCC calls for swift, massive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change and the widespread famine that could result.

Burchfield said that American farms will be more resilient against climate change if they switch from monoculture — a single commodity crop planted in rows — to farms that integrate more diverse crops.

“Relying on technology alone is a really risky way to approach the problem,” Burchfield said. “If we continue to push against biophysical realities, we will eventually reach ecological collapse.”

Japan court: Nuclear plant's tsunami safeguards inadequate

MARI YAMAGUCHI
Tue, May 31, 2022,

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court on Tuesday ordered a utility not to restart a nuclear power plant because of inadequate tsunami safeguards, backing the safety concerns of residents at a time the government is pushing for more reactors to resume power generation after pledging to ban imports of Russian fossil fuels.

The Sapporo District Court ruled that Hokkaido Electric Power Co. must not operate any of the three reactors at its coastal Tomari nuclear power plant in northern Japan because the inadequate tsunami protection could endanger people's lives.

The utility said it will appeal the ruling, which it called “regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.”

A massive earthquake and a tsunami over 15 meters (49 feet) high hit another nuclear power plant in Fukushima in northeastern Japan in 2011, knocking out its cooling systems and causing three reactors to melt and release large amounts of radiation.

Many of Japan's nuclear power plants have been shut down since the disaster for safety checks and upgrades. The reactors at the Tomari plant have not operated since 2012.

The government has been urging plants to resume operations to replace fossil fuels and reduce global warming. It is now accelerating that push because of fears of a power crunch following its pledge to phase out imports of Russian coal, liquefied gas and oil as part of international sanctions against Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

About 1,200 people from the area of the Tomari plant and elsewhere filed a lawsuit in late 2012 demanding that it be decommissioned because of inadequate earthquake and tsunami protections. In its ruling, the court dismissed that demand.

Chief Judge Tetsuya Taniguchi said Hokkaido Electric failed to take steps to address safety concerns and demonstrate the adequacy of the plant's existing seawall, which was built after the Fukushima disaster but has since faced questions about its weak foundation.

The operator has proposed a new seawall that it says could protect the plant from a tsunami as high as 16.5 meters (54 feet), but provided no details about its structure or other plans, the court said. The plant is located at a height of 10 meters (33 feet) above the sea's surface.

The court also ruled that Hokkaido Electric had failed to adequately explain how it can ensure the safety of spent nuclear fuel inside the reactors.

Blood Tribe reserve ruling draws distinction on treaty rights
Julius Melnitzer -

First Nations seeking to enforce treaty rights must commence their claims within the applicable limitation periods in provincial and federal legislation, even if the treaty rights arose before Aboriginal rights were enshrined in the Constitution Act of 1982, according to a Federal Court of Appeal ruling earlier this year.

The Blood Tribe had claimed that Canada had breached an 1877 treaty by basing the Band’s reserve entitlement on an underestimate of its population at the time the treaty was signed.

The February decision overturned a 2019 Federal Court judgment that found Alberta’s Blood Tribe was entitled to an additional 162.5 square miles of land for its 547.5 square mile reserve in south-western Alberta, already the largest reserve in Canada.

In arriving at its conclusion, the FCA drew an important distinction between “treaty rights” and “Aboriginal rights.”

The Blood Tribe had claimed that Canada had breached an 1877 treaty by basing the Band’s reserve entitlement on an underestimate of its population at the time the treaty was signed.

The Federal Court found that the Blood Tribe’s claim for breach of treaty could have been discovered as early as 1971, but that the Band did not sue until 1980. Under normal circumstances, then, the six-year limitation specified under the relevant Alberta law would have applied and the action would have been out of time.

The Federal Court ruled, however, that treaty obligations were not enforceable in Canada until the Constitution Act, which enshrined treaty rights, came into force in 1982. Under this reasoning, the limitation would not have expired until 1988 as the right to sue would not have existed before 1982.

But the FCA disagreed and in an unanimous decision concluded that treaty obligations existed before 1982. It followed that the Blood Tribe had the right to sue for breach of these obligations from the date of the Treaty’s signing.

“(The Constitution Act) is not the source of treaty rights,” the court wrote. “Treaty rights flow from the treaty, not the Constitution.”

And, the FCA noted, limitation periods “have been consistently applied to treaty claims regardless of whether they arose before or after 1982.” While there was “doubt, ambiguity and lack of legal recognition in respect of Aboriginal rights (before 1982), the readiness of the courts to supply a remedy for the breach of a treaty has never been in doubt.”

The FCA acknowledged that its ruling could create a “perception of unfairness.”

“There are circumstances, and this is one of them, where the law itself cannot provide the needed reconciliation,” the court wrote. “A court does not have a discretion to deem treaty rights enforceable or not depending on how it perceives the equities of a case.”

The court also noted that the conclusion it reached did not foreclose all remedies to the Blood Tribe. Parliament had established the Specific Claims Tribunal to address historical treaty grievances. There, the Band “would not face a limitations issue.”

Arendt Hoekstra, an Aboriginal law practitioner in Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP’s Vancouver office, believes the FCA’s decision is correct.

“The Court of Appeal recognized that the Federal Court had overstepped its boundaries by failing to follow precedent in favour of carving its own path in terms of fairness,” he said. “While there’s some unfairness in the result on appeal, a decision to the contrary would have created a larger injustice by injecting uncertainty into the jurisprudence.”

But Krista Nerland, a lawyer with Olthuis Kleer Townshend LLP in Toronto, a firm that represents Indigenous groups, says that although the FCA followed the “dominant trend of judicial thinking,” the courts need to re-examine their position.

“The jurisprudence leaves room to rethink the logic,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense that the Constitution Act would bar the remedy while acknowledging the right.”

More particularly, Nerland cited various courts’ acknowledgment that the “honour of the Crown” must inform the approach to statutory interpretation, including statutes of limitation aimed at defeating Aboriginal claims in respect of treaty promises.

“There are no Supreme Court of Canada decisions dealing specifically with the impact of limitation periods on treaty rights in the context of the honour of the Crown,” she said. “So courts need to examine this issue with a lot of detail, because the effect of applying limitations to treaty rights is to hollow out the honour of the Crown.”

CONSPIRACY THEORY FODDER

Peter Doocy worries Biden will use Canada's proposed handgun ban on Americans

David Edwards

May 31, 2022

C-SPAN/screen grab

Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre what President Joe Biden was going to do in response to Canada's newly proposed gun regulations.

At a White House press briefing on Tuesday, Doocy expressed concern about gun regulations that have been proposed in Canada following the recent mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas. The proposed Canadian law would ban assault-style weapons and put a "freeze" on handgun sales and imports. It would also revoke the firearms licenses of Canadians involved in domestic violence-related crimes.

"Canada is making it impossible to buy, sell, transport or import handguns," Doocy complained. "Would President Biden ever consider a similar restriction on handguns here?"

"We'll leave it up to other countries to set their policy on gun ownership," Jean-Pierre replied. "The president has made his position clear. The United States needs to act as I just laid out. He supports a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high capacity magazines and expanded background checks to keep guns out of the dangerous hands."

"He does not support a ban on the sale of all handguns," she reassured Doocy.

Watch the video below from C-SPAN.

Reclaiming identity through hemp in the Lebanese valley of hashish

Tessa Fox

NEW ARAB

Across Lebanon, the infamous Lebanese region of Beqaa Valley is synonymous with hashish cultivation. Deprived of opportunity, and segregated from society, one Lebanese man has chosen to buck the stereotype and has since sparked a hemp revolution.

A defined rhythm is made as Hamza Chamas slaps dried, crunched up hashish stalks onto a plank of wood with nails sticking out of it, in order to soften and break up the fibres before brushing them with a metal comb to produce fine grass-like material.

It’s a raw and laborious way to convert the unused plants of hashish – which are planted and harvested in abundance in the Beqaa, in Lebanon’s east near Syria - into soft fibres which can then be used to make paper and textiles.

Born and raised in the village of Boudai, close to the ancient city of Baalbak but a two-hour drive from the capital of Beirut, Chamas has been experimenting with the many products that can be made from the hashish plant.

"The first thing people say when they know where we’re from is ‘ah you have hashish, oh you’re in a tribe so you kill people, also I have a stolen car, it must be in your village"

“Hash is grown everywhere here, but I’m the first person to be working in hemp,” Chamas told The New Arab, as he sat drinking coffee in his house surrounded by farmland.

Chamas describes all the by-products he uses from the hashish plant as hemp, whereas in places like America and Australia, hemp is a specific plant of the cannabis family that is grown only for its non-smokable products, such as fibres and seeds.

Boudai, and the nearby village of Yammouneh, are well known for producing hashish, and while it isn’t legal in Lebanon, the farms and producers are protected by the tribes of the region.

The first process of making hemp fibres is crushing the dried stalks of the hashish plant

[photo credit: Tessa Fox]

The Lebanese state, as Chamas said, has left them to their own accord since 2012, “because all the tribes made an agreement that if someone came to destroy the crops or arrest us, or put their hand on the plants, they’ll be killed.”

While this tribal law has long protected the main income of many families in the area, as a child Chamas felt trapped by the customs of the village, as well as isolated from other avenues of knowledge and culture.

“I had no personality because the system of society is based on fear... we don’t know what we want... there was only school, family and television here,” Chamas, now 36, said.

After being crushed and then scraped through metal the hemp fibre becomes softer, almost ready to be used for making paper or textiles [photo credit: Tessa Fox]

As a kid, Chamas felt there were no resources to see what is possible or available outside of the village, and knew he was stereotyped because he was from Beqaa.

“The first thing people say when they know where we’re from is ‘ah you have hashish, oh you’re in a tribe so you kill people, also I have a stolen car, it must be in your village,’” Chamas explained.

After drifting in and out of studying and working in Beirut for seven years, meeting new friends in cultural spaces in the capital, but not “understanding anything because they were all talking about Marxism and liberalism,” Chamas made a post on Facebook that would change his life.

“I wrote: ‘The only source of knowledge in the village is the mother, the father and television, we need books to make a library for children.’ I knew if we had the knowledge we would be without fear,” he said.

From 2017 onwards, Chamas collected more than 2,000 books for the children of his village and forged ahead with creating a library in empty shop spaces, naming it Shahraban, after his mother.

The project gradually grew beyond loaning books to children in the summer holidays; he now provides workshops every two months for the youth of Boudai, ranging from the basics of photography, and cinema, or bringing musicians or rappers to help the kids make their own songs.

For a long time, the people in Boudai continued to tell Chamas that he was wasting his time, that he should get married and have children, and questioned how he would make money to eat.

"Everyone is familiar with hemp, but they know about it just to be smoked, they don’t know how to use it in the different ways Hamza is sharing"

This is how the idea of using hemp was born, as Chamas’ cousin once turned to him and said; “you bring books but how will we eat from them?”

Considering the seeds of the hashish plant are generally used as bird feed, Chamas decided to take them from the nearby farms and make hemp milk, nutritious plant-based milk with a nutty taste, made by blending hemp seeds with water.

“At the beginning, the people in the village thought they would get high from it,” Chamas said.

So he took the milk to a lab to test it and the results came back that THC – the psychoactive chemical in cannabis – wasn’t present, but it was indeed packed with protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals such as phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and iron, which is why it has been labelled a superfood.

A shed filled with hashish plant stalks in Boudai village, normally burnt but saved by Hamza Chamas to make fibres for paper, textiles and hempcrete [photo credit: Tessa Fox]

Chamas often goes to Beirut to sell the hemp milk as well as cakes he makes from the milk and seeds, to generate income to support the library in Beqaa.

“In the future, the library will be fully funded from the hemp products... to create this circle of knowledge, economy and culture,” he envisioned.

His library workshops have also expanded to include how to make the milk, as well as fibres which can be used to make paper and textiles, and more recently hempcrete – a natural building material made from hemp fibres, clay and lime to replace conventional bricks or cement.

Various samples of hempcrete blocks were made by Hamza Chamas and his community. The darker block has more clay in the mix while the white brick has more lime added [Tessa Fox]

Raneen Chamas, 25, first learnt how to make paper and textiles from Chamas in Boudai and loved the creative process of it.

“It’s like you’re recycling the gifts of your soil and land by not throwing it away for nothing,” Raneen Chamas told The New Arab.

“By making paper to write on… you’re using nature to learn and teach more,” she continued.

Raneen Chamas also believes using the hemp will improve the village economically seeing as so many people already grow the crop.

“Everyone is familiar with hemp, but they know about it just to be smoked, they don’t know how to use it in the different ways Hamza is sharing,” she said.

He feels his community is too busy working in farming the money crops of hash, as well as apples to a lesser degree, so would be less interested in making hemp milk at home.Mohamed, 30, from Yammouneh – who didn’t want to share his last name for fear of the police monitoring his village - is interested in building chalets out of hempcrete blocks.

“The main concern is to sell hash [to generate income] but if they see that the hempcrete is working they would start building with it,” Mohamed told The New Arab.

Chamas wants to share the knowledge and process of making hempcrete with all the surrounding villages, though if they use the hempcrete for business purposes, as Mohamed intends to, they also need to provide a space in the village for Chamas to create another library.

Seeing as producing the fibres by hand is so labour intensive, Chamas is hoping to buy a machine which can be installed in Boudai in order for the community to benefit from the hash stalks they normally burn.

Importing a machine for the fibres will certainly be expensive, though Chamas is hesitant to approach any NGO for support in funding it because they often don’t understand the identity or background of the community, and people of the region feel NGOs are trying to instil their own values, as he said.

“I know the people’s mentality here which is why I won’t bring books that will make problems… I don’t want to change the village, I just want to create a window, to work with the children… develop their tools, be connected [and] to know that there are choices in this life,” Chamas said.

Tessa Fox is a freelance journalist and photographer covering war and conflict, human rights and humanitarian affairs across the Middle East.

Follow her on Twitter: @Tessa_Fox

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